by Jo Ann Beard
Small- to medium-size creatures creep and coil themselves over the desert floor, making their separate ways toward their separate destinies. Big creatures drive their cars along its roads and mostly don’t get out, except to take leaks at the edge of the blacktop. Or point their cameras, hesitate, and give up. It looks different through the lens than through the windshield. Empty and blank and pointless.
I’m in a green tent that turned luminous a few minutes ago when the sun hit it. Eric is cooking breakfast and I’m lying in a sleeping bag not wanting to get up. It is freezing, that much is definitely true. And my shoulders hurt from too much sun and the ground is hard as a city street.
“Come on and get up,” Eric calls. “It’s warm out here.” I peel up a corner of the green door and see him turning omelets with one gloved hand. The other is inside his coat pocket. He’s got binoculars around his neck and a purple wool baseball cap on his head. He looks like a maniac.
I’m getting up.
He roams in the blistering sunlight. The sand beneath his paws feels like fire. Every two or three miles he finds a spot of shade and stretches out, squinting into the distance, panting fast and loud. A quick movement, an interruption in the blankness of the sand, and he rises and runs, ears cocked, feet springing off the sandy ground. Mice and snakes. It takes several to make a meal. If the head of the snake rises in the air, he backs off, whining and growling; if not, he pursues it, sometimes winning, sometimes not. In his dreams at night the long limber bodies of the serpents move unexpectedly at him. Awake, he bites the heels of the beasts in the pastures, on the long empty range, dodging the hooves, tasting the dirt and dung and the coarse fringe of fur. The coyote hates horses and mules, the lowing cows, rich men and poor men. He likes mice and rats, the birds that burst forth in a glorious fan of wings, a squawk.
He roams in the blistering sunlight. His stomach gnaws and his eyes become more alert. The scent of water rises in his consciousness, he presses his nose upward and springs into his lilting trot. Around water is food. The desert gives way to the dappled green of sparse bushes, billowing grass. The coyote tilts his head sideways and uses the round dish of his upright ear to bring in any sounds along the bank. He drinks, listens again, and settles himself to wait. He scratches the area right where his heart beats. Small sounds come forward tentatively from the buzzing emptiness. The grass begins to sway as the breeze picks up. The sun is receding; it is long past dinnertime. The current carries small sticks and leaves, twirling, past his face as the coyote watches the bank, still as stone, waiting for a creature to come forth. From the cover of the wavering rushes, the rabbits press low against the ground, against the urge to run-run-run. The riverbank breathes quietly and patiently; the coyote pins his eyes on a moving reed, turns his ear, lifts his muzzle slightly. A chipmunk leaves the shelter of the grass to step forward. A cluster of oblong seeds on the moist bank has called to him and he must obey.
Inside its green skin a frog blinks, a rectangular insect with a tender belly is claimed by a sticky tongue. The chipmunk squeaks once, the coyote wags and growls as he chews, the dying sun pinkens the air.
We are under a giant balanced rock. There are trees here with bark like alligator hide. Suitcases with leaves. Their roots pop up out of the shallow soil like bent knees poking out of bathwater. We have canteens, just like cowboys, but the water tastes old and filthy after it’s been sitting in there. My shoes are covered with dust and a mile ago a small, thick rattlesnake buzzed at us from the edge of the trail. From above, this place appears as rugged badlands, big craggy pinnacles sticking up like blunt bayonets. The snake made me jumpy as all get-out but I’ve already filed the image of it away — recoiling on itself, the head a pulled-back wedge, its pattern subtle, smudged and blended like a charcoal drawing on the rock’s surface — to be remembered later when I’m back in my own habitat, standing on a linoleum floor somewhere. What I really want to see is a javelina, but of course I won’t. They’re piglike things with tusks and they run in small herds, snorting and huffling over the pine needles and fallen logs at the bottom of this place. This is a bowl of mountains and greens with tender pieces of meat roaming here and there.
