Below excerpts from #11. To read more, subscribe today.
Bull Mountain Elemental
By Joe Wilkins
Earth
When you leave the fields,
it’s in your mouth,
your throat, summer sweater for your tongue—
that taste of roots
and shit and iron. You work it
with a jackknife from beneath your nails,
scrub gullies of it at your elbows.
How it becomes your face—
wet nostril ring,
furrows of it fanning from the raw wells of your eyes.
Blink and cry but this earth is all
you’ll ever see.
Fire
It begins in the rotten body of a cottonwood.
The jackpines too are tinder-dry. Like old women
stepping from the kitchen,
they sigh and fall
in the bright flames. The rimrocks fairly rage.
Even the valley’s a hive of smoke.
For there is no river,
only a track of dust.
Late August and fire everywhere—
river willow and prairie thistle,
dry earth and drier sky,
the coal-hot sacks of your lungs.
Air
Across these plains a dry wind pours,
lifts and carries the stink of sage, wild onion,
breath of diesel, cries of faraway birds—
And you and I as well.
We unbend
our backs, lift our arms, let the day’s sweat dry
down the length of us—this tongue of wind
to bless us, carry us somewhere else.
Water
I wake in the dark.
Only the moon’s far eye,
mouths of stars.
The mud of the field sucks at my hip boots,
a snake swings through the alfalfa.
When the sun rises, this field will steam, snakes twist
and slither up under the rocks—everything
will go down to dust. Yet tonight
the ditch is a runnel of sky,
and I step into the moon.
to read more poetry by Joe Wilkins purchase High Desert Journal #11
Mother’s Milk
by Amy Irvine
You say yes to the sunlight and your pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing, don't try to lie to yourself. — Hermann Hesse, “Wish Jar”
All week, they were elusive. Slipping through the timber like phantoms, they were nearly imperceptible. Wherever the trees opened up, telltale steam rose off large, matted ovals of meadow grass. The tangy, oily scent of animal sex hung heavy in the morning air, like ripe fruit about to fall. Still, it was hard to imagine that anything substantive had been there only moments before. Even the cries were dubious. High-pitched and mewling, their calls were otherworldly—as if the sounds nearly escaped those frequencies audible to the human ear. Looking back, I was skeptical that I would see one. And the thought of their flesh in my mouth for nourishment was, for the first time in my life, something I could barely fathom.
But on the third day of the hunt, Herb proved their presence by dropping a five-by-six bull—a single shot at four hundred yards to the base of the animal’s throat. Before the harem had time to mourn the loss of their lead male, a younger bull moved up from the rear to assume the lead. As far as hunts go, it was pretty ideal—quick and clean—the kind every first-time hunter dreams of. And it all went down well after daybreak as my husband cruised casually along a mild ridgeline—just far enough from the road to be legal. Even the aftermath was easy: Herb and his partner Chris gutted the animal, and then had no trouble catching a ride back to camp. Two guys from Michigan pulled up with our men sitting on the Michiganders’ tailgate; Herb’s grin was wide enough to span galaxies. Into four of our camp mugs he poured shots of good whiskey, and the men raised them in celebratory toast while Mandy flipped pancakes for the kids and I stoked the wood stove that burned continuously inside the wall tent.
It was meant to happen. I could tell he really believed those words, as if there had been an explicit contract of understanding between the animal and him. The other men nodded in total comprehension. Even after the visitors left, Herb and Chris continued to replay every detail of the morning. They spiced up their tale with graphic, grisly adjectives as they gathered the gear they would need to quarter, skin, and carry out their quarry. I moved away, beckoning our five-year-old daughter to follow with the mundane ploy of brushing her teeth. But Herb noticed the way we hung back, even as Chris’ wife and children encircled him. Finally, he called me over. With blood-stained fingers, he scrolled through the photos on the screen of the digital camera. They were the kind where the hunter stands proudly over his kill, the antlers hoisted up for a better visual.
He kept looking down at my face, growing more confused by the minute at the distance I had put between myself and his success. After all, he knew that I’d grown up in a family of hunters. That the procurement of meat for the dinner table was in no way an abstraction. And while he never actually took me hunting, I had always helped my father—and with eagerness: Plucking pheasants. Gutting rabbits. Catching back straps as they were sliced away from a hung carcass and then wrapping them in freezer paper. In short, my husband would have thought that, of all the women he knew, I’d be the most excited about this new family experience. He would even admit that I was the one who had taken us along this trajectory; that but for my rants about factory-farmed animals, and my concerted efforts to pass a hunters’ safety course and to get our names in the draw for game tags, he’d still be eating shrink-wrapped feedlot hamburger. He’d even go as far as to say that I have the better shot. The better eye at spotting game. And the more ravenous appetite for wild meat. But suddenly, to either of us, these facts were totally irrelevant.
Herb took one last, long look at my face before heading back out, and still I could not muster an expression to put him at ease—for I failed to understand my reaction as much he did. Conversely, I could see in the man I knew like the back of my own hands precisely what he had concluded: That I lacked the R-complex, that most elementary part of the brain which higher mammals share with reptiles. The part that manages the most basic, most primal acts. The part that can, even in the most mild of men, override reason and restraint with aggression, lust and brutality. In his mind, I was the chalice: the one suited to receive the gifts of the hunt, to render them into a meal and to offer them up as sustenance. But I was not the blade. I was not cut out to kill. And since I had nothing with which to refute this, no better explanation, I quickly conceded with a shrug that he was probably right.
