Desert Solitaire (12 page)

When Husk was nearly close enough to reach the toes of his boots Mr. Graham shot him again, this time in the head and with the rifle. He dragged the body into the cab of the truck and slammed shut the doors. He thought for a while, then opened a five-gallon jerry can and poured gasoline over Husk’s body and all over the interior of the cab. He found a second gasoline can, unscrewed the lid and set it in the right-hand corner of the cab, on the floor. Mr. Graham was sweating badly, his hands shaking, his chest painfully constricted. He was about to light a cigarette but thought better of it. He sat down near the truck to rest for a while.

Thinking carefully, Mr. Graham decided to ease the truck down close to the edge of the mesa, stop it there and toss a match in on his partner before pushing the whole works over. The truck was parked parallel to the rim, not facing it, so Mr. Graham after removing the rocks from in front of the wheels climbed into the driver’s seat, pushing Husk’s legs out of the way, and automatically, out of habit, turned on the switch. He had almost stepped on the starter before he realized the danger. Without starting the motor he disengaged the clutch, took the truck out of gear and turned the wheels downhill. There was an awful lot of loose play
in the steering. As the truck began to roll Mr. Graham’s right foot groped for the brake pedal, found it and pushed it down to the floorboard without meeting the slightest hint of resistance. In sudden alarm he grabbed for the parking brake and found the handle missing. There was nothing there. All at once Mr. Graham knew that more than anything else in the world he wanted to get out of that truck.

As the end of everything swept toward him he struggled with the battered door, got it open and tried to roll out. But as he tumbled from the fast-moving truck the inside door handle, projecting forward, slipped into the open pocket of his jacket. Mr. Graham’s feet touched solid ground only briefly before he was jerked like a hooked fish over the verge of the abyss. Lightly attached to one another, weightless and free, the truck with its open door and Mr. Graham went off all together into space. He saw the horizon swing in a queer way far up on his right, and to the left, where the earth had been a moment before, was only the sky, a few stars, the tranquil moon floating far below.

The rising sun discovered the boy still alive, stirring feebly in the sand. After some time, moaning softly, he got up on his knees. One eye was swollen shut. His left arm hung limply from a dislocated shoulder. When he tried to lift the arm a wave of pain surged through his body. Nausea rose from his bowels. He waited and when the pain and sickness subsided he hugged the injured limb to his chest with his good arm and got slowly to his feet.

The pain came again, ebbed and returned. His shirt hung in tatters from his shoulder. With a shred of it he made several turns around his left forearm and slung it from his neck. Slowly, tentatively, he started down the bed of the ravine, downhill. Going through a willow thicket the rags of his shirt caught on the branches. He freed himself by stripping off what was left of the shirt. And trudged on.

Not once did he look back or upward.

At noon he found water. Beneath the shade of boulders jammed in the middle of the streambed lay a basin of quicksand with a pool at its center. The heart-shaped prints of deer led in and out. Billy-Joe waded through the mud, went down on his belly, cleared the slime from the surface of the water and drank. Through most
of the afternoon he lay there. When the sun had moved beyond the canyon wall he crawled out of the sucking sand and went on.

Now he was hungry. He found a bush with red berries like currants and ate them. In a dank and shady place he found a cluster of plants with large white trumpetlike flowers the color of moonlight. The flowers were fragrant, tender, inviting; he ate them. He walked on, following the downward course of the dry streambed. When he began to feel a little dizzy he sat down again to rest.

Although it was still day the new moon could be seen in the slot between the canyon walls, drifting among clouds. Staring at the moon the boy saw it surrounded with hazy rings, rust-colored. The dark vibrations in the sky hurt his eyes. He looked down at the sand between his legs.

The dry sand, scattered with pebbles, seemed alive. The surface of the ground was palpitating softly, steadily, as if breathing. And each pebble, formerly so dull and sun-bleached, now shone like a jewel. He had never seen anything before so beautiful. He passed his free hand before his eyes and saw the bones glowing through his translucent flesh. He stared and stared and then something off in the corner of his field of vision caught his attention.

There was a bush. A bush growing out of the hard sun-baked mud. And the bush was alive, each of its many branches writhing in a sort of dance and all clothed in a luminous aura of smoky green, fiery blue, flame-like yellow. As he watched the bush became larger, more active, brighter and brighter. Suddenly it exploded into fire.

