BEFORE CROSSING THE DESERT by Dean Marshall Tuck
Ray leaving with nothing but the clothes on his back, walking beneath a late- spring, wooded canopy. Dirt roads will lead to paved roads, paved roads to highways. A few rides and he’s a hundred miles from home. A hundred’s as good as a million, but no matter where he rests nor the duration of his stay, he knows he will shut his eyes in new rooms and new towns among new people forever, gathering a thousand lives into this one lifetime – his wife, daughter, and son merely three drops of rain in a red clay puddle, their concentric ripples echoing outward into stillness, Ray’s boots stepping over, leaving, gone.
Ray listening to a woman in a diner tell how her sister- in-law was visited by pale men in dark suits after seeing the amber orbs of light rising, dancing, then zipping across the sky during those days when so much strangeness surrounded the visits of the flying gray creature with glowing red eyes. Learning how the woman lost her husband and son in the bridge collapse that marked the end of those fantastic happenings, the family car sunken deep into the murky, green river bottom. Riding east with an old man who saw gruesome things during the war, who says he has a son who would be Ray’s age now, who warns Ray about the dangers of hitchhiking, who trucks only to keep the lights on at home, who worries if he can afford to feed his aging hogs through the winter, who then prefers cigars to talking, leaving a trail of chewed-up stubs littered along the highways. Ray hunching against the passenger door, glimpsing a great sandhill crane sailing above their truck as they cross the river before falling asleep.
Ray pouring scotch and soda for sweaty men who run business empires all over the country, who laugh like fraternity brothers in the dim room overlooking the tenth fairway. Ray, after nearly everyone has gone, attempting small talk with a man who owns the clubhouse, owns the dining room, owns the course, owns the mountains surrounding the lake that he owns which his grandfather created by building a series of dams and flooding an old mining town that very few living even remember. The man sipping his drink, replying, “I don’t care for football.” Ray later chewing on a forkful of lobster meat – the first lobster he’s ever seen – which a member has sent back to the kitchen for being overcooked. A young server from Poland laughing at his expression and later taking Ray to one of the hundreds of wooded waterfalls, this one named after a boy named Freddy who fell to his death from the top of the watery cliff. The young woman nearly slipping into the pool at the bottom, caught by Ray, the small of her back firm in his grip, their eyes meeting, her waiting for Ray to decide.
Ray fleeing the mountains, heading east.
Ray lying in the back seat of a car, two teenagers in the front, amused at picking up a stranger walking through town at night. The girl sliding across the bench seat, pressing into her boyfriend, begging him to tell Ray the story of the crazy man who lives near the mill, “But take him the right way,” she’s saying before he even agrees. The boy detouring into the rural suburbs. A few miles in, and it’s all woods and farmland and darkness. The boy telling the story: “This fella who owns the mill and much of the land out here, his wife died when his daughter was just a girl, so all growing up, she was her daddy’s whole world. He’d do anything to take care of her . . . ” Turning on a dirt road, an open field of wheat on the right, woods that meet the road on their left. “But after she turned sixteen, she went wild – boys and fast cars.” Hitting the gas, spinning a cloud of dust, grinding gravel into the road. “Her daddy bought her a car so she wouldn’t ride with bad dudes, but she was a wild one. Until one day she was fooling around with a guy while they were flying down this very road . . .” The girl grabbing the boy’s thigh, laughing suddenly like a woman, not a teenager. “. . . and . . .” The car fishtailing in the dirt before coming to a stop with the headlights pressed against the thick forest wall beside them; there, the rusted- out body of an unidentifiable wreck of a car. The girl growing quiet as the boy continues down the road, taking curves too fast. The boy pumping the brakes, clicking off the headlights, saying, “Get the light, Debra.” The girl reaching under the seat to retrieve the light. “This man’ll shoot his .22 at us if we hang around.” The car lurching along at a crawl, the girl rolling down her window and pointing a deer spotlight past the hood of the car, and with the flick of a switch, lighting up a sprawling yard with massive colored shapes and designs, some turning, some spinning, structures of mangled steel, creaking and moving in the midnight breeze, each with patterns of reflectors, a rainbow kaleidoscope illuminating the darkness until the girl kills the light, the total darkness afterwards, confusing and unreal. The boy pulling away. “Her daddy was devastated. Went crazy. Started building this park in front of his house. A bunch of road reflectors and a whole lot of metal. He did it so folks would slow down by his house at night, so they wouldn’t end up like his daughter. Some say it’s a memorial. Some say he’s crazy.” Neither of them laughing or talking anymore another few miles before slamming the brakes and shouting, “What the hell is that?” Ray getting out of the car to find a bushel basket in the middle of the road, filled with deer hooves, entrails, and blanket of hide, shouting back to them what he sees before they peel out, leaving him a few miles from town, alone in the night.
