The Boys of My Youth (8 page)

In the tall papery weeds he pants and heaves and eventually, regretfully, begins licking the red off his paws. This will lead,
as always, to the licking of his whole body, the coarse mangy fur like sawgrass against his tongue. He spreads the toes of
one back paw and gnaws something hard and spiny away from the pad. He shakes his head fiercely to dislodge it from his teeth
and then groans, rolls over flat on his side. He is in a trance now, one lobe of the brain completely at rest, in a smooth
white fog that settles completely, like bedcovers, and doesn’t lift until dark. The other lobe is on edge, senses opened so
wide they
collect amazing things: the screaming of unseeable insects hopping from one hair follicle to another; the droning currents
emanating from power lines a quarter mile away; the throbbing of water deep beneath the ground. In the fog each paw twitches
in preparation for the leap, the bite, the flat-out escaping run. Through the mist creeps a glowing, dull-witted bunny, eyes
stupid, tail erect. Yellow paws pulse against the dirt as the coyote closes over its belly and suddenly the bunny is a chicken
and the prized feel of it — white feathers beating softly against his muzzle — causes him, like a dog being petted, to wag
heavily against the grass and bark lightly in sleeping pleasure.

In my dreams the ground murmurs over and over, until I’m ready to wake up swinging.
I am Kansas
, it says,
I am Kansas I am Kansas I am Kansas
. This is a train headed for Arizona and those are other passengers. The guy across from me has on house slippers and a hat
because it’s freezing in here. He’s reading a book with a sprawled dead woman on the cover. Beside me, Eric is sleeping with
his neck exposed and both hands lying open and empty. God. I put my own hands back into my armpits, bring my knees up, bend
my head down, and try to sink back into some kind of blankness. Inside my mind a green and brown landscape appears, a mountain
hillside with white-tailed deer arranged here and there, a stump, a path, a clump of rocks. Old slides from past vacations
click into place and then disappear, one after another. The wheels drone. A burned forest, the sharp gaze of a fox, a pair
of ponies standing at a fence, wildflowers, and broken barns; they each snap into position, linger while I look, and then
make way for the next. Beneath me the gravelly ground goes on and on, explaining itself in dull tones:
I am Kansas I am Kansas I am Kansas
.

Small- to medium-size creatures creep and coil themselves over the desert floor, making their separate ways toward their separate
destinies. Big creatures drive their cars along its roads and mostly don’t get out, except to take leaks at the edge of the
blacktop. Or point their cameras, hesitate, and give up. It looks different through the lens than through the windshield.
Empty and blank and pointless.

I’m in a green tent that turned luminous a few minutes ago when the sun hit it. Eric is cooking breakfast and I’m lying in
a sleeping bag not wanting to get up. It is freezing, that much is definitely true. And my shoulders hurt from too much sun
and the ground is hard as a city street.

“Come on and get up,” Eric calls. “It’s warm out here.” I peel up a corner of the green door and see him turning omelets with
one gloved hand. The other is inside his coat pocket. He’s got binoculars around his neck and a purple wool baseball cap on
his head. He looks like a maniac.

I’m getting up.

He roams in the blistering sunlight. The sand beneath his paws feels like fire. Every two or three miles he finds a spot of
shade and stretches out, squinting into the distance, panting fast and loud. A quick movement, an interruption in the blankness
of the sand, and he rises and runs, ears cocked, feet springing off the sandy ground. Mice and snakes. It takes several to
make a meal. If the head of the snake rises in the air, he backs off, whining and growling; if not, he pursues it, sometimes
winning, sometimes not. In his dreams at night the long limber bodies of the serpents move unexpectedly at him. Awake, he
bites the heels of the beasts in the pastures, on the long empty range, dodging the hooves, tasting the dirt and dung and
the coarse fringe of fur. The coyote hates horses and mules, the lowing cows, rich men and poor men. He likes mice and rats,
the birds that burst forth in a glorious fan of wings, a squawk.

