vol. 1, 2007
Looking for the Mule
Jerry D. Mathes II
We stood at the edge of the shaft, then started down the ladder, my grandfather, his partner Charlie Donner, and I. I was fifteen, working my first summer in their goldmine, the Purgatory. The three of us waited before switching on our headlamps, feeling our way down each rung, as the light of the mineshaft’s mouth receded like falling away from the sun. As I descended into the Purgatory Mine, I felt the void crush in around me. The black was absolute until we switched on our headlamps. As I worked, I strained between hammer blows, listening for creaking timbers or the slow grind of shifting rock. I kept breathing, but it was as if fluid half-filled my lungs. I envisioned a crumbling arabesque of granite, lichen, and moss, forcing air out of the earth with a giant whoosh—a sigh for the dying. Grit and sweat encased me in a mineral husk. At noon, we trekked back to the ladder and switched off our headlamps. As I looked up the ladder, I shivered and lost my balance trying to stand still in the mine’s dark, goldless bottom.
Charlie Donner whistled a tune I didn’t know. He said to me, “If this life don’t suck a fellow’s balls up, Wes, nothing will.”
I thought I was special, living like I was in the old west. No one mined like this in the late seventies, as far as I knew. Hundreds of abandoned shafts pocked the American southwest, but most operations were huge like the Kaiser iron pit mine at Eagle Mountain, California in the eastern Mojave Desert, where my father drove massive dump trucks that spent work shifts spiraling down into the open pit mine and back up to dump ore. It was about an hour and half overland from the Purgatory and sometimes we could hear its blast siren on the wind. My small high school sat in the shadow of the mine’s tailings heap.
I followed Charlie up the ladder, Grandfather last. We climbed for the speck of light, and I tried not to climb too fast and bump Charlie or slip. I grabbed each rung as if I were a hundred feet above the earth. My hands always weakened, and the arches of my feet cramped, as I climbed out and tried not to slip off the path leading away from the shaft. I wanted to collapse, away from the hole. The slightest breeze drew goose pimples out of my skin. I felt the atmosphere move—the earth’s slow spin.
We weren’t guaranteed to find any more gold, but I felt freer than my father locked into his cycle of driving trucks hours a day then watching television and drinking beer, waiting for those canned vacations once a year or the other high school kids working as dishwashers or clerks or whatever crappy summer job they managed to scrape up. My father felt his dad was wasting his time out in the desert, and that I needed to earn an hourly wage to learn what being in the workforce was like. At times I felt torn. It was my mother who convinced him to let me spend time out here to get to know Grandfather better and to quit moping around the house. “Wes loves staying out there and needs to stretch himself against the desert before adult life takes hold. Besides,” she said, “Charlie likes the change in conversation.”
Grandfather and Charlie were both lean and scraggly like the Joshua trees scattered around the mine and wore sweat-stained cowboy hats. Charlie had a jutting chin that he pointed with when his hands were full, and my grandfather’s wild eyebrows collected dirt, until they looked like mountain ledges. As a kid, I thought those two old men never aged. In 1942, they had dropped out of high school in Bristol, Tennessee and joined the army together. I loved those early photos of them: cocky hillbillies in their army uniforms. I thought about them only a couple of years older than me, going off to war.
I hiked down the ridge to check on Molly, their mule, although she really belonged to Charlie. She was like a long legged dog, and I looked forward to feeding her. At eighteen years old, she had hauled a lot of supplies, and my mother had a photo of me on her back when I was four. When she saw me, she switched her tail, walked once around the pen, and then came to me, pitching her head. I went into the corral and as I scratched her ears, she leaned against me. I laughed. “Geez, Molly, stand on your own four legs.” She turned her head to me and chuffed. I patted and rubbed her on her ribs.
