Last Days in the Desert

“Is this—?” asked Stacie.

  “It’s right around here...the place I had in mind for them. I thought this was the street. Oh, I know. We’re almost there,” said Yadira happily. “It’s right around this corner!”

  “Is that damn cat still following us?” asked Tiffany.

  “No, I think we lost him,” said Stacie, glancing back. “Itzel scared him.”

  “He was trying so hard to kill himself with toad crap,” said Yadira.

  The line of three girls, Stacie, Tiffany, and Yadira, slackened their pace. They began to falter. “How can we...is it up here?” Someone lurched forward.

  “You don’t know which street?”

  Heading east on Eighth, then turning on Stadium, the line of girls carried the toads in their plastic pails. Each pail had one large toad or several small toads in it. The handles of the rubbery basins bent ominously. The girls bore the pails under hunched shoulders, shuffling hurriedly, unable to look forward without straining their necks.

  An anonymous-looking sun-burnt lady in the backseat of a bagged, primer-painted Honda leaned out the car window and looked up eagerly as the police copter ripped the darkening sky, banking slowly away in the direction of the rail lines. “Fancy cops,” she muttered, ducking back inside. She sawed vigorously at a press-on nail. “You’re scaring away the aliens!” she screamed. “This is the biggest little hick town in America. They’d arrest a fucking cactus for jaywalking.”

  She glared at the line of startled, muddy girls blundering across the crosswalk in front of her car.

  “It’s down here,” Yadira said, once they had safely passed the Honda and the screaming woman. “It’s a really good place for them.”

  “I hope so. I don’t want to feel guilty any more about these toads,” said Tiffany.

  “It looked like the perfect place,” said Stacie.

  As Yadira had explained it, she had an idea of where to leave the toads, a place that was better than the backyard of the old house. She told Stacie and Tiffany that she remembered something she’d seen while trudging home from the university weeks earlier on a nearby street. Out of the corner of her eye, it being so hot, her eye caught a tiny glistening stream of water from a Jacuzzi that had been installed in a backyard. The Jacuzzi had a drain line that was running out a back gate. The stream from a hose flowed down the banks of an arroyo onto the sand bed of the arroyo making a little toad swimming pool. The arroyo bed and banks were also thick with shrubs and bushes. This was the ideal place for them to take the toads. She wondered herself why hadn’t she thought of this great idea before when they tried to put the toads in the backyard. That had been a terrible idea, since there wasn’t any way to make sure the soil stayed wet for a while and the cat didn’t bother them and get killed, though they’d never liked Mr. Biggs very much, and even less now. This idea was much better because Colorado River Toads lived in the arroyos, as far as Yadira knew; she’d heard the horrible ruckus they made from the arroyos in town; it sounded like a lamb being slaughtered. And Tiffany and Stacie agreed that leaving the toads in an arroyo seemed correct. A dripping Jacuzzi would be the perfect thing to keep the soil moist. Tiffany thought if they put the toads in the moist sand it would be soft enough that the toads could hide themselves before the morning. Or if they wanted to hide in brush they could. There might be cats and dogs after them, but probably not before the toads would hide themselves. The toads could wait there until the summer rains and then emerge. Anyway, the toads themselves would know what to do, and the girls wouldn’t have to worry too much about where they left them as long as there was enough cover, brush, and moist sand. They were quite sure of that.

  When the girls neared the dripping Jacuzzi, a yellow Gremlin stood in their way. It was backed into the bare edge of the arroyo, parked so that it straddled the part of the arroyo bank at the rear of a house, right in the spot where Yadira thought they could climb down the dirt bank into the bed of the arroyo. The dripping Jacuzzi was only fifty feet farther from the street. The other bank was too steep and too thickly overgrown with thorny trees and cactus for them to make their way down.

  “What’s this?” asked Yadira when she saw the little car blocking their way down to the arroyo.

  “Somebody’s parked in the way,” said Stacie.

  The Gremlin was a wreck. Dented canyons at the car’s rear were of sufficient depth to have housed miniature dioramas of canyon cliff dwellings. The car’s side panels were unsparingly buttered with pinkish gobs of Bondo and had been spray painted various blue hues. Tape crisscrossed the rear brake light cover, holding it in place. At the back of the Gremlin a tiny pink trailer, the color of used chewing gum nosed into the arroyo like a thirsty dinosaur. In places the trailer had been patched with sections of cardboard or plywood. Odd cuts of cardboard, like cereal boxes and such, jammed the windows and lines of rust ran down from the window frames and door in such profusion that it seemed the trailer was bleeding from every orifice. There were dents and dings in the trailer side, and some furniture was strapped to the roof and back. Evidently the owners had been scrounging the neighborhood, taking the choice pieces of metal and the better furniture left out on the curbs when students abandoned their rentals for the summer.