Ray roaming up and down an ancient neighborhood near the waterfront where a sign by an old oak tree says a great war began here, a fort far across the water with an illuminated flag. Passing through neighborhoods set in palmettos and live oaks hazy with moss spilling from their branches, colonial homes and their wrap- around porches with white railings, their wrought iron fences around shadowy yards. Ray’s thinning rubber soles molding to the mortar and cobblestone with each step down the empty streets. Resting against a building across the street from a gleaming white church with a towering steeple, sipping whiskey from a flask, murmuring to himself, breathing deeply, almost sleeping until a sinking feeling possesses him. Irrepressible dread. Ray watching a figure wearing something like a monk’s habit, an almost brown crimson, the figure moving smoothly along the façade of the church, lingering at the door, turning in Ray’s direction, underneath its hood, emptiness where a face should be, a stare, then passing on, turning the corner, gone. Ray refusing to move or to tear his eyes away, an empty stillness burning within him that feels endless and sure as the grave, but then, broken by the sounds of a choir, indistinct, ghostly voices, echoing through the streets, their wordless harmony freezing him all over despite the sweltering heat, the notes rising and falling like the water gently lapping against the monument walls out across the bay. Ray checking the time – midnight – but the voices go on singing, singing still . . .
Ray sweating, lifting full baskets from pots of boiling water, dumping the contents upon a sheet of plywood laid atop two old sawhorses: crab legs, ears of corn, potatoes, shrimp, andouille, onion, crawdad, and mussels, the steam rising up, scorching his skin, steeping his beard and clothes in spices. Ray returning the empty basket to the kitchen, swearing against the heat, sweat dripping from the tip of his nose; wishing just one of the men who sell their catches to the owners would hire him. He’d work for nothing. Some boat, any boat. So he might feel a little wind, a little lightness in this place so heavy and stifling, where the alligators, dragonflies, and snakes only move when they have to. Ray slapping his apron on the parking lot pavement, swearing, finding a train depot back in town.
Ray learning the hard way that jumping trains east of the Mississippi is a bad business, riding the rails too far north, not far enough west, the hammering of fists and clubs, fighting back and losing, tenderized but toughened, sometimes thrown from railway cars, other times thrown into jails before yet again, finding a freight train to help him put the cuts and bruises, black eyes and bloody mouths behind him . . .
Ray winding up on the streets of a city where people worse off than Ray wind up festering in their stinking rags, occupying alleys, creating their cities within the city. Ray understanding the danger of staying too long. Learning from one of the legions of homeless which sidewalk smudge belongs to the last of the real mid- town gangsters. Thinking he’d like to trade places with that gangster for one of the beef sandwiches from the deli or even a couple hot dogs from the umbrellaed street corner carts. Ray growing gaunt in his travels, his clothes hanging loosely now, rarely bathing, hair flipping out from his hat, a beard long enough to tuck into his shirt against the wind. Finding rambling to be a hungry business, but only at first, however many weeks it takes for eating every day to feel like a luxury.
