* * *
Veena put on her gloves and goggles, stood on the stool, and pulled the plug on the upper peephole. Between her gloved thumb and finger, the tip of the plug was cherry red. She kept her head back while a clear flame shot three inches out of the peephole.
At 1560 degrees, Hoa adjusted her infrared goggles and yanked open the firebox door, throwing in staves as fast as possible while the heat whelmed her chest and face. Five medium and five thin staves, one after the other, keeping heat loss to a minimum. The fire was the color of electric goldfish. When new staves met the flame, Hoa heard them crinkle and dissolve.
At 1650 degrees, a gaseous orange flame blasted from the peephole. The acrid, ashy smell began to give the stokers a high. The kiln temperature rose quickly now, so quickly the flame, needing more oxygen, began to suck it from the clay vessels themselves. When the pyrometer read 2010 degrees, Hoa eased herself between the stacked wood and the kiln to open the damper, the hair on her arms singed, and she emerged flushed, wiping sweat from her forehead. The solid kiln looked pregnant, its bricks expanding outward, smoke and light pouring from gaps where clay mortar had fallen away.
Veena was stoking six plus six, the wood meeting flame hissing like bacon in a frying pan. Between stokes, Hoa selected staves, setting them upright against the kiln on Veena’s left. As Veena shoved one stave into the firebox, Hoa held out the next one. Then they switched places, Veena pulling the collar of her shirt up to wipe her glistening face. Hoa opened the firebox and used a stout piece of green wood to stir the ash over the grate, a sheet of smoke unwinding from the firebox and enveloping her.
Veena slid sideways between the kiln and the wall and tapped open the side damper another inch. She slid out and drained her water bottle in breathless gulps. In mutual exhaustion, both women sat on separate stools watching the pyrometer, waiting for the moment when the heat would stop rising and they would need to stoke again. In the open pit beneath the firebox, embers flared and shifted. Heat. Bring it on. Hoa could take the heat.
Hoa’s Walk
The weekend before they left for Mexico, Dale had flown to DC to visit his parents. He had called her from a downtown bar, a little drunk, and it was hard to hear him over the bar noise. He was saying “I’m at this place called, believe it or not, Wisdom. With my sister. We had to get out of mom and dad’s house. So we’re drinking ginger mojitos. Here I’m standing at the bar and all I can think about is you. I can’t be having a good time without wanting you with me.”
She felt such tenderness inside her when he said that. Softly, she told him “I’m witchoo baby.” She’d once heard Dale’s Virginian cousin say it like that, and ever since, she and Dale would pass the phrase back and forth to each other. “Witchoo baby.” “Witchoo too.” But he hadn’t heard her with all the bar noise.
Witch-you-babe-bee. Each step she took now seemed to deliver one syllable of that phrase. Over and over, as she walked the sandy rut of the trail. The flat-topped mountains off to the north were low enough to call hills or mesas. She could see bushes climbing the slope. It was beginning to darken with evening. Her feet were sweaty inside her shoes. Witch-you-babe-bee.
She spotted a single shining dragonfly wing stuck between two small stones in a berm. She noted two fluffy underfeathers in the dirt. A black skink, and later another one, fluttered across the trail and disappeared. Some kind of camouflaged grasshopper clung to branches of the chaparral.
I won’t sleep, she told herself. I can walk through the night.
She felt the low angle of the sun on her cheek and thought about how it must be on Dale’s cheek too. What was he doing? Was he limping along behind her? This same sun, this same sun. And her boy? What was he doing? The more she imagined Declan, letting herself think about his state of incommunicado, the more her breath shallowed as she walked. She felt as though her heart were sinking toward her solar plexus, drawing a draft of pure sadness after it. Not her own life, it wasn’t her own life she would miss most if she never found her way out of this desert.
eight
The Iteration
From the grooved highway at sixty-five,
a hum rises. Except intimacy
there is nada. That
was a scissortail the woman says.
The boy in the back seat stops
blowing his Coke bottle
as they pass
the mowing machines. Spiked
lobelia, crown vetch, trumpet vine
under the blades of the Ditch-witch tremble.
What is the true jelly of an animal?
asks the boy, tonguing his tooth
on its last string. The woman
turns her face smiling.
The skyline jumps over the moon.
The man drives with his finger
inside her. Years
of together. The theories
were unfit to live on.
Only dust was given duration.
They know that
they are naked.
Friday Evening
Outside the cave, in the fading day, Dale stood teetering on the hill of talus. Quickly, he thought. He bent, going light-headed, and picked up a flat rock larger than his palm, limping with it to the closest nopale cactus. There were dozens of nopale dispersed in the slather of brush on the hill, and barrel cacti too, although they looked more formidable. The prickly pears on the nopale were green and orange, dotted with brown nubs anchoring displays of spines. The fallen fruit was desiccated and withered, and none looked edible. Dale dropped the rock by his boot, struggling out of his shirt. Bending forward to keep from going faint, he spread the black shirt on the sandy brash. Before the light goes. He picked up his rock, tapping at a ripe fruit. It detached instantly, falling onto his shirt. He knocked off six prickly pears, piling them together. Then he tested the edge of the rock against one of the green, flipper-like pads from which the fruit grew. The pad, too, dropped readily from the cactus. He limped back to the cave carrying the rock in one hand and his shirt, folded around the nopale pad and fruit, in the other.
Dale eased himself against the near wall where he could see in the dimming light. His senses beginning to revive. He scoured the back wall anxiously for the rattlesnake, but didn’t find it. Against the blackness of the back wall, he did make out a man-sized passage of more profound blackness, a tall, skinny tunnel leading further into the cave. Leaving the open shirt of nopales, he tentatively crawled toward the passageway, the sharp rock floor chaffing his knees through his torn cargo pants, and he sniffed the skunky pungency. Somebody’s stash.