Desert Ghosts

  He paid no mind to the noise he made coming through the scrub. The flickering light of a distant fire drew him on. He could see it well in the gloaming. He knew where there was fire, there were people. Where there were people there was water, and sometimes food. Even if he had to take it from them. Even if they were the food. He had not resorted to such measures yet, but he knew in his guts he was not above it.

He drew closer and saw an old native woman with a deeply lined face. She sat on a toppled Joshua tree. Its roots fanned in the air, silhouetted against the dimming sky like a half dozen crooked arms reaching hungrily out of the pebbled sand. She wore cracked spectacles of the like he had not seen on a human face since childhood. The fire reflected in the lenses’ fractured facets made it look like her eyes glowed. This spooked him, and some of the absolute desperation went out of his hunger

        He stopped just outside of the seizing orange circle of light and considered her.

        When she turned to him, the flames reflected on her eyes turned to water and age. There was no fear in her look. She merely took stock of him. He licked his lips and looked at the plate in her lap with the remnants of food clinging to it. 

She stood, waved him over, and ladled some chunky, wet slop out of a steaming cast iron pot close to the fire. The smell that came to him was rich, salty, and familiar, though he could not put name to it. His stomach growled so loudly it startled him into movement. He gave a last look around at the desolate land and the growing darkness, and walked to the fallen tree to sit.

The old woman handed him a small plastic cup with warm, but clear water, and the plate. There was a chunk of hard, dry bread on the side. He grabbed the items unceremoniously, emptied the cup in one swallow, and used the bread to shovel the meat, starchy vegetables, and gravy into his maw. It was so hot it burned going down, and the crust of the bread scraped at the roof of his mouth. But it was so good he moaned as he ate.

He licked the plate clean minutes later, and held it out to her.

“More,” he said.

Wordlessly, she took the plate, ladled on more – Stew, he thought. It’s called stew. – and produced another chunk of the bread from her bag. She took the cup to a rusted metal bucket behind a jagged root, and filled it. She put it on the log next to him.

He ate and drank. She sat in the dry grass on the other side of the fire. The flickering light shone again on the lenses of her broken glasses. She watched him, and after a few momenta, she spoke. Her voice was dry as the land, and cracked as her spectacles.

“Not long ago, I had a mule. It was not much of an animal. It got me from town to town. But this land takes its toll, and in ten miles there is only little water for two. Traverse that ten enough times and soon we all end up in the stew pot.” She cackled softly at that and fell quiet.

“There were three wells between here and yonder hill when I was a girl. But the sky drank those, and if it gave them back, it gave them somewhere else. My papa told me his grandparents were so thirsty, their ghosts were still drinking the land dry. I used to think he was telling tales, and later that he was making metaphors. You know what a metaphor is, mister?”

He shrugged his shoulders and put the last bite in his mouth, smacking his lips.

“Metaphor is just a different way of saying the same thing. When I understood that, I knew he was right. They’re still drinking the water from the ground. From the air. Right out of our lungs.”

It felt like spiders on the back his neck. He rubbed there and tossed the empty metal plate into the dust. He wiped his hands on his stained and dusty trouser legs, and leaned toward her with his hands on his knees. “Ma’am, I ain’t understood only about half a what you just said, but I know I don’t like it. I thank you for the meal and the rest by a fire, but I’d also thank you to shut up now.”

The woman just nodded and smiled bitterly. She stood, gathered the pot and plate, and walked around her tent, which was just two tattered, black and white striped blankets over a few broken branches.

When she returned, she tossed a few more scraps of dry wood on the fire. Her eyes followed the sparks up into the inky blackness between the stars.

He slid onto the ground with his back against the tree. His belly was full and his mind recovered from the seed of unease the woman’s words had planted there. His chin sank to his chest and he slept.

In the dream, he looked up at a circle of sky from down in a dry stone well. He moved to begin climbing, but his feet were cemented up to his ankles in dried mud. He sensed a shadow and looked back up to see that someone was sliding a slat-board cover over the well. He tried to call out, but could not. The darkness overtook him. Then he felt a cold, dry hand on his cheek.

He jerked awake in the darkness. The stars glared down. He was cold. The fire was now only embers. Already the dream was fading, but he rubbed his stubbled cheek and shivered.

The Joshua tree roots broke easily. He put three of the chunks of wood on the fire and tended it. When the fire caught, he sat back down, and listened to the soft snores of the old woman. Lulled, he was asleep again in moments.