"Nature"

The year is 1969. A man has a fight with his wife, takes their son and just...drives. For hours. On an impulse, they decide to stop on a remote stretch of highway and take a walk in the desert...

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The boy leapt and threw and hooted their way forward. All around them there was life: grasshoppers, ants and flies. Burrows where snakes or rodents must be drowsing. The bushes that had looked like uniform lumps of gray-green from the highway revealed themselves to have waxy leaves or little yellow flowers or thorns. Distance doesn’t give you perspective; it distorts, the man thought. To understand a thing you have to experience it close-up. You have to live it.

 

“Daddy, I’m thirsty.”

 

It wasn’t the warning it should have been. With thoughts like these, about man and nature and the nature of boys, and the wind and sun competing to comfort them, and the mountains in the distance (that he suddenly realized he’d been aiming for) looking so close but never any closer, it wasn’t a thing he heard as he should have heard it. It was just a thing kids said.

 

“Me too.” Although he wasn’t, yet.

 

They came to a dry wash, a depression where once water had flowed. The rocks here were rounded, tumbling down the sides over ground like crazed pottery. Bisecting their path, the gulley was like a bookmark in a story, and for the first time the man wondered how far they’d come. He turned to look for the Chevy, saw a metallic blue blob in the distance.

 

When he turned back, the boy was already picking his way down, then sliding on his rump, stirring up dust and a cascade of small stones. The man followed, cursing his shoes. It hadn’t been planned, this walk, any more than the start to this day had been planned. That had been a surprise to him, just as it had been a surprise to her when he’d appeared at home in the middle of the morning, dismissed, in every way, from work.

 

“Dad!”

 

The boy was hunkered down on the other side of the wash, poking at something with his stick.

 

Half hidden by a creosote bush. White, hard-seeming, smooth. Just looking at it, the man understood, for the first time, the term dry as a bone, and he almost grinned at the cliché.

 

“It’s a skull, isn’t it Dad?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“A human skull?” The boy’s voice an equal mixture of fear and hope.

 

“No. Not human.”

 

“What, then?”

 

Elongated, with large eye sockets on the sides. A truncated jaw with a few stout teeth. Not a coyote or a dog. Too big for a rodent.

 

“I don’t know. A goat, maybe?”

 

“Can I keep it?”

 

The man said yes, knowing she wouldn’t like it. He picked it up gingerly, expecting bits of flesh, clinging, ants, surely, but it was clean and white as if dipped in bleach, just a bit of loose dirt crusted where it had been lying. He brushed that off and grasped it through the eye sockets, carrying it like a bowling ball. It’s like a boy to be interested in a skull, the man thought. It’s like a boy to run and throw rocks and get dirty. The thought calmed the engine that had been running inside his chest since that morning, the one that had demanded motion, speed, an open highway and distance from her.

 

Dismissed. Going first to find his son, just to give himself one moment more between life as it was and what it would become. Then this new affront, which sent him bellowing for her.

 

You allow this?

 

He was just playing.

 

He’s wearing a dress!

 

He dresses up in your clothes too sometimes. It’s harmless, at his age.

 

What else goes on around here while I’m at work?

 

Wouldn’t you like to know?

 

The boy was the first to see the abandoned shack. He ran to it, standing on tiptoe to look through the cracked glass of the remaining window. When they circled it they found it had no rear wall. Dried wood, so sere it had turned gray, tumbled inward to merge with the desert floor. Junk, pushed by relentless winds into the corners of what had been two rooms, seemed to prop up the disintegrating walls: rusted tin cans, the bones of a chair, coils of wire, a once-blue tarp crumbling to dust in the sun.

 

“Daddy, did someone live here?” The boy was tightrope-walking a fallen plank across a sea of junk.

 

Had someone? Was this the wreckage of some life? How, out here? Nothing but dry washes, rocks, brush, the mountains in the far, far distance.

 

No water.

 

The man turned to look back. He could no longer see the car.

 

“Daddy?” Crossing a sea of rusted metal, broken glass, tetanus.

 

“Get down from there!”

 

The boy hopped down and stared at his father with pink-rimmed eyes. “I’m thirsty.”

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Read the full story in Issue 5 of bosque literary journal: click here.