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We quit the farm years ago, just before the garlic should have broken the trampled black soil. It was near daylight by the time we settled on a price for the boat.

She smoked Dunhills and drank whiskey like the tide water rising to cover the sulfer smell of the marsh reeds, cattails, egrets and cranes, like ghosts in the water where the dead swim and teenagers throw bottles to watch them sink. 

The north pole migrated, summering in Siberia, but our compasses held true and in inky blackness we slipped away from shore, wind filling the sails. 

The buttons of her blouse fumbled with my fingers, her ankle jewelry chimed the wind and kicked up sand along the beaches while I lay awake dreaming of a sleep I used to know when the best water I had ever tasted came from a 7-11 in Singapore. I went to porthole and yes the sea was still there, vast and unmoving on the map above the bed. 

I thought of the funeral pyre we watched from the statium benches with the swirling pigeons caught in flight. Like the first breathe after a nightmare the heat draws the eyes open the minute the fire licks the feet, the smoke and leaves curl the skin tight like a snaredrum until it breaks and dissolves in bubbling fizzles.

She had photographs of pigeons in a white room made of crushed eggshells with shelves stuffed full of telescoping Russian dolls. She learned of sailors and seafaring ways and dressed as a boy took to the far cities, prisoner to her dream of white light and burnt sandelwood like crumbling teak altars turned to ash.

I bought the nightgown you were wearing when we met and it was better when you wore it. I tried to hold the water in my hands but it slipped through the stone and into the fountain bathing the pigeons in squeals of children.

And when the strangers settled in it seemed all right for a time 


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She left just before the blindfish turned up. The limestone was rough and I only had three more shells for the carbine. I still had half a box of smaller shells, but the pistola was rusty and of questionable use. My feet were bleeding.

I am not sure that I have killed. It may be that I have. I have only three shells, but it maybe that I have always only had three shells. The Pistola appears to have been retrieved from the creek though I do not remember taking it myself. She may have done that before she left. There are no empty casings in the streambed, though it is difficult to see with the murkiness. It may be that I have not killed at all. In any case, not recently. And I have no plans to do so in the future. Though I am keeping the carbine in my hand and shells in my pocket.

We left the truck at the bottom of the road where it slipped and disppeared, broken slabs of concrete crumbling to dusty stone, rebar from a long departed bridge poked out between waterworn rocks, little red flags, markers, still tied on the ends like rotting silk, hung limp and still. Weeds and thin vines of honeysuckle poked up between ragged conrete, coiling around each other into snarls impossible to cut through. Closer to the river we dodged sumac and milkweed, stepping carefully over the body of a dog, bloated, fur picked clean, skin swollen and split. The dead stillness of tropical heat, the buzz of flies, the crinkling sound of maggots seething through the rotting flesh, the buzz of locusts, beatles testing their harped wings in lengthening light. No birdsong. 

The air hung heavy; closer to the river wafts of cool, ephemeral air. The bank was steep but cannelured with footholds. We moved downstream, watching garbage and leaf detritus collect in edgewater pools drawn inexorible down.

The sharpness of the karst cut my calloused heels, neat lateral incissons that would soon turn to lesions in the tropical heat. I sat to fashion sandles out of heavy leaves from an overhanging rubber tree. When I stood up she was gone. I made my way down to the cave, limping and watching the frothy white sap flow from the thin strips of rubber tree flesh tied over my feet. The milky liquid begin to mix with blood and pool on the curled edges of leaf, resembling a mixture of blod and semen. There was no one at the cave. I was about to turn around when I saw the blind fish clucking its gills; it swirled its tail in the muddy water and disappeared into the darkness leaving behind curious cryptic characters etched in the sandy bottom of the pool. The flickering of sunlight moving in ripples through the leaden weight of water made it impossible to decipher the runes. 

The depths of the river in the cave are uncharted, some say deeper than time itself, most certainly harboring the the murky doom of uncertainty. The unfathomed depths were said to have dried up in an earthquake that swallowed the river whole leaving behind flopping helpless fish, eels, crabs and something of which none of the villagers would speak. Upstream. If she went down into those depths all hope is lost. I tossed the pistola in gurgling black shadows as an offering and studied to stream flowing inward, the yawning mouth of the cave seemed ready to crack, dry fossil scarabs and trilobytes dropping like teeth falling from the depths of dream. I had not expected this. The going out, the letting up, the water moves inward, we outward like beggard peasants, interlocutors trawling through encampments of the damned. I loaded the carbine, sliding the shells in and ramming them home with a solid click that echoed back from the mouth of the cave. I stepped slowly into the water and moved toward the center of the stream, the cabine raised about my head. River jetsamn banged against my ankles, I felt something slick and biting darting at the spaces between my toes. The river sucked and swallowed, I could feel the bottom open up and then the rush of night.

	
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merging to some blurred unaccountable shape and then the crunch of the Falcon's tires sliding into the parking lot. The slamming doors, the bouncer's extended a hand, Jimmy grabbed it and reached around clapping the back of the leather jacket, Claire deigned a kiss on the bouncer's stubble cheek, the smell of leather, smiles. 



In the distance a group of balloons set alight into the afternoon air.

Like a 

Earlier, when the sunlight dragged the shadow puppets of cottonwood and telephone poles across the wall, Jimmy had spoken ardently, pacing the room like a caged cat, gesturing, gesticulating, gestating and hatching forth the most marvelous of thoughts, anything that floated by in the ether of his consciousness. He had a natural energy Claire envied, but when the light faded something in him seemed to temporarily collapse, though she knew it would return again later, when night had riped to total darkness, it was here in the rheumy dusk that he stuggled and fell to empty ramblings, here in the borderlands, where Claire felt most at home, he stuggled to find something to hold on to.



Outside a dying dust devil made a last dash across the parking lot, grabbing small flotsam of paper and dry leaves as it moved, slowly testing its way until it reached the side of the West Rider Hospital where it dropped down the stairwell and collapsed, falling against the green door which read Staff. Two leaves and a small scrap of paper edged up and flapped against the door which was propped open a couple inches by a rolled issue of *Boys Life* magazine, purloined from a waiting room two floors up where schoolboys distracted themselves from the looming dread with stories of lost mountains inhabited by goblins and hunch-backed terrors. A last wisp of winter air worked its way around the tattered cover dragging one of the leaves and a bit of paper in with it. The ratty pages of *Boy's Life* gave way and the door eased shut behind the wind. The paper swirled inward drawn by the backdraft of the closing door, skating down the cold linoleum tiles, beneath the buzzing hum of half-burned-out florescent lights, swirling bits of dust and lint traced an echo of movement, the ghosts of nothing. 



To some people the desert is a hot wind at the gas station, something passing through and to be passed through. Others see a sunny retreat from cold wind billowing off northern lakes. Some see it as an endless playground of sunshine, golf and hotel pools. Some are just born into it and forget to leave. Claire did not think she looked nervous or worried. She suspected that her older and more malicious nephew had put the younger up to this sort of thing. She felt she had composed herself rather well throughout the evening, dealt admirably with the blistering afternoon heat and then amicably with the barely known relative and extended family that stopped by to wish her well. It alarmed her that she could so completely separate the words coming out of her mouth from the ones forming in her mind. When will they slip over, some sort of damn break loose and everything comes tumbling out. She thought of the sea gulls leaping into the air, they hunched slightly coiling up to spring of the ground and then their wings lifted them into the wind.