The Last of the Smoking Bartenders

by C. J. Howell

  The air grew muggy and warm as the road descended though canyons of carved rock, each one looking like the Grand Canyon, and off the plateau, out of the high plains. On the valley floor the rain had left fields of hearty yellow flowers flowing out from the highway, dazzling, feverish, they were probably more accurately described as a weed, a virulent dandelion perhaps, with thick green stalks and curved green barbs, rippling like an ocean to the distant hard scree and volcanic slabs. At the lower elevations the landscape grew increasingly insane. Rock formations dotted the horizon like Hershey’s Kisses a half mile high, like cookie dough flicked from a giant spoon onto a sizzling pan. Tom thought of Dr. Seuss, and of how he too was probably crazy.

  By nightfall he found himself in the outskirts of Phoenix, the last ride speeding away unapologetically. The night was phantasmal. A gentle breeze felt like the darting tongues of a thousand cats. The air, thick and humid, made the light sticky, and it clung to street lamps forming white balls against the black sky.

  After a few minutes the heat became unbearable. He stripped down to a dingy brown T-shirt that had once been white, and piled the remnants onto his pack. With the poncho, wool coat, hooded sweatshirt, and long sleeve thermal strapped onto the top of his pack, he looked like a Sherpa beginning an ascent as he started out toward the glowing skyscrapers in the center of the valley of light.

  He hopped over a guardrail and crossed a sterile dirt field studded with a few clumps of bunch grass and creosote to the nearest clutter of street lights. Like everything in the desert, distances were longer than they appeared. An hour later, Tom pulled himself over a concrete wall into a subdivision. He aimed toward the city center, planning to hitch north again when it was feasible, heading toward the dam, always to the dam.

  The streets curved and spiraled. He followed the contours of the sidewalks, passed yards landscaped with gravel and cactus, getting lost in cull de sacs and enjoying the randomness of the streets. He found his way out of the maze, the entrance marked by a boulder engraved with the words Skyview Estates in a manicured rock garden.

  An empty road stretched a good two miles without a single traffic light. He cinched up his pack and walked. Atop a small rise, the valley stretched out below. An orange moon, almost full, hovered above the downtown florescent pillars, the radiant orb barely squeezing between the barren mountains, ringing the city ablaze with pinpoints of light like the stars in the sky if they could been seen. Once in a while a late model sedan or a new SUV buzzed passed on the straight stretch of road. He felt his legs winding down, the product of a long day and many miles without food. A mile in he could make out a set of gates and a glass enclosed booth. He uncinched his pack for minute and paused to catch his breath, trying to gauge if the guard booth was manned or not. It seemed likely it was. He hopped a low concrete curb and bushwhacked through a stand of chaparral onto a dirt field dotted with cactus underfoot. He skirted a few conical anthills by the light of the orange moon using the distant freeway as a guide. He caught a trail used by animals and migrants and came upon a burnt black fire ring a good distance from the wall of the next subdivision. He let his pack fall without ceremony. He took a deep breath, feeling his chest free of the weight. He gathered some bramble off the ground to make a fire in the fire pit. He snapped off two handfuls of twigs close to the twisted dry truck of a stunted Russian Olive and plucked another handful of undersprigs of sage to use as kindling. The light was still pretty good from the moon. He watched a prairie dog rear on its hind legs, sniff the air, and dive into its hole. He pushed the kindling into a pyramid in the center of the oft-used fire pit and lit it with his lighter and eased in the thin branches and knotted limbs of the Russian Olive to build a small fire. The night suddenly contracted, and his peripheral vision shrunk to the small circumference of the firelight. It was quiet save for the echo of the eighteen-wheelers on the freeway, strangely rhythmic and calming. A blackness that could be seen surrounded the fire pit. He listened to the twigs crackle. He could hear nothing from the subdivision.

