by John Brandon
Dannie didn’t want to keep playing the scene over and over. None of it was her problem anymore. She could quit trying to figure Arn out. She could quit wearing out her eyes on the empty spot in the world where his crappy pickup used to be. She’d had her explanation, her little speech planned out, and he hadn’t wanted to hear it. Now she felt like she had to tell it to someone. The words were lumped in her throat. She had to walk out into the desert and whisper them to a cactus or something.
Dannie pulled away from the window and went to the kitchen. She stared vacantly into her pantry. There were about a dozen boxes of crackers, all open. She didn’t even look in the fridge. She drank a glass of water and went to the back sliding door and looked out past the balcony. Her condo felt creepy, like a big country house.
Dannie remembered college, high school. She remembered all the breakups, the loss and the freedom. Breaking up back then had been exhilarating, but now she only felt adrift. Even her divorce had seemed positive, but there was nothing positive about losing Arn. Dannie didn’t open the sliding-glass door. It still wasn’t dark out, the moon a low bloom. Dannie was going to have to start from square one. She’d done it before and she was going to have to do it again. She was going to go to a fertility doctor and she was going to look for an appropriate partner. If she had to move back to LA to find one, that’s what she was going to do. She was going to set herself a deadline, and if she didn’t meet anyone by then she was going to look into other options. This thing with Arn had been built on deceit. It was a deceitful fling, and now all the deceit was gone, behind her. She was going to sit around for a couple days and wait to get her period. She could feel the start of it. Her periods had gotten worse in recent years. She would bleed like she’d been stabbed. She wouldn’t fit into her jeans. She would have horrendous thoughts. She’d be stuck in here alone, like someone coming off drugs.
THE RIVALS
Sometimes the wolf could withstand a series of full days without a song and sometimes he grew demented and out of control after only a few hours. He struck again, a dog and cat who lived next door to each other. The owners of the animals were not on speaking terms, but the pets were close. The wolf had broken their necks and flung their bodies under a shrub. Again he had not eaten his prey. At first look, the dog, an Australian cattle dog that for some reason had never grown to full size, and the cat, a massive tabby, looked to be cuddling, taking a nap.
The owners were two old men who’d worked in the turquoise trade and had each coached many youth baseball teams. Once, they too had gotten along famously. They were both lifelong bachelors. The cat was named Bonnie and the dog Clyde.
MAYOR CABRERA
The council meeting. Lofte had always scrimped and jiggered, but this year a lot of items would be plain neglected. No further magic could be performed on the numbers. There hadn’t been a security patrol or volunteer fire crew for some time, but now they would have to close the recreation center. There once had been a commercial alliance that spruced up the main drag every couple months. There once had been a parents’ alliance that stewarded the baseball diamond.
Mayor Cabrera had not gone to see Dana last night, the second appointment he’d missed. It had been two months since he’d had his troubles with her. He wondered if Dana thought he’d met someone, that he’d given Dana up for some other woman. Maybe she thought he was having money problems, as if that would’ve stopped him from visiting. He would’ve robbed a bank, if it had come to that. It was seeming more and more farfetched, the notion of Mayor Cabrera driving to Dana’s villa and propositioning her. Washing his car, slapping on cologne, knocking on her door and looking her in the eye and asking her to fully retire and become his woman—the idea seemed childish. Dana didn’t love him. At least at this point she respected him as a customer. Mayor Cabrera couldn’t have Dana think of him as pathetic. That just wasn’t something he could live with. If his dream of being with Dana was what had caused him to go to his sister-in-law when she needed him, then good had come of his falling for a professional lady. He could think of it that way. He’d only seen his sister-in-law four or five times and her spirits had already risen.
“Hidey there, Mayor,” said one of the council members. “You with us?”
