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She moves back on her elbows and it falls away, everything she had on and the ocean falls through her eyes and moves down slow to her feet. We smell like beer and bikes and sweat and dust. And human. And in my dreams she is alive.
But in this waking place, the end of the world comes and goes and I die a little, but I keep pedaling and keep sweating until my body is nothing but a movement machine. Breathe in fuel, catalyze it in blood, and turn it to motion for the sake of motion. The world turns beneath me and offers itself up, the hills and valleys and sinewy exposed heart of the earth. So I'm all day lost to agony and memory.
I remember crouching down and letting the sand blow around me. The world was nothing but aerial calcite and the grains were like powder. A drift formed up on my knee and mounded up over my feet. We couldn't see through it and all the technology in the world could not cut it. We could move at night with the world a cathode electric green and the heat of the quick and recently dead glowing white. But this was not the dark, this was the earth rising up to meet us. We sat for four hours with the drifts around us growing into dunes. I tore off pieces of the black rag protecting my head from my drab, sand-colored helmet and stuffed them in my ears and nose.
And when we came back eighteen months later, the skinny Puerto Rican kid kissed his crucifix and mumbled a Spanglish prayer and told me the green lightning striking the mercury water of that gulf was the end of the world. The sky turned gunmetal and mountains formed over the land and God broke over the water like Casey Jones. Then hailstorms started up and the most advanced fighting force in the world was kept at bay for a week in the falling ice.
The storm clouds come over Slickrock and I find a shelf of Cretaceous river sand to hide under. Just me and a few black widows to ride it out. The cedars start to hiss and move and waver and then the cottonwoods down in the dry creek make a sound like sand blowing. The first drops hit the red alluvium and the dust craters.
It's a different desert and I've been riding it for days. Down U.S. 50, down 141. Through the old rough mining towns that are more bust than boom. And the winds caught me somewhere back around the Flume and pushed me on south, along Old River Road. No pavement for eighty-five miles, only dust and the climb up Wray Mesa. It's been one hundred fifty miles and I still can't quit thinking about her. About that time we held on through the morning and night in a tent with the whole world blowing apart outside. It was rain, then snow, then ice, then rain. A cougar walked through camp in the morning and eyed us like toads.
If all the land and sea gave up its dead, and they all rose up in resurrection, into the clouds and into the blue, then I might believe in the god of all this rain. The creek swells up red and thick and the channel widens. The ledge of sandstone keeps me dry while I eat the last of the jerky and half of an oatmeal bar. I think about spending the night here, with the black widows waiting blind and hungry and the rattlesnakes looking for a place to be dry. Nature kills you much more creatively than man ever can.
The first wound of lightning opens up in the valley sky and the report knocks my teeth together. I have a flask out and death on its way to my veins while the creek eats itself. My knee and my shoulder and my back start to hurt. Sometimes she would warm up a bottle of oil in the flowing hot water and rub along the twisted and rent muscles there. She would run her finger over the round scarred hole in my back and we would pretend she'd live forever.
And a world away from her, when we sat in the desert watching the sky turn white hot and the sand turn to glass, we would talk about home and we would pretend that we would all live forever.
But no one ever does.
This ride was supposed to be a ride away from her and those friends and all the cathode green ghosts in my dreams, but it only left me alone with them all. The cedars have no opinion and the sage has no advice and the cottonwoods turn ashy and fall into the creek. Me and the devil sit under the rock watching more of my Colorado wash away to Old Mexico and the clouds start to break. If the world was ever new, this is what it would look like. Gray green and mercury with iron-rich dirt the color of blood.
While time murders my bones, I mount back up and start the trip new. The air is laden and cool, but it's harder to breathe. Gypsum Ridge is gone away and Slickrock Hill looms ahead. The sun burns back out of the silver clouds and the road starts to steam under the heavy and close heat. The novelty of this desert hanging heavy in water is lost on me because the hill is so damn hard.
And when she moved back onto her elbows and God broke over her body like Casey Jones, we thought she'd live forever. But the earth and sea does not give up its dead. It pulls them down, into the ground, into the deep. But for now, I ride across the top of the earth. Over the Jurassic remains of deserts come and gone and over the exposed rotting bones of once-great mountains. The sun burns it all away and all I can see is the next few feet of road, up here above ground cruising the domain of the temporarily living and of disembodied ghosts.
At least the dead sometimes have the sense to stay under the ground out of the rain.
| Exclusive Dirt Rag Web-Only Extras For Disappointment By Way of Gypsum | | This story won second place in the 2009 Dirt Rag Literature Contest. Congratulations and thanks to Casey for sharing a fine piece of literature with Dirt Rag readers. |
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| Comment from Anonymous on 2009-12-08 |
| Thanks that was good. It gave a morbid sense of being. |
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