For a long while, she has been holding him hostage in her breast pocket. Now, she takes him out and un-smothers him from the fabric of her shirt, smoothes out the crinkled edges, lays him flat on the table. She studies him, his creases, the wrinkles that have begun to form from familiar laugh lines and the gather between his brows. She knows that the dry heat can do this to a person. He is an exoskeleton, a snakeskin that begat vacancy from its leather carcass. He has lips like books: parched pages that have separated from exposure; and a rasp that escapes from deep in his chest when he speaks, in the rhythm of rattlebox seeds, like the sound of parchment shifting, little pods from a Missouri tree shaking; les levres aiment les livres:
“Don’t let us die out here, in the cottonmouth canyon land. This is big desert ache; this here place where John the Baptist came to dine on locusts and hang with saints.”
“Please,” he begs, “Keep this gaping wound from swallowing us, from getting us way down and lost in the starved belly of the States from which there’s no return; please, keep us from the harm.”
And she considers him, then, as he is, and not just as he looks on paper. To look at him like that, a lifelike countenance in front of her, after having gotten used to the well-worn impression of his sun-stroked silhouette, is like pins and needles waking after a slumbering silence. What a face! It appears wiser, for its wear. She begins to think of Los Angeles, reeling outside a cheap motel in China town where she can make love, if she pleases, for three days straight.
She is thirsty for this existence that she’s begun to manifest, and she is anxious to see the other side of the desert and to finish this map she’s mostly crossed to get there. She is calculating distance in her mind: not numbers, which may be understood as many miles between, but as scheme and happenstance, those estimates referential only in retrospect: of thought drifts, velocity, and muscle mass. He is the map in her pocket, having known the road and acquired its traits. The edge, already somewhat visible, is fate. She is not yet willing to admit this, though she thinks it.
She knows that she will have to accept an end that is premature; because she can already feel a fetal curling for it in her belly. The loss of it is a familiar, warm waste that shrinks her dreams in defeat: this thought she has, has consequence and its birthing pains are felt long before their context is expelled:
Softly, she leans into him,
“Alright, be free. But don’t tell John. Don’t tell. I couldn’t keep on living out here, without you, love, on just sweet wild honey and tumble weeds.”
And the part I just added:
Past the buildings there is a lot of dry space, not like the ruddy stuff we’d just come from, but a real sand paper effigy with great ghetto canyons with a train lugging through ‘em. There’s gophers popping out every which way like whats-its galore. Great goddamn. And we criss-cross the interstate all the way to the Arizona border, tagging in and out, left and right; with it teasing the whole time, the badger that it is, like a goddamn whore; and I can’t get it out of my mind, even for a minute, that goddamn death trap! The Arizona border comes up like a jack rabbit. Just the way Dan Manke wants it to.
Just as barren as the rest of the fucking desert, but with a trading post cropped out right smack in the middle of everything, so you can’t miss it. It is the most absurd scrap of architecture that I’ve ever seen. A teepee, how goddamn ridiculous—with plastic animisms emblemed on the cliff above, lifesize—deer, eagles, some other fanatic wildlife shit—I don’t know.
We stop here a while and chew gum and I walk inside hoping someone will yell at me for being a hot sweaty mess and not buying anything and just filling my water bottles but no one does and it pisses me off. There is a rain cloud that looks damn ominous hanging on the far end of a mesa, but I just sit and watch it. About one in the afternoon I say, “Whelp, we’re in Arizona now. Shit.” Then we get on our bicycles and I stick my chewing gum to my tire for good luck and we keep on riding, now on the left side of the interstate– important only in that we’re not actually on the interstate yet, thank god.
Actually, it’s pretty fucking beautiful out here and quiet, too, although the interstate is a loud, sinister beast with bulging arteries and you get the imagery. But we are to the left of it, and its beautiful. Just us and our last leg of old ’66, cutting through the Rez; the clouds hanging behind us for some reason and just dim enough to cast a boorish purple bruise on the mesa façade. We are in a high spot, and to the left of us the landscape falls off into a vast basin, behind us, of course, are those buttes, and in front of us just looks so damn hot and godforsaken and sweltering—the road itself is swaggering, a mirage if you will. There is a barbed barrier between us and the highway and it sort-of makes amends with my nerves. The impending clouds keep us cool, and that is really the crux of it—you don’t really feel hot out here, because it’s a dry heat. But you see it; and so the shadow of a cloud is a blessed respite in its trickery.