When I came back up, Charlie sat on a rock, rolling a smoke; a book about Jedediah Smith lay next to him. He crossed his legs and smiled when he saw me, and thumbed over the ridge. I climbed past Charlie after he let me have a drag, and I saw Grandfather talking to two hikers. The college aged man and woman wore shorts, khaki shirts, and lightweight hiking boots. Carabineers, rock anchors, helmets, and rope hung from their packs. Grandfather grew agitated when he saw hikers, thinking they might be environmentalists bucking to expand Joshua Tree National Monument and shutdown his operation, but he looked relaxed. As I got closer, I heard their conversation.
The man said, “We’re from Irvine. A friend told us there was some gnarly rock climbing out this way.”
“Yeah,” the woman said. “Like, we saw the oilrig and thought it’d be cool to check out.”
I couldn’t see Grandfather’s face, but I knew he was smiling after I saw him rub the back of his head. He pointed to the derrick and saw me when he looked back. “That head frame’s for hoisting ore.” He winked.
I waved and said, “Wouldn’t get so lucky as to hit oil. It’d ruin our lifestyle.”
Grandfather stayed to talk with the climbers as they asked him about any rock faces around. I went back up to where Charlie sat. He looked up and said, “That old man will tell them stories until the coyotes start yipping. How’s Molly?”
“Lazy.”
“Me too.” He handed me the cigarette.
“How’s the book?”
“Good. I had me a funny thought when I saw them folks down yonder.” He pointed toward where the climbers were. “Folks like old Jedediah here,” he patted the book, “came scouting around, looking to open a country. Now we got people who only want to wander around and climb rocks like they was on a playground.”
“Recreation nation,” I said.
“All less than a hundred years or there abouts. There was hardly nobody out here when we trained up for the War.” He pointed west with his cigarette. “Right over there.”
I looked at the horizon.
He drew in a drag, blew a stream of smoke and said, “I been out here a long time.”
“Would you like me to rustle some lunch up?”
He nodded, dropped his butt and crushed it under his boot. “No one lives off the desert anymore.”
Just these two old men, I thought.
Grandfather rarely left the mine after Grandmother had left him for Africa the year before. By the time I finished my first year of high school she’d be dead. A week after the news, I got a postcard from her: I saw the gorillas. Made the trip worth taking. Love, Grandma Ev. The smell of frying eggs or Estee Lauder powder always made me think of her.
Her leaving shocked us kids, but my parents later admitted they were surprised she stayed so long. I know I was hurt that she had taken off and at the news of her death I searched for all the wrong relatives to blame, but finally understood it was her. It was who she was, just as digging in the earth was Grandfather.
The rift between my father and grandfather widened after her death. It started when Grandfather refused to help his son with any money after an adolescent fight about going to the Colorado River with friends during a Spring Break instead of working in the Purgatory. Grandfather told him, “Money and your mother have spoiled you, what you need is hard work.” Dad dropped out of college and went to work for the company mine in Eagle Mountain, and anytime they were in the same room it made my stomach hurt and throat tight, especially after Grandmother left.
What made Grandmother as unswerving as a train for all those years and what finally caused her derailment? Did she get up one morning in a house bought from a mine that kept her husband and say to herself, “I’ve crocheted my last doily,” and called the Peace Corps? I only knew that Grandfather and Charlie had struck a vein of gold that could’ve retired them both, but they kept digging and blasting, even after the vein pinched off, confident they’d strike the metal seam again.
After lunch we descended into the earth and worked the afternoon. We gathered at camp as sunset colored the Palen Mountains pink in the east. The wind picked up and switched to the southeast. I sat by the campfire, embers flying up as mesquite burned. I massaged my feet and hands from holding a six foot long rod of steel, the rock bit, or the sledgehammer and hauling the ore cars up the shaft, drank coffee and smoked a cigarette Charlie rolled. It could’ve been 1879 under the darkening sky. I had finished my first year in high school and understood more about busting rocks with explosives than how the school sports program fared or any of my class subjects, with the exception of history.