He roams in the blistering sunlight. His stomach gnaws and his eyes become more alert. The scent of water rises in his consciousness,
he presses his nose upward and springs into his lilting trot. Around water is food. The desert gives way to the dappled green
of sparse bushes, billowing grass. The coyote tilts his head sideways and uses the round dish of his upright ear to bring
in any sounds along the bank. He drinks, listens again, and settles himself to wait. He scratches the area right where his
heart beats. Small sounds come forward tentatively from the buzzing emptiness. The grass begins to sway as the breeze picks
up. The sun is receding; it is long past dinnertime. The current carries small sticks and leaves, twirling, past his face
as the coyote watches the bank, still as stone, waiting for a creature to come forth. From the cover of the wavering rushes,
the rabbits press low against the ground, against the urge to run-run-run. The riverbank breathes quietly and patiently; the
coyote pins his eyes on a moving reed, turns his ear, lifts his muzzle slightly. A chipmunk leaves the shelter of the grass
to step forward. A cluster of oblong seeds on the moist bank has called to him and he must obey.

Inside its green skin a frog blinks, a rectangular insect with a tender belly is claimed by a sticky tongue. The chipmunk
squeaks once, the coyote wags and growls as he chews, the dying sun pinkens the air.

We are under a giant balanced rock. There are trees here with bark like alligator hide. Suitcases with leaves. Their roots
pop up out of the shallow soil like bent knees poking out of bathwater.
We have canteens, just like cowboys, but the water tastes old and filthy after it’s been sitting in there. My shoes are covered
with dust and a mile ago a small, thick rattlesnake buzzed at us from the edge of the trail. From above, this place appears
as rugged badlands, big craggy pinnacles sticking up like blunt bayonets. The snake made me jumpy as all get-out but I’ve
already filed the image of it away — recoiling on itself, the head a pulled-back wedge, its pattern subtle, smudged and blended
like a charcoal drawing on the rock’s surface — to be remembered later when I’m back in my own habitat, standing on a linoleum
floor somewhere. What I really want to see is a javelina, but of course I won’t. They’re piglike things with tusks and they
run in small herds, snorting and huffling over the pine needles and fallen logs at the bottom of this place. This is a bowl
of mountains and greens with tender pieces of meat roaming here and there.

My thighs are on fire, from the burn of the sun and the exertion. From the lip of the bowl, up top, it looked more treacherous
and lively than it turned out to be. The cleared overlook at the tip of the trail, Massai Point, is named for a Chiricahua
Apache man who stole a horse out from under the droopy mustache of a settler. The startled, righteous white man gathered up
some of his buddies and they stood at the point and watched for the Apache to show the top of his head. Rifles poised and
scanning, they kept their eyes peeled. From the overlook there are a hundred thousand gaps and crevices between the balanced
monoliths and stacked boulders. Breathing into the granite walls, hands flat and calming against the heaving sides of his
new horse, he waited them out, watching the sky darken and the moon lift its face. They got tired of waiting and rode back
to their settlement, miffed at the giant sheltering landscape, the defiant stone thumbs that hid wild Indians in their shadows.

This is daytime. My soap opera is on right now, somewhere. Back in Iowa. My people are roaming back and forth on the television
screen, all prepared for any kind of upheaval; there are a lot of chiffon dresses and dyed-to-match shoes. I mention to Eric
that my show is on. He turns with a grin and watches me ski down a dissolving patch of trail. Loose rocks roll beneath my
feet as I’m carried along. This is elementary physics, ancient Egyptians used it to take house-size rocks here and there,
up and down various hills. I skid one foot halfway under an overhanging rock and a curled ribbon of skin peels up my leg.
Rattlers hang out under rocks, waiting for a shin to come along. Yee-ikes. I pull my lower leg back out where it belongs and
start making an enormous deal out of my injury. Eric sprinkles water on it and yawns. He remembers that we’re an hour off
down here, the soap is already over.

