Tina :)  posted:

     "The leetle flowers, they are preetee."  Rose was 
startled back into the world.  Taking a deep breath, she 
was surprised that she had not noticed the stranger's 
approach.
     "They're crocuses" she said, wondering how far someone
would have to travel to grow a layer of grime so thick.  
"The first flowers of spring, around here."
     The wanderer looked from the flowers to Rose and back
again.  It was difficult to tell them apart and he wasn't 
sure if it was the tequila, the altitude, or the truth.  
"Een thee desert...wee do not trap thee flowers thees way,"
he said, feeling dizzy at the exertion of so much talking.  
Rose tended to have that effect on people, to inspire 
them to tell her things, sometimes things she didn't 
care to know.  
     Burrito wasn't fooled by any of this.  He knew El Dupree
never looked at a flower down south.  "Ayi, we must do what we
must do," he thought, as he caught whiff of a local female 
mustilid.  The fat one was on his own.
     "You are thee one called Rosa?"  El Dupree asked.
     "Why yes, I'm surprised you know my name," Rose smiled.  
She lived alone at the end of a winding mountain road. 
Visitors always knew her name.  "Rose Jones.  My husband,
Casey, and I built this home long ago.  He's gone now, left in 
a train crash.  But the union is good to me and it is a full 
life, here, with the sky and the trees and the other creatures."
     Rose thought the wanderer looked thirsty and tired.  "Would
you like some lemonade?"  She doubted this was his beverage of
choice but one has to start somewhere.
     "Beer..." the dusty stranger replied.  Actually, it sounded
like a belch but Rose was a gifted interpreter.  The dusty, 
tired ones always wanted beer.
     As Rose walked through the garden to her little house, El
Dupree slumped down to the ground.  Resting his bulk in the 
cool, black soil, El Dupree looked up toward a gentle blue sky 
that called him to sleep.
     In his dream, El Dupree heard the hot, thin wind ruffle 
the tattered edges of his sleeves.  He was lying in the shade 
of the railroad water tank, the only shade for miles in the 
white-hot furnace of Sonora.  The wind was speaking to him, in 
the smooth, studied, desert way, "la cervesa de la Rosa." 
    It was a name he had heard before.  Rosa.  Rosa Jones. 
Many travellers he met in the dry lands of the south told the 
story of the woman in the mountains of Montana.  Some said 
she was a spirit woman, not only of this world.  Eyes grew 
distant and blue as they thought, but could not speak, of 
the place they had gone to drink her brew.  They could manage 
only a whisper, "La cervesa de la Rosa."
     El Dupree was thirsty.  He did not know were to find Rosa. 
North.  North, in Montana.  He would find her.
     It seemed a hundred years ago that the journey began.  At
last he had found her, or at least it seemed he had.  Her name 
was Rose and she had offered him beer.  "Soon," El Dupree 
thought as he woke from slumber, "I will know."
     As El Dupree revived, he found himself sitting in a large
wooden chair, staring into the laughing diamond eyes of his
companion, Burrito.  "Welcome back." Rose said.  "While you
were asleep, your friend returned.  He said you wouldn't mind 
if he drank your beer."  Burrito scampered down the round 
one's belly, up the arm of Rose's chair, and gave here a 
cool wet kiss with his nose.
     The crocuses were enlightened.