Charlie poured more coffee into our cups and said, “I’ll never forget when we first came out West. I never did see so much sky or land without trees.” He pulled thread from his ragged pant cuff. I loved this story, but had only heard him tell it four or five times like those definitive family stories we tell occasionally. “Me and your granddad said then, that after the war, we’re done with Tennessee.”
He pointed down the long arroyo. “We tracked the gold from down yonder.”
Grandfather said, “We were a couple of greenhorns digging around, fresh from riding around Europe in those suffocating Ronsons.”
Charlie said, “It did take a few years to wear all the green off, and then a few more to find old Purgatory. We made some finds, nothing but a taste though. Enough to keep us at it.”
“Finding gold is like finding critters out here, you really got to look, all this empty space hiding things. Fact is we almost walked over this deposit. It was rusty gold and looked more like iron than gold, but gold she was,” Grandfather said. “Right after that I wrote for your grandmother to come out and wired her more money than her family had ever seen.”
I thought of them wandering, loaded for prospecting: rucksacks, rock hammers, shovels, canvas water bags, tins of food, magnifying glasses, mercury, nitric acid, carbide lamps, magnets, and gold pans—two men wearing new jeans, old army boots and determined smiles, clattering at playa’s edges, shoveling the dirt and rock. Seeking something precious.
The night cooled. I started to cook some canned meat and canned vegetables in a cast iron skillet. Charlie cracked open his bottle of Yukon Jack, sipped out the neck and passed it to me. I swallowed the syrupy fire and handed the bottle to Grandfather. They laughed as I gulped air and sipped at my coffee. The terrain darkened and became featureless. I could see the horizon against the paler night sky with stars like scattered silver flakes on black sand. Our fire floated on a black disk as if we crouched on a sable plain and if I wanted, I could walk over the valleys—on air.
The next afternoon, I held a rock bit, and Charlie swung the sledge. It was heavy and with each swing it felt longer and my hand numbed. The hammer rang. I twisted the drill’s shaft and made sure it was set in the hole we were drilling. He hit it again. They only used old equipment that could be used without compressors, or generators because they had started that way and figured why invest in more than they needed and haul more equipment up to the claim than was necessary. We bored holes to pack with dynamite to blow a crosscut. He hit the bit again, and I twisted it, shards of rock flew like pieces of glass in my headlamp’s beam, a small puff of sparkling dust. He hit again and my teenage hands slipped. The hammer caught the edge of the bit. It careened up, wrenching the drill down and crushing my hands into the rock. Charlie yelled back for Grandfather. Charlie said to me, “Don’t worry, I don’t think it’s fatal. I suspect you’ll be fine enough for cards tonight.” I held my hands close to my body as if they were cut gems. I’d never been hurt so bad, but I kept it to myself. He was right. I understood as a child that men didn’t make much of their injuries and went back to work as soon as they could. Even my father at the company mine, who had Worker’s Comp and insurance, wouldn’t use it unless the supervisor told him to. I’d flex and unflex my hands through the pain over the following days, willing them to heal. What else was there for me with those two old men working without a gripe?
We quit work, walked to the ladder and returned to the surface.
A thunderstorm rolled in out of the southeast. Cumulus clouds sparked and fired the afternoon. We sat on the edge of the ridge and watched as the clouds built up, at first low over a distant mountain range like dust from a distant cavalry troop. Dark streaks of rain looked like a black pedestal holding the clouds as they billowed and spun across the blue sky. I liked watching the squall line as it advanced over the desert; the black rain cast a shadow of water and when the wind started gusting, we lowered our heads against the sand as the first fat drops fell. It felt like being supercharged within the static of the cell.
We retreated to the shack and drank and smoked Bull Durham and played rummy until we had to light the kerosene lamp, while the squall beat the shack’s sides and pinged rain off the tin roof, lightning filling the shadows, and thunder so close it was like sitting next to a string of sonic booms, causing me to flinch.
