Shelton Family Saga

Chapter 50

Alex Callie, 2021 - 74 yrs old

I still remember the day I got my face blown off. It took everything, but it didn't take my soul. I never really understood why I got to keep on living, when I had just lost so much. I mean, I was a pretty boy, and always had been, a real ladies man and I loved them all; but, truth be told, I loved myself most of all. I possessed a penchant for flashy things, kind of like the diamonds I had adorning my teeth. They were faceted, fancy cut VVSI diamonds encrusted by 21 carat yellow gold. The whole top row, as well as the bottom row of my teeth were slugged out all the way back to my molars. My knuckles were adorned just as much in the same fashion. I looked up to my big brother Juntas, cause he liked the good life just like me. Only difference was he knew how to shirk trouble, whereas I invited it in. Living the good life always made me smile; and, I naturally felt it was my destiny to bask in all the glory it had to offer. Let me take you on a journey down the road of life I chose. And, that's the biggest thing we as human beings fail to realize, that we are where we are in life based on nothing other than our own free will of personal choices. That's in the Declaration of Independence where it talks about civil liberties for every person in the United States. I guess you can say, It's the American Way.

It was a Saturday when it happened. Although, that was forty-nine years ago, it's a part of my experience that will remain with me from this realm into the next; however, it really does seem like it was yesterday. In Big Horn County, in 1972, it was easy to get ahold of drugs. Thats where the most reservations were, and my daddy was a Chief of one of the biggest. He was a very well known man and although he went by Juntas, the same name as my big brother, everyone just called him Chief. He stood tall with broad shoulders and had high cheek bones with sunken jaws. He fiercely believed in the power of the land and the supernatural forces that governed over it. He used herbs for medicinal purposes such as calming and healing the inner spirit; you know, the one we are born with that rests on the inside of us. A drug known as peyote was one he used regularly. It was popular among the townsfolk. I had some peyote one day that I was smoking to calm my inner spirit, and that's when I was approached by someone in the town. They wanted to do an exchange for it, which was no big deal cause we did that on the reservation all the time, bartering products and services between one another. Thats how my people subsisted, off the land and through empowering ourselves through empowering others. It's one of the reasons, if  not the main one, why my mother didn't want us venturing off the reservation, for the likes of all the trouble that awaited outside our sacred tribe. Unfortunately, I was all too eager to see what was happening outside our tribe and my curiosity led me in a different direction. Let's just say that was the gateway that opened up my inquisitive senses to a whole other dimension. At first, I made lots of mistakes trying to use the peyote as a bargaining tool with the townsfolk until I shared the information with my brother Juntas. I told him how the townsfolk were willing to give just about whatever they had to gain access to it. Juntas showed me how to leverage my bargaining power, and that's when the adventure really began.

So again, back to the night I got my face blown off when I was twenty five years old. I'd been hanging out on Skid Row. The place I'm from, Hardin, MT, didn't really have a Skid Row per se; but it was the closest thing to what one would know as such in todays era. This ol' guy I met told me he knew a way to experience a major high. So high you felt like you were floating in the clouds. It involved some baking soda, a careful amount of water, a big pot, a spoon for stirring it all together, along with some other stuff; he said it was a few things you had to do with all the ingredients to cook it, but please understand, i'm just relaying to you what he told me, cause I don't really know or understand the recipe. I never ever tried it. Truth be told, I don't believe he knew the recipe either; because look what happened as a result of it. Standing over the makeshift stove out back of that tiny shack watching him do all this cooking, I heard a crackle and a sudden pop. Before I knew what had hit me, my whole face was blown clean off my face. No pun intended with that idiom, cause unfortunately, that's just the way it happened. Fast and ferociously. I didn't feel a thing, but the aftershock was excruciating. Everything stung so bad, and the stinging sensation quickly turned to deep, gut wrenching pain, and finally to numbness. I was beginning to totally lose the feeling in my entire face. I remember running away from there screaming into the darkness of the night. I ran without stopping until I made it back to the reservation desperately trying to find my brother Juntas. It was nerve racking, because I knew everyone on the reservation and they knew me. All in all, my goal was to locate my brother without Chief finding out. By the time my momma found me, I was in a teepee at the back of the reservation where River-boy had his daddy apply some kind of ointment to where my face used to be. I laid there in horrendous pain until my momma came in, saw me without my face, and told me to get up before Chief found out. She didn't know what to do, so we just went to my twin sister Averie's place in town. It was so late and deserted by the time we got there, I heard her pump her shotgun through the thin walls of her house. When she swung the door open, I could see she was holding the shotgun with one arm. I was at such a loss for words all I could do was whimper. I just moved my lips not knowing what would come out, but I ended up telling her how my face was completely gone. I suppose she thought I was joking as she asked me where the fuck my face was after I had already told her it was completely gone. I was so emotionally spent and didn't know what to do, I just collapsed in her arms. I really wanted my big brother juntas; because, he would know what to do. Yeah, I really needed Juntas.

Turns out my sister had met lots of townsfolk in Hardin and away from the reservation. She had made a friend in a girl named Moselle and Moselle's brother had a best friend who was a college graduate. The college graduate worked at the hospital in Sheridan, WY and he was good friends with a well respected plastic surgeon. The surgeon had gained fame from a skin graft he had performed on a guy whose motorcycle had burst into flames when his back tire was clipped by some drag racing teenagers. The surgeon had fixed up that guy on the motorcycle into someone so brand new, you couldn't even tell he had his face burned off. Lucky for me, I got the same skin grafting procedure and today my new face is so even toned and smooth, that unless you knew my history, you wouldn't have any inkling of an idea that my face had once totally been erased.