junkyard dogs

In the lot at Rose, two of the RVs serve as trash heaps. There is a third, somewhere, which didn't make it into the lot today. Their roofs are stacked with upturned tables, paintings, clothing, chairs, buckets, pieces of wood, anything. Their insides are just as full, with broken CDs, an orange colander and single black combat boot spilling out of the back, out of the passenger's seat, into what little space the drive has left. 

They belong to the same guy. Sitting outside Prospector's van, as Rodney beats Vince in chess, we see him atop one of the vehicles, trying to erect some flag as he stands knee deep in his sea of possessions. 


"Junkyard dog," I say. That's what Roger calls him. 


"I'm a junkyard dog," Rodney says. "He's a pirate without a shit." 


He's a speed freak, Prospector explains. Sees value in everything. 


Rodney's apparently taken the opposite approach, though he does his fair share of speed. He wears only a pair of shorts, his nose the peely red of perpetual sunburn. I've never seen him wear shoes, and the only thing I've ever seen him carry is a plastic bag full of bread. he eats what people hand him--at the moment, a bag of vanilla wafers, their box discarded sometime before he got them.

He's also the best chess player around.

Rodney moves a piece forward--a live, 22-caliber round Prospector found on the beach, which now fills in for one of the white pawns.

"I keep thinking the sun might set it off, take us all out," he said when we first started using it. But in its first week as a chess piece, it's only managed to take out a few other pawns, or maybe the occasional night. Prospector's also carved a new rook for white--a very passable tower, the color of balsa wood.

It's a scene at once timeless and rooted in this moment, this place. Like I saw all over Asia and Africa, grown men take refuge from the sun in the shade of the largest object around, passing the too-hot hours with games and marijuana and talk of women.

But the shade, here, is cast not by a house or a tree, but rather by Prospector's van; Kai and I sit on our skateboards, the folding chairs reserved for the two players; and the plastic chess board is fastened to the folding table with black electrical tape--an attempt to stop the sea breeze, which occasionally knocks the bullet-pawn onto its side, from wreaking any greater havoc on the game.

Kai, known here as German, fiddles with an mp3 players he found. It's good, he keeps saying. It's good, it plays perfectly, but the screen's messed up in the middle. He found it in the alleys off Speedway.

"God, whose move is it?" Prospector says. "Come on, play! I'd lose on purpose just to give someone else a chance to play."

Roger walks by, returning to his own van afer a visit with the Colonel. As he passes, the pirate yelps, hopping on one foot and wrapping his knee around a lone Corinthian column t the corner of the van's roof. He looks down towards Roger, his long, thinning hair splayed out to the sides, eyes open wide, unblinking, frightened. 

"You OK, Jimbo?" Roger asks.

"Damn bumblebee. Back bumblebee landed on my elbow. Trying to push me off the edge." 


"He's awful small, I think. I doubt he can push you off." He laughs, trying to calm Jimbo down. 


"I thought he wanted to sting me."


"Sting you? Well that I could believe." He continues on towards his van, leaving Jimbo wrapped around the column like the wood vine carved onto its surface, holding on as if to a life raft.