Whimpering, Billy-Joe pressed his hand to his eyes and felt the joints of his bones grate together like glass. He held himself rigid against the convulsions that swelled with a droning murmur through his body. They grew more powerful, overwhelmed him, possessed him. Yielding, the agony passed out of him and beyond and all became quiet again, marvelously still.

He lowered his hand, opened his eyes. The bush was in place as before, writhing and glowing but not in fire. The walls of the canyon towered over him, leaning in toward him then moving back, in and then back, but without sound. They were radiant, like heated iron. The moon had passed out of sight. He saw the stars
caught in a dense sky like moths in a cobweb, alive, quivering, struggling to escape. He understood their fear, their desperation, and wept in sympathy with their helplessness.

He watched and a meteor passed beneath the web, gliding more slowly than a ship across what seemed an infinite sea of vibrant, curling waves. In the wake of the meteor streamers of flame expanded with languorous, unhurried ease, fading out as they grew larger but leaving the sky in some way transmuted, stained by their burning passage.

The boy looked down at the bush, at the pebbles on the sand, at his hand. When he looked up again the meteor had crossed about two-thirds of the interval between canyon walls and was still advancing. Before it passed over the farther wall he fell asleep. And when he awoke late the next morning he remembered all that he had seen but no longer as anything strange. For everything appeared to him as equally strange.

The still-smoking wreckage of a truck which he passed in the middle of the day, with ravens picking at fragments of burnt meat crammed inside the crumpled blackened steel—this did not seem to Billy-Joe in any way extraordinary. Farther down the canyon he stepped over parts of a human body—an arm encased in the sleeve of a jacket, the shoulder gnawed down to the bone—and a head, the head of a man, separated from its trunk by a blow of some incredible violence. He looked at these things and he saw them but did not pause. He shuffled past them without glancing back, neither slowing nor increasing his pace.

The ravens watched him go, croaking with satisfaction, and swept down again upon the remnants. They approached their meat in a stylized, formal fashion with little dancing steps and covered it under widespread, glossy, blue-black wings.

In the afternoon he came into a larger canyon, through which flowed a small stream. The place should have been familiar to the boy—the warm, unpleasant-smelling water, the mudbanks encrusted with alkali white as salt, the tamarisk and pickleweed—but he did not recognize it. He drank the water and bathed his eye. The swelling was beginning to go down and he could open the lids enough to see through. He followed the water.

All through the day clouds gathered in the sky, wind whistled above the walls, and by evening he could hear from far away the
mutter of thunder. At night whenever he awoke for a few moments he saw flashes of lightning reflected in the sky. But no rain fell where he was. His hunger made him sick with misery, worse than the pain of his arm and shoulder to which he was now accustomed, or the fiery discomfort of his sunburned back.

When morning came he got up and tried to go on but could not walk very far. He crawled into the shade of a giant cottonwood tree, long dead, that lay across the streambed with its roots exposed and its bare limbs pointing up the canyon. The cool damp sand felt good to the boy, with the water trickling over his feet and ankles. He was not going to walk any more. He would wait now for whatever had to happen. He was tired. And everything was strange.

He might not even have heard the coming of the flash flood. It began as a dim toneless resonance in the distance, like the sound made by a train entering the far end of a very long tunnel. Gradually the vibrations grew in volume until the canyon filled with a dull and heavy roar. But the flood itself did not yet appear. Half-conscious, Billy-Joe dreamed of home.

One two three four small gray birds fluttered out of the willows beside the stream and flew in circles to a perch high on the canyon wall.

Now.

Around the bend up-canyon poured a red snout of liquid mud, which seemed to mumble to itself as it advanced. Sliding greasily forward the snout of mud dashed against the undercut wall on the outside of the bend, wallowed over ledges and swung back to the main channel in the center of the canyon floor. The clear perennial stream which flowed there was suddenly buried, extinguished. Swaying from side to side in the rhythm of its pendulous momentum, like a locomotive on uneven rails, the flood rumbled down upon the boy and the dead tree and everything else in its path. Dust sailed into the air as it crashed into mudbanks; cracks rippled like lightning over the surface of the alluvium, yawning wide apart as chunks and blocks and sections of dried-out earth slid or toppled into the torrent. On the crest of the flood as it came, above the churning debris of bushes, vines, weeds and logs, floated a delicate and rosy vapor, a fine pink mist suffused with the glow of sunlight.

