Watch the desert. It is
out there. This abomination. Watch along the ridge, over at that mesa, after
sundown.
You can hear it,
sometimes,when it’s completely dark. So dark, even the stars have died out.
In the Southwest. In
Arizona. Not among the cities and towns. Out where the scrub brush and
ocotillo cactus take over the landscape. In those places where the tumbleweed
blows through like a whisper of the past. The coyotes at twilight on the ridge
of a mesa, their ki-yis sing of something sinister, something unnatural. The
nest of rattlers in the shade of the overhanging rock has been driven out into
the bare flat sunlight. And something there, at sunset, scuttling along the
dark lip of a cave – a crack in the wall of a cliff – some creature there.
Strange things live on
the desert.
Strange people, too.
I heard from an old man
over in town that some dogs got torn up bad out on the mesa, right near where
the new housing development’s going in. Maybe it was just coyotes, or maybe
even a mountain lion from up the in the hills, driven down from its home by
hunger and thirst, but it didn’t sound like it.
Someone said that they
found a deep hole in the ground when someone started to dig up an area for a
new house and a swimming pool. They break up the earth, tear into it, and
change it. They don’t think there’s anything in that desert earth, do they?
They don’t think the something waits.
They’re idiots to
expand this town out there, out where nobody in his or her right mind should
live.
Strange things, strange
people, strange times.
2
What are the demons
that drive us?
For me, it’s the past.
Memory is my demon. When we are young, we do stupid things. There’s no way
around it. Perhaps we experiment with a drug that will hurt us. Perhaps we
attach ourselves to the wrong people for us. Perhaps we take the one road off
to the side of the main highway that may be the one road we should never have
taken. Some of us die from our stupid things. Some of us survive and look back
and regret our youths.
Some of us have a feeling of
being damned from our stupid choices when young.
But I found out, every man
can be redeemed. No matter how awful his demons are. No matter what he has
done. Murder? Redeemed! Betrayal? Redeemed. Witness to slaughter? Redeemed.
But sometimes redemption
looks a lot like Hell itself.
And those demons are still
there. We chase them down whether we wish to do so, or not.
What makes us pursue those
demons, even when they destroy us? It’s simply attraction. Once we get
something in our eye, we want to see more of it. We want to own it.
Let me tell you about
attraction.
Attraction makes us chase
what, in the end, may chase us down. It is the shiny thing in the road that
draws us, crows all, to our dooms. Most times, the truck out of nowhere bears
down on us and we end our lives in a flutter of dark feathers and scraped
skin. Now and then, we nab the shiny thing and we fly with it. But there’s
always one more shiny thing on some other road. Attraction is like that.
I know about attraction. It
led me to bad places, but also to good.
Once, after a two year love
affair with the bottle, a failed suicide attempt, and a growing realization
that my life was my own and didn’t belong to anyone else, I saw a woman
walking down Main Street in Naga, Arizona, who looked like she kept two
bobcats fighting under her dress. I followed her around town, until she made
it to her car, and then, she turned around. I knew she was my redeemer the
moment I saw her. It was more than attraction. It was something I didn’t
think, then, could exist in the universe.
It was grace.
She had a face that made me
forget everyone else I had ever met. I found her attractive, to say the least.
I would’ve chased her to the ends of the earth if I had to, and given that
Naga, Arizona, seemed like the end of the earth, I supposed I did. I was just
twenty-three at the time, and living a crazy life. But she decided I was right
for her. We ended up getting married, I became a better man than I’d started
out as, and after she died -- too young -- I went and built my home in a
cavern out along a mesa, about ten miles off the new highway. I hated people,
didn’t love the world, and preferred the company of jack rabbit and coyote to
humankind. I had enough, and what I didn’t have, I scavenged and hunted and
traded for. I wrote books, some of which have been published, but few have
been read. Books with titles like, Abominations in the Ancient World,
and The Lost Gospel of Hell. I know things that many most men don’t,
and I’ve tried to research all of it, to find out the truth of it. Sometimes,
the visions themselves tell me the truth.
Sometimes, they lie.
I’ve seen a lot of
strange things on the desert. I’ve seen a man who seemed to be turning into a
dog. I’ve seen rains come out of nowhere, and from their pools, in the crater
depressions of the mesa, strange fish generate from fossilized eggs. I’ve
heard of a snake so large that it feeds on wild burros, and of a mountain lion
who hunts only children.
But the one thing that
is undoubtedly the strangest in my existence was something that was called
Scratch, and lay within a stone box in a glass case inside a gas station’s
roadside attraction.
Let me tell you.