  He opened the pack and pulled out his clothes and his emergency cans and his bag of change. He had a can of corn, a can of green beans, and a can of chunk light tuna. The tuna, he thought, was doubtful. It had been in there a long time. He set the can of corn and the can of green beans atop the fire. He smelled the clothes from the pack for mildew, detected it, and decided there wasn’t much to be done other than try to shake out the wrinkles by snapping each piece taut and then laying them out on the desert floor and hanging his skivvies between the sticklike branches of a scraggly desiccated acacia. He did his best to pull his pack inside out to give it some air. When the cans were blackened and the labels burnt, he ate the green beans and the corn with a spoon and drank the water at the bottom of the cans once it was cool enough to drink. The corn was delicious. He stood and looked into the distance letting his eyes adjust to the darkness and then walked a circle with his back to the fire around the perimeter looking for any sign that he’d attracted attention. He stood still and pondered the night for some amount of minutes and returned to the now dying fire and sat down crosslegged on his outstretched coat and counted the bag of change. Most of the silver was nickels. Dimes were valuable and quarters were little nuggets of gold. He had fistfuls of pennies. It amounted to twenty-six dollars and ninety-seven cents. He ziplocked the bag airtight, stuffed it under the coat, and went to sleep.

  He awoke just before dawn, the night sky slowly drawing away at the edges, the silhouettes of mountains appearing against an emerging band of pale blue. He became aware of the familiar sound of tractor-trailers on the interstate. A line of headlights consolidated from the east down valley along I-10 from Tucson. The pale blue light cast the desert in a soft blue hue. He stood, stretched, and lit a half-smoked GPC. He watched a trickle of red bulbous ants brave the white and gray ashes of the fire pit to get at the spent cans. The wall surrounding the subdivision was closer than it had appeared at night. His clothes were strewn about like the remnants of a house sucked into the heavens by a tornado. He flicked the cigarette into the fire pit and gathered up his clothes and shook them out and folded them neatly like they’d been freshly laundered. He counted out three dollars of change for his pocket and replaced the bag of change in the bottom of the pack. He packed the backpack tightly and fit everything in except for the coat, which he lashed onto the top, and his canteen, which he let dangle off the back by a nylon cord. The desert lightened from blue to pink to yellow, and the sound of traffic on the freeway intensified, and the freshness of the morning air dissipated, any crispness gone humid. He drank the last of the water from his canteen, saddled up the pack, and started walking. He followed the wall of the subdivision, meandering around the dust-hidden cactus, thorned shrubs, and partially subterranean agave, invisible in the flat graveled gap between the interstate and the outer suburbs.

  The wall ended at a road that led to another walled subdivision with a guard and a gate, and he stayed out in the wasteland, walking past that subdivision and yet another until the sun was high in its arc and thirst drove him to climb over the eight foot concrete block wall and enter back into the world of men. He pushed his pack over the wall and heard it land with a thud and then dropped himself over. He landed on the yellowed lawn of a backyard of a three bed, two and a half bath ranch style. The house had an empty feel. He lifted his pack off a now crushed viburnum and walked around the side of the house and looked in the windows. No furniture inside. A for sale sign in the front yard. He shuffled back to the backyard and searched through some tall weeds alongside the house for the water spigot. It was dry and rusted around the wheel. He twisted it open but no water came out. He walked out into a wide cul-de-sac. He followed the streets watching for signs of life. There were for sale or foreclosed signs on about every third house and only one or two parked cars on each block. He checked the spigots on the side or in the back of the houses that had padlocks on the front doors and were clearly empty, and the water had been turned off on all of them. H
is face pulsed with his heartbeat. It felt red.

  On a street with no cars in any of the driveways, he chanced going into the backyard of a house without a for sale sign. The yard was covered with white crushed stones, no weeds. Under the stilts of a white painted back porch, he found the spigot and filled his canteen from the metal tap. The water was warm as bathwater. He stuck his head under the tap and let the water make its way through his hair and beard. He drank from the canteen, filled it back up again, and scuttled into the backyard of the adjacent house that appeared abandoned. He stretched out in a thin strip of shade next to the house and drank deep and heavy from the canteen. The pounding in his temples subsided. He put his head on his pack and lay flat and smoked a cigarette.

