The Book of Drome Ch6: Walk Of Life

They walked across Ajo Highway at the traffic light where it intersected with Camino Verde, the road they’d walked down to get there. They were not far from where he’d camped. The light did not stay green for long, that intersection was not pedestrian friendly. It never stayed green long enough for people to walk all the way across unless there were cars on Camino Verde triggering the pressure plates under the surface of the road; otherwise the people who were crossing did so at a brisk trot. Debbie was not capable of the brisk trot, she was slow in her movements as she was in her speech. She waddled like a penguin. Dusty held her soft warm hand as they crossed halfway and waited on the concrete island between the eastbound and westbound sides of the highway as cars and trucks zoomed past. People drove very fast on this part of Ajo Highway on the other side of the mountains from the city and The Zone. It was just before 6 AM now so The Highway was very busy with commuters and smugglers. There was already a warm wind blowing. He saw some clouds to the northeast and he could tell there would be storms that night.

“The rains are coming,” she said. “It was already getting moist this morning. The butterflies taste the moisture with their feet.”

“Yah,” he said, looking off into the distance.

“That’s good for the land.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And hopefully we’ll get relief from the heat. But I need to find a dry spot to sleep.”

“You can stay in my trailer if you need to.”

“Thank you Debbie.” he said. The light changed again. “Come on,” he said, and took her hand and they crossed the road together.

When they got to the other side, before she let go of his hand, she held it up to her face and looked at his fingernails, which were painted electric blue. “I like your fingernails,” she said. “They're pretty.”

“Thank you,” he said. “So are you.” They both smiled. She really was pretty now because of how the inner beauty that came through in her speech also glowed through her adorably pudgy face, especially her eyes. That warm glow from the deep inarticulate darkness of them. Of her. She smiled. She only had a few teeth in front. She’d gotten some replacement teeth a while back that she’d been very proud of and shown off to everyone but then after a trip to the mental behavioral health facility she’d come back without her new teeth and when he’d asked her what happened she’d said someone at the hospital stole them and nobody would help her find them. She also said one of the orderlies had beat her. That had been over a year ago. She’d been in and out of health care facilities many times since then and she always told him about it. She spoke of such things in a way that almost seemed like bragging, as a child might speak of going to the hospital. With a kind of naive pride. But she was old and hers was a life of much suffering and while she was indeed simple she still knew her own life better than anyone else ever could.

She scrutinized him, squinting. “Are you gay?” She asked. “Are you transgender?”

“Eh. Sometimes, I guess” he said. “My younger friends tell me I’m ‘fluid.’ But like, Je est un autre, non?” Part of what he liked about living in the wilderness was that you didn’t need to have a self.

She eyed him for a second, mirthfully suspicious, squinting. He winked at her and went on.

“I grew up without a stable sense of self and it took me years, decades, to realize who and what I am. Once it happened a bunch of tiny separate things all fused together into one luminous whole and for reasons beyond my own understanding I began to feel at home in my own mind body and soul even if I’m still kinda weird to other people. But I’ve always been a little queer I guess.”

“That’s beautiful,” she said. “I bet Jesus did that for you. That is what He does.” They turned east and headed toward the gas station and the city and the sun. They were no longer holding hands but they walked together intimately in the spiritual sense, each open to the true self of the other.

“Something like that,” he said.

“Aren’t you Christian?” She asked him.

“I’m fluid,” he said.

“How do you stay fluid in the desert?”

“Dumb luck I guess.”

“How do you know it isn’t Jesus?” She asked.

“I don’t know it isn’t Jesus,” he said.

“Luck is a dumb fat bitch like me,” she said, chuckling triumphantly to herself, knowing it would get a rise out of him.

“Debbie!” He gasped.

To their left, to the north, was Ajo Highway; and to their right, to the south, was a broad concrete wash beyond which lay suburban housing developments, a swatch of desert with dirt roads through the cacti, and the Casino Del Sol at The Yaqui Pueblo. The wash was relatively new. They’d been building new public infrastructure out in The Perimeter as the land was developed by big real estate companies every month of every year now. Both sides of the highway now had big new concrete washes and they were adding another lane on each side.

