Jacob Kelly
The
poverty in the village was exposed by near darkness. Sixteen people declared their independence
from the rolling thunder by surrendering to the loneliness of their homes; an
isolation even greater than that of their desert community. One woman told the village tale, as was customary
before sleep, of the men that would leave the town never to return. She told her son the story with great
conviction and caution. As she
progressed she arrived at the part where the men would be swallowed whole by
the encompassing desert. Her voice
quickened as she told this part of the story, feeling the exorable pressure
from her son’s eyes to finish as soon as possible. She never glossed over this section, she just
tried to get her words out faster so to be done with it. It exhausted them both. The mother finished speaking and the boy let
out a sigh, finally able to roll into his bed spread and be claimed by the calm
dead of sleep.
There was no danger in the rolling
black clouds above although the village respected it as such. The desert village became arrested by the
night, having seemingly ceased to harbor life.
Horses did not stamp, becoming light breathing and statuesque. The power lines, not yet three years old,
were the only thing to enter and leave town on any night. The day the lines appeared was exciting for
the villagers, but the excitement slowly turned to tension as no proof of their
creation showed. They stretched outward
into an openness that felt un-enterable and harbored sparse life and
desolation, and their presence was regarded as intrusive and oppressive as the
desert that surrounded the small community.
Standing atop a weather beaten wooden porch a Man with a Gun lazily eyed
the dark clouds, as if they in some way would get the sense that he had great
distaste for such things as storms. His
eye does not move from the cloud particularly worthy of his scorn, as though he
was staring down some great adversary.
Another man approaches from a house across the way with a start to his
steps as though to say do not speak until
I have made my peace, breaking the Man with the Gun’s gaze from his dark
patch of sky.
The two men talk for nearly an hour,
exchanging hurried, hushed words between each other. The man who approached the other has a desire
to leave the village, to learn where the power lines may lead him. The other warns of the folly of entering the surrounding
desert during storm times. The Man with
the Gun, undoing the button of the holster at his side, holds out his revolver,
telling the Man with Desire that if he must go to at least take something with
which to protect himself. The Man with
Desire replied that he would not need it; that if the place he was going,
wherever it was, were to require that he have a weapon then it wouldn’t be
worth going there. The Man with the Gun
forces his weapon back into its holster, his eyes not moving away from his
friend. Breaking from the conversation
immediately, the Man with his Desires set out of town loaded with the light
gear he had deemed necessary, following the power lines.
*****
The night air hangs with an avidity
of a storm breaking out, stuck limbo.
The overcast that sneered down on the Man with Desire seemed only a
couple of feet above the power lines that he followed. He went under them for hours, waiting for the
cloudy canvas to crash down onto both him and the lines at any time. He wanted them to swallow him up and carry
him into some vague newness that he had dreamed about every night for as long
as he had lived in his village. His
footsteps seemed to sound hollowed the farther that he got from his village, as
if the air was getting smaller and tighter around him; he estimated that he had
to be a good ten miles from the only people that he knew of. Determination was his deity, and he found it
in his coffee, pockets, bad meals, and all of the ethereal images that he could
conjure. The vegetation and cacti grew
more and more dense, at first in patches and then in full blown foliage. He felt uneasy with each step as he walked
through the brush and bramble, not knowing what lay underfoot on the desert
floor. The man with desire increasingly
felt like the only one to have ever touched these grounds, although he knew
this to be an impossibility as he followed his guide from ten feet on high. The lines above were a testament to something.
His chin was falling into his chest and
bouncing back upright again like a pendulum, his feet kicking more and more
sharply into the shrubbery as his pace slowed.
Sleep crept into his body and he began searching for a place to
rest. His need for rest had begun to
outweigh the drive for discovery. The
Man with Desire settled on a patch of bare, flat dirt between two boulders
about three times the size of himself, not quite twenty feet from the
lines. He kneeled on the ground,
unrolling his sleeping bag over a patch of dead earth that had been spared by
the vines and bramble that surrounded.
He had resigned himself to the idea that the storm wouldn’t break, that
it wouldn’t be born this late into the night.
He felt that it would have the good sense to at least know not to start
up at such a late hour. The Man with Desire
slowly opened his bag, dipped one foot
in first to make sure everything felt alright, then combined a growl and a sigh
and crawled in, kicking at smaller rocks with his feet as he settled in for the
night.
*****
He awoke the next morning to the
sound of gunfire incredibly close, the blast ringing in his ears, his body
jerked upright by the startling sounds.
