This Magnificent Desolation

by Thomas O'Malley

  The tip of Maggie’s cigarette turns molten as she inhales. I slept out here once, she sighs, just like we’re doing now, a long time ago. When I left the opera and knew I couldn’t sing any longer, I got on the road and just started driving. I had no idea where I was heading, no thought of where I’d go.

  I was alone then but a lot braver than I am these days. Lit myself a fire and watched the night come down, but I couldn’t sleep. It was a strange thing, being here. At twilight you might see soldiers in the shadows that lengthened across the plains and all the desert stretched before you filled with them. At night, you might imagine them moaning with the desert wind.

  Maggie shivers and places a log of deadwood on the fire. The flames hiss and roar, sending up a shower of sparks into the night.

  You really saw that?

  The mind, she says and taps her head, it can play tricks on you. And I was young, she says, the flames sending shadows flickering across her face. That night—she holds her cigarette smoke and then exhales—I also saw Silva Bröhm.

  The singer who killed herself?

  Maggie nods, points with her cigarette toward the darkness beyond their fire. Walking right out of the desert toward me, the black and garnet gown she’d made famous in her scenes from Die Zauberflöte flapping madly about her.

  Maggie flails her arms in the air and moans: a comic ghost; and Duncan laughs.

  Silva, she says, was telling me that I should continue to sing.

  But your throat, Duncan says, and his mother smiles, touches her neck. He imagines the scarred cartilage from the last concert she’d ever performed thickening in her throat. She nods. I know, Duncan, I know.

  But why? he persists.

  Because that is what we do. We do what we are made to do. If we didn’t, we’d die as well. No matter how bad it gets, when I stop singing, that’s when I’ll die.

  So, what are we doing here now? Duncan says. We’ve never actually stopped before, we’ve never—and he mouths the words slowly, emphatically—actually camped.

  He looks at her seriously, eyes wide and questioning.

  Mother grins, hugs her knees to her chest, and rocks slowly back and forth. She shrugs. Okay, okay, I get it—I do! We’ve never actually camped, despite all my driving us around, is that it? Jesus, you’re a hard one.

  Well?

  Well then, it’s about time that we did! After all, this is the road I took, and she hesitates, a long time ago, before … when you were born.

  Duncan stares at the sparks from their fire rising into the black sky, and higher, where they seem to merge with the sparks of stars that revolve up there, and in the vastness: a glove lost by astronaut Ed White on the first American space walk, Michael Collins’s camera lost near Gemini 10, garbage bags, a wrench and a toothbrush, struts, orbital dampers, empty fuel cells, fragments of rocket thrusters, fuel re-cyclers, filters, piping, tubing, a fuselage, floating in space and decaying and crumbling in their failing apogee about the moon, flaring as embers themselves as they break apart and disintegrate in the outer reaches of the atmosphere. Night and day the various pieces of rockets and satellites and men falling from the sky and a million more pieces still that would continue to circle the earth for a century or more.

  Duncan looks at her and smiles. I think you’re meant to do something special too, he says.

  Maggie reaches forward and takes his face in her hands. Her eyes are black and wide and unblinking. Firelight reflects in them, and there are two small burning embers at the center of each pupil. Perhaps we’re meant to do something special together, she says, perhaps we’re meant to be here, right now, just the way it is.

  She pulls him close and sighs, shuddering deep and long, and Duncan cannot tell whether it is due to profound contentment or merely resignation, an acceptance of defeat and giving in to the insurmountable obstacles that she believes await her, or perhaps it is simply the desperate need for a drink.

  Oh my Duncan, she says. I think the one special thing I may have done in my life was to have you, and in this brief moment, he believes her.

  Above them the stars spin lazily across the curving plane of the earth and with them the blinking fuselage lights of airplanes, jets from the Nevada airbases, and the low trajectories of half a dozen satellites. Duncan has never seen a sky so black and so full of light, so full of artificial movement and yet seemingly so far away. In San Francisco the sky pushed down upon them as it seemed to swell and rise, curl like the crest of a wave coming in off the bay and them caught in its trough. The stars so low at night sometimes that it seemed you could reach up and touch them.