Ray riding the rails with a grizzled young man who, beneath the beard and grime, and the dirty brown hat and tattered corduroy jacket, is really just a boy from a wealthy family, running from becoming his father or his uncles or any occupation he might lapse into at any point on this journey – warehouse lackey, machinist’s apprentice, assembler, shift captain, foreman. “Then what?” the boy saying, “Another balding, pot- bellied desk- sitter with an unhappily- ever- after wife and three spoiled kids and a couple mistresses and . . . ” the young man’s voice droning with the rhythm of the wheels on the rails, the countryside streaking past like Impressionist paintings of wheat fields, pine groves, rolling hills, barns, and pastures dotted with black cows. “That life ain’t for me,” the kid saying. “They can have all that. Just leave me this,” the kid pointing to the great expanse of prairie before them, its low- hanging clouds sending nebulous dark shapes passing over the horizon. “I’m gonna live it. Then I’m gonna write it. Here.” The kid reaching into his sock, handing Ray a wad of money. “Get you an old car. This life don’t suit you.” Ray refusing. “I’ve been carrying it for nearly half a year, too scared to let it go. Now I know it’s the only thing standing between me and what I’m trying to do out here – who I’m trying to be,” the kid saying. Ray taking the money before leaving, telling him, “I hope you get where you’re going.” The kid saying, “I’m already there, man.”
Ray finding a town, shaving – cleaning up – staying in a cheap motel, sleeping mostly, eating cheeseburgers, fries, and vanilla milkshakes when he wakes for a few days. Buying a beat-up car he points west. Sailing through the badlands with the windows rolled down, looking like a new man. Deep in the bottom of a butte, among the feathery grasses, small yellow flowers, and prairie dog cities, pale sandstone walls climbing high above him, their stripes and layers of earth stacked upon itself for millions of years, like a city made of cake and ice cream in a perpetual slow, dripping melt. A lone bobcat. Wheeling buzzards. An easy wind so gentle it cannot be heard, a silence so absolute, he can hear familiar voices begin to speak inside him. Ray beating his hands in the dirt, weeping. Pausing, listening again, hearing only the wind. Ray grinding his tears in the dust with the heel of his fist, finding something other than stone, harder and darker than the sandstone, a trilobite. Spitting on the fossil, brushing and blowing away the dirt until revealing its rows of legs. Ray fishing a tire iron from the trunk, chipping at the stone around the creature, taking this gift with him now always, wherever he goes.
Ray driving through the desert at night, talking to himself or to God or to a ghost or to no one or to everyone. Sometimes a coyote or jack rabbit flashing their eyes or crossing the road before him. At the desert’s edge, finding a tiny restaurant, a family’s residence conjoined with a kitchen and dining room large enough to serve a dozen people in the chance event a caravan ventures off the main highway in dire need of gasoline before beginning the empty hundred- mile stretch Ray has just traversed. Ray taking a seat, wicker chair, checkered tablecloth, and half- sheet, laminated cardstock menus. A teenage boy tying his apron on the way to the table, asking what’ll it be: hamburger steak, onions with gravy, rice, and string beans. The kid ringing the service bell at the counter, calling the order into the kitchen, then leaning against the counter, asking Ray where he’s from. Ray thinking on this, asking what a kid does for fun living here in the desert. “We’re outta the desert, here, mister. Dad farms oats and hay. I help with that.” “But what about for fun?” Ray asking. “I play football. Got a game tonight actually. We play eight- man, so most of us play both sides, except the quarterback.” Ray and the kid talking until a woman appears at the order window with his food. “Did you get him his drink?” the woman asking the boy, impatient, not surprised. “Dang, Ma.” Rushing away. “I always forget,” the kid saying to Ray as he sets a Coke down. “Drink’s on the house, Ma says.” The kid talking to Ray while he eats, telling him about how he drives nearly thirty miles to school one way, how they live next to the restaurant but spend most of their time in here, how they hardly serve a couple dozen people a day, how he’s saving for a used car so his mom can have the pickup in the day while he’s at school, how his father trucks, farms, and runs combines for other farmers and always comes home well after dark; asking Ray about his family and his home, where he’s going, why. Ray not responding, thinking about lying, feeling bad about this notion, changing the subject. The woman in a floral- print dress, slender yet hearty, dark, careful eyebrows with the slightest of wrinkles at her eyes when she smiles, gently reprimanding her son for bothering customers while they dine, yet joining the two of them at the table, anyway. Ray hearing them talk, to him, to