PART ONE
CHAPTER TWO
1
1977. No cell phones.
An old-fashioned, pre-tech world, if you will. An innocent world that seemed
guilty. A year of death, pardon, disco, and, as the year wore on, gas lines.
The death penalty was reinstated with the execution of Gary Gilmore, the first
man to be executed in the U.S. of A. since 1967. Gerald Ford, then-president,
pardoned Tokyo Rose. Pardons were the order of the day. Jimmy Carter, from
the peanut farming family, arrived in the White House just about the time when
the economy began taking a downturn. But Jimmy pardoned the draft dodgers of
the past. Pardon! Soon enough, gas lines lengthened. It was a strange year of
unrest and discontent, and nobody knew why. Maybe it was because disco had
become the dominant force in pop music. Who knows? If you were in college at
the time, and it was a little private middle of nowhere college in Virginia,
in the mountains, you probably were a preppie, and you probably were in a
fraternity, and you probably wanted to get the hell out of there except your
folks were divorced, nobody really wanted you home for the Spring Break, half
your friends were heading to Virginia Beach, half to Florida, but the girl you
wanted badly was going to make a fast trip to California and get back to
campus within two weeks.
And you owned a car and
wanted to drive her out there and back. Four days out, four days back, four
days in L.A.
Not bad.
It was a crazy thing to
do.
But you were nineteen,
hated your life, and crazy was something you needed.
She was someone you
needed.
“Attraction can really fuck
you up,” so says Josh.
He’s stretched out on the
lawn because he drank too much that night and felt too awful and wished he
were somewhere else and could be someone other than Josh, youngest son of a
farmer, first to go to college on a scholarship, no less, and further from his
dreams than he was from the stars above him.
2
Night descended, then grows
luminous with lights of the college and town. Jackson College, liberal arts,
private, over-priced, party school. It’s one of those genteel colleges,
nestled in the Blue Ridge, with columns and Old South delusions and tradition
fomenting in the overcrowded boxwoods and magnolia overhangs. The town is
quaint and small enough to support a single movie theater called the Bijou,
and after nine o’clock, all the traffic lights flash yellow. Fraternity Row is
a street called Stonewall Avenue, and the houses look as if they were all
built the same year, with a colonial kind of style – columns and balconies,
and a grandness all mushed nearly side by side: Lambda Chi, Delts, Pi Phi,
Zeta Beta, all lined up, and on this particular Friday night, all lit up with
parties and drunken students and music of all kinds blasting out of the
windows of each house.
A boy of nineteen with
a long face and sandy blond hair is lying on the lawn of one of the houses,
looking up at the stars.
The stars are out in
full force – thousands cover the night sky.
He tries to identify
the constellations – the Pleiades, Orion, Scorpio – but he nearly flunked
astronomy, and to him, they just look like jumbly pinpricks in the fabric of
the world. The darkness, with the holes in it that hint at another side, a
bright paradise somewhere far away.
He is drunk from the
cheapest beer from a warm keg out back in the driveway, and he stumbled to the
front lawn, where girls step over him on the way into the party.
The party roars – its music
and screams spreading out into the night, but he hears it like the ocean in a
shell.
“Attraction can really
fuck you up,” he says to no one. “It can fuck you up good. You gotta choose
the right person, because if you don’t, and you choose the wrong one, or you
let nature take over so you always pick the wrong ones, it sends you to hell.
Hell in a handbasket.”
He thinks of Bronwyn.
3
Bronwyn Shapiro: brown hair,
straight, long, five foot three, wears black too much, smokes too much, no
breasts to speak of, but somehow looks more skeletally advanced than other
sophomores, wears glasses but looks intellectual instead of geeky, doesn’t put
up with shit from the guys at the frat, writes poetry that she considers
puerile but she takes creative writing classes, anyway. That’s where Josh
first saw her: freshman year, expository and creative writing 101, Michael
Framington – the short story writer – teaching. Bronwyn read a poem about
setting fire to her roommate’s hair. Framington called it the worst case of
overwrought emotional baggage with the sensibility of a disturbed eighteen
year old that he’d heard in years. Josh wanted to hear it again. After that
class, he went to her and asked her what she was reading. She glanced up at
him – splayed on a tamped-down carpet of fresh grass – and shut the book.
“It’s called a book,” she
said.
“Now that’s a suitably
bitchy thing to say,” he said.
“You know, when I’ve noticed
you in class, I’ve always thought you were a loser and now you’ve just
confirmed it for me,” she said. “Please leave.”
And that was the moment he
felt that he had to have this woman in his life no matter what.
A year later, lying on the
grass, looking up at the stars, Josh wishes she were with him...
Copyright 2005 Douglas Clegg.
Used here with permission, all rights reserved.