Grandfather and Charlie got a glassy look and they smiled at each other. Charlie dealt the cards over an old army blanket that covered the table. He wouldn’t play unless he could deal over the wool and had said, “We got to have some kind of standards in this place.”
I had turned Molly loose to graze earlier. In the morning, she’d be standing in the corral waiting for a can of oats and a scratch on the withers or behind the ears, to lean against me. This ritual was what I imagined other kids saw in ball games or school dances. Outside I could hear the alien sound water rushing down the arroyos, filling the playas and natural cisterns where animals would drink for months. It was like a wet wind blowing through the high desert peaks.
The squall line passed over. Wind still blew and each gust slung rain a little harder. Grandfather only let me have a couple of snorts off the scotch, but it was enough. I scooped the cards off the table when the glasses and ashtrays shifted and shook as a dull rumble came from down the ridge. The clattering of rocks could be heard over the wind, and then only the wind remained.
“Sounds like a small slide,” Charlie said. “I hope old Molly weren’t in the way.” He sipped his scotch.
In the morning, Molly waited for her feed and used me for a post as I scratched her ears. After, I followed Grandfather and Charlie and walked down the trail. We found the slide, sun shining on the uncovered rocks blocking the trail on the edge of the arroyo. A huge granite boulder sat in the center.
Charlie knelt down and said, “We’ll have to blow this thing down the hill. Good thing I didn’t want to go into Indio for a burger and a date shake.” He laughed as he took off his cowboy hat and dusted it against his thigh.
Grandfather edged close to the rock, placed his hand on it and pushed on it a little. He turned and started back toward the mine. “I guess we’d better get some dynamite,” he said.
Charlie and I stood and Charlie slipped a small bottle from his pocket, took a sip and handed it to me. The Yukon Jack burned my throat. “That’s it, not too quick. A fellow don’t want to rush down a good drink,” Charlie said.
We climbed back down with several sticks of dynamite, some fuses and blasting caps.
“I reckon we ought to put the charge under that side and roll her into the ravine over there,” Charlie said.
“Suppose that’d be the best one,” Grandfather said. He pointed at me. “You go on and get up the hillside on the other side of that small bluff.”
I looked a quarter mile to where he pointed. “What? I’m not man enough anymore?”
“Now, Boy, I think your parents would stretch me like a hide if I got you killed. Charlie here will tell you, even an experienced hand can kill himself.”
“I help set charges in the mine.”
Charlie smiled and said, “This is a different set of rules. Things won’t fall out of the sky in the shaft. Once, in France these engineers rigged a set of dragons’ teeth to blow and after the blast, pieces of concrete and earth dropped on them. I tell you, I laughed so hard when they got up rubbing where the chunks hit them.”
“Let me help with something.”
Grandfather said, “I suppose you can clear out a place to set the charge, while we get it ready.”
Charlie measured out two arm lengths of fuse, clipped it, and set a cap onto it. He put it into his mouth and crimped the cap, so it would not slide off. He had lost the crimping tool six years before and started crimping blasting caps onto the fuses with his teeth. He had said, “I just feel the edge, come back a tooth’s width and bite.”
I moved some rocks and created a pocket for the dynamite, then found a couple slabs to lay over it to help direct the blast. “I’ll head up the hill,” I said as they started to insert the cap and fuse into the stick of dynamite.
Down the ridge and out into the flats, the desert air hung with coolness and the rain invigorated the greens among the browns, whites and yellows of the earth. The small leaves of the bitter brush, mesquite and sage and small clumps of grasses scattered about like star bursts. In a couple of months most everything would be brown again, except for the spikes of yuccas, Joshua trees and the cacti. The shadows still held dampness, but under the sun the land was dried. I looked down the ridge. Charlie bit on another cap and handed it to Granddad.
I sat and waited for them.
Charlie let out what he called a Rebel Yell, and it sounded like a shriek of a cat hit by a car and made me jump a little, even from that distance. He and Granddad had lit the fuses and walked up the trail toward me.