My thighs are on fire, from the burn of the sun and the exertion. From the lip of the bowl, up top, it looked more treacherous and lively than it turned out to be. The cleared overlook at the tip of the trail, Massai Point, is named for a Chiricahua Apache man who stole a horse out from under the droopy mustache of a settler. The startled, righteous white man gathered up some of his buddies and they stood at the point and watched for the Apache to show the top of his head. Rifles poised and scanning, they kept their eyes peeled. From the overlook there are a hundred thousand gaps and crevices between the balanced monoliths and stacked boulders. Breathing into the granite walls, hands flat and calming against the heaving sides of his new horse, he waited them out, watching the sky darken and the moon lift its face. They got tired of waiting and rode back to their settlement, miffed at the giant sheltering landscape, the defiant stone thumbs that hid wild Indians in their shadows.
This is daytime. My soap opera is on right now, somewhere. Back in Iowa. My people are roaming back and forth on the television screen, all prepared for any kind of upheaval; there are a lot of chiffon dresses and dyed-to-match shoes. I mention to Eric that my show is on. He turns with a grin and watches me ski down a dissolving patch of trail. Loose rocks roll beneath my feet as I’m carried along. This is elementary physics, ancient Egyptians used it to take house-size rocks here and there, up and down various hills. I skid one foot halfway under an overhanging rock and a curled ribbon of skin peels up my leg. Rattlers hang out under rocks, waiting for a shin to come along. Yee-ikes. I pull my lower leg back out where it belongs and start making an enormous deal out of my injury. Eric sprinkles water on it and yawns. He remembers that we’re an hour off down here, the soap is already over.
The air turns tangy and alive, the sun is gone, the sky is black. Glimmers of light bristle forward in the dome above the coyote’s head. He moves out. The night has a seething quality, a crisp silence that hides the tunneling of small, cowering mammals, the slumped somnolence of the wandering cattle, the wide-eyed jitters of the stick-leg deer. The moon, from the bitter cold of outer space, croons to the griddle of the desert. The coyote listens and turns to the west. An image has moved forward in his head: Out of the murk a picture comes to the forefront, melting into view. The thick, spongy edges of lightness, the dark legs and face, the palpable panic of the herd. The sheep are waiting. The moon pushes him forward from behind and snakes slide under bushes until he passes. Out of nowhere a skunk appears, startled, hunkering low with wide mirrored eyes. The coyote darts, bites, and opens the belly with one efficient fang. He drags it around in a gleeful circle, then thrusts one shoulder at a time into the cooling wetness. It is night and feelings are rising up, like blood to a scrape.
The desert is lunar. Every so often a night bird courses low over the sand and the mice shudder, the lizards peer lidlessly around, unroll their tongues and reel them in again. The moon lowers itself, sitting for a few moments on the shoulders of a western butte, considering the lake of shadows. In its distant, porous memory, the moon can conjure up how it pulled the ice back like a bedsheet, exposing the tender ground beneath. The face on the butte is ice blue and furious, slumping beneath its shoulders infinitesimally, down and down, until it is gone and the stars are livid and blinking. The insects teem, the rodents scrabble, the night-blooming flowers push themselves open and await their guests.
We have two things going for us: a spectacular white rental car and a bag of red-hot cinnamon Fireranchers. We discuss for a fair amount of time while sucking on the Fireranchers whether it is right to “beat” a rental car more than you would beat your own car. We decide it isn’t right, although we immediately follow that up by seeing how fast it can go on a stretch of gummy blacktop. It goes to one hundred and thirty miles an hour before it starts shivering.
The rent
al car has air conditioning but we’re not using it. Instead we’re keeping a spray bottle full of water in the cooler and spritzing ourselves with it every few miles. Now there is a contest to see who can put a new Firerancher in his or her mouth and not bite it for however long it takes it to disintegrate. I will lose this game and we both know it. We’re playing it because we’re stupendously bored but still in high spirits. Every so often I put my foot on the dashboard for a leg inspection. My shinbone is a gentle, peeled blue. This is from when I fell down the mountain into the den of rattlesnakes.
“It wasn’t a mountain, it was a path,” Eric says. “And there weren’t any rattlesnakes.”