each other, sipping his Coke, drifting a moment, forgetting to listen to their words, enjoying their voices, the earnest affection for each other in the sounds they make, ringing out like poetry – Ray, thinking of another family a half- continent away, a wife and daughter, a troubled shadow of a boy – the mother telling Ray how a person ends up running a makeshift restaurant built from a home on the edge of a desert, a cloudy haze creeping into the boy’s eyes like a coming storm, a note of resignation in her voice as the mother continues, elbows propped on the table supporting her lovely face, the overcast covering her eyes too, now a fading smile – Ray panicking inside, his heart swelling with words he’d only blubbered alone to the stifling silence of the badland butte, a breath – the mother and son waiting for him to speak – another breath, a hard swallow from telling them everything – the mother sensing the tremor inside him, her eyes glazing with tears – a doorbell clattering against a screen door, two men walking inside, seeing the three of them sitting quietly, intently at the table of the otherwise empty restaurant, asking if they’re still serving. Ray, realizing for the last half hour he’s been pretending to be the third member of this family, pitying himself, cursing himself, praying to forgive or better yet forget himself. Leaving a note on the back of his bill, “It’s yours,” and a twenty- dollar bill underneath the keys to his car. Studying a few family pictures framed on the wall next to the entrance, memorizing their faces, refusing to look at the father’s, turning towards the kitchen to glimpse the woman’s face one last time, straining to hear her voice, but she is gone. Ray walking away, catching a ride with yet another trucker, speeding through the void, headed to a green glow on the horizon, wondering if years from now they’ll think of him, if they’ll tell a story about him, and if, in the story, he’ll be an angel, a man, or a ghost.
Ray demanding a truck driver pull over and let him out. “What the hell, fella? You crazy? Shit don’t live out there,” the driver pointing to the silvery white landscape. “It’s like dropping a man in the middle of an ocean,” the driver imploring him. Ray pulling on the door handle anyway before the truck has slowed to its stop. Ray thanking him and slamming the door, crossing the highway, the ditches, and a wire fence to step out into oblivion’s fringe, black, shimmering, shapes vanishing impossibly far into the distance. Ray collecting smooth black stones the size of his fist in the blinding heat, gathering them into a pile, sweat soaking through his shirt and pants, slipping into a heat- induced delirium, stumbling, a memory of a radio preacher playing in his head . . . God speaks but he won’t beckon but so many times, and you keep turning away, quenching the Spirit, it’s a dangerous game, my friend, and it won’t be long before God quits knocking on the door of your heart, leaving you with nothing but silence, forevermore, friend, isn’t it time you turned from your own selfish ways . . . Ray lifting the stones, hearing voices in them now, crying out, placing them in lines and curves next to each other, letters: the names of the family he vows never to speak of. Ray walking back to the highway, leaving them once again, never looking back.
Ray craning his neck underneath redwoods, the Pacific crashing into nearby cliffs. Emerging from the woods to find a pebbled stretch of beach. Happening upon a scarlet stone marbled with white, glazed with ocean spray – the petrified heart of an ancient merman still to this day swimming the deepest fathoms of the sea, sloughing his tail and growing legs once a year to wade out to shore, combing the earth in search of this most precious, lost possession. So thoughtless and forlorn. How could you lose something so essential? How fortunate I should find it. Here. Ray heaving the stone into the ocean, dreaming of the polished ruby, sinking for days, however long it would take to tumble down to where all the deep- sea creatures look on, aghast with their empty dead eyes, scowling their nightmare teeth.
Ray borrowing a pair of binoculars from a park ranger, a young woman with long, shiny blonde hair, stationed on a lighthouse, both of them looking at sea lions at the craggy bottom of the cliffside. Ray wondering what it might be like to stand here day after day, watching the sun set over the ocean, wishing he was still in his thirties like this young woman, wishing he might at least stand there until sundown beside her. Later, Ray ascending hundreds of stairs back to the parking lot with the first Irishman he’s ever met, waiting every so often for the man to catch his breath, the Irishman, perplexed by America’s youth who dream of hostel hopping through Europe, “If I lived in this country, I tell ya, I’d never leave,” him saying, enamored with all of America except the Golden Gate, an ugly, rusty thing that leads to absolutely nothing. His aged mother waiting for him in their car, agreeing about the bridge before wishing Ray farewell.
