“No, no, thanks,” Mitch said, “our truck is just down the road a ways.”
“Okay, then.” The LeMans drove on, and the bald man kept looking at them through the back window.
Laney watched the car disappear down the road and then hit Mitch with the pump belt as hard as she could across his back and shoulder. He ran away some steps.
“What?”
“If you had even a piece of a brain, you’d be dangerous,” Laney said.
“I got rid of them,” he said.
“Where do you think they’re going? They’re going to my truck.”
“You don’t know that.”
Laney walked away from the road out across the desert.
“What are you doing?” Mitch asked.
“You go on to the truck. Here, take the fucking belt.” She tossed it to him. “And here are the fucking keys.”
He stopped her with a raised hand before she tossed those, too. “Calm down. Where are you going?”
“I’m going to town. I’m going to get off this shit highway and walk out there where they can’t see me.” She turned and marched quickly through the sage and over the prickly pears. She was glad to be walking on ground instead of pavement.
Mitch caught up and walked beside her.
They walked east and down into a dry river bed, and followed that north. Laney was glad she had drunk so much water. The sun was intense and robbing her of energy. She wanted to keep all of her fluids, but the pressure in her bladder grew worse. She considered that being scared was exacerbating the problem. She walked away from the bed toward a stand of rocks.
“Where you going?” Mitch asked.
“I’m going to take a piss, okay?” Laney rounded the rocks and stepped onto a large downward-sloping stone flat, out of sight of Mitch. She pulled down her jeans and underwear and squatted over the rock. She closed her eyes and waited, taking a deep breath, trying to relax. She heard a sound beside her, opened her eyes, and found a stream striking the rock just ahead of her and to her left. Mitch was standing beside her, urinating. Laney shook her head.
“Jesus Christ,” she said. “I can’t even pee by myself.”
Mitch sighed.
Laney quickly pulled up her clothes before letting out a drop and walked away, fastening her pants. As she stepped from the rock to the ground something caught her eye. A sunning diamondback was only three feet from her. The dull sand color of the snake stung her senses. She hadn’t disturbed it, so there was no rattling, no acknowledgment of her presence, but still it took her breath away. She looked across the rock flat and saw that there were snakes everywhere. She looked back and realized that she had absently wandered into the middle of a nest of basking rattlers. The sight and the thought that she had been in the middle of them made her shiver for a second.
“What is it?” Mitch asked, noticing her distress. Then he looked to where she was looking. “God almighty,” he said softly. “Fuck,” he said louder. “Look at all these fuckers!”
Laney stepped back some more, leaving Mitch alone in the middle of all the rattlers.
“Look at this shit,” Mitch said.
Laney looked at Mitch and wanted to laugh. She turned and started to walk away.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Town.”
“Wait. How did you get over there? How’d you get past these snakes? How’d you do that?”
Laney answered him without looking back. “I’m used to it.”
Wash
Dusk came on and the pinacate bugs were out of their holes, and trudging along the sand wash. Lucien Bradley pushed his toe into the path of one of the large beetles and watched it stand on its head. He glanced up at the shriek of a chat-little and noticed the pink in the sky. Although it didn’t show promise of rain, he walked up to the high ground near his truck to settle in for the night. He remembered how quickly desert floods could occur, how his father would not drive across a dip in the road if there was water standing in its trough. The chill of evening was already upon him, pushing his shoulders tight into his body and his palms flat together. He built a fire, ate a sandwich that he had bought some miles back outside of Las Cruces, and then rolled out his sleeping bag. He warmed his hands before the flame one last time and arranged sticks by the fire before slipping into his sleeping bag. Lying under the moon he noticed a saguaro cactus standing beyond the glow of his fire. He tried to recall the last time he had been able to sleep in the desert. The desert he and his father had shared was not like this one. The high desert was not as severe, not as frightening, constant, relentless. It was harsh only for its lack of water. His father spoke to him, a dead voice in the wind. He told Lucien what a fool he was, a fool to love the low land, a fool to have left school and joined the army, a fool to have no answers, and a fool to expect answers to questions he was foolish enough to ask. “I’m dead now, you fool,” his father said, “and I’ve died to fucking spite you. Giving up life for what?” Lucien put a stick on the fire and said, “Fuck you, too.” And then he felt stupid for talking aloud to his father. The dead made for decent memories, but lousy conversation. Fire was the substance of stuff, he thought, heat and consumption, light and vacuum, the center of power and the edge of approach and all the kinds of philosophical shit his father used to say about it. He was tempted to shove his hand into the flames.
His mother would be waiting in Taos for him and she wouldn’t tell him to get fucked. She would hug him like he was no fool, cry about his father’s death, and smile over her son’s homecoming. She would ask him to tell her about Honduras and then not listen. He laughed as he thought about the low desert surrounding him, thinking about water, no water. But when the water came it meant death. Mice and snakes and nests and anything else would be swept away by flooding, sudden rivers on a timeless landscape. To drown in a desert, that was the way to die, sinuses replete with sandy water, dead eye to dead eye with rattlers in the flow. Lucien closed his eyes and thanked God or something, anything, that he was out of the army, lost, but out of the army, no smarter, but out of the army.
The morning came to him along with thoughts of fishing and tying flies. The close work with the feathers, thread, and fur had always relaxed him. He drove the two hours north to Albuquerque and decided not to stop, not to eat. He decided to make his mother happy by arriving at her house famished. Her house — he replayed the words and they sounded right — her house. It was not his home; it hadn’t been for some time. It was a hard thought, but he wondered if he needed his mother. He loved her, but did he need her? A referee was of little use in a ring with one fighter, but had there ever been a fight, or was he kicking himself silly for things he’d never had a chance to say to his father, or worse, had the chance but not the inclination?
Camel Rock was a landmark because big rocks tend to be landmarks. It was a sign that he was closer to his country, but it was a sad sight, the dromedary outcropping crawling with camera-toting visitors and their oily-fingered offspring, nature’s new erosive element: people who were shaping land just like time and water and wind, but leaving no beauty, just marks. He noted the rock as he rolled by, but kept his eyes forward on the highway with its steady, mesmerizing, reassuring yellow line. Then he was waiting for the view, the view he would get when he was through the mountain pass and looking down on the Taos Valley, where the Rio Grande Gorge snaked through like gossip.
He reached the vista, stopped his truck, and got out to have a look. It was as he always remembered it, no larger than life, but the biggest life he knew. He was like the space between the walls of the gorge, being from a black father and a white mother. He was not Indian, not Mexican, but he looked like he could be either. The gorge was a vastness that couldn’t be ignored, but really couldn’t be defined. There were some black people in Santa Fe and certainly in Albuquerque, but not in Taos, save for the occasional counterculture, transplanted, California-style would-be artist passing through or settling to work in a gallery or boutique. A thunderhead formed over the hills to the west as he drove through Ranchos de Taos and he counted another five fast-food joints added to the awful strip that threatened to make even this place, so singular in setting, just another clone row of America, another burb of the interstatic. He drove through downtown Taos and its traffic of beat-up pickups and BMWs and rusty ’63 Impalas and Mercedes to El Prado and then down the dirt road that led to his mother’s house.