I spray cold water on my shin and then put my leg back down where it belongs. My whole body feels swampy. The air is a blast furnace and the windshield is a magnifying glass trained on our forearms. We are one moment from ignition. I turn the water bottle around and squirt myself flat in the face and then offer to do Eric.
“I’ll do myself,” he says threateningly. I hand the bottle over. It’s not my style to squirt him with ice water while he’s driving but predictably he falls apart for an instant and turns the bottle on me. It dries in one second from the hot breath coming through the window. We roll along in silence for awhile, sweating and thinking, working on our Fireranchers. Mine is so thin I try just resting my teeth on it to see how it feels. I bite it in half.
We are taking the low road from Tucson to a national monument on the border of Mexico. The map says we are now passing through the Comobabi Mountains, but outside the windows of our car the desert is as flat as a sheet of parchment. The saguaros have given way to brush and patches of gravelly dirt; along the highway from time to time are homemade altars. We keep passing them, eighty miles an hour. The next one we’ll stop at so I can see who it’s an altar to. There aren’t even any jet trails out here, the sky is a long, blue yawn. Neil Young comes on the radio.
We see a hawk up ahead, standing on the hood of a broken-down car. We slow down to gaze and it stares at us. Its black-trousered legs are sturdy and long, its beak is curved. We peel off, back up to warp speed, and the landscape turns into a melting blur out the windshield.
“Look, sweetie,” Eric says, turned toward me in the driver’s seat.
On the very tip of his tongue is his Firerancher. Thin as tissue paper, it looks like the moon in the daytime sky. Suddenly love is looming over the car, as big and invisible as the ghost mountains of the Comobabi range. I smile at him and turn up the radio with my toes.
He snaps peevishly at his haunch, bending stiffly backward to chew the peppery trail of a flea. The walls of the den are pungent with the smell of safety and his own fur. He gives up and flops back over, closes his eyes in the dimness and begins panting. No good, he’s awake now, it’s time to step back out into the day. In the sunlight he blinks and stretches, fore and aft, like a collie. He shakes so hard he almost knocks himself off his feet. The sky is as blue as blue and the coyote is in a good mood.
He lifts his muzzle and takes in a long snort of air, pulling with it the invisible happenings in the vicinity. There’s something big and dead looming just over the rise. The coyote yawns and his tail swings down between his back legs in its traveling position. He puts his nose to the ground and begins his afternoon expedition. Somewhere, right on the edge of what his nose is capable of, a rabbity perfume is lingering. He breaks into a lope just for the fun of it but drops back down to a trot after a hundred yards or so. The sun is pressing burning fingers into his spine. The blacktop dips into view, and as the coyote moves toward it he prepares himself for the highway’s big medicine. The sandy dirt beneath his paws gives way just a bit as each foot lands and springs off, the small stones and irregularities in his path add juice to his travels but rarely pain. Under his paws it is sand… sand… rock… sand… stick… sand… stick and then the highway’s medicine: hard… scalding… scalding… scalding and then gravel… sand… rock… sand… sand… rock… sand again.
As he passes once more safely through the hard pond of highway fire the coyote is startled by something in the air, something dangerous bearing down on him. Alert and agile, he jumps to the side, cringing and whining, but it is too late. An empty bread wrapper hits him smack in the side of the head.
The landscape has changed from the invisible Comobabi Mountains of love to the barren flats of boredom and annoyance. The sun is a yellow baseball hanging over right field, the driver’s side is in the shade and the passenger’s side is sizzling. I decide it’s my turn to drive.
Eric glances over. “Uh, doubt it,” he says.
I’ve just noticed how his hairline has taken a daring swoop down his forehead and back up again, just like his father’s. I mention this to him while inspecting my fingernails.
He smiles and addresses me by my mother’s name. “I mean, honey,” he corrects himself, “the kid’s got the wheel and the kid’s keeping it.” He’s leaning back in his seat, steering with one finger, brow arched. We are very bored.
The kid is a shithook, I remark.