  Mother cranes her neck up at the sky; again, he is taken by the paleness of her neck, all the more startling in the dim light. He follows her eyes as they search the night. Her eyelashes are speckled with sand. He waits for her to speak, and when minutes pass and she doesn’t, he points with his stick.

  It’s Michael Collins and the Columbia command module, just by Cassiopeia, in Orion’s belt. The hunter. See that star—the bright one in that group of stars? See how it’s moving?

  Mother frowns and Duncan strokes the sky with his stick again, as if he is writing upon a sheet of glass.

  Do you see it?

  Slowly she nods. Yes, she says and smiles. And perhaps it is the drifting smoke from the fire, the fluctuations of visibility in the atmosphere, but the star appears to shimmer and flicker and then burn ever more brightly.

  It might very well be, she says. It might very well be. The fire crackles and spits as it burns down, the scrub sending small gasps of pungent, acrid smoke up before them, burning their eyes and making them weep even as they smile. Mother laughs and Duncan feels he might laugh as well, and then she holds her hand to her mouth as tears comes suddenly, surprising her.

  Duncan pokes at the embers of the fire with his stick, watches the wood smolder and blacken. Out on Route 95, a tractor-trailer speeds past, its engine thumping loudly against the night and the loneliness of the desert, headlights floating across the tops of the surrounding stone, and then when it is almost gone, its sound and light fading, the driver downshifts and its engine gives one last combustive roar, like a distant howl down through a long, winding tunnel, out into the trembling darkness.

  He watches the stars falling across the wide sky and he even imagines he hears the crackling, fizzling hiss of their tails burning brightly out. The fireworks above them gradually die down, and when they are done, the stars seem even brighter than before. Now and then beyond the sandstone boulders a lone car passes out on the desert highway, honky-tonk or threads of a revivalist’s radio show drifting by on the warm air, the car’s halogens arrows of light barely breaking the night, trembling on the tops of spindle and acacia and merging with the horizon until they too become like stars themselves and the night seems like a giant cocoon on the verge of sleep and waking.

  Duncan looks over at his mother, asleep, and snoring lightly. Beneath the blankets he can make out the shape of her arms wrapped about her stomach. Sparks from the fire spiral heavenward. He follows their spinning gyre, leans his head back, and watches the stars stagger across the dark roof of the world.

  Chapter 56

  The car breaks down two hours after they leave the Valley of Fire. At first it is merely a slight bucking on the hills but then the engine begins to whine, as if it is slipping its gears.

  I don’t need this, Mother groans, and holds a hand to her temple. Jesus, my head feels as if I went on a bender.

  It’s because you’re not drinking, Duncan says, and when she glares at him, he looks back at the road before them.

  Mother turns on the heat and opens the vents all the way. Duncan smells rubber and burning plastic, and from deep in the cloth and leather, the vinyl and metal and all the crevices of the car, the smell of fish: a thousand fish swarming and slapping and slowly putrefying in the muck along the banks of the waterway before their house after the tide has gone down. He gags. Mother’s eyes flicker from the road to the dash.
r />   What is it? he asks.

  The damn radiator. We’ve been at the top of the red for the last ten miles. I’ve been mostly coasting, hoping to cool the engine down. Dammit, I checked everything before we left.

  A small explosion sounds beneath the hood and steam begins to billow from the front of the car. Waving one hand at the cloud of steam, Mother steers them to the side of the road and brings the car to a stop. She steps out and strides to the front of the car. The radiator lets go and steaming water gushes about her feet.

  Oh you bitch, she says.

  They lock their belongings in the car and begin walking, and soon the car is a black shape on the road behind them. When Duncan looks next, it is gone. The road before and beyond them stretches into an indeterminable distance with withered shrub grass, dry willow, and yellow tamarisk. The breadth of the plains trembles and shudders at either side of them from a breeze that Duncan cannot feel. His duffel bag bangs against his back and the straps pinch and chafe his shoulder. Sweat soaks his sides.

