The end of the line
Calamity at first sight
Now the man in me don't walk right
Just like a pebble in my shoe
But you were a wanderer
And a competent one at that
So it caught me by surprise this vulnerability
That I never thought I had
?The End of the Line," Boy & Bear
The ground hadn?t seen water for weeks. The landscape itself was pitched at a slight angle, as if the entirety of it ran toward a great centralized drain. The dirt was hard-packed, gouged, pock-marked, and riddled with chasms that looked like mouths lying open in wait for rain.
Ketch put the toe of his boots to the cracks in the dirt, making a slow, thorough sweep of the lines the way a palmist would study an open hand. ?We can stay here,? he said.
***
The Camino?s engine had long since gone cold, the three of them solitary travelers in this landscape: man, woman, machine; blankets and whiskey under an unsympathetic sky. Nothing had disturbed them that wasn?t of their own making. Aside from the wind with its usual tricks.
She rose up: a tide of bare skin, sloughing blankets and sand, her skin slick with the same dreams that caught in her eyelashes. Bare legs spread hot across him. Her head tipped back to a sky brimming with old light, shoulders bared until the wind draped them and doused the fever in her eyes.
?You know the Anasazi?? he asked. There was no sleep in his voice. He could rarely find it out here. Too many things in the night, too much empty space for the echoes in his head. His hands were restless and indecisive. They settled on her waist and then started roaming: the top of her thigh, the small of her back. Those liminal spaces of body halfway to other destinations where his fingertips landed and flew off over and over again.
?Some.?
?The Ancient Ones. No one knows what happened to them.?
?Illness, other tribes, violence, migration, no one reason for certain,? she pursed her lips, blew smoke like a kiss to the sky. ?That?s what I always heard, anyway.?
?Not the same as seeing,? he replied, and she cocked her head down at him, her hand sliding over naked torso, splaying wide across his sternum. It was a prompt of a kind, so he told her about the shadows that visited his mother once. How he saw them from the corner of his eyes, too young for them to make him anything but vaguely uneasy. For weeks afterward on their kitchen counter lay a shard of red earth curved like the top of the sun, the symbols etched in the clay foreign to him, foreign to everyone else but her. He remembered she?d sit at the table, too, fingers weaving in and out of brittle grass, unraveling the baskets they?d brought. She?d run a nail the length of the strands like a needle to a record?s groove, listening to the hands that made it.
?What do you want with all of it?? he?d asked her years later as he stood above the shelves and boxes of artifact mixed with junk. There were totems and trinkets, pottery and paintings from tribes that were allies and those that were enemies and some that had long since forgotten which they were. She collected feathers like she meant to fly away herself and turned one between her fingers from where she stood across from him. ?None of it?s ours, anyway,? he said.
His father was two years from his death. Ketch was a year from first change. Amelia Bell was already the face he looked for every morning in the school hallway. His mother had begun to grow quieter and quieter, as if each passing day drained another word away. Ketch wondered now if she?d already known back then what was to become of her only son.
?Says who?? Her eyes snapped at him, sharp as they always were, sharp as the quill of that feather dimpling the pad of her finger. She came around to fold the top of a box back down over the contents. ?It?s everyone?s, and if you don?t know that by now, you haven?t been paying attention.?
He didn?t know where the bowl went, or the baskets, only that they disappeared and left in their place a deeper line between his mother?s eyes that refused to thin even when she smiled.
****
He didn?t tell Madison about the boxes or the admonishment, his father, Amelia Bell, or the day the seams of his skin split wide and something else came in. Not yet. Something started rattling around in his chest, a kind of warning that turned his eyes away from the gunslinger?s to find a patch of star-studded night sky. Her fingers closed upon him like she knew, like she could catch it and keep whatever it was right there.
Madison shifted over him, knees locking around his waist, snakedance of her body easing down until he got that look on his face she?d come to know. And then there was nothing but the sky above with its impassive light and the whisper of blankets and skin.
Later, he would come to understand that this was where the end began.