The town council consisted of four members. One was Lofte’s lone lawyer, a guy who always wore a polo shirt and always carried a tape player with headphones for listening to books on tape. One councilman was a kid in his twenties who was a single father. He drove his daughter to Albuquerque every day, to a fancy school. The kid was awaiting a big settlement because a surgeon had messed up one of his hands. There was an elderly councilman who was a crack shot and had a range set up on his property. If you showed up at his house and asked to shoot, he’d lead you around back and load up his arsenal of old rifles and let you have at it, no questions asked. The last member of the council was a middle-aged woman who was loud and grating, but if you knew the facts of her life you couldn’t help but root for her.
The council discussed the wolf. The town’s pet owners were in a lather. This was a problem something could be done about, unlike the budget. Maybe they could have a vote about it, a town vote. People loved that, when they got to decide something local and immediate. The youngster with the daughter said he knew a guy who sold these rigs that turned regular fences into electric fences. If you had a chain-link fence you could spend eighty bucks and hook up this box that ran a current. The kid presented this information, like most things he said, as an idea to be only lightly considered, a jumping-off point.
“What about the people with wooden fences?” Mayor Cabrera said. “And what about the pets themselves? The very pets we’re trying to protect could get harmed.”
The old man didn’t know why they didn’t set traps. Bait them with ground beef. You’d get a few coyotes collateral damage, but so what. The lawyer wondered what the proper channels were. Wolves were protected, no doubt. Maybe the state would tranquilize and relocate it. The tutor-woman said that in the old days people would’ve looked after their own, bundled up in a rocking chair on the porch, shotgun at the ready. To be honest, she added, she didn’t give a shit about people’s goats and cats. She didn’t like when people treated animals like they were family. In truth, she was rooting for the wolf.
Mayor Cabrera hadn’t told the council about Ran. He hadn’t told anyone at all. He didn’t like keeping secrets, but he didn’t want folks to get their hopes up and also didn’t want to deal with people who’d resist having an enormous off-brand church moving into the area. Mayor Cabrera of course resented that some stranger from another state would determine whether Lofte survived. He felt like he should be doing more to secure Ran’s favor, but he wasn’t sure what. Maybe he was supposed to fly to Iowa with a detailed proposal, a sales pitch that pointed out the myriad attributes of North Central New Mexico. He didn’t have that in him. Not these days. He was also keeping the whole thing to himself, he knew, because if it didn’t work out it would seem he’d failed. It would seem that the town had expired not due to population atrophy and dwindling tourism, but because Mayor Cabrera hadn’t been able to close a deal. Mayor Cabrera didn’t want to fail, nor did he want to perform a miracle. Honestly, he didn’t even want to come to another of these meetings. The council had moved on to another topic and Mayor Cabrera again wasn’t paying attention. In a few minutes it would be break time and Terry, the old guy, would pour everyone a small cup of the lemony liqueur he was never without.
The fact that Mayor Cabrera had only recently gotten it together to do a proper Internet search on Ran was a testament to his lack of presence when it came to mayoral concerns. During one of the many slow moments at the motel, he’d gotten the lobby desktop fired up and typed Ran’s name into a search engine and browsed about a dozen relevant links. What he’d gleaned, and he couldn’t tell if the information pleased or dismayed him, was that Ran was unconnected from any serious wrongdoing. He didn’t seem to have ever been to prison, didn’t seem to have made
anyone mad at him, didn’t seem to have fled from anywhere. He’d changed his haircut and clothing style, but people did that. He’d changed church denominations—people did that too. What he was, it seemed, was determined. He was a leader. A talented, capable leader.
CECELIA
Cecelia had filled a whole tape, front and back. The latest song was about souls who spoke the same language, and how when those souls were close to each other they could finally see that they’d been banished to a foreign locale for years, alone, squinted at, and now they were home. You could say parakeet or bedpost, viper meat or dry toast. Everything was comprehended. The song talked about clouds being born, which happened when all the winds in the sky spoke the same dialect. The last line was, When it’s about to rain, I know I know you.