  How far have we gone? he asks.

  Mother glances at him and then at the road before them. Oh, only about a few miles, Duncan.

  It feels much longer than that.

  You should have left the bag behind, she says. We’ll get the car towed once we get to where we’re going.

  He wants to ask where that might be when she looks at his bag and asks what’s in it. He’s brought clothes, underwear, a bottle of water, two tins of baked beans, and a tin of Labrador herrings, but when he tells her Brother Canice’s radio and his rail maps and timetables, she rolls her eyes and stares back to the road. You should have left the bag behind, she says again.

  Upon a distant low hill a plume of black diesel smoke bends in the wind and Mother pauses, cocks her head listening. Her legs tense as if they have become conducting rods to every vibration in the earth. It’s a train, she says slowly, and then perhaps a mile distant or so its whistle sounds across the fields. It’s a train.

  Mother searches about them, and he watches as her eyes seem to grasp a telephone pole and follow it east, and his heart begins to hammer when he thinks of what she is contemplating. She begins walking quickly, striding through the wild grass, following the direction of the pole. Come on, she says. We’re going to jump this train, and her legs begin to move faster, and Duncan races to keep up, his duffel bag bouncing against his back. Wait, Mom, he calls, Wait.

  The cars bang and rattle upon the rails as they pass, coal soot and grain flax smoking the air, sunlight glinting off the cars and making them squint. A hundred cars pass, and Mother searches for an opening, seems about to rush the rails and grasp one of the cars by its front pinion and wrestle it from the tracks. Duncan’s throat is dry and his T-shirt drenched to his skin. The dry grass upon the slopes of the rail cut sways and shimmers dreamlike and it is suddenly difficult to breathe. He sits heavily upon the crumbling wood and watches as his mother stalks back and forth as another hundred cars pound their way east.

  Goddamn it! Mother hollers, and they watch as the engine and its cars snake slowly into the distance.

  They walk a cinder embankment, following the train tracks, with their heads down against the sun. The sun glints off the hot-looking rails, the gleaming track of steel that train wheels have scraped and worn to a luster. Cicadas vibrate and thrum in weeds and bushes that line the gravel furrows. The heat of the sun presses on the back of Duncan’s neck, and he feels himself stooping lower and lower before it, although when he looks at his mother, she is walking straight as a chisel. Only her head, her large hat flapping and billowing softly with the hot wind, is lowered upon her neck—she could be sleeping and yet moving forever resolutely forward, one foot up, one foot down, one foot up, one foot down. The wind billows and presses her dress about her legs, and Duncan can see the muscles in her hips quivering under the light material.

  Blisters begin to burn at the sides of his toes and upon their bottoms, and then, after they’ve walked another mile or two, he feels them burst, and his toes become so raw he can only hobble on the edges of his feet and heels.

  Mom? he says, and then again: Mom?

  Maggie’s head jerks slightly but she doesn’t look back. Yes, hon? What is it?

  It’s my feet, he says. I don’t think I can walk much farther. He licks his dry lips, watches her back with growing desperation. Mom, he wants to scream: Look at me! Listen to me!

  Hmmmmm.

  Hobbling, he drops the duffel bag to the ground.

  A wail sounds startling close, and the rail ties are thrumming between the tracks. Duncan blinks and yellow and orange sunbursts float before his eyes. Mom? he calls weakly, and mother turns and grins.

  This time, Duncan, we’ll do it. We really will.

  Maggie hops the rails to the embankment and Duncan stumbles after her and the train is quickly upon them, its metal dump cars and flatbeds flashing by and rattling and banging the rails so hard it is deafening. Flying cinders bring up welts on his arms, on the skin beneath his shirt and jeans, and he cries out. Mother is shouting but he cannot hear her. She has begun to run and, looking back, waves for him to reach for a handhold. And he thinks what type of mother allows their child to jump a speeding train.

