Big Lonesome

by Joseph Scapellato

  On mornings after the lonely lawyer-woman’s visits, the old horse’s muzzle would be pocked with lipstick in little skipping prints.

  “Another gateway altogether,” said the man from Pennsylvania.

  The man from Illinois had listened closely. He flicked a crumb from his beard and said, “That’s invasive.”

  This irritated the man from Pennsylvania, though he wasn’t sure who or what his new friend had called invasive. His irritation, because it felt unfounded, slumped into shame—his shame moped to another memory: years ago, his aunt, who’d kept keys to his parents’ house, had moseyed through the front door to find him on the family room couch, whacking off.

  “Wish I could tell you how to do it right,” she’d said with a laugh.

  “Muscle and movement,” chanted the man from Illinois, waving his hand like a hypnotist, no longer addressing the man from Pennsylvania, “the movement of muscles, muscled movement, majesty,” and these words broke loose a jammed-up memory he’d been unknowingly tugging at since their talk had turned to horses, the memory, he now knew, that had supplied his argument. With his hands on something solid at last, he whooped, fixing to ride it as hard as he could.

  He scrambled to the top of the table. He clap-clap-clapped. He stomped.

  He kicked an ashtray—it exploded on the pavement—and with gusto spilled his story to the icehouse patio: sixth grade outdoor education! A weekend trip to Southern Illinois! A goddamn dumpy ranch! They’d milked dumb cows and charted dumb stars and on the last day, they rode the fucking horses. He’d been terrified to be away from home and on a horse, then bored as they tromped single-file through the ranch’s meager acres, then mesmerized as he watched the horse in front of him start shitting, its anus like the inside of a mouth, a chewing in reverse, and finally, awestruck as the ride ended at the stables, where their social studies teacher, a chaperone, mounted a spotted mare like he’d been doing it every morning of his life. This teacher was a squat and expressive man, respected only by dorks, mocked for missing one and a half of his fingers, the pathetic result of an accident in his father’s Chicago sausage shop where he’d worked for candy bars. Atop the horse, however, he was an altogether different entity. He kicked into a canter, a gallop, a wild but measured blasting back-and-forth that opened the mouths of all the girls and boys who watched. He’d even yeehawed.

  “A horse,” shouted the man from Illinois, “complete in itself, incompleted by the rider it completes. But incompletely.”

  Many had left their tables. Those who remained stared or pretended not to, in fear or in reverence.

  The man from Illinois lowered his voice, as if about to remove his clothes. “The second time I rode I thought too much and fell off,” he said. He clinked his smile with his bottle. “Two broken teeth.”

  “Ow,” he said, touching his face.

  The man from Pennsylvania, meanwhile, had stood up and stepped back to better watch his new friend’s storytelling. Through it, his own shame and irritation had been carried off, though a grainy jealousy remained. That he felt this seemed uncharitable. Still more uncharitable was the feeling that followed: he knew he would leave the icehouse and his new friend, right now, without a word, not unlike how he’d left Pennsylvania and his dying aunt, how Pennsylvania and his dead aunt had left him. He was in touch with being out of touch, he thought, again. He ended his beer in one gulp and tossed it at the garbage bin. The can airballed badly. A grim barback built like a retired boxer stooped to pick it up. He lurked closer. The man from Pennsylvania stumbled away, his head shining with sweat.

  “I used to want to ride them,” said the man from Illinois, wobbling. “Now I only want to break one.”

  “If you do,” said a woman he couldn’t see, “hold on to the mane. It’s the head that kills you.”

  “The head!” he screamed, and he lobbed his bottle over the icehouse and into the street, where, out of sight, it shattered.

  Snake Canyon

  B. and Y. took the road without a name to Snake Canyon. Again they looked for signs. None.

  “Snake Canyon Road?” said B.

  He braked over a bump. The old car bobbed and rocked. They passed another high desert subdivision, a half-completed housing development ribbed with the skeletons of homes that would have big-windowed views of the valley. No one was at work on them this afternoon. The only signs read, FOR SALE.