Billy-Joe watched the flood surge toward him, saw the light shine on the roiling tomato-red waters. Instinctively he crawled deeper in among the roots of the tree and clung there with his good arm and both legs as the deluge smashed over him.

The big cottonwood shuddered under the impact, stirred, swung loose and rose, becoming buoyant. As the flood widened and deepened, filling the canyon floor from wall to wall, the tree began to float with it, slowly at first and then faster and faster as it was caught in the central current. The limbs spreading out on either side, like outriggers, kept the tree from rolling as it sailed toward its destiny.

Gasping for air Billy-Joe crawled onto the trunk and rode it all the way through the canyon, all the way while boulders clashed in the foam beneath him and slabs of sandstone shook free of their ancient fastenings, spalled from the cliffs and crashed with a sound like thunder into the heave and roar of the flood. He was still leeched to the tree, part drowned but alive, when it caromed off a jutting outcrop at the canyon’s mouth and glided majestically out onto the flow of a wide and gleaming, deep and golden river.

Now began for the boy what was for him an unreckoned, uncountable series of days and nights. His life became dreamlike. The nightmare with its unacceptable disasters was left behind, submerged in chaos. He lived now a dream. A golden dream which grew day by day more golden, more dreamlike, on the golden water under the inescapable eye of the golden desert sun. He clung to the tree as if it were the only thing he knew; he had neither the thought nor the power to leave it. And as the tree drifted southward and west through the labyrinthine canyons of the river, through the immense silence, the light came down on his naked body from above, from the burnished walls on either side, from the dazzling play and sparkle of the water itself.

At first during the early days he may have made feeble efforts to cool his body by slipping off the trunk of the tree and floating with it, one arm bent over a limb. But as his strength diminished he would have found it always more difficult to pull himself out of the water and back onto the trunk. Finally he must have given up those efforts and remained entirely on the tree, making no move whatever as the rays of the sun, direct and reflected, seared his flesh, baked his brain within its skull, poisoned the marrow of his
bones. Each night brought relief, enough to stir his drugged consciousness and arouse his agony. Each day brought the golden sun, more than enough to burn him deeper into the dream. At last he surrendered and passed through his pain into a deeper state of bliss.

Sixteen days after Mr. Graham’s last flight Billy-Joe was discovered by the ferryman at Hite’s Crossing. He saw the tree lodged against his landing dock and what resembled a shriveled human figure attached to the trunk of it. He called for help. Carefully they removed the body which was covered with a mass of second and third degree burns. The boy certainly appeared to be quite dead. But then they detected a trace of life. Or thought they did. Someone radioed for an airplane, the boy was flown to a hospital in Flagstaff. The doctors there believed that Billy-Joe was still alive. They put him into an oxygen tent and pumped quarts of glucose into his veins. Mrs. Husk was contacted and came down to see him. But he never saw her. He never came back, never opened his eyes, never spoke. He could not live anymore and after three days even the strongest of the doctors let him go. Then he died.

Mrs. Husk survived, even after the remains of her husband and her lover were found, and with her two little daughters went back home to Texas. (But not to the farm—that was gone. Along with Grandpaw.) About a year after the incident in Utah she was approached cautiously by a lawyer, an affable young fellow from Austin. After the usual sociable preliminaries the attorney said that he understood that Mrs. Husk, as inheritor of the estate of her late husband, held a 40 per cent interest in a group of uranium claims known as the Hotrock Mountain Mineral Development Company. Mrs. Husk said that this was true. The lawyer said that he had been authorized by an interested party to negotiate with Mrs. Husk the purchase of her share in these properties. Mrs. Husk said how much? The lawyer said that he had been authorized to offer Mrs. Husk $4500—twice what her late husband had paid for them. Mrs. Husk said that she would settle for $150,000. The lawyer smiled and said that he was quite serious. Mrs. Husk said that she was serious too and that on second thought perhaps $237,000 would be a more reasonable figure. The
lawyer smiled again and revealed confidentially that he had been authorized to offer,
if absolutely necessary
, as much as $15,000. Mrs. Husk said that $192,761 seemed to her a fair price. The lawyer offered her a cigarette. She took it. He lit it for her with a trim-shaped lighter bearing on its fuselage the emblem of the USAF. They agreed shortly thereafter on the sum of one hundred thousand ($100,000) dollars.