It must be time for a drink. I swirl water in my mouth, dribble it into my hand, spread it across my face. The pause that refreshes. And yet the bush has moved, is moving, draws closer. Under a felt hat, a hem of white hair, the face is the color of sand. A wary face.
“Hey!”
I wave but he doesn’t wave back. His expression is stern and distant both, and it makes me remember.
“Dobbs,” I say. “The gentle hangman.”
He folds his arms. “I know you, bub?”
“A few months ago at the hot springs.” I flip my sunglasses up. “We had some beers.”
“Don’t fancy the new beer. Tastes like mop water.”
“You wanted the cans for scrap.”
He grunts, tipping back, as if memory is a well bucket he’s pulling up. “Had a weedy little gal along. Wouldn’t leave you alone.”
“Dobbs.”
“Dobbs,” he confirms.
After which there’s nothing else to say. We could be in line for food stamps or waiting on the platform for a train. Afternoon is well along, but the sun feels perpendicular. The gentle hangman, humming, strikes the pediment of his chin. He declines when I offer the canteen.
“Best way to clean out the system is leave it empty awhile. Don’t let your minerals build up.”
The bandanna round his neck has faded from red to pink with countless washings, but the felt hat and the checked shirt are improbably crisp, store-fresh. Here he’s shaped in my mind as a natural growth on the land when the mirage could easily stretch as far as a nursing home he walks out of all the time.
“I don’t just pick things up from the funny books,” he says, reading my thoughts. “It’s a way of things sticking to me as I go. Like when the Baxter twins was running sheep all through here, eight, maybe nine hundred head, this was before they shot each other about a second term for Senator Mack, but at the same time there was a lady worked at the hotel who wore her own teeth on a bracelet. And I remember all that together.”
All right. Dobbs, in his time and place, is as true as parthenogenesis.
“Gonna take a whole lot of past with me. And soon.”
I can’t help wanting to be briefly vivid, another deposit in his alluvial mind. I invite him to come and see my spot and warily, conditionally, he accepts.
“Long as that little gal won’t be present. Her and her temper.”
He motions me impatiently ahead, but his pace is slow, wandering, and it’s hard not to distance him. He stoops over rocks, examines the roots of some weed he’s pulled, not out for scrap today, but reassurance instead. And, of course, he’s disappointed when we get there.
“This ain’t no layout, bub. Where’s your damn corrals?”
But he seems glad of the shade under the awning, settles into my director’s chair with a comfortable exhalation. Watching me gobble jerky, all the gentle hangman asks for is a little sugar to lick from his hand. He nods; his tongue is quick as an anteater’s.
“Don’t got even an outhouse,” he grumps, surveying from under his brown hat. “What are you, one of them bag-packers?”
“Backpackers.”
“Anyhow, something for nothing.”
I correct him again. “Nothing for nothing.”
He’s slack in the canvas chair; I’m stiff on the ground. His face, lined like river mud, is steady on me. It isn’t the wary face, nor the stern one, but I have to answer it.
“Things that stuck to me I want to be rid of, see.”
“On the house.”
He fishes out a pack of mentholated filtertips, the gentle hangman preparing a victim. He snaps the match alight on his teeth and holds it for me. I blow a solemn chain of smoke rings.
“A thing I can tell you — and it ain’t for me, since to do it I always felt fine — is I never once pulled the trap on somebody wasn’t just as glad at the very end to go.”
To believe in a man who’s known only clean cases all his life is something I couldn’t have done before. Today I can let hard facts go soft, become tractable as a bosun’s dream of the Mojave.
Dobbs says, “Maybe you could wrap up a little more sugar in a bag?”
I take time with the old man’s bundle, folding corners precisely, but he’s gone when I bring it outside, gone without telling me there is nothing to find here.
Birds are low and loud in the sky. Their noise bends around me like water. I take heart. I unfold corners precisely. Wind billows up out of its troughs and blows white grains away, leaving the paper clean.
50
ISOLATION DISTORTS AS IT toughens. It shrinks and magnifies, reroutes, subverts the normal controls. I recognize in myself certain disturbances, reactions that are powerfully wrong. Misplaced objects infuriate me. The faint trail of a jackrabbit fills me with wild, hopeless panic.
But now, I think, I have the sort of companionship that will steady me and smooth me out. Three days ago clanking woke me and I tumbled out the Airstream door to face a scrawny goat with a bell around his neck. I gave him water, and called him Rosing, after the inventor of the cathode-ray receiver. I didn’t know how to remove the red plastic clip in his ear that marked him as someone’s property, but I cut loose the bell. We shared a tin of sardines and slept in the shade of the awning like comrades of a prolonged desert campaign.
Scarred and underfed, a battered range refugee, Rosing is tranquil. He is unperturbed to the point of hospitality by flies that crawl along his snout, so incurious that only repeated yelling will cause him to turn his head. He consumes cactus methodically, with a nearly circular chewing motion that causes him to resemble a fastidious mandarin. I take comfort in his exemplary resignation. Aid and comfort.
Chuff-chuff-chuff: the soundtrack for embassy evacuations. A bulbous black helicopter passes over our heads, carrying, with equal probability, soldiers or hunters or survey geologists. Or eager Japanese in rayon cowboy shirts, satraps of the company that hopes to feed its reactors with what it can extract from this land. I’d like to take them out of the air with my slingshot, then sit and watch black smoke plume, listen to the sounds of melting. Righteous glory, a boy’s idea. These two-legs, eh, Rosing? Fucking parvenus. One blink of biologic time and they zip around as if the place were theirs to own, strewing dead certainties like the rest of their garbage. Sunlight glints and blurs on the rotor blades. Chuff-chuff-chuff.
I lift Rosing’s damp muzzle from my lap, probe his expressionless gray eyes. Comrade, is there still time to get away? He blinks. He dips his head. He lifts and lowers one little black hoof, a hoof as cleanly split as any dialectic proposition. It’s not my fault they picture Satan with a goat’s horned head, then talk about the lamb of God. White woolly innocence versus rancid concupiscence? Not my idea. Everything works together — tendon, ligament, and bone — as Rosing subsides into a drowse. Different genotypes, comrade, different protein codes. It’s none of my doing.
I brew chili pod broth on the stove, hot vitamins. The generator’s low on fuel, not too many viewing hours left. I dial rapidly around and around, a pinwheel of incoherence, maximum heat load. I stop on the prettiest face.
“Call our eight hundred number now and help us feed the world. Call right now.”
A nisei flower with hair to her hips in a tank suit with peekaboo cutouts. Rear projections flash behind her. Bounty of the ocean, kelp farming, krill-based soft drinks. Metal rings hang from her nipples.
“Take an all-important support posture. Please call right away.”
Images recycle, coral and spume, begging bowls. I’m right in my place. Her eyes, shiny as bits of ormolu, as piercing as nipple rings, are fixed on me and me alone. Why do you stay away? they ask. We miss you so. Her tongue slides around the roof of her mouth, waiting for me to open up so she can slip me guilt to suck, grit wrapped in mucus. Women always want to haunt. She speaks of the internment camps so far from water, the dusty barracks, the glare, the heavy stink of trucks.