He immediately felt an intense pain in his upper thigh, his head waving
back and forth like a fish struggling for air.
He awaited the fisherman’s cudgel that would put him out of his misery
so he could pass on, eyes vehemently scanning the scene for the person about to
end his journey. Not even ten miles from
his home. The man from the night before,
the man who had told him not to leave the village was here with him now,
scanning his gun back and forth in front of a rattle snakes face, the snake
following the barrel the entire time, before pulling the trigger again.
The Man with Desire scurried out of
his bag, limping over to one of the boulders nearby, trying to stand himself
up. Wincing as if in question to the man
with the gun as to what had just happened, the man told him that he had picked
a poor spot to sleep, that a couple of snakes had moved nearby to his camp to
try and keep warm. The Man with Desire
checked his gunshot wound, still wondering how and why his friend managed to
shoot him, when the Man with the Gun’s demeanor grew much more distraught. The holes in his thigh were too small to be
gunshot wounds, and the Man with Desire’s world started to become distorted and
ethereal. His friend hesitated towards
the sleeping bag, staring heavily at it and sluggishly lifting his
revolver. Taking aim he squeezed the
trigger once, twice, three times, until he had nearly expended every bullet he
had left all over the bag. Any rustling
that had started inside slowly stopped.
The air stunk with poison and sweat
and gunpowder. The Man with the Gun told
the other that they needed to head back, try and get some medical attention on
the wound, and get out of the incredible nothing that they were surrounded
by. The Man with Desire managed to
understand the notion of heading back in his feverish state and immediately
refused. If he was going to die anyways
in wouldn’t be there. He wanted to die
knowing what was out here.
The Man with the Gun slammed his
weapon in its holster, expanding the leather by his frustration. He began to
wish that he had set out after his foolish friend sooner. His sighs came heavier and more disgruntled
trying to force out guilt he knew he shouldn’t feel. The Man with the Gun
decided to at least grant his companion what he wanted, but he was still wary
to travel so far out into the desert and maintained to himself that their pace
would not be terribly quick. He fashioned
some rope from his pack to the hole riddled sleeping bag and placed his fellow
man on it like a makeshift sled. He
slowly pulled the Man with Desire along under those parallel lines; any pain
that should have been felt from being dragged on such thin sheets of fabrics
was utterly nullified by the intense high induced from the poison. The Man with the Gun’s revolver dangled from
his thigh and swayed back and forth into his leg with every step that he took. The dull sound of the gun smacking into his
leg seemed to explode each time, as if it were the only sound in the world to
the Man with Desire. The pawp… pawp…
pawp… of the pistol was making his head pound.
The blur of color around his sleigh dog seemed to be engulfing them
more violently than the storm clouds.
The Man with Desire’s head snapped
from side to side as though he was rapidly taking in his surroundings for the
first time. Based on his reactions to
his environment it seemed as though he was experiencing all of his senses for
the first time in his life, not sure what to make of the world that he found
himself in. He batted at the edge of his
sleeping bag with his hands. It appeared
to him that the brush and the vines of the desert floor were encroaching upon
his sleeping bag like hungry snakes, as hungry as if they had just woke up for
the first time after a long winter. The
Man with the Gun looked wearily over his shoulder at this.
*****
After several hours of travelling on
in this way the desert air clung heavily to their backs, hung tight to their
calves, and the Man with the Gun made it the excuse for his slow pace. He had brought along a few spliffs of cheap
weed and tobacco for them to share and now seemed as good a time as any for his
friend to smoke. It was made marginally
better to the Man with Desire knowing it would probably be his last smoke. The pawp… pawp… pawp… of gun on thigh kept
resonating in the air as he took a hit of the weed. For the time the Man with Desire seemed to
only dart his eyes back and forth at the vegetation on the ground, having
stopped at swatting the edges of the sleeping bag. Thunder began to roll overhead and it felt to
him to be such a deep rumble that the Earth was coming apart, and the power
lines overhead was its seam.
He
had taken to imagining things, anything,
to counterbalance his distorted perceptions on reality. He
imagined that he was on a desert moon covered in sand, crawling bramble, and
dead dirt; that he was riding horseback with his friend just outside of their
village; that he was actually back at home in his bed, all to pass the time and
keep his determination up. But
determination was beginning to drain his confidence. And all the imagination in the world couldn’t
keep the Man with Desire from noticing the constant sound of the bull rider’s
yell shrieking its way off the little leather stamp on the back of his friend’s
jeans.
