Mayor Cabrera put away the football helmet. It was the middle of the night but he felt wide awake, so he went up and cleaned the windows in the lobby and dusted the countertops and the desk. He put new candy in the dish and squared up the rug and filed some stray paperwork. Put more paper in the printer. Replenished the coffee supplies. After that he went out front and swept in front of the carport and then, out of tasks, wandered back to the basement and found himself sitting at the big metal table with a sheet of printer paper in front of him. He found himself writing a letter. He dove right in, parsing out the difference between wanting someone and needing someone and which was worse. Nowhere did he write Dana’s name. He wrote of the trouble of having his feelings ripen rather than rot. He wrote about the back of her knee when she bent her leg, about her tiny ears. He wrote about thinking of her with other men and having his heart fold up and collapse. Of her practice of wearing a different perfume in each season, and how he hadn’t smelled the winter fragrance this year. Other men had, but Mayor Cabrera had not. He wrote down all the nicknames Dana called him and that he’d never once called her a nickname, had never addressed her in a whisper as anything but Dana. He wanted to call her something other than the name her mother had given her. He wanted to call her Love. Mayor Cabrera wrote of the time he’d visited her, going onto another page now, one of his first appointments, when he’d arrived and could tell she’d been crying, her eyes puffy and voice wavering, and he hadn’t asked her what was wrong. If he ever saw her again, that would be the first thing he’d ask, what had upset her that day. He wasn’t afraid of the answer. He wasn’t afraid of Dana’s past or her present. He wasn’t afraid for his own feelings.
Mayor Cabrera wasn’t calming down, but he wasn’t feeling as crazy. It wasn’t late. It was 11:30. He hadn’t eaten dinner. He wrote that the night was an evil time but not when he was with her because then he wanted the night to last forever. Mayor Cabrera felt that Dana was his oasis and he wrote that down too and then he rested his pen. He didn’t need to worry if everything in the letter made sense because he wasn’t going to send it. It wasn’t really a letter. He picked the papers up and gazed at them, as if they held a landscape rather than a frenzy of words, listening to the sand brushing against the high basement windows. He didn’t ball the pages up. He folded them in half and then filed them down in the empty garbage can in the shadow of the big table.
THE GAS STATION OWNER
The sun was a sour note lingering in his temples. He got his headache about this time, like clockwork, about an hour after his breakfast of jerky and pretzels and coffee. It was like a visitor, the headache, a companion. It might have been brought on by the arid glare, but it also had something to do with lack of whisky. The gas station owner had brought none at all, and that had been an error, but he would’ve been out by now anyway. He could only have brought a bottle or two. He’d get past it. He was glad he’d at least brought sunglasses. He’d never used them before, had always considered them womanly, like sandals or scarves, but he’d never been in this much glinting late-winter sun and he’d never quit whisky.
The gas station owner hadn’t moved in a week. He’d found water gurgling down a cliff face and had stayed with it as long as he could, burning up seven of the forty days he was going to stay in the desert, but now the trickle had petered out altogether. He had come across a roofless hunters’ cabin two mornings after leaving Lofte and had found a jar of sweet pickles in a cabinet. The day after that he’d crossed some kind of old fire road, free of tire tracks but still edged with shin-high berms. But then this spot — he knew it would be the last easy place. There would be narrow canyons with puddles hidden in their troughs. There would be cacti with moist flesh. Rain, with any luck. The desert was asking him to bow out now. He was being tempted, like someone from a Bible desert. Tempted to give up his journey.
He wasn’t going to bow out. In the morning he would leave here and wander not in the direction of the basin towns and not in the direction of Albuquerque. He would wander toward nothing. He would find some other water, and some other water after that, or he would not.
He’d killed and eaten a crow, and that was the only action he’d taken so far that felt right, that felt like real engagement. He’d leveled his pistol and intentionally winged the stupid bird. Then he’d gotten a grasp and broken its neck and plucked it and cleaned it in the pure trickle and roasted it over his fire. It was more work than it was worth, but it felt right. It was an action that had startled the desert, that had announced his presence.
He looked out from his half-assed grotto, which gave him shade mostly when he didn’t need it, late in the day, and the far-off mountains appeared to be crumbling. The mountains he could barely see, veiled in the blue dust of distance — that’s where he would survive or perish, where he would find himself in a type of straightforward peril men had found themselves in since the beginning of time.
SOREN’S FATHER
He had decided maybe it wasn’t a great idea to have Gee keep coming up to the clinic room. Something was wrong and he wasn’t interested in figuring out whose fault it was because it was probably his. He hadn’t told Gee any of this and had been avoiding her calls. He wasn’t sure how to proceed. Everything was his fault. Doctor Raymond had come in that morning to flash his penlight in Soren’s eyes as he did every week and then listen to his chest and declare with astonishment, as he did every week, that Soren still didn’t need a tracheotomy. Soren’s father had asked him exactly what he was looking for with the light and when the doctor said he was watching for any changes, Soren’s father cut him off and said there weren’t any damn changes and that was obvious and if it was really necessary to keep shining a bright light in the kid’s eyes and making useless checkmarks on a useless clipboard then could the doctor come do that when Soren’s father wasn’t around?
“But you’re always around,” said the doctor.
“I didn’t say it would be easy,” said Soren’s father.
Now Soren’s father felt bad about that. He wasn’t upset at the doctor. He was upset because he saw he had to face Soren’s situation alone. It was one of those things. There were four walls where Soren’s father lived and a wasteland out the window, and Soren’s father had to figure out how to do the time alone. He had to make peace with the beeps and cycling hums of the machines that monitored Soren. He had to make peace with the clinic food, which he now knew was terrible. He had to make peace with his son’s sallow, sinking face. He did not need to be leading on some woman who was too good for him anyway. He wasn’t with the living. He wasn’t with the living and he wasn’t where his son was.