  A fire in a hibachi burned near a flat slab of river rock. The whole camp looked like a homey picture, if you had in mind a sort of beat-up home in a trailer and you didn't mind cooking your dinner outdoors near a weedy arroyo.

  Outside the bulbous little trailer a man bent down to pry up a tin can lid squashed onto the earth. But the most astounding detail of his appearance awaited. When he struggled to bend over, spreading widely his legs, the action revealed that his pants seam was shredded and he wore no underwear. Across the solar system, the setting sun’s rays zoomed in a stream of light particles. These traveling particles, these flecks or specks or dots, these photons, made their blazing entry. At the speed of light the discrete particles flew across all the solar system’s great cold blackness, tore in their tiny tearing bits and penetrated the earth’s atmosphere and all that distance coming to sunny, sunny Arizona and seemed to bear down especially and intensely, lighting up in all the dark world this one crevice. And that light stream burst forth, unclouded, palpable, conspicuous, and glaring with the mission of brightly illuminating a hideously hairy butt crack.

  Light has its purpose, but who could have thought this was it?

  “Crap,” cried Stacie, falling back. Collectively they wished the sun could be switched off at that very moment and that pageant, spectacle and peep show made sultry and ash.

  The figure turned, straightened up, and immediately strolled toward them, scratching his airy bottom. “Howdy.”

  “Holy—crap,” began Yadira, who stood in front, with her eyes tearing. She veered away sharply.

  Stacie stopped. “Shit. Shit,” she said, checking her steps. “This is shitting spooky,” she said under her breath.

  The man grappled Stacie’s arm and squeezed it tightly. “Hey, pretty giurl. You’re welcome to join us.” His dirty, bruised face with its fang-like teeth studied her closely. A broad smile spread on his face.

  “Oh listen...,” began Stacie.

  “We’re busy,” said Tiffany, abruptly trying to pull her friend’s arm away from the man’s firm grasp.

  The man grappled Stacie’s arm strongly and turned her his way. He steered her to the camp.

  “Why don’t you sit down with us and try some scetee beans? Makes a good meal. Lot of people don’t know them beans cook up soft and sweet. ‘Specially with a can of Bud in them. That’s my friend’s secret.” A toothless man in a Guatemalan hat toasted them with an empty beer can left beside a pot of boiling mesquite beans. “We’ve got a camp down here tonight and we’re happy to share.”

  “Oh, thank you, but I don’t think we’re hungry,” said Stacie.

  “Sit youself down.”

  “No, we don’t have time for this,” said Yadira.

  “You don’t have time for this? What,
college giurl, are you writing your dissertation today? I said sit down.”

  Stacie backed quickly trying to elude him and make a get-away and he put his hand on the bucket. Stacie fought to regain control of the pail.

  “Sorry, we can’t join you,” Yadira called.

  “Little smart-ass college bitches,” grumbled the man.

  “Yeah, sorry,” Tiffany added.

  At the trailer door a toothless woman jouncing a baby on her hip appeared and tossed a bundle out the door.

  The lady stared at the muddy girls with pails. “What’s in the pails, dears? Why are you wearing gloves? Were you gonna do some dumpin’ down here?”

  “Shut up, bitch,” hissed the man.

  “You donna tell me to shut up!” exploded the lady.

  “I can tell you to shut up because when I fucking say something you do it, if you know what's good for you and the—”

  “I won’t take that shit from you!” The blowsy woman burst out of the trailer doorway. She nearly put another scar on the child who seemed already to have gotten the worst end of fate against the doorframe. As she and the baby came out, the trailer door slammed against the outer wall with so much power it nearly tore from the hinges.

  She rushed the man. The smeary-faced baby clung to her, its panicky eyes as big as saucers.

  The man dropped Stacie’s arm and prepared to throttle the woman. He also began abusing her verbally.

  As awful as it was, this domestic argument was the golden opportunity they had been praying for. The three girls dashed away in many directions as fast as they could with acceleration they never realized they were capable of while holding pails full of toads; a fucking retreat was their immediate overriding concern. They made off quickly and worked their escape up the street, the awkward pails, slapping against their thighs, hampering them. A glance over their shoulders showed the horrid man was wrestling with his wife.