  Y. waved. “Maybe the road’s between names.”

  “It has an old name,” said B. “I want to know it.”

  Y. made his tell-a-joke face. “Bill Bigley?”

  “Bill Bigley” was the possibly fake name of a man whose mail had been coming for months to B.’s apartment—oversized envelopes, beat-up packages from out of state, RESPONSE REQUIRED notices from local agencies—all of which B. handed back to friendly but indifferent mail carriers. “Bill Bigley” had become what B. and Y. said instead of saying, What the hell can you do? or Good luck, jackass. Lately it’d begun to mean, Let’s get a goddamn beer. Many goddamn beers had been got—B. and Y. had hit the last week of their first year of graduate school, the both of them history students, hardworking would-be scholars from places other than the southwest.

  Snake Canyon, the canyon they hiked once a month, hunched low in a high range. The car took the steep bend toward it, juddering—the development vanished; on one side, the rise of sheer rock and broken ridges, and on the other, the open desert bristling in heat and haze all the way to the horizon. They talked of final projects. Fat bugs spattered the windshield. They passed smashed animals, the buzzards that slow-flapped into flight away from the bodies, and the entrance to a private drive, its black gate shut. The nameless road ended in a nameless gravel causeway, which kicked on for a mile until curling into a little empty lot. They parked.

  They slammed doors and stepped into the living stillness.

  The air was clean and dry, but flush with the feeling they’d come for: an emptying out: an emptying in. A reminder that they were made out of their bodies.

  B. slapped on sunscreen. Y. one-shouldered his backpack.

  They hiked the trail through a scrappy landscape scrubbed brown and red, green and yellow-golden. Far-off peaks and slopes stood, sat, or stretched in great basins of sun and shadow. Within reach were feather-tipped grasses, clusters of thriving cacti, lonesome stands of trees. Dark beetles zipped and clicked.

  Y. stopped near a skinny gulch. “Smell that?”

  B. made a show of sniffing.

  Y. said, “Musky, musky-fresh. Alive!”

  “Smells like beard,” said B., grinning through his. He finger-twisted a knotty tuft. The director of their program joked weekly that B.’s beard grew B., not the other way around. Its thickness made him look more rustic than he was. He enjoyed his comforts, he liked to say. A big man.

  With his foot Y. tapped a clot of dirt into the gulch. He was clean-shaven and short-haired, as thin as a teenager. He fixed a stare on anyone he listened to, often through their pauses, which made him seem judgmental. Special reserves of funding had recruited him. He wore a chewed-up straw hat he’d bought abroad.

  A sheet of shadow crossed the canyon like the turning of a page.

  The little mountain appeared, the one they knew. They’d gone off-trail to scale it every time they’d come. It was of a climbable incline, dotted in dead trees and wiry bushes, and at its peak it wore a shallow slab-like cave. A black tongue of shade extended from the cleft. When the trail got as close as it would to the base, B. and Y. broke off into the pathless high desert. They trudged through grasses. Every step scattered scores of insects. The little mountain, modest from a distance, swelled skyward as they approached.

  “Let’s name this mountain,” said B.

  Y. stroked his chin in an exaggerated way. “Let’s name this mountain—let’s name this mountain Let’s Name This Mountain Mountain.”

  “Original. Accurate.”

  “It’s probably close! To the ‘old name’ . . .”

  B
ehind a heap of prickly pear opened a clear draw onto the base. They jogged up it in one go and began to crouch-climb, pathfinding. One part calculation, one part intuition. Secure sure footing. Maintain momentum. Skirt the likely lairs of deadly animals. They’d never seen a mountain lion, they’d never seen a snake. Scorpions, tarantulas, yes. Loose rocks chuckled when they misstepped. As their eyes went down, easy spaces entered their conversation, changing its shape. They traded monologues. Their hearts thudded, their legs fired. No shade until the top.