Cecelia was tired of missing Reggie over and over in the same way. She was tired of sloughing on and off the same sadness, no progression, no control. It was all apprehension when a new song arrived now, no joy. The songs were hollowing Cecelia out. They were relentless. They’d proven their point. Each song was beautiful in flight, but they had no regard for the wear they were causing as they landed, song after song, on the same strip of Cecelia’s heart.
DANNIE
She had been harboring the irrational hope that Arn would show up at the vigil. The vigils were hers now, something he’d lost in the breakup. Fitting, because they’d been hers to begin with. There were only three of them now. The vigil group had withered week to week before Dannie’s eyes but she still didn’t know how it had come to this—only three. The college-age girl looked so tired, her face all shadows. And then there was the arrogant man with the pin-covered coat. Both of them had cast strange looks at Dannie when she’d walked up and settled in without Arn. They knew they’d never see him again.
Part of the parking lot had been repaved. When Dannie had first shown up the smell had been overpowering, but now she was used to it. She felt lightheaded. When the time came to leave no one moved. Usually the vigils ended naturally, the vigilers a unit, a herd, but tonight someone was going to have to lead. Dannie hoped she could count on the other two vigilers to show up next week and the week after and the week after, but counting on people was foolish. Worrying about being alone seemed to be a good way to wind up alone. Dannie wondered if the others were hoping she’d stay like she was hoping they would, and she wondered if they felt weak for hoping that, for needing someone else to be alone with.
MAYOR CABRERA
He still had his high school football helmet. He’d never turned it back in—had stolen it, if you wanted to put it that way. The helmet was silver with a green facemask. His high school, over near Golden, had been poor and still was. You could tell the high schools with money by their soft sod fields. Mayor Cabrera’s school had a gridiron of mown weeds.
He remembered the bus rides, wondering if he would be a different person in Albuquerque or in Santa Fe. He got to return kicks for a season, when the little slick guy broke his collarbone. Mayor Cabrera always went around the first tackler and through the second. That had been his method. The coaches had always pointed Mayor Cabrera out as an example of heart and toughness, never as an example of speed or agility or power.
Mayor Cabrera was sitting in the basement of the motel, his palm pressed against the cool dome of the helmet. He recalled the feeling of waiting for a kickoff, rocking leg to leg in the calm before the tornado. He remembered getting prepared mentally to enter that closed circuit of chaos, wondering if the chaos, that particular return, would be on his side or against him. And then he thought of Margot, a girl who had taken a liking to him junior year and who would rise to her feet in the stands and cheer Mayor Cabrera’s name in the quiet before the ball was kicked. Mayor Cabrera remembered being embarrassed by that, by Margot cheering for him. He could remember fearing looking over and making eye contact with her more than he feared being smacked by a linebacker with a fifty-yard head of steam. This girl Margot had made it where she and Mayor Cabrera were lab partners when they dissected frogs, and he had clammed up and barely said a word to her, standing right next to her for two entire class periods, tiny organs on display in a tray in front of them. This girl had intimidated Mayor Cabrera to the point that he could not discern whether she was pretty. Now, in his memory, with her heart-shaped face blooming up from a turtleneck in the stands, she was angelic. Mayor Cabrera had been frightened of her, and when she’d given him a letter just before Christmas break professing her affection he had made no acknowledgment. He never, in fact, spoke another word to her. In the spring they didn’t have any classes together and eventually Margot wound up dating another boy and then during senior year she moved away to somewhere unfathomable like Minnesota. There’d been Margot and then there’d been Mayor Cabrera’s wife, some years later, and now there was Dana—the three women Mayor Cabrera would never stop thinking about. Margot had knobby little knees and Mayor Cabrera had always marveled that she didn’t fall over when she walked. She had seemed both wiser and more naïve than Mayor Cabrera, back in high school, sage yet also silly, but it was just that she hadn’t been afraid. He had no idea what had happened to it, the letter. He kept everything, but he didn’t have that letter. He could still see the handwriting, which wasn’t cursive but was still bold and loopy.