  “Those freaks,” cried Yadira breathlessly outstripping her friends in an effort to be first well away from the camp, “They’ll kill the baby. I’ll call in an anonymous 911 when we get back to the house.”

  “God, did you see his pants?” asked Tiffany.

  “I did and I wish I hadn’t,” said Stacie, huffing and puffing.

  They reached the top of the street. Yadira led the way. She whirled around the corner pell-mell. They nearer a small strip of undeveloped land that stretched down toward another part of the arroyo.

  Out of the back of a thick creosote bush a voice spoke.

  “Whatcha got in them pails, girls?”

  “Oh God,” said Stacie, shrinking back.

  Yadira wheeled around, her eyes bugging out. She shuffled her feet faster and faster. Up the cracked asphalt, toward a big pothole, she tried to run as fast as she could.

  Suddenly, someone vaulted through the flimsy cover of the bush. It was a man who bounced out and in a split second he’d covered the ground between them and the edge of the road. They recognized him as the man stirring beer into the beans at the fire. He wore baggy camouflage pants and a black T-shirt. On his head he wore a Guatemalan hat and underneath it his hair was a fiery bush of reddish brown sticks.

  “Oh God!” screamed the girls.

  “Get away!” Yadira tried to swerve into the middle of the street.

  “Lemme see whatcha got in them pails,” he demanded.

  “Please, go away!”

  “Keep going. Shit!” cried Stacie.

  “Whatcha got in them pails?” He grabbed Yadira roughly by the arm and wrenched her to a stop.

  “Leave her alone. Let go of her arm,” said Tiffany.

  “Don’t make me angry,” he pleaded. “You don’t want to make me angry.”

  “We don’t want to! Just leave us alone and let us get out of here!” cried Stacie.

  “Well, I just might and then again I just might not.”

  “Now, stop!” cried Yadira.

  “Gemme those.”

  “No.”

  “Do I have to get rough? Lemme see.” The man had wild eyes, which they could see better when he pushed his twiggy red hair aside.

  “They’re just toads. Believe me.”

  “Toads?”

  “Somebody left them with us as a joke.”

  “You won’t even want them,” said Tiffany, standing far off.

  “Shut up. I decide what I want.”

  “I just thought—”

  “Did I ask you to think? Put ‘em down.”

  Yadira put her pail down.

  “Tilt it thisa way. Whoa, whatcha doing with toads?”

  “Trying to get rid of them.”

  “Shut up. You talk.” He waved at Stacie.

  “We’re trying to get rid of them. Someone left them in our house and we’re leaving them in the arroyo.”

  “Yeah? Well, now they’re mine. Put ‘em down.”

  “Listen, we feel really responsible for these guys so don’t hurt them—” Yadira began in a lecturing tone.

  “Shut up. Put ‘em down. Slide them over to me.”

  “All the pails,” he ordered. “Now, what else you got?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Where’re your purses?”

  “We just came out of the house for a second. We didn’t bring our purses.”

  “Didn’t bring your purses, huh?” For a moment he studied the pails, rubbing his face, bent over slightly to look in. His face showed amazement at the strange things he had acquired and he was wondering if there was going to be any real value in what he had just stolen because his knowledge of drugs was pretty sketchy and mostly involved its consumption, but he seemed to recall that there was some use of these toad things which he remembered, vaguely. Calculating and measuring and imagining the probable money he might make off of these amphibians and how did these girls end up with…

  Stacie grabbed Yadira’s arm. The length of their attacker’s stupid thoughts had occupied his brain long enough to embolden the two girls. Another escape seemed possible.

  They took off. Yadira ran without her pail, Stacie and Tiffany took theirs back.

  “Shit!”

  “Run, run as fast as you can!”

  The thief awakened from counting his chickens to realize some of them were leaving. He began chasing them and was gaining on them, because they were slowed down by the awkward pails that kept banging their legs. But they lucked out when the man happened to glance back at the pail that was left on the street and he saw the other man from the camp creep out of the desert and approach it. Their pursuer swung around to defend what he’d stolen. He returned to his pail of toad in a manner that let Yadira, Stacie and Tiffany know that he and the other man were about to battle.

  “That’s mine,” said the man in the Guatemalan hat, pulling a gun from his waist and pointing it at his friend.

  Tiffany, Yadira and Stacie shuffled as fast as they could back to the house with the remaining toads.

  Chapter Ten