  Midday. The rectangle of shade narrowed and then disappeared. He slung the pack and started out again across the subdivision. He was immediately sweating, his skin growing blotchy and irritated. The heat did something to his clothes so that they gathered and bunched in the wrong places. Within a few blocks he began to tire again, but he plodded through, caught a second wind, and kept walking. Sweat dried and ran again fresh. It was inefficient going, the streets curved purposelessly. He followed the pattern of the plat, stamped onto the earth by a long gone developer, the circular streets filtering to a wide divided boulevard with stunted dust covered palm trees planted in a row on the median. A car came up behind him, a purple Chevy Cavalier with dark tinted windows and muffled bass. It sped up as it passed him, leaving a cloud of grit hanging in the air that swirled and stuck to his sweat creased skin. The boulevard tapered to a narrow entrance lane and exit lane with gates locked in the up position and an empty guard house with realtors’ fliers taped to the windows.

  He followed the road outside the subdivision for at least a mile before coming to a scaffolding of traffic lights at an intersection of two nondescript roads, seemingly too wide at six lanes each. He bore to the left and walked the road most parallel to the interstate that seemed to be heading in the general direction of Phoenix, although both roads were barren of homes and businesses and only led to the brown distance where homes and businesses presumably were. He walked along the wide empty street with occasional cars blowing by at sixty miles an hour. After a few miles he came to another display of heavy yellow traffic lights mounted on huge metallic silver steel poles at an intersection with no cross-street, only a dirt parking lot to a construction site with some cleared lots dedicated to some past or future construction. The light turned red nonetheless.

  He kept walking, feeling his legs wind down. His steps were small, footing unsure. He wasn’t so much hungry as weak. He sat the pack and rooted around in it for the can of tuna. His fingers shook as he opened it with the can opener. He ate the oily meat with his fingers. The grime from his hands ran down his forearms, the tuna juice acting as a solvent. He ran his fingers around the inside of the can to get the last shredded fish particles and then tossed the can on the side of the road. He saw no reason not to litter here. Everything here was litter. He slung the pack and continued.

  He walked for the rest of the day. The road was a treadmill, a straight shot to nowhere. Distant objects, the mountains, buildings, and bridges were not getting any closer, instead they rotated like stars in the night sky, moving along the periphery so each time he looked up they looked different, appearing at new perceptions, until he wasn’t even sure he was looking at the same thing or something totally new and unexpected. After some miles he passed a fortress wall of a neighborhood with only one gated entrance. He hoped for a gas station or a shopping mall, the start of the city, but when the wall abruptly ended he saw that it was another stretch across barren desert to the next signs of civilization. As the day waned, traffic increased, people coming home from work, but there was no sign of the heat letting up. It was the hottest part of the day. Each breath scorched his lungs. He had never inhaled heat before. The asphalt seemed to be giving off its own fumes, adding fire to the air. He felt like he was swimming in a thick oxygenated batter. He watched his arms moving slowly through the dense air, as if they were buoyed on thermals rising up from the ground. Ahead there was a long crack in the desert, a fissure that ran the breadth of the valley. It was an eroded creek bed from years when the water still ran. The road ran over it as all roads did. It took nearly an hour to reach. Tom stumbled off of the road and skidded down a red sand embankment into the riverbed and crawled onto the concrete escarpment of the overpass and into the shade. On his hands and knees, he climbed up the cool concrete incline under the road and rolled over on his back, breathing hard. He felt his face pulsing red, skin tight, peeling and flaking off. He lay there for long hours as sun went down. He was out of water. He thought he might die. But he did not.

  He awoke, or at least became aware that he was awake. It was night. The sky was black. He saddled the pack and scrambled up and out of the culvert on his hands and knees, grabbing brittle weeds that easily pulled free, roots insecure in the sand. He gained the road and walked until sunup. Another dawn. It lightened imperceptibly until all at once he could see his surroundings. Traffic was lighter, maybe it was a weekend. He was into long blocks now, with streets and long walls with houses behind them. Far down the road he saw a sign perched on a staff high about the road that could only have been placed there by a gas station.