They squatted by me, and we waited. The smoke from the fuse drifted downhill as it burned under the rock. I braced for the explosion. The faint sounds of dirt bikes traced through the air. I turned my head trying to place where the noise was coming from or see a trail of dust. Nothing. Smoke had quit coming from the rock. It sat in the trail. I kept trying to anticipate the explosion, the dull thump, staring until I had to blink my eyes. The sound of the dirt bikes faded. Charlie said, “I reckon we’ll give it a few minutes and I’ll go on down and check on it.”
Grandfather said, “We can wait longer than that.”
Charlie said, “Hell, it ain’t blown in five minutes, it ain’t going to blow in five hours. Fuse must’ve gotten damp. We’ll just have ourselves a smoke first.”
He rolled three cigarettes, passed them out and lit them with a match. After he fired his, he shook out the flame, flicking the stick into the brush. I continued to stare at the rock. No smoke floated or hovered around its base. I tried to keep on alert. I didn’t want the charge to blow when I wasn’t ready.
Charlie stood and started down. “I’ll be back directly,” he said.
He reached the boulder and knelt next to it. He shaded his eyes, peering into the seam between the boulder and the ground. From where I sat, his back was to me. I watched as he moved rocks away from the boulder. He eased out the first charge, then the second. He extracted the fuses, tossing them down the hill. After placing the dynamite on the ground he stood and waved to us. We waved back like he was some outfielder who had just caught the last out. Measuring the fuse, he cut it, and then he fished a blasting cap from the box in his shirt pocket. He seated it on the fuse’s end and bit down on it. I saw his head snap back and an eruption of blood as the blast exited out of the bottom of his jaw. He collapsed.
I ran, stumbled, down the ridge. Grandfather followed me. When I got to him, I couldn’t believe the blood splattered everywhere. The blast knocked Charlie unconscious, but he was still breathing. I tore off my shirt, dropped to my knees and tried to stop the bleeding. My thin shirt was useless. I slid my arms under him. My hands and legs ached, but lifted him, knowing his only chance was to get him to town. I stumbled and tripped, but never fell and rocks jammed my feet and the thorns of brush and cactus caught my clothing. My breath came hard. My body reacted and I was divorced from it. I didn’t look at the man in my arms. I focused down the ridge. I knew I had to get there. All I saw was the truck and willed myself toward it step by step, because it was the only way out of the desert for Charlie, and I was the only one who could get him out. I heard Grandfather yelling for me to keep going to the truck, “Don’t wait for me, go. Get on down to the hospital.”
Charlie bled to death halfway down the mountain. I wasn’t sure until I got to the bottom by the truck, but I felt less of the weight of him. I’ve heard people talk of dead weight and always thought that meant heavier. I stretched him out in the bed of the truck while I waited on grandfather to reach us. I gasped for breath and my head full of the sticky iron smell of blood. With my shirt I tried to clean the blood and bone shards from his face and chest, but the blood soaked shirt couldn’t absorb anymore and I ended up smearing it around, doing nothing. Far away to the south, I could see dust from dirt bikes and birds soaring on thermals. Jumping from the truck’s bed, I threw up and tried not to cry. Charlie had always joked, “If I die, don’t feel obliged to eat me—on account of my namesakes and all.” And that was all I could think about.
* * * *
After Charlie’s funeral, my father banned me from going back to the mine. We sat in the kitchen of our prefab company house: Grandfather, Father, Mother, and I. An argument broke out, brief and vicious like a street fight. Grandfather asked if I could go back up and take care of Molly and close up the mine so he could go visit friends from the war he and Charlie had had down in San Diego.
My father said, “Absolutely not. You have to be crazy old man.”
Grandfather said, “Of course you don’t want to teach the boy how to finish a job, just how to quit.”
“My boy is going to start learning how to operate in the modern world. Banging on rocks, hoping to strike gold is a worthless dream.”