Calamity at first sight
Now the man in me don't walk right
Just like a pebble in my shoe
But you were a wanderer
And a competent one at that
So it caught me by surprise this vulnerability
That I never thought I had
?The End of the Line," Boy & Bear
The ground hadn?t seen water for weeks. The landscape itself was pitched at a slight angle, as if the entirety of it ran toward a great centralized drain. The dirt was hard-packed, gouged, pock-marked, and riddled with chasms that looked like mouths lying open in wait for rain.
Ketch put the toe of his boots to the cracks in the dirt, making a slow, thorough sweep of the lines the way a palmist would study an open hand. ?We can stay here,? he said.
***
The Camino?s engine had long since gone cold, the three of them solitary travelers in this landscape: man, woman, machine; blankets and whiskey under an unsympathetic sky. Nothing had disturbed them that wasn?t of their own making. Aside from the wind with its usual tricks.
She rose up: a tide of bare skin, sloughing blankets and sand, her skin slick with the same dreams that caught in her eyelashes. Bare legs spread hot across him. Her head tipped back to a sky brimming with old light, shoulders bared until the wind draped them and doused the fever in her eyes.
?You know the Anasazi?? he asked. There was no sleep in his voice. He could rarely find it out here. Too many things in the night, too much empty space for the echoes in his head. His hands were restless and indecisive. They settled on her waist and then started roaming: the top of her thigh, the small of her back. Those liminal spaces of body halfway to other destinations where his fingertips landed and flew off over and over again.
?Some.?
?The Ancient Ones. No one knows what happened to them.?
?Illness, other tribes, violence, migration, no one reason for certain,? she pursed her lips, blew smoke like a kiss to the sky. ?That?s what I always heard, anyway.?
?Not the same as seeing,? he replied, and she cocked her head down at him, her hand sliding over naked torso, splaying wide across his sternum. It was a prompt of a kind, so he told her about the shadows that visited his mother once. How he saw them from the corner of his eyes, too young for them to make him anything but vaguely uneasy. For weeks afterward on their kitchen counter lay a shard of red earth curved like the top of the sun, the symbols etched in the clay foreign to him, foreign to everyone else but her. He remembered she?d sit at the table, too, fingers weaving in and out of brittle grass, unraveling the baskets they?d brought. She?d run a nail the length of the strands like a needle to a record?s groove, listening to the hands that made it.
?What do you want with all of it?? he?d asked her years later as he stood above the shelves and boxes of artifact mixed with junk. There were totems and trinkets, pottery and paintings from tribes that were allies and those that were enemies and some that had long since forgotten which they were. She collected feathers like she meant to fly away herself and turned one between her fingers from where she stood across from him. ?None of it?s ours, anyway,? he said.
His father was two years from his death. Ketch was a year from first change. Amelia Bell was already the face he looked for every morning in the school hallway. His mother had begun to grow quieter and quieter, as if each passing day drained another word away. Ketch wondered now if she?d already known back then what was to become of her only son.
?Says who?? Her eyes snapped at him, sharp as they always were, sharp as the quill of that feather dimpling the pad of her finger. She came around to fold the top of a box back down over the contents. ?It?s everyone?s, and if you don?t know that by now, you haven?t been paying attention.?
He didn?t know where the bowl went, or the baskets, only that they disappeared and left in their place a deeper line between his mother?s eyes that refused to thin even when she smiled.
****
He didn?t tell Madison about the boxes or the admonishment, his father, Amelia Bell, or the day the seams of his skin split wide and something else came in. Not yet. Something started rattling around in his chest, a kind of warning that turned his eyes away from the gunslinger?s to find a patch of star-studded night sky. Her fingers closed upon him like she knew, like she could catch it and keep whatever it was right there.
Madison shifted over him, knees locking around his waist, snakedance of her body easing down until he got that look on his face she?d come to know. And then there was nothing but the sky above with its impassive light and the whisper of blankets and skin.
Later, he would come to understand that this was where the end began.