Ray haunting the wharf and dive bars and bookstores and Chinatown shops and anywhere else he pleases, being catcalled by angry poets smoking and swearing behind their expensive coffees. Ray looking down from an observatory at the bridge and the prison island recalling stories of jumpers and gangsters and men who dig tunnels in concrete walls with palmed silverware, who maybe drown, who maybe escape on crudely fabricated life rafts, who maybe live alone somewhere nobody knows, feeling hungrier and emptier by the minute, Ray grasping the handrail, hoping the next somewhere calling him will feel different somehow.
Ray accepting a free ride in a taxi, making his misgivings known. “Look, if you don’t know where you’re going, you might as well get part of the way there quicker.” Ray not arguing with this logic, enduring the cabbie promising him all the trouble a young man could get into in a town like this, rolling up to an awning, velvet rope, limos, taxis, everyone younger than Ray, women in short, tight- fitting dresses, men in shiny tailored suits, slicked hair. The cab driver saying, “There’s more tail in that place than even a young buck like yourself could handle.” Ray being ushered from the car up the carpet to the front door, two bruisers stepping aside telling him to enjoy his evening, one of them speaking indiscernible words into his wrist. Ray walking down a dark hallway lined with strange abstract paintings, enormous gilt frames of dingy gold. Thumping loud music shaking the chest hair beneath his shirt. Finding a lady perched on a tall barstool behind a kind of podium at the end of the hall where a large room opens up, a bar on the left, a small stage on the right, tiny round tables filling the floor. The lady speaking words he can’t hear, even when he leans his ear up to her lips. Ray absent- mindedly reaching for his wallet despite having warned himself about everyone in this city seeking to take everything he has, until his eyes finally register the nearly nude, topless dancer on stage, a smarmy emcee having just announced her, slinking backstage to a curtain, the dancer raising a black feather boa from her chest, the hostess’s soft hand touching Ray’s stubbled cheek, whispering now, but Ray hearing this time, at last realizing the hostess is topless as well. Ray excusing himself, pushing his way through the swarm of people in the hall and outside, holding his breath until he’s safely down the street, checking his pocket for his wallet once more, not daring to look over his shoulder lest he become a pillar of salt.
Ray listening to the river rushing through the canyon, the whitecapping current growing less visible in the setting sun, finding a piece of ground fit for his lean- to tarp/tent, setting up camp far enough from the twenty- somethings and their lanterns and campfires and guitars and beer and smoke. Ray warming a can of soup by his tiny fire, being offered a beer by a lanky young man with glasses and heavy facial hair. Ray hesitating but the kid’s earnest smile and congenial manner winning him over. “You gotta join us though, mister,” the young man saying, Ray already regretting but following anyway. The young man leading him to the fire with friends and strangers alike, demanding someone get Ray a beer and slide down to give him a seat. Ray learning these young people are largely strangers to each other, yet they’re sharing everything they have. Two cleancut brothers with slicked- back hair, like the rock n’ roll stars of another era, standing near the fire with acoustic six- strings on matching straps. The brothers’ voices melding in familial harmony – one singing higher and the other singing low, taking turns with the melody, coming together for the refrain – sung in a distinct way, the notes and the words ringing out in clear, perfect unison, singing:
I roved and I roamed, and I traveled from home
And I left Ginny far o’er the sea
All the old men in town,
Taking turns putting down
Ol’ wayfaring, wandering me.
If I saw her one day, would she ask me to stay
Could I still be in their family?
All I am, all I lack,
Would they even take back
Ol’ wayfaring, wandering me?
Keep a warm fire light, hug my daughter goodnight,
Make sure to rock my baby to sleep,
Tell Ginny not to wait,
Not to curse nor to hate
Ol’ wayfaring, wandering me.
Ray sipping or smoking anything passing his way, laughing, singing, crying, talking, stumbling, crawling, sleeping, waking with a young woman’s wavy chestnut hair in his face, smelling of sweet Betsy after rain, her warmth consuming him, the river carving through the canyon, breakfast voices, Ray lying awake with his arm pulling her close, living this way for another hour.
