The Field

He knows that Denver field, the one where the headless homeless heartbroken hoboes, drifters and transients exist, hide and run for their lives behind Union Station. It’s a tricky place at night.

It runs north way up to the stockyards area near the old Coliseum, not to be confused with the one in Rome where they fed you-know-who to you-know-what; where every cold frostbite February cowboys, cowgirls and plain old city folk put on the Stockmam's day extravaganza awarding prizes to animals and the field runs south past the main Post Office Terminal annex and westward toward immigrant hopes and dreams up off Federal Boulevard on a rise with a church and laundromats and renovated upscale posh neighborhoods overlooking a gleaming screaming downtown Silver City skyline and the killing field is full of tall weeds in the Platte River flood plain.

There’s a fine view of Rocky Mountains from the field amid random acts of premeditated violence around small fires as drifters wait and pray to stay invisible long enough to ride the rails out of town away from the mean old street.

In the summer children scream on the roller coaster at Elitch Gardens down the street. It used to be up on 38th and Tennyson where his aunt and uncle ran a drugstore then a pharmacy after W.W.II. They worked their fingers to the bone, sweated their lives out and never asked for much. My aunt was so conditioned by the depression she maintained 37 different envelopes for budgeting their cash flow and checked every penny every night.

It ain’t no field of dreams in that big lost lonely weed choked undeveloped tract of real estate along tracks where freights and Amtrak scenic vista super dome liners blow long lonely whistles as buttoned downed waiters serve blood red Colorado tenderloin down wind from the smell of meat cooking at Coors Field where the boys of summer play hardball.