The air turns tangy and alive, the sun is gone, the sky is black. Glimmers of light bristle forward in the dome above the
coyote’s head. He moves out. The night has a seething quality, a crisp silence that hides the tunneling of small, cowering
mammals, the slumped somnolence of the wandering cattle, the wide-eyed jitters of the stick-leg deer. The moon, from the bitter
cold of outer space, croons to the griddle of the desert. The coyote listens and turns to the west. An image has moved forward
in his head: Out of the murk a picture comes to the forefront, melting into view. The thick, spongy edges of lightness, the
dark legs and face, the palpable panic of the herd. The sheep are waiting. The moon pushes him forward from behind and snakes
slide under bushes until he passes. Out of nowhere a skunk appears, startled, hunkering low with wide mirrored eyes. The coyote
darts, bites, and opens the belly with one efficient fang. He drags it around in a gleeful circle, then thrusts
one shoulder at a time into the cooling wetness. It is night and feelings are rising up, like blood to a scrape.

The desert is lunar. Every so often a night bird courses low over the sand and the mice shudder, the lizards peer lidlessly
around, unroll their tongues and reel them in again. The moon lowers itself, sitting for a few moments on the shoulders of
a western butte, considering the lake of shadows. In its distant, porous memory, the moon can conjure up how it pulled the
ice back like a bedsheet, exposing the tender ground beneath. The face on the butte is ice blue and furious, slumping beneath
its shoulders infinitesimally, down and down, until it is gone and the stars are livid and blinking. The insects teem, the
rodents scrabble, the night-blooming flowers push themselves open and await their guests.

We have two things going for us: a spectacular white rental car and a bag of red-hot cinnamon Fireranchers. We discuss for
a fair amount of time while sucking on the Fireranchers whether it is right to “beat” a rental car more than you would beat
your own car. We decide it isn’t right, although we immediately follow that up by seeing how fast it can go on a stretch of
gummy blacktop. It goes to one hundred and thirty miles an hour before it starts shivering.

The rental car has air conditioning but we’re not using it. Instead we’re keeping a spray bottle full of water in the cooler
and spritzing ourselves with it every few miles. Now there is a contest to see who can put a new Firerancher in his or her
mouth and not bite it for however long it takes it to disintegrate. I will lose this game and we both know it. We’re playing
it because we’re stupendously bored but still in high spirits.
Every so often I put my foot on the dashboard for a leg inspection. My shinbone is a gentle, peeled blue. This is from when
I fell down the mountain into the den of rattlesnakes.

“It wasn’t a mountain, it was a path,” Eric says. “And there weren’t any rattlesnakes.”

I spray cold water on my shin and then put my leg back down where it belongs. My whole body feels swampy. The air is a blast
furnace and the windshield is a magnifying glass trained on our forearms. We are one moment from ignition. I turn the water
bottle around and squirt myself flat in the face and then offer to do Eric.

“I’ll do myself,” he says threateningly. I hand the bottle over. It’s not my style to squirt him with ice water while he’s
driving but predictably he falls apart for an instant and turns the bottle on me. It dries in one second from the hot breath
coming through the window. We roll along in silence for awhile, sweating and thinking, working on our Fireranchers. Mine is
so thin I try just resting my teeth on it to see how it feels. I bite it in half.

We are taking the low road from Tucson to a national monument on the border of Mexico. The map says we are now passing through
the Comobabi Mountains, but outside the windows of our car the desert is as flat as a sheet of parchment. The saguaros have
given way to brush and patches of gravelly dirt; along the highway from time to time are homemade altars. We keep passing
them, eighty miles an hour. The next one we’ll stop at so I can see who it’s an altar to. There aren’t even any jet trails
out here, the sky is a long, blue yawn. Neil Young comes on the radio.

We see a hawk up ahead, standing on the hood of a broken-down car. We slow down to gaze and it stares at us. Its black-trousered
legs are sturdy and long, its beak is curved. We peel off, back up to warp speed, and the landscape turns into a melting blur
out the windshield.