Mayor Cabrera put away the football helmet. It was the middle of the night but he felt wide awake, so he went up and cleaned the windows in the lobby and dusted the countertops and the desk. He put new candy in the dish and squared up the rug and filed some stray paperwork. Put more paper in the printer. Replenished the coffee supplies. After that he went out front and swept in front of the carport and then, out of tasks, wandered back to the basement and found himself sitting at the big metal table with a sheet of printer paper in front of him. He found himself writing a letter. He dove right in, parsing out the difference between wanting someone and needing someone and which was worse. Nowhere did he write Dana’s name. He wrote of the trouble of having his feelings ripen rather than rot. He wrote about the back of her knee when she bent her leg, about her tiny ears. He wrote about thinking of her with other men and having his heart fold up and collapse. Of her practice of wearing a different perfume in each season, and how he hadn’t smelled the winter fragrance this year. Other men had, but Mayor Cabrera had not. He wrote down all the nicknames Dana called him and that he’d never once called her a nickname, had never addressed her in a whisper as anything but Dana. He wanted to call her something other than the name her mother had given her. He wanted to call her Love. Mayor Cabrera wrote of the time he’d visited her, going onto another page now, one of his first appointments, when he’d arrived and could tell she’d been crying, her eyes puffy and voice wavering, and he hadn’t asked her what was wrong. If he ever saw her again, that would be the first thing he’d ask, what had upset her that day. He wasn’t afraid of the answer. He wasn’t afraid of Dana’s past or her present. He wasn’t afraid for his own feelings.
Mayor Cabrera wasn’t calming down, but he wasn’t feeling as crazy. It wasn’t late. It was 11:30. He hadn’t eaten dinner. He wrote that the night was an evil time but not when he was with her because then he wanted the night to last forever. Mayor Cabrera felt that Dana was his oasis and he wrote that down too and then he rested his pen. He didn’t need to worry if everything in the letter made sense because he wasn’t going to send it. It wasn’t really a letter. He picked the papers up and gazed at them, as if they held a landscape rather than a frenzy of words, listening to the sand brushing against the high basement windows. He didn’t ball the pages up. He folded them in half and then filed them down in the empty garbage can in the shadow of the big table.
THE GAS STATION OWNER
The sun was a sour note lingering in his temples. He got his headache about this time, like clockwork, about an hour after his breakfast of jerky and pretzels and coffee. It was like a visitor, the headache, a companion. It might have been brought on by the arid glare, but it also had something to do with l
ack of whisky. The gas station owner had brought none at all, and that had been an error, but he would’ve been out by now anyway. He could only have brought a bottle or two. He’d get past it. He was glad he’d at least brought sunglasses. He’d never used them before, had always considered them womanly, like sandals or scarves, but he’d never been in this much glinting late-winter sun and he’d never quit whisky.
The gas station owner hadn’t moved in a week. He’d found water gurgling down a cliff face and had stayed with it as long as he could, burning up seven of the forty days he was going to stay in the desert, but now the trickle had petered out altogether. He had come across a roofless hunters’ cabin two mornings after leaving Lofte and had found a jar of sweet pickles in a cabinet. The day after that he’d crossed some kind of old fire road, free of tire tracks but still edged with shin-high berms. But then this spot—he knew it would be the last easy place. There would be narrow canyons with puddles hidden in their troughs. There would be cacti with moist flesh. Rain, with any luck. The desert was asking him to bow out now. He was being tempted, like someone from a Bible desert. Tempted to give up his journey.
He wasn’t going to bow out. In the morning he would leave here and wander not in the direction of the basin towns and not in the direction of Albuquerque. He would wander toward nothing. He would find some other water, and some other water after that, or he would not.
He’d killed and eaten a crow, and that was the only action he’d taken so far that felt right, that felt like real engagement. He’d leveled his pistol and intentionally winged the stupid bird. Then he’d gotten a grasp and broken its neck and plucked it and cleaned it in the pure trickle and roasted it over his fire. It was more work than it was worth, but it felt right. It was an action that had startled the desert, that had announced his presence.