Ray learning trades from a man with more wealth than sense – masonry, welding, architecture, construction – building an eyesore of a castle in the wilderness, to the chagrin of neighbors and county planning and zoning, who all succumb to the almighty dollar and the best team of lawyers west of the Rockies so declares this wild, anti- government capitalist, conspiracy theorist dreamer, zillionaire, whose tirades sound mostly like hate and rage when Ray meets him, but sounding more like reason and truth after weeks living and working alongside the man. One day, assisting the man welding – applying the finishing touches high upon a steel catwalk archway, twenty feet higher than the highest treetop – Ray, looking out over the wilderness, away from the welding arc, noticing a shimmering in the woods, one tree, then an adjacent tree, then the next, like a systematic wind or an invisible brontosaurus brushing against the trunks and upper branches. Ray stopping the man, pointing, asking, “What’s happening, an earthquake?” “They come around every so often,” the man saying. “Good thing we’re up here and not down there with them, buddy.” “Them?” Ray asking. “Children of the sons of God and daughters of man,” the man saying with a laugh more like a cough. The man squinting down at the trees, flipping his visor back on, back to his job. Ray thinking, I’m done with the woods forever, and maybe I ain’t ever coming down from this scaffolding.
Ray watching the sunset, drinking beer atop a giant dune of white sand with several servers from a nearby restaurant where he’s been washing dishes a few weeks. A server telling him how the military dropped all kind of bombs, missiles, and atomic weapons here. “One nuclear explosion,” the girl saying, “lit the night sky for three days, swirling greens and blues and purples like the northern lights as far as you could see . . . ” Everybody thinking they were going crazy or that they’d secretly been dosed with experimental drugs, or that they’d been abducted by extra terrestrials, or that they’d slipped into another dimension through an unstable portal a bomb had opened, or plenty of other theories. One server saying how his father had lucid dreams every night since the test. Another saying how, after the tests were finished, the bombs and the extreme heat had forged crystal stalagmites rising from the ground like great mountains of hoarfrost, how the white sand turned into jagged glass splinters, towering and protruding in all directions. Almost no civilians were allowed to witness the effects of the test, but there are rumored to be a few people in town who had broken a few crystal daggers from the mountains before they bulldozed it all back into dunes.
Ray listening, wiping white sand from the lip of his bottle, drinking another beer, the sun painting the sky, changing from orange and red to pink and lavender. Before leaving, watching a slender white dust devil, breezing slowly across the dunes, elegant and lonesome, disappearing.
Ray’s ride pulling into a desolate rest stop one night to fill up before crossing the desert, Ray with his arm hanging out of the window. A Navajo man with long, gray hair, an old cowboy hat with a silver buckle on a black leather band, wearing ceremonial beads around his neck, approaching the passenger side to speak to him, asking if he can spare a buck or two. Ray wincing, knowing he’s nearly cleaned out, unfolding his wallet outside the window where the man can see his one remaining dollar. “Yours,” Ray saying to the man, giving it to him. “My last dollar.” Ray smiling, the man chuckling back. “Good man, you are a good man,” the Navajo telling him, giving him the two- handed shake. “Listen,” the man saying. Ray hearing voices and drumming in the distance. “There’s a gathering tonight, kind of like a pow- wow. A friend of mine’s grandson is coming of age. It’s a big celebration. I was going to leave, but maybe you want to see?” Ray nodding, the man smiling. Ray getting out of the truck, dismissing his ride with a wave, following the man into the darkness, listening to him tell how the boy had been fasting and praying alone on the mountain for the better part of a week – all the while, the voices and drums growing louder, the smell of food and smoke growing stronger as they approach – how soon, the friend’s grandson will be emerging from a sweat lodge behind the building where all his family and loved ones have been feasting and singing and praying for him, waiting for his return, waiting to hear what the spirits have shown him, waiting to learn where his path will lead.
Dean Marshall Tuck’s fiction has appeared in The Florida Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, South Carolina Review, Epoch, and Fugue Journal. This story is an excerpt from his novelin-progress, Twinless Twin.