“Well what are you lookin’ all high
strung about? You should be lookin’ pretty comfortable down there while he’s up here dragging you along.” The
Man with Desire quickly flicked what was left of his spliff onto the ground,
trying to shake the sound of the little leather… person’s… voice. The Man with Desire began sweating even more
heavily than before, to the point that his clothes would soak through
completely.
“He’s
draggin’ ya off to the Land of Molted Peacock Feathers, ain’t he? Yeah, been there a few times myself… Oh I’m Lee Wrangler by the way. I already know all about you though, been
watchin’ you for hours down there.” The
pawp pawp of the revolver finally stopped as the Man with the Gun turned to his
friend to make sure everything was alright, that he hadn’t passed out or died
on him yet. The Man with the Gun had
hoped that maybe he had and he’d be able to start getting back home, but this
thought brought even more exasperated sighs of guilt than before. He feigned a smile and turned back,
continuing to pull him through the muggy desert air. The Man with Desire tried to shake the
hallucination with a heavy blink of his eyes but the voice continued:
“Ya know… it would make life a whole
lot easier for me and my buddy here if you’d just hurry up and die. The longer you carry on livin’ down there on
your old shot up sleeping bag the farther out in the middle of nowhere we’re
all gonna be, and that just sucks for everybody,” the Man with Desire kept
trying to focus solely on the pawp… pawp… pawp… but he was realizing that the
voice he was hearing wasn’t going to go away. “Look bud, I used to be an assassin for some
corporate big wigs over in Shanghai; if there’s one thing I learned from my
many years on the job it’s that if you’re gonna die then just go ahead and die. And if you need a skilled hand at helpin’ you
with your passing then ya don’t need to look any further than myself. I’m incredibly skilled in several forms of
martial arts, and I have had a hand in helping to write every book in
existence, in some way or another. But I
wouldn’t take too much of what I say to heart.
After all, I am probably just a figment of your hallucination.”
The leather man on the Wrangler
stamp continued on as the Man with Desire watched the blitz of color flood by
around him, especially as twilight began to set in. He didn’t want to fall asleep because he knew
that it would probably be the last thing that he’d ever do. The Man with the Gun, now covered in sweat,
looked hopefully towards the coming night, as it would probably grant his
friend release from his pain and thus allow him to start the walk home. “The lanes for these power lines were
originally carved out by these giant cigarettes, if you’d like to know. I have a feeling you do. They just had about fifteen people pushin’
each one of them, right on down a straight line from one town to the
other,” Rain began to pelt the Man with
Desire’s world mercilessly, to the point where he wondered if he would be
swallowed up by a great flood. The rain
drops were now six inches in diameter to his eyes.
“All
that smokin’ and burnin’ really did a number on the vegetation in the area, and
ended up making this here desert. Pretty
easy to lay down power lines when you got miles and miles of desert to run
with.”
What
little saliva that was left in his mouth tasted of dirty bath water. Finally, as quietly as he could manage
through cracked lips so that his friend would not hear, the Man with Desire
asked Lee Wrangler if he was going to die soon.
“Well, that’s entirely up to you,
really. The sooner the better for your
friend here, though. If you carry on
living too long you’ll probably just end up getting the both of ya killed and
then I’ll just be lyin’ out here in the middle of nowhere, no one to talk to
but myself.” The breaking of the storm gave the Man with the Gun a weather beaten
look that shamed the Man with Desire every time he was able to focus his eyes
long enough on him.
He told the Man with the Gun to stop
dragging; that this magic carpet ride through the desert needed to come to an end. He labored to say it as loud as he did, but
his words managed to pierce through the stiff desert air. The declaration relinquished the Man with the
Gun of his moral obligation to whom he thought of now as a sad, yet still
foolish, man. There was a sigh of relief
from the gun wielder that seemed to extinguish all of the breath that was left
in his lungs, so that he nearly collapsed on the ground next to the Man with
Desire, taking a knee. Nothing was
really there in front of the Man with Desire that he could make out with his eyes,
but he was still fairly certain that the Man with the Gun was next to him
now. The rushes of colors were
gone. The intense humidity, the pawp
pawp pawping… even Lee Wrangler, all gone.
The Man with Desire felt he was already partially gone.
*****
As darkness
began to encompass the village, sixteen people retired to their homes in a
concerto like movement, seeking ignorance to their world in the form of
sleep. One mother, as customary before
sleep, told the story of the men that were lost to the open maw of the desert. She did not gloss over their departure into
the land of the dead and desolate, although the boys eyes pleaded her to do so.