They could see the gas station and convenience store about about a half a click down the highway to the east and beyond that the mountains and above them the rising sun. He walked slowly so that she could keep up. After her chuckling had subsided she put some music on from her phone. Elvis Presley. She loved Elvis Presley.

“I left my new speaker at home and I gave the other one to the church,” she said.

“Which church?”

“The one at Ajo and Mission.”

“By the library.”

“No, the one by the McDonald’s.”

“Yeah the library is right across from the McDonald’s.”

“No it’s diagonal from there. The church is next to it going the other way.”

“They’re all in that same general vicinity though,” he said.

“Yeah I guess,” she admitted grudgingly. They grew quiet for a second as Elvis finished singing In the Ghetto and Rumble by Link Wray came on. They saw Joe and Darren and Brandeen in the near distance hanging out by the side of the gas station. That was a rough and dusty trio. The music hit like a cue in a movie and the dust blew in a troubling plume across the lonesome desert highway. Dusty wondered where Joe’s girlfriend was, she was always by his side but he didn’t see her. In the store, he thought to himself.

“I got a new boyfriend,” Debbie said.

“Online?” He knew to ask. She always had online “boyfriends” who tried to scam her. Her son always argued with her about it and shamed her for it. Sometimes he took her phone away. That was one of the things that really hurt her sometimes, not just because she loved her fake boyfriends but because it was her own son bullying her while telling her it was for her own good. Such things could wound her. Sometimes she called Adult Protective Services on him. The family always seemed to be feuding. Dusty didn’t know the children personally.

“Yeah,” she said. “He lives in New York City. He asked me to marry him. Stop walking so I can show you a picture.”

They stopped and she showed him a picture on her phone. He had been through this with her several times. People were always trying to scam her out of her disability money, he agreed with her son on that, but he didn’t like that the son bullied her about it. Aimai-elle un rêve? So she loved a dream? Oui. Yes. Was she wrong to do so? Not at all. We all love dreams but it’s just so much easier to see that particular madness in others than in ourselves.

He knew that he himself may well have been more in love with his own dream of the world than the world itself, musing in pursuit of a visionary state and for the satisfaction and enjoyment of his own mind rather than the pursuit of some verifiable truth external to such. These thoughts flitted through his mind like hummingbirds among desert trees but they were in the background as he focused on her.

He asked her: “You’re not sending him money are you?”

“No,” she said.

“Don’t let him hustle you, you’re a mark because you love people naturally.”

“People try to play me because I’m retarded,” she said matter of factly. She was not upset, it was a plain fact of existence to her, like the sun being bright and water being wet. Thoughts flickered through his mind: water is two parts hydrogen one part oxygen and people are mostly water and empty space and water adheres to itself and people stick together. How do the wind and water weave their waves within one another. Who weaves spacetime into the heaving void. And do the believers really know the ways of the weavers? Would we weigh wind on scales of fish or water on the whisper of a wish? But he was mostly focused on her. He nodded. She was well aware that she was a target for all manner of predatory behavior and she had been raped robbed and beaten more than most people in the world ever will be and yet she persisted in trusting and loving the world more than most people in the world ever will. Or so he dreamed she did anyway. And this dream seemed true. Dreams seem true, that is how they work. They mean things.

“Wait,” she said just as he was about to start walking again. Morning traffic sped by on the highway beside them in a constant low rushing roar. Cars like corpuscles on that vascular muscular highway. The lifeblood of capitalism. America. He looked at her and she at him and her eyes lit up with mirth. “You wanna see his dick?” She asked him, giggling.

“Nah I’m good.”

“It’s huge,” she said. “Aren’t you gay? Don’t you like dick?”

“Not right now,” he said. He started walking again but she stopped him again.

