Apology

© Jane Molinary

I’VE BEEN HERE IN THE DESERT, in this little town, for two months now. I don’t know if you would like it out here on the high southwestern plains but I suspect not. Such windblown open spaces. The trees in town give way to endless arid prairie. The constant passage of long, loud trains, busy, muscular, saddening.

I know our little boy would like that, at least. The trains.

Yesterday, along the tracks west of town, the Union Pacific boomed down with five engines and three hundred double-stacked cars. Six hundred cars, if a piggyback is two. You can believe that or not.

The mares and foals were gone from their pasture. Eight large crows flew from the cistern there, silent, blown by the southwest gray-blue wind.

A pronghorn stood alone on the hill, just inside the barbed wire fence, alert and anxious, making that strange call they make. Like a wind-up party favor, or the stripped gears of a lawnmower crank yanked hard and whirring sharp and short. A cough from rusting metal lungs.

Farther down, on the tracks’ north side, another pronghorn sprawled out dead in a dusty two-track road, eyes and tongue hollowed, devoured by flies, still swarming. Something had yanked his colon out and left it two feet from the carcass, the round cavity beneath his tail empty and wet with bright fresh blood. A strange mutilation. No obvious sign he was hit by the train, or shot, or chased and torn apart by lion or coyote or some extraordinarily numerous murder of crows. Only the bloody colon, and the coat along each side of his spine roughly shorn, as if grazed by the sharp front teeth of his own kind.

Pronghorn, jackrabbit, horses, crows. Trains, clouds, the occasional car. You rarely see people if you don’t go downtown. Which is good.

I SPEND ALL MY TIME at this house I occupy up on the hill, or walking the trail out into the desert along the railroad tracks, or at the liquor store or grocery store, or drunk and wandering one of the desolate dirt tracks spurring from town into the prairie. All else is gone, like the pronghorn, like the little bird I will tell you about, like my former ambition, which now seems to have been tied far too closely to a lack of imagination, so, gone.

I did make a friend, Marie, who works in the coffee shop in town. This is not her great ambition. Like a lot of people here, she’s lying low for a while. She does occasional favors for the movie people who are in town making, of course, a movie. The regular movie people live in the motel. The big shots and stars rent estates and have their personal assistants plus special assistants who live in this town. Marie is sometimes one of those.

In fact, we met when I went into the coffee shop where Marie works, and she mistook me for a movie person because I was a new face in town. We laughed about that and I got a free coffee. Should I have been flattered to be mistaken for a movie person, or is it just that movie people, everyone except the most famous or the prettiest actors, look like ordinary people out of their element?

Marie even has a sense of humor, in her own way, about her cancer. She still calls it her cancer even though it’s officially gone. She says it’s like a bad boyfriend—you never know when he might show up again, asleep or passed out there, in the backyard, but alive. I went over to her house for dinner, and she didn’t mind talking about her cancer, or her boyfriend who had a harder time with her cancer than she did, or how long she will stay here before going back to civilization, which for her is California, and how nice it was to spend time with a man (me) without all that shit going on. Infatuation, sex...