A shithook with the wheel, though, he clarifies. He points out that I’m sweating a lot, more than he’s ever seen me do. “Pretty hot over there, eh?”
I begin calling him Lovey, and suggest that we change drivers without stopping. He gives in reluctantly, only because he knows eventually he’ll lose. If I don’t get to drive pretty soon I will open my car door while we’re moving and he can’t stand that. He’s afraid I’ll get sucked out by accident and it’ll be his fault for being a control freak.
You have to be going really fast for this trick, over seventy miles an hour. Both of us recline our seats all the way down, I do the gas pedal with my left foot and hold the steering wheel steady with my left hand while Eric climbs into the back seat. I move over the gear shift and slide into his seat while he climbs over my reclined seat back into the passenger side. It’s not exactly that smooth, of course, there is a lot of swerving and hollering that goes along with it. We settle in and bring our seat backs into position and open a can of malt liquor.
“Yee-haw,” I say, now that I’m in the driver’s seat. Eric tries to rig up a shade for his window using a white T-shirt. He can’t get it to stay draped over while he rolls up the glass. I enjoy watching him do this a few times and then look sympathetic when he gives up. “Pretty hot over there, isn’t it?” I ask him.
“Not really,” he answers.
Twenty miles later we enter the Valley of the Ajo and head for the monument, right above the border of Mexico. The road is endless, with wavering lines of heat rising up and a mirage that looks like a silver pool always about half a mile ahead of the car. Suddenly Eric points and I press on the brake. Along the edge of the blacktop on the opposite side of the highway is a coyote, pushing a bread wrapper along with his nose. He ignores us completely, stops and puts one paw on the plastic wrapper, takes it in his teeth, and begins pulling it apart. He shakes his head like a dog. I pull off into the gravel and try to sit quietly, like I’m not a human. He’s staring at me now, still nosing into the bag, gold eyes looking up from the dirty plastic.
The car is a boiling caldron. The coyote stands scruffy and skittish, like a wild dingo dog I met once, who bit everything in sight, wagging his tail like a maniac. Eric slides the camera to me and puts a hand on my arm. He whispers in my ear. I nod. I love dogs better than anything else on earth, next to cigarettes and a couple of people.
I find him in the lens, framed in a square. As I click the shutter he jumps sideways and takes off, running a few yards and then skidding to a halt, looking back over his shoulder. He’s not afraid of us, he’s just horsing around. In the rearview mirror he canters over the rocks, low to the ground, tail tucked. In the slide, projected on my living room wall, he will be a gray, moving blur, a running pelt. The gracious arms of an organ pipe cactus direct him up the hill, over the rise, out of the frame, and into memory.
The saguaros send out long lavender fingers into the afternoon. Grains of s
and cool and then warm again as the slow sweep of the shadows moves past. Something looped and coiled unravels gradually, in no hurry, to follow the pool of purple, the spot where the shadow meets its source. It feeds a tongue out, testing the temperature of the air, and begins to wind back into the debris of the cactus again, until there is only a barely visible presence on the ground, a tangled rope with scales and eyes.
Nearly fifty feet in the air a scar, made with a pocketknife and dirty fingers, is visible on the skin of the cactus. A flicker lands on the green pinnacle and peers around, pokes the needle of its beak into the flesh, and peers again. A ridge ten miles west stands fluted and browning, like the crust of a pie, a hawk slides down a current of air and floats above it. The flicker thrusts again and shrugs the moisture down its throat.
The cactus receives the bird, tiny claws like pins, with the same indifference as it had the man with the pocketknife on the shuddering horse. Weak and boiling, he dug and dug into the spiny hide with his pocketknife. The horse died within the reach of the saguaro’s shadow, descending into a dull bag that collapsed on itself, bones moving out across the desert floor in the mouths of jackals.
The man either made it or didn’t. The words he spoke and the voice he spoke them in linger high above the ground nearly two hundred years later, buffeted by the hot wind, nourished by desperation and the terrible solitude. The flicker turns his head into the wind, finds the moisture again, drinks, and lifts off. The currents of air move around the top of the cactus, over the thorny scar.