  Embarrassing, argued B., that neither of them knew Snake Canyon’s history. What indigenous peoples, what settlers, how it had been named. Embarrassing not just because they studied history, but because here they were, contributing to the larger problem: Americans not knowing the history of American places. A problem that could be remedied, and when remedied, could remedy even larger American problems.

  Y. agreed. He added that this problem’s source could be found in the short-term advantages to overlooking history. By intentionally or unintentionally overlooking history, American communities could choose to shape and be shaped by imagined futures that, at least initially, appeared untouched by American mistakes, by American embarrassments. Freedom in forgetting.

  “Look at the way that cities grow out here,” he said. “They get big without knowing where they’ve come from.”

  “They ignore where they are.”

  “Continually.”

  “They can only see themselves from the inside out.”

  Beneath them the surface changed: steeper, with bigger rocks. The light felt heavy on their backs.

  “We need more embarrassment,” said B. He sopped his face with his shirt.

  Y. said, “We could start by seeing that it’s already here.”

  “It’s not enough to look.”

  Y. took off his hat to scratch his head. He stared at B. “Fact.”

  Brown birds darted above them, moving so fast their folded bodies hissed.

  They sprinted the last stretch to make the cave’s shade. Then they were in its mouth. A deep coolness settled onto their limbs. They sat on cold stone.

  Y. opened his backpack.

  “Cave Mountain,” announced B., patting the ground. He thumbed at the cave walls. “Cave Mountain Cave.”

  They cracked tallboys. Y. made three toasts: one to Cave Mountain Cave on Cave Mountain, one to how the act of giving old places new names obliterated the desire to discover old places’ “old names,” and one to B.’s lack of consistency. B. toasted to Y.’s ability to confuse a man’s jokes for a man’s serious scholarly interests. Y. toasted to B.’s inability to admit that the two were the same. B. toasted to being a dick. Y. toasted to the dickiest dick they didn’t know, Bill Bigley.

  They laughed and drank and called each other names.

  They ate peanuts and trail mix.

  They talked about their girlfriends, about long-distance dating and in-program dating.

  Y. said, “You pretend to be the people you’ve always been. You aren’t. You’re always changing a little—in this case, changing a little in separate places, changing in response to those separate places. If you live in the same place you don’t notice the little changes, but if you live apart, when you finally get to see each other again, you notice, and the little changes feel big. You feel cheated. You pretend not to notice and you pretend not to feel cheated. You pretend you’re who you were.”

  “What are some of your little changes? I can’t imagine you changing.”

  “I’ll tell you when I see her next week.”

  They opened two more tallboys.

  “Class, guest lectures, bars, parties,” said B., “you’re with each other everywhere, all the fucking time. You start to think you’ve seen every side of each other. You get really sure. Because of that you dig ditches, ditches you pack each other into. Don’t step out of that ditch! Every relationship gets there, it’s just that when you date in the program it gets there fast.”

  “Little changes, ditches . . . definitions . . .”

  “Definitions,” agreed B. “But it’s mostly good to be defined.”

  “The little changes, those are what push you outside. Outside of the definitions.”

  “Or into the definitions.”

  “‘The difference is merely qualitative,’” declared Y., imitating a professor they didn’t like, a man out of touch with every class he taught.

  They kicked around inside the shallow cave.

  They threw rocks, flat ones that exploded down the mountain.

  They discussed other students in the program, the ones who’d grab up the fellowships, grants, and jobs. They outlined what they themselves intended to do with their degrees. Since last semester they’d changed their minds more than once, right there on the mountain. They wondered: How else would they change their minds, and what would be the whys? Years from now, what would they make of their years here? How would they argue that what had happened here had led to who they would be by then becoming?

  They stepped to far ends of the same bush and pissed.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Y. “It’s important to have fame.”

  “You’re in the wrong field,” said B., and thought: But you will. Everyone bends the fuck over backwards for you.

  “Oh, I know. I mean in-our-field fame. One book, one article that’s cited for decades. Like with Dr. Z. Not because I want everyone to know me, but because it will make me make my work better.”