I blurted in, “What would you know? You copped out and took the safe route.”
My mother said, “Let it go, all of you. Please, let it go.”
His eyes never left me. He looked like he was chewing rocks then said, “You’re no man. Someday you’ll get it, maybe, maybe not.”
Grandfather said to me, “Now, don’t be disrespectful to your father. I’ll take care of it myself.” He left the house, and all I heard was the sound of the rough engine fading away.
* * * *
School had been in session less than a couple of weeks. When I got home from class, my mother mentioned that a friend of Grandfather’s had called from San Diego. Apparently, he hadn’t shown up yet. Nodding to her as she mixed margaritas, I walked out the door and into the desert. I climbed a ridge to watch the sunset. As I sat down, what my mother had said registered with me. I got up and ran home. In the kitchen, I told Mom that I needed to ride my dirt bike up to the mine to see if Grandfather was up there and if Molly had been looked after. She looked at me and said, “Your father doesn’t want you up there.”
I had to go. But she was adamant. “You can wait and talk about it with your father. That old man has been up there since the forties, he’s fine.”
Another few hours could matter. I knew she would never change her mind. Retreating to my room, I stuffed a pack with some gear and waited until I knew she was watching television and strode out.
* * * *
I hadn’t been in the desert for a couple of weeks and it had been a week since I left home. When I got to the mine, it was still in disarray, and Grandfather’s old red Dodge was gone. I thought about Molly. Down at the corral, hoof prints led out of the open gate. I figured Grandfather probably found Molly missing and went for help. I knew I had to follow the mule’s tracks. I couldn’t leave Molly out here to be ravaged by coyotes. Charlie wouldn’t have wanted that. It hurt that Grandfather didn’t come to me for help, but after thinking about the argument with father, I understood.
I picked my steps with care. The stones slipped. Hot morning air convected the fragrance of pinion pine and mesquite up arroyos. My lungs filled with air like incense. Cholla, prickly pear, ocotillo, and barrel cacti were scattered among the joshua trees and yucca plants—in the desert, everything was swathed in spikes or thorns. A dust devil on the playa leaned with the wind and smog blown inland from Los Angeles streaked the southern sky. I shifted my bush hat back and scouted the trail for rattlesnakes or tourists with six-guns, pretending to be cowboys.
The desert felt like prehistoric space to me. I could fix a spot to navigate by and by midday feel like I had made no mileage toward it. I thought of the immigrants, who wandered into this desert like Charlie and I used to talk about. I wondered if they thought their life so bad back east that they figured this wasteland worth crossing. Charlie and I also talked about the people not fitting into the world of cities and towns. I was only looking for a mule.
Molly’s tracks pocked the trail, and I followed them. I imagined Molly waited at the corral for days before wandering off. The mine had looked untouched. The first day I struck out on foot. Taking off like I did, I didn’t stop to check the fuel and I’d be lucky to make it back home on what was left.
Ahead of me the trail ran into a base of a butte and angled up the steep slope. I labored and sweated up the slope and at the top looked over the desert of folded and broken rock. The tracks faded, blown away by the ridge-top winds. With my binoculars, I scanned the landscape. I saw a place in a bend of a wash at the base of small cliff where the brush was denser and greener. I knew I could find more water there. I also knew that where I found water, I might find Molly. Grandfather taught me that when he told me about his early days prospecting about how he and Charlie found all the springs and used them as camps before striking gold. I wondered how he was.
I scrambled down, kicking dust and stones, to the base of the hillside and worked my way along the sandy bottom of the dry wash. It was a narrow channel. The brush had been scoured from the banks, leaving reddish and gray stones. I wasn’t worried about flashfloods because when I was on the top, I saw no clouds, except for the smog.
