They know where I am. Sun is high up now, looks like noon or close to it. I just have to reach those rocks and make a right. A right at the rocks. I’ll bet I can see the house from those rocks if I can get up there. Used to be able to climb like a little monkey. That big oak in the backyard, could see the whole damn valley from the top there. Out here, not one tree… Just rocks. Those tests we were doing killed everything. If there was a tree here before it sure as hell wasn’t here after we got done. Surprised it didn’t kill these lizards too.
How is it I can see the moon in the middle of the day? What’s the moon doing out this damn early, I wonder? The moon spins around the earth, the earth spins around the sun, and the sun just sits here on top of this desert. Burnt the whole place up orange. Used to be you could get one of those magnifying glasses and hold it to a piece of paper or a twig and the thing would start to smoke and soon enough it would catch fire, just like that. Point that at a lizard and see if the thing don’t run right back under a rock. The sun is just cooking us down here, like someone’s holding that damn magnifier and playing some sick joke. Well I’ll be damned if I’m gonna hide at this point. Just keep moving or they’ll get you.
Not a single tree out here now. Used to hitch the horse to the tree out front as a kid, felt like a regular cowboy eating lunch while the horse rested under the shade. They don’t even sit down to rest, makes you wonder why people have to lay under the covers for near eight hours a night to keep going the next day. Pathetic. Give me a piece of ground to lay my gear down and I’ll take a nap good enough to recharge for a whole week. People complain too much, cause they don’t know any better. Would you look at that, the sun and the moon together like that? Now how do you expect me to make a sundial without a twig in sight? I guess one of these pointy rocks will do the trick. Prop up the rock in the sand like a miniature Stonehenge. Now what a sight that was. A thing like that. Piece of the way back past just sitting there, untouched. Here we are trying to blow things to smithereens.
Gotta make it back to base and tell ‘em all about this. Haven’t seen a thing move out here except for these old grey lizards scurrying around. Could be they all left when they heard our engines. This dry wind carries the sound clear across the sand, over the dunes, past the rocks, over the canyon, through the valley… But mostly all you can hear is the wind.
Lawrence of Arabia, now there was a piece of work. A good soldier with a rebellious heart… win a war all by himself if he wanted. A blue-eyed devil riding around this desert on a fine stallion, hootin’ and hollerin’ like that, what a sight. Must’ve scared the hell out of anyone who wasn’t with him, that’s for sure. Something else to see that happening on a big screen when it’s five below outside, a big blizzard coming. Snow and sand, it’s all the same in the end really. End up stumbling around blind as a bat either way. Can’t see what the hell you’re shooting at, what’s shooting at you, don’t know where you came from or where you’re going. Hell on earth.
Being deep in a jungle you can’t see a thing, but the thing is out in the desert you can see too much. That lonely horizon. They say hell is other people, but I think really hell is yourself, too much. A man will start seeing things that aren’t there when there’s nothing to be seen. Dad used to read us that story, says the desert is just a big old labyrinth that kings used to confuse their worst enemies.
The old man sure liked to read. Boy, he would read about three newspapers every day, cover to cover. I think he even read the obituaries and the classifieds. He’d be able to tell you any kind of story, you’d be laughing your ass off and he’d just go on and on, something that happened thousands of years ago and here he is telling it like it happened yesterday and he was there to see it. Tears rolled down his eyes every time he laughed. Funny how close laughing and crying could be.
These shoes are no good for walking on sand. Whatever happened to my boots?
That hawk up there can probably see clear to the end of the world.
Pissin’ in the wind, nothing quite like it. To take a piss in the grass, in the middle of a forest or something like that. Dad always said that was his favorite thing, and he sure did piss in the outdoors a lot. I’d hear him walk outside next to those bushes before the sun came up and take a piss back there. Not quite the same pissing in the sand, out in the desert, but still makes you feel alive for some reason. You eat with forks and knives, hide yourself when you piss and shit… forget you’re an animal after all. Something so basic, natural, ‘bout pissing in the grass or the sand I guess. Something we forgot but can still feel in our nerves deep down somewhere, some kind of freedom. Maybe we can mark our territory like a dog or a wolf and just lost practice, that’s all.
Then you get old like me and start pissing yourself… that’ll remind you about being an animal! Only marking yourself as territory, cause that’s all you got!
Make it to the path and I’m on my way. They’re probably right on my tail now. Can’t see a damn thing in this heat, not even the horizon can stay straight, sweating like a whore at Sunday Mass.
The ground is hard now, baked solid by this damn sun. Used to be you’d throw some seeds over your shoulder and a plant would grow right there in the dirt, green all over the place. Dad mows the lawn twice a month sometimes, the weeds are so stubborn.
Just keep walking straight ahead. Must be the river over that ridge. That trip out of Ohio, clear across this great land. Where’s the ocean? we’d ask. Are we there yet? It’s right over those mountains, he’d tell us. But it wasn’t. He’d laugh and laugh. Then you’d forget, when you’re a kid you’re always forgetting, everything’s always new. You’d look at that sky over past the range and see the ocean in it, almost hear the waves. ‘Til suddenly it really was there.