  The blocks were long. He walked slowly. Crossing the long black parking lot of the Conoco station, he found he could not pick up his pace and simply had to endure the last minutes it took to get to the glass door and the air conditioning inside. He bought a plastic gallon jug of water, a tin of sardines, a box of crackers, a microwave burrito, and a Slim Jim. It cost $8.74. He sat on the curb of the parking lot and drank half of the water and ate the microwave burrito.

  He rested a long while, although there really was no such thing as rest in the nuclear heat, just a slow sucking of life force. When he at least had his breath, he walked the parking lot, paying extra attention to the curb gutters and the row of newspaper boxes, and collected 17 cents and a half dozen usable butts. He sat back down and smoked two of the butts, mildly disgruntled that he had found not a single quarter around the row of newspaper dispensers, a row half as long as it should have been or once was and most of the metal boxes dispensing free rags advertising cars or hookers. No loose change around those. The decline in newsprint was bad for everyone.

  He shouldered the pack and moved on. The road he traveled became marked by traffic lights at regular intervals. The sidewalk was wide, white, and uniform. The blocks were long. On each block there was some sort of strip mall, single story tubes of building divided up internally into individual shops occupying either a street corner or a rectangular box if in mid-block. Cars pulled in and parked directly in front of the building, and people went into the shops and then returned to their cars. Other than that there were no people to be seen. The sidewalks were empty. The stores had tinted windows so no one could see in. The side streets were quiet.

  He walked the long street, not even attempting to hitchhike since he knew it would be futile. But he was glad to be in the city where he could find food and water when he needed to. A bank clock read 118 degrees. Its black digital screen rotating slowly on a tall pole reflected a blinding metallic glare when its corners hit the sun with each rotation. A line of cars idled at the bank’s drive though lanes, windows rolled up, air conditioners on high.

  He kept walking. Impossibly, the blocks grew longer, a half mile between cross streets. By late afternoon the business along the road had dwindled, replaced by industrial parks and glass encased suburban office complexes and then began the long concrete or faux stucco walls hiding unseen housing developments. The gaps between revealed alleyways to open desert. Reluctantly, he let the reality seep in that he was not in the city at all.

  He stopped and looked back from where he’d come and then forward down the wide street. Nervously he finished what was left in the plastic gallon jug of water. He felt light headed, shaky. He wasn’t even sure he coul
d make it back to the last convenience store. What was it, two miles back? Four? He kept walking forward, now just hoping for shade, thinking it was ridiculous that he should die of thirst surrounded by millions of people in some nameless suburb. Not ridiculous but pitiful. Pathetic. But his next thought was that people die like this every day. The thought scared him. The immediacy of death, the unpredictability of it, the thousand little decisions that cause it. He actually started walking faster, not sure how a death like this would work. Would he suddenly die of heat stroke, or slowly wind down, feverish and delusional, not aware of what was happening to him, like a mountain climber so hypothermic he takes off his clothes like he was at the beach as the snow piles up around him. He suspected the latter. He wanted to act while he still had his wits. He needed refuge. He walked another mile, the early rush hour traffic thundering past. If he collapsed here would anyone notice? He knew the answer. Not until it was too late.

  He came to a bridge over a canal. It was bone dry. At least there was shade. He made his way down under the bridge. He could hear his joints creaking, as if his limbs were held together by rubber gaskets that had dried and cracked and were on the verge of crumbling to powder.

  He was not alone. Across the dusty debris strewn bottom of the dry aquifer a group of migrants clustered in the shade. Beneath the near side of the overpass a man sat on the cement incline with his elbows on his knees. He wore a floppy canvas hat with the drawstring pulled tight under his chin. He had a narrow face tanned to the color of copper and bright blue eyes. A scraggly beard revealed that he was neither young nor old. He absently searched for something in the deep pockets of his cargo pants and, not finding it, brought his knees up to his chest and refolded his hands there.