  B. said he didn’t agree but he knew what he meant.

  “It’s not personal,” said Y., looking at B. and thinking: You will never make it.

  They crushed the cans and stuffed them into the backpack.

  You won’t have to work as hard, thought one.

  You’re not willing to work it every way, thought the other.

  Both thought, The work.

  That’s it, that’s all, that’s everything.

  “Ready?” they said.

  They high- and low-fived.

  They ran down the mountain. The grade pulled them fast, then faster. Legs loose, eyes quick, they rode their own momentum into elevated states of action, an unthinking done to them by their bodies, a sensation within and without at once as they covered ground, skip-sliding, pivoting to dodge cholla and yucca and barrel cacti, tapping tree trunks for balance, stomping to slow down and leaping to speed up and laying out a long and crunching track of noise and dust until Y. fell, with a shout.

  B. staggered to a stop, nearly going down himself. From where he wound up he couldn’t make out Y., only where the bank of dust ended.

  “You all right?” he yelled.

  A dry rattle, loud and rising.

  B. picked up a heavy stone and hustled over.

  The rattle ceased.

  Sitting up, Y. was separating himself from the gnarled gray branches of the ocotillo he’d landed in. Its curved thorns scritched out of his shirt. He was hatless, without his backpack, his arms bleeding. After B. helped him to his feet, Y. unbuttoned his jeans, tugging them past his boxers to just above his knee. Two marks glistened high on his thigh. They drooled blood.

  “I stepped on a snake, I fell, the snake bit me,” said Y., making his tell-a-joke face. “Through my jeans.”

  B. checked his phone. No signal this far inside the canyon, but there’d be a low one closer to the lot. What muscle there was on Y.’s thigh was already darkening, inflating. B. knew enough about snakebites to know that with immediate medical attention everything would be okay. Y. had read that too, somewhere, but had the feeling it would have been better if the snake had bitten him lower.

  Both stared at the snakebite as if it would speak.

  B. had been speaking, saying things since checking his phone. He looked away from the wound and stopped. He couldn’t remember a word of what he’d said.

  Y. pulled up his pants. When he buttoned them he felt as if he had stood up inside himself.

  —inside himself and at the bottom of himself.
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  The bottom of himself was a narrow black ravine. The narrow black ravine ran into and out of a crooked darkness. The self that had stood up inside himself touched the walls of the narrow black ravine. This caused crazy echoes.

  Everything the standing self did caused crazy echoes: breathing, blinking, feeling.

  “How are you feeling?” said B.

  They were easing down the mountainside as fast as they could, B. staying close. Because of the grade they walked in zigzags.

  Y. answered, “Not enough on the outside, too much on the inside.”

  B. backed up. He rerouted them around a dip.

  “It means I feel like I was bitten by a rattlesnake,” said Y.

  “That’s all right: you were.”

  “It bit me, it rattled, it left.”

  B.’s hands hovered at Y.’s side as he hobbled around a many-bladed agave.

  The mountainside became less steep. Some distance away, the legs of the trail wobbled in the heat. Beyond that sat the valley’s city-haze, foul and lazy.

  Everything B. said began with his saying they’d be in the lot before they knew it.

  “It rattled after,” said Y. “Afterthought.”

  B. said that that was all right.

  “All right!” said Y., make-a-joking.

  At a juniper Y. winced. He bent as if he would puke.

  B. put their arms around each other. Together they straggled, their legs working like stilts. Their balance wavered. “Hold it,” said B., adjusting their limbs, and when he noticed that Y.’s arm, streaked and sticky with blood from the fall, had streaked his own arm sticky, he felt as if he had walked out on himself.

  —walked out on himself and turned back to watch.

  The self that had walked out crossed its arms. It was proud of the self it had walked out on. The self it had walked out on was moving a friend calmly through the muddy cloud of a crisis. Every move that self made made the watching self shudder with pride.

  Y. puked, a thin and beery froth. It sprayed both their shoes.

  “Almost to the trail,” said B., keeping them moving, “almost to the lot.”