The young man sitting in the passenger seat of the old
hearse kept wiping his eyes. There was
nothing to see through the windshield.
The only thing that might be seen, if the fierce rain did not occlude
our view, would be cactus and Joshua trees.
Those trees would hold up their arms in a shrug. “What? What you want?” Joshua trees might not have the answer for
you, but maybe it isn’t time to tell you their truth.
I said, “Tellesco.
What the fuck is going on with you?”
He looked back at me with hollow eyes. “I have no fucking clue.”
Or course.
That is the way we would end up.
With out a single clue.
Great.
Now what?
The rain coursing down from the unseen clouds overhead in
the depths of the desert made it hard to see.
But Tellesco knew his way home.
He pointed at the street signs, and said, “The next one on the left is
my street!”
I slowed down and turned off of the old, crumbly tar onto
the dirt road. The thing about a dirt
road in the desert is that when it is an ancient river valley, well, the dirt goes down
only so far.
The mud of a million years of being a river bottom will
become packed into a solid, impenetrable, impermeable surface when it has become a high valley desert. The inch or so of silt will make the tires
slide if one is not careful, but the tires may not get mired in mud on a dirt road, if kept clear of the dust.
The dirt goes down only so far because the eons of mud have
become cement, which is known as “Hard Pan.”
It is like iron.
Across the surface of the hard pan was the desert dust, and
mixed with rain, it would be slick.
We would have to continue on at a slower pace.
We had to go home, and not end up in the fig tree orchards.
We passed the occasional driveway now and then as we
traveled along the rainy lane, with the hint of a purple glow above the
mountains off to the side, to the east.
Tellesco grabbed my arm and I almost spun the steering
wheel. I regained control. “Don’t do that!” I said.
His eyes freaked me out,
They looked like crazy marbles.
Dude was scared.
He said, “Mr. Will! I
really don’t want to go any further!”
I slowed the heavy hearse to a stop and put her in
park. I said, “Do you want to get out
here?”
He said, “We need to turn back. I have a cousin who can help us out.”
I shrugged his grabby hands off of my leather and swung
around to look directly into his eyes.
He was refracted from the light coming in through the windshield. He looked like a ghost of his former
self. I said, “You ain’t got no cousin
who can help us out. You just afraid,
that’s all. Have you been back here
since the fires?”
He shivered. His
white claws reached for my leather. I
let him grab hold of my arm. I said, “Ain’t you got no one else to help you?”
He closed his eyes to stop the tears. “Sh.. Sh…Sh… Sean.”
Aw, Jeebus fucking shit.
Looked like it was only me now. Sean was gone.
Fuckity fuck fuck.
Fuck.
I said, “Tellesco, Sean would want us to go forward. You know it.”
It was a gamble, but it was all I had.
His grip on my arm eased, but then it tightened again. He said, “Don’t talk about Sean like he’s
dead!”
Damn. I didn’t know
if Sean was dead or alive, but I had a feeling that he was gone. Yet, this would have been a bad thing for
Tellesco to hear. So I said, “Sean wants
you to go back here.”
Tellesco wiped his eyes with the back of one white,
clawed-up hand, and he said, “How do you know?”
I said, “Because Sean ain’t afraid of nothing. And if you want to be his friend, then you
gotta man up here. You gotta stop being
a pussy and fucking deal with this shit.
Tell me I’m wrong.”
Tellesco got mad. “I
ain’t no pussy!” He threw my arm away
and he folded his clawed-up hands across his bare chest. “I ain’t no fucking
pussy.”
I pulled my leather on right, and put that old bitch back
into gear. “Then shut the fuck up and
stop crying,” I said. I felt bad saying
that, but he needed to stop being a whiny bitch.
He looked out of the window at nothing, and stopped his
sniveling.
About damn time.
Of course, I had no idea why he had such a hard time with
going back home, but I had a clue.
I just chose to ignore it.
I was an asshole, you see.
.