In the bend of the wash, the cut bank was ten feet high and the rock face extended another thirty feet higher. Just above the high water mark a petraglyph was carved into the granite: a bighorn sheep. The water wasn’t on the surface, so I knelt in the sand and scooped it away from the shaded bend. Damp, the fine grains stuck to my hands, and as I scooped, water started seeping in. I dug until the hole was deep enough for me to take a long drink. Sometimes at springs, cisterns, or defendable buttes, I’d find pottery shards, stone tools, or arrowheads. I thought of how in a hundred years someone might come across the Purgatory and try to piece together the culture of hard rock miners.
In the shade, I ate a can of beans, and then drank from the hole. The only tracks in the wash were lizards, pack rats, rabbits and the occasional snake. I hoisted my pack onto my back. My body was stiff. The long days exhausted me, then sleeping on the cold ground, in an old, wool army blanket, waiting and not waiting for scorpions or snakes looking for warmth, the rocks rising up after my body pushed through the sand. My body ached from the hours of climbing and walking. Grit and grime chafed my feet, armpits and crotch. Sand lived in my mouth.
I heard a small plane. I knew the fire fighter at Lake Tamarisk had his own plane and sometimes flew around and knew someone could be looking for me. I moved into the bend next to some brush and sat. Every time I heard dirt bikes or aircraft, I hid. For the same reason, I never lit a fire, even during the day for fear of sending smoke. I didn’t want to be found and forced home before I found Molly.
When the sound droned off, I got up and climbed up the ridge. I looked for a reasonably flat area about a third of the way down, a spot out of the flood area and off the windswept ridges and out of sight. If I were lucky, I’d hit a thermal belt where it’d be ten degrees, or better, warmer. I found a nice flat area that had a small screen of brush. The sun started to go down, and I was in the shadow of the ridge. The morning sun would hit me as it cleared the horizon. The warm wind moved down slope.
I ate some Spam and beans with a tortilla. The food was warm from being carried in the pack next to my back. I sat in a dried shallow depression rimmed with mesquite and ironwood. Locoweed rattled when the wind gusted a little. Across the arroyo, on the ridge top, the sun illuminated a low stonewall. A natural formation, some people, who didn’t know, thought pioneers or Indians built them. The light caught its edges and deepened the shadows in the cracks between the rocks. I watched it until it disappeared into the darkness and fell asleep wondering how far off Molly was and how Grandfather was doing. I also thought of my parents, although I knew they would be more pissed than concerned.
In the morning I started a grid search to the south and around noon sat under the shade of mesquite just looking at the playas. I napped a little. I was tired. At the top of a mountain, I saw I-10 to the south, the artery of commerce between L.A. and Phoenix. Semis, cars, buses, groups of motorcycles, RVs, and trucks towing boats to the Colorado River or Lake Havasu. It must have been Friday. A train smoked and cut across the desert like a Chinese dragon. It seemed to float above the ground. I thought about the troop trains Charlie and Grandfather talked about riding on. They had been out here before the interstate, back when the highway was two rough lanes and when rutted roads and mule trails were the only way to get around off the route. So much had changed in the desert.
I shook my head and pinched the bridge of my nose, massaging it. At the edge of a playa, I spotted what looked like a vehicle. With my binoculars, I saw it had the same faded red color as my grandfather’s truck. Excited, I started down ridge. I had to get down there to help Grandfather. I didn’t know if the truck got stuck or if he had parked and taken off over the desert on Molly’s trail. Rocks and dust scattered ahead of me. The slope was steeper than I thought. I kept my eyes on the truck as my speed built up. I grabbed at a bush and leaned back to slow down. Thorns dug into my palm, and I let go. I slid further. My foot grazed a rock, twisting my ankle. I cursed.
A sharp pain shot into my calf as I slid into the wash. I sat and took several deep breaths. My ankle throbbed. The laces on my boots had loosened, so I cinched them up to keep the swelling down. I stood. “Stupid son-of-a-bitch,” I said as I flexed my ankle and grimaced. A loss of focus had killed better men than me. I could still walk. I had to walk, and I limped down the wash that cut out onto the playa.