  He sees his lower legs torn from his knees, so that when he looks down there are only the bloodied white stumps of his kneecaps, shining white through the glistening gore, and there on the tracks, ten yards or so away, where they’ve been dragged by the car’s wheels, the bottom parts of his jeans, with his sneakers twisted aslant the tracks, his legs twitching as they spurt blood from their hollows.

  Mother looks back at him and blinks, as if she suddenly sees him and is envisioning the same thing. They are moving up an incline and the train begins to slow and mother runs to him, takes his hand so that they are running together.

  Duncan, she says. You can do this. Now, we will only jump a train when it has almost come to a stop.

  At the top of the rise they are still keeping pace with the train and Mother guides him toward the ladder of a dump car, takes his duffel bag from him, and screams at him to grab hold. The metal is burning to the touch and he clenches his teeth as the skin blisters. Hold on! Mother says, don’t let go, and she grabs his shirt and pushes him up. His heels grasp the bottom of the rail and, with Mother pushing from behind, he begins to climb. Hurry up! she hollers. Get over the top!

  And then suddenly there is a face of a man above Duncan, peering down, floating like a pale balloon in the blue sky, and an arm reaches down and grasps his hands and with a grunt hauls him up and over the top of the dump car. He’s hurled against the side of the car and lies there breathing heavily, clutching his side and waiting for the stabbing pain there to subside.

  The man squats on his haunches and stares at him, long arms dangling between his legs. Hello, he says and grins, flashes the most astonishingly white teeth Duncan has ever seen.

  Never seen a bum with teeth like these, have you?

  Duncan shakes his head, and the man leans close, so close that Duncan can smell him: ripe as day-old meat spoiling in the sun. His eyes shine pale and sick looking.

  And you never will, kid, he says. You never will. He laughs and claps his hands, and then glances up as Mother makes her way overthe lip of the car. Her hair and dress billow in the wind as she momentarily saddles the lip and then swings her legs over and drops to the bottom, coughing raggedly and gasping for breath. She looks to the man and then to Duncan.

  Duncan, are you all right? she finally manages, and Duncan nods, but she keeps her eyes on the man. His long, sun-darkened face bobs up and down as he looks at her.

  Folks call me Spider, he says.

  Mother nods, still sucking in air, but Duncan asks: Why Spider?

  I don’t know, perhaps because I’m tall and lanky and I can climb anything.

  Why not a monkey?

  Spider bares his teeth. Do I look like a monkey to you?

  Mother bunches her dress between her legs and sits against
the wall beside Duncan, reaches over and pulls him close. He looks up at the sky passing above them, blue and absent of cloud. There is the sweet, cloying smell of tamarisk, the rusk of limber pine and piñon, and narrow-leaf cottonwood, its fluffy white catkins floating above them like small clouds a mile distant and falling as if in a dream and then a glaze of heat settles upon the dump car and Duncan’s throat is suddenly raw and dry.

  What’s the matter with him? Spider asks and gestures at Duncan, his hands dangling weakly from his wrists. Why’s he making so many faces?

  Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with him.

  Spider snorts and shuffles forward. Mother’s hand squeezes Duncan’s shoulder firmly, and Duncan knows she’s trying to be reassuring.

  He looks into Duncan’s eyes. There’s something wrong with you, all right. He taps his head. It’s up here, isn’t it? Something not quite right. I can always tell.

  His gaze flickers to Mother. He stares her up and down, eyes moving slowly across her body. After a moment, he hisses: You two don’t know ANYTHING. You be good to Spider and he’ll show you. I’ve been on every train in the West. I’ve been all through California. I know where to get food and who to talk to and who to avoid. I get things done and nobody messes with me. There ain’t a person riding these rails who don’t know the name Spider.

  Okay, Spider, Mother says very slowly. We’ll all be good.

  Chapter 57

  The hours pass in the dull daze of heat, the click-clacking of the wheels, and the slow, metal groan of the cars as they move across the plain. From half a mile ahead the engine sounds its horn as they pass through signals, empty transfer stations, and water depots. Duncan leans his head against his mother’s shoulder and dozes. When he opens his eyes, Spider, sitting just beyond the edge of the tarp yet engulfed in its shadow, is looking at them.