“Wait,” she said. A gentle wind caressed them like the infinite whisper of a loving god as they stood in the cool warmth and gathering light and he waited as she’d instructed. He drank from his water bottle again. He wanted coffee. Lulu the gas station manager would give him free coffee. The world was so full of gifts and yet people were still so full of want.

Debbie showed him her phone and he looked and saw a picture of a giant erect penis. He cringed.

“Debbie,” he said.

She giggled triumphantly.

“Come on,” he said. “I want to get to the store so I can talk to people before I catch the shuttle.”

“You gonna buy anything?”

“No,” he said. “But Lulu gives me coffee. I’ve been living completely by way of thievery and gift lately. Without money. With only what possessions I can carry without burdening myself.”

“I can buy you something,” she said. “I have money.” She was always generous to him and often offered to buy him things.

“You don’t need to,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “Do you want to come to our wedding?” The dream husband seemed so real to her.

“Sure! When is it?”

“We’re still figuring that out,” she said. “Eventually though. It’s going to be in Brooklyn.”

“Oh neat, I love New York City. I know you been to New Jersey before because I told you I used to live in Hoboken and you said you had a teddy bear named Hoboken.”

“Yeah I got him from a trucker in Hoboken so I named him Hoboken. He’s gone now, my husband threw him in a fire.” She relayed this cruel fact without sorrow and seemed amused by it. She smiled. It was true that it was an interesting thing to have happen. Her leathery brown face gleamed with soft golden highlights in the desert dawn. Her eyes twinkled.

“I remember the story,” he said. That husband had beaten her often and he’d gotten angry at the teddy bear for making her happy. The man hated Hoboken. A mean-hearted and violent man. Such men happen. Theirs was the love of power, hers was the power of love. She was the kind of woman such men happen to. That husband was the one who’d been murdered by a friend in Phoenix. His doom had been her liberation and Dusty thought that it was sad that life was that way sometimes. But it was very good that she was still alive and smiling.

He looked off into the sky. There were thick clouds just starting to appear. A red tinge to the clouds like blood. Iron and oxygen, he thought, supermassive stars. The heart of the heart of the country. The clouds would roll in over the city slowly as the day progressed. Dusty thought it might take the entire day for the front to get to The Perimeter. It was coming in from the northeast and would probably veer along the mountains to the south. The lightning will reveal the form of the mountains and the thunder will make them tremble, he mused to himself.

He would have to figure out a good dry place to sleep. He had no tent. He’d become very used to the elements. He’d become one of them. An element. Without his Dustyness the surrounding desert of The Perimeter would not be what it was. He thought to himself: the life element carbon is stardust formed by the fusion of helium atoms which are formed by the fusion of hydrogen atoms in the vast furnaces of the lifegiving stars. He wondered: how can people think space is a cold lifeless place? The desert morning wind caressed his skin in with dry ancient whispers.

He walked slowly so that she could keep up. They passed an anthill busy with ants gathering small green leaves and yellow flower petals from mesquite and creosote. The leaves and petals had accumulated to form an image that he could see but which the ants could not have conceived. They made it seem as if a life force emanated from the ant hill as the ants poured in and out, their shadows slightly displaced in the long slant light of the rising sun such that their activities appeared to have a certain depth. He thought to himself: the instar phase of insect development occurs between molts until the insect reaches sexual maturity and seeks to propagate itself. The mature ant has an exoskeleton made of a glucose polymer chemically composed of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, basic elements produced in stars. It is thus that the insect and the angel are wed.

He smiled. Debbie saw him smiling and she smiled too. He made sure not to step on any ants. She also made sure not to step on any ants. The two of them were so different and yet so profoundly similar. This is more common than people suppose. He saw her looking at him and he looked into her eyes and both their eyes gleamed with a common light. They slowed down briefly but then kind of snapped out of it and regained their pace and he looked forward down along the dusty path they walked between the rushing road and the dry concrete wash at the gas station in the dawn.