Silhouetted against the backdrop of an early morning sun behind Goldie’s
ramshackle Airstream, Grizzly her prospector boyfriend sweeps the
fringes of the sand dunes with his newly acquired metal detector.
“I gotta open up, see you later,” Goldie yells to Grizzly.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Grizzly yells back.
Goldie shrugs and heads over to the Desert Sands, a trucker’s
diner where she slings hash for a living. When she’s not at
the diner she spends her time stuffing scorpions, rattlers, roadrunners
and any other desert critters she can come by. Everybody that passes
through Furnace Gulch can tell you that there are pieces of the desert
that reach deep inside your soul and God only knows the desert has
a hold on Goldie.
She wishes Grizzly wouldn’t leave this morning. She can see
this new fangled machine has a hold on him and suspects it will lure
him deeper into the desolate canyons searching for a gold mine that’s
obscurely marked on a treasure map he won in a crooked game of chance.
Why even last night he refused to leave the damned thing outside even
though it bleeped all night. And it wasn’t until she finally
flung it out the window far from her trailer that it stopped its insistent
bleeping.
Goldie believes in Grizzly more than anything else in the world. He’s
promised her when he strikes gold they’ll hitch up the Airstream
and head east to the Roy Roger’s museum where just about everything
that once lived with Roy (except Dale) is stuffed. Once she stuffed
a wild burro rearing up on its hind legs just like the picture on
the poster of Roy’s stuffed horse Trigger.
Mojo, owner of the Desert Sands has a dark and dangerous secret that
shows up one day, a strung out Sicilian Princess who was once his
lover. Seems she wants a cut of the blood money Mojo skipped town
with when he double-crossed the mob and if he doesn’t cough
it up pronto he’s looking down the barrel of a very early retirement.
Mojo leaves Goldie to run the Desert Sands while he heads out to recover
the mob’s money he buried in the desert. While he’s gone
the Sicilian Princess shows up with a bunch of unsavory friends to
help her trash the diner. What they didn’t count on was Goldie
and a few burly regulars who give the Princess and her friends a rough
ride out of town. Mojo returns empty handed only to find Goldie fatally
bitten by a deadly rattler. Grizzly returns with the mob’s money
he found with his metal detector. Goldie gets her death wish when
Grizzly and Mojo use the mob’s money and hire Trigger’s
taxidermist to stuff her. They build a Taj Mahal on the roadside leading
into Furnace Gulch and on a pedestal in the center of the marbled
courtyard a spectacularly mounted Goldie still rakes in big tips from
the truckers that live her legacy.
One day as the golden hours of the sunrise unscrews itself from the
desert floor the mob shows up. They hurt Mojo really bad and vow to
flatten the Taj Mahal and Goldie too if he doesn’t hand over
their money by tomorrow morning.
When the darkness of night is underway a stooped prospector leads
a burro through thick sand along a desert trail. For an instant a
splash of moonlight illuminates the stuffed figure perched atop the
burro that seems to plod to the beat of the bleep from the metal detector
tied around its neck. The three silhouettes pick their way up a winding
ravine deep inside the soul of the desert.
Joyce Dutton is co-creator of the Midlifeonline.com
Diary Club. This piece is a synopsis of her original screenplay.