After a mile, my ankle numbed. I made it to the truck, and it was my grandfather’s. The rear right tire had been spun off the rim in the sand, and the axle was wedged on the ground. Walking around the truck, I found Molly’s tracks leading out onto the playa and next to them, Grandfather’s boot prints. I shaded my eyes and looked across to the other mountains. Nothing moved. High up in the sky turkey vultures drifted on the haze. I followed the boot tracks.
The dirt on my body itched. I stumbled on the small ripples of earth left where the water had evaporated. The flatness made walking easier, but I felt a little delirious on the stark white dirt under the sun. I squinted and fell into the steady step after step like a being rocked in a cradle. I lost consciousness of everything except where I put each foot and the heat swallowing my body as my mouth dried. I walked during the dangerous part of the day when I should’ve been under the shade of a rock or bush, glassing the desert for movement, a time when heat stroke could knock you down before you ever knew you were struck. My mouth thickened with mucus. The sun drew an arc over me until its rays shone in my eyes whenever I looked up. Dizzy, I stopped and took a drink.
I followed on, hoof and boot tracks one after another and me on the flat plain crossing an occasional slash a motorcycle had cut. Sometimes the footprints stumbled, or left drag marks where the heel or toe didn’t get lifted all of the way. A speck on the dried lake bottom, I thought of the broke down truck and that maybe I should’ve turned back for more help, but knew there was no time. The time for turning back for help was done, and I knew if anything was to be done, it had to be done, now. In my mind I could hear Grandfather and Charlie laughing, telling me, “You took that drink, now swallow it.” I had to follow those tracks, to the coast if needed—modern world or not, I still had to walk in the old way, the tracker and the tracked.
I stopped close to the old shoreline of the dead lake. After a couple of minutes and another long drink, I clambered up to a flat spot and saw Molly’s head above some mesquite. I laughed, did a little foot shuffle, but restrained myself from yelling, so as not to spook her. Not that I could’ve yelled very loud anyway with my parched throat.
I walked to her. Standing still, she tilted her ears toward me. I smiled. I thought she might come up and lean on me. As I cleared the last bush, my stomach went sour and as the smell hit me, I turned and vomited. My legs cramped. Grandfather lay dead in the sand. His old canteen, canvas rucksack were strapped on his body, and it looked like he died in the act of crawling, moving forward. My legs wobbled and I fell to my knees. I sobbed, but found the desert had dried the tears in me—only sweat came out of my body.
The months of the summer and fall collapsed onto me. My gut hurt. I sweated as an evening breeze picked up and cooled my skin. I knew the times of Charlie and Grandfather kicking around the desert to make a living were all gone. It wasn’t 1879 or 1949—it was 1979. I would never live like those two old men. Outlived and left behind. Nothing left but ruins, artifacts and the bones of ghosts under the burning sun. I also knew my father’s ways were fracturing, except he wouldn’t have a piece of desert to isolate himself on, only a lay-off notice and the unemployment line.
Molly pawed the ground and snorted. I had lost track of time. I stood and rubbed my eyes. The sweat burned. The sun began to set. Taking out my water bottle, I rinsed my mouth with the warm water, and then poured some in my hat for Molly to drink. She pushed my hand down as she slurped then lifted her head and chuffed at me. Water sprayed me. I wiped my face and then scratched her between the ears as she pawed the ground. I winced into the sky, said, “It’ll get cool soon.” My voice cracked. Bile soured in my throat as I looked at Grandfather’s body in the sand. I took out my wool blanket and covered him.
I knelt by him. I didn’t know any of the rituals of prayer or funerals, so I mumbled, “God rest his soul.” It felt false and cheap. I stood and looked around wondering which direction to take. The highway lay to the south out of sight. I stretched and decided not to go anywhere for a while. The sunburned smog traced a red scar above the mountains, while the western sky erupted with the color of bloodied oranges. The ancient lake tinted yellow and faded to dark as I gathered brush for a signal fire.