I screamed at the stab to my leg. Josh always camped with his students at official sites with tables and fire grates, but he’d wanted the two of us out in the middle of nowhere. And there we were, only us and the desert and a sere, planeless sky. We’d parked the truck and put on our French Foreign Legion caps and hiked hot silent miles into the wild brush from the road, as requested by park rules for “wilderness camps.” The Joshua trees had thinned out as we went farther east. We’d passed rock formations that looked like animals and gourds and human skulls, hiked across bajadas and around granite outcrops. Josh pointed out iguana, skulking coyote, rabbits, squirrels. Desert dandelions and mallow, flame-tipped ocotillo, beavertail, prickly pear. He was walking ahead of me, pushing water and supplies in the small wheelbarrow; he’d told me to walk behind, to obliterate the wheel’s track.
Tire marks can live out here for years, he’d said. And they don’t belong here. Scars in the desert heal slowly.
Thank you, teacher, I said. But my footsteps don’t belong here, either. Don’t footsteps count as scars?
We wove our way through creosote bushes and gray-green cactus scrub, breathing hostile air that heated, dusted, and dried my lungs, when I felt my leg seized by sudden hot pierces in the flesh of my right calf, just above my boot. I shrieked. A cylindrical piece of gray-green cactus half a foot long clung to my leg as if Velcro’d, its spines lodged in my skin.
Josh dropped the wagon and ran to me, grabbed my hand before I could reach down.
Uh uh, he said. Don’t touch.
Out of nowhere, I said. This thing attacked me out of nowhere. I bit my lip, determined not to cry, split open, fall apart.
Jumping cholla. They’re everywhere.
He pointed to a shrubby, fuzzy cactus nearby, three or four feet high, pale green and flowerless. It looked like a bristled balloon animal, twisted from those long, skinny balloons into joints, and covered with spiky hair. It looked mocking.
You must’ve brushed against it, he said. You step too close to one of those joints, they sense the moisture or heat or energy or something and attack. They jump and cling on.
This is like getting all your childhood vaccinations at once, I said. I wasn’t crying, yet.
I told you to be careful.
You told me to be patient.
Same thing, he said. He rummaged in his duffel bag. They also call it teddy bear cholla.
Adorable, I said. I pulled the bottle from my backpack and gulped water.
Or silver cholla. They have these silver sheaths on their spines. Look at it, see the sunlight through the spines? See how it shimmers? They’re sort of luminous, huh? Pretty?
Josh.
That’s good, keep drinking your water. You’re breaking out in a sweat. And breathe, Holly.
He came to me with a comb and a pair of pliers. He helped me sit down and propped my leg up on his thighs.
A lot of people think chollas are sort of ugly, he said. Stiff. Stunted-looking. I think they’re sort of cool. They get little violet flowers around this time of year. And they’re edible, you know? They taste great, sweet, you just have to peel them and—
Josh, do something.
Yeah, hold on.
He slid the comb between my leg and the cactus, threading its teeth among the spines. I swallowed a long drink of water so I wouldn’t scream again, maybe my two gallons’ worth.
These’re called glochids. These little spines, see? They’re barbed. They lock in under the top layer of skin. That’s how this thing reproduces. The joints cling to whatever passes by. Whatever’ll carry it around. Then it lands somewhere and takes root. Chollas are tough. Ranchers hate them; they’re like weeds. But medicine men used cholla on people during prayer ceremonies. They believed the spines drew out the sickness.
Josh.
Okay, hold on.
He gripped the comb, then flipped the cactus joint off and away from me, leaving a dozen golden needles still imbedded in my leg, and despite myself, I shrieked again.
Why didn’t you warn me? I asked.
I’m sorry.
No, about the cactus. If they’re so dangerous.
Okay. I’m warning you now. This is going to hurt. Take a few deep breaths. Try to relax.
One by one he pulled the spines out with pliers. My leg bristled and I shivered at the fierce, tiny burns. I chewed my tongue and swallowed blood while he tried to distract me by teaching me all about cacti. Their survival strategies. How their spines evolved from leaves as a defense against predators, how the reduced leaf surface helped them endure the desert. How their thick, waxy skins retard evaporation, how they’re misers, hoarding water in their fleshy stems, in their ribs or barrels or pads of tissue, how during and after a rain they gorge on water, expand and swell to hold as much as they can, how their root systems are shallow but extensive, spreading out wide under a thin surface of dirt to pick up and store moisture from the lightest desert shower. He talked in a smoothing, soothing voice while pulling out the spines. Each spine barb tugged with it a small divot of flesh, a brief welling of blood, and with each tug I thought Why didn’t he warn me? Why did he bring me here, drag me out in the middle of vast nowhere, if this was just going to hurt? He was trying to get me to relax and succumb to all the landscape and space, to feeling, to feeling small and not clinging to anything, to letting go. As if that weren’t dangerous, as if there’s any peace in that.
Cacti are actually related to the rose family, did you know that? he was asking. You can see it when they bloom. They blow roses away. Sometimes you can actually watch a cactus flower unfold, the petals open up and uncurl. Actually, they’re more beautiful than roses. You expect a rose to be beautiful. It’s more interesting to find all that beauty in a cactus. The split personality, you know?
I didn’t say anything. I was too angry, I didn’t trust myself to speak. Or breathe, I didn’t trust the only air there.
Okay, he said. Your spines are gone.
He squeezed my calf hard to bring out the last of the blood, blotted it away with a piece of gauze, then applied antiseptic ointment from the first aid kit. I wiped the sweat off my upper lip. My T-shirt, one of Josh’s, was sticking all over; I was sweating too much and too fast for the air to burn it off my skin.
Are you okay? he asked me. He leaned over and pressed his mouth against my damp forehead.
I’m okay, I said.
Drink more water, he mumbled against my hair. I want you guzzling, like, two gallons a day. You need to replace all those fluids.
I nodded, just a small dip of a nod so he wouldn’t move his mouth. But he did. He wrapped more gauze in a bandage around my leg, then carefully disposed of the bloodstained gauze in the Hefty garbage bag.
I WASN’T GOING to make love that night. My leg still throbbed, I felt filmed with sweat and sunblock, I wanted to punish Josh for not taking better care of me. We’d zipped our two mummy bags together and I crawled inside with him, determined to stay separate and stiff as wood. But he named the stars for me, and I pressed against him for a sense of scale. He wove his legs between mine so my bandaged calf would rest on top, and I bent my other leg to help. He raised his hand up to trace the constellations, but the parallax distorted their forms; I reached up with him to clasp his hand, trace the sky with him and share his view, horizon, galaxy. He kissed me and then I could breathe again, fully, breathe in the air that was him, breathe in the having him to hold on to, what always made me feel found and unbound, blessed. His touch always split me open into something tender and sweet. He saw in me something luminous, ready to bloom. But it was all him, and he never realized that. I didn’t deserve such significance. I didn’t deserve him. An elemental, pure, and infinite him, a man who saw the life in a dead lizard, who saw more beauty in a cactus than a rose, who could find the pulse in a petrified limb. A man who didn’t realize that I was just a mere me, and that I lived on, drank from, him. And that without him forever as wellspring, as font, I would shrivel up to a small, withered, petty thing and die.