Going through the Ghosts
by Mary Sojourner
Published by University of Nevada Press
Graveyard, which Maggie was working as a favor for Sherree, only out of her lifetime of guilt about everything, was the worst. Runner was nowhere in sight. Sarah had been scheduled for mornings. The bartender Tom was a guy who had to tell you every second about his tragic childhood – that caused him to become a control freak – which he was except when he was mixing her order, resulting in Bloody Mary’s minus vodka and wine coolers minus cool.
Maggie could hardly wait to go home. She’d rented a mini-apartment with a back balcony big enough for a chair and TV tray. The kitchen was perfect for a small gerbil family. If you turned around too fast in the living-dining-bedroom you could redecorate in five seconds flat. The fridge was mostly freezer. It was assumed that one entertained frequently and required not much more than ice. Even with the swamp-cooler going full tilt the place was an oven – but, it was hers, hers alone.
Riverview Heights was about 50 feet above the backside of the Creosote Winners' Mall and a half-mile from the Colorado River. Directly below Maggie’s back-porch was the Riverview Heights World-Famous Heart-Shaped Pool, terminally afflicted with algae and screaming kids. No problem, as long as she could look out over the tops of the dying palms and see the Colorado at dawn and dusk. When it shimmered like pewter, the casinos could have been carved from ruby or emerald or cubic zirconium.
Tom cleared his throat, “I’m sorry, you know how I am, I forgot that last drink, what was it?”
“A draft beer,” Maggie said.
He nodded. “Maybe you should speak a little louder from now on.”
“How’s this numb-nuts?” Maggie yelled.
“I didn’t expect that,” Tom said, “I thought what with you being an older woman and all, you might be a kinder person than some.”
Sarah let herself into the trailer. It was past midnight. She’d tried to walk off back-to-back shifts – as if you could out-run 16 hours of making fry bread and listening to Leola tell her how lucky she was to be an Indian in modern times. One more week and she’d have bus-fare to Bone Lake, if she felt ready to go home. She knew she could call her auntie for a loan, or maybe even that cranky old healer, Minnie Siyala, but she understood that she had jammed herself into her own mess and she was going to have to get herself out. She remembered Minnie Siyala calling her Mulehead Girl. “Damn for real,” she muttered.
She’d stomped back and forth on the Riverstroll five times. Old couples wandered. Gaunt men with piss-hole eyes leaned on the railing over the water, any interest they might have had in a good-looking woman leached away by bet after losing bet. It was the safest place for a woman to walk by herself, especially a woman who knew that tweakers ran the Creosote night.
Sarah had emptied a bag of breakfast scraps for the black and white mom cat and her babies. She had never really liked cats till she landed in Creosote. This cat family was such stubborn hustlers she had to love them.
She dropped the greasy bag in the trash and poured a glass of water. Sarah heard her roommate, Tina Rae, moving around in the back. It was only when Sarah realized that Tina’s old Celica was not in its parking spot that she dropped the glass and bolted for the front door.
Ghost Hunting in Baker City, Oregon
By Suzanne Burns
I have to accept the real reason why I’ve never enjoyed spending time outdoors camping and hiking, spelunking among the bats, powering a mountain bike down a deserted trail: I am afraid. Of monsters. The psychotic chainsaw-wielding type. The blood sucking type. The howling at the full moon type. Your garden variety creature of the night. And I will also admit how this fear is categorically my own doing, because I am a horror movie junkie. I’ve seen them all and reveled in the gore without turning away, lunged full-throttle into plots involving zombies and ax murderers, smiled with glee at those manufactured moments of utter terror.
I have a theory about why I am enraptured by scary movies. I’ve always longed to believe that if the world, even the make-believe world of cinema, can purport that supernatural beings exist, then someone, someday, will do the same for God. And if this theory fails I take comfort in the fact that, in movies anyway, the bogeyman only goes after “bad” people: the ones “free” enough to have sex before marriage, smoke pot, bare their midriff, drink to excess. All the intoxicating things “good Catholic girls”—and boys—are most definitely warned about.
Those of us enraptured by scary movies know the cardinal rule: you will not be a victim unless you are alone, like being left to the mercy of a desolation that can only come when you stand in the silent lobby of the Geiser Grand Hotel in Baker City, Oregon, at midnight.
My husband suggested Baker City as the destination for a recent road trip. He is a well-adjusted, optimistic soul who equates darkness with sleeping. In the middle of the night he has never mistaken the coat rack for a werewolf, the grinding of our refrigerator’s ice machine for a poltergeist. He does not need a nightlight. He does not enjoy horror films. He most certainly does not believe in ghosts, but he does believe in God. I ask him how these two beliefs are mutually exclusive and he usually changes the subject. But he indulges me, as all good husbands do. When we phoned ahead to make reservations at the Geiser Grand Hotel, crown jewel of Baker City with its Italian Renaissance revival architecture, its dinner menu that promised to rival any upscale restaurant in much larger towns, I swooned at the chance to participate in one of the infamous Geiser Grand ghost hunts. But the quiet voice, the nagging one of agnostic fear asked, What are the implications if I do see a ghost? What does it really mean if I don’t? I had to know more about the ghost hunt that would take place while we visited the Geiser Grand. Why do they do what they do? Are they looking for religion, too?
As Is
by JJ Clark-Finalist Spur Award
Her grandfather told her once that Asa Bordona had worked for a turkey farm out at Chinese Camp as a semen sucker. He had explained that the sucker was the boy who used a straw to draw the semen out of the male turkey to put in the female turkey so she would hatch eggs. As she and her grandfather walked from the parking lot towards Bordona’s Furniture and Appliances, Lily June wondered if this was where the song “Turkey in the Straw” came from. “That damn Portagee got paid twice what me and the other boys on the crew did,” Bud had told her. He had told her this so she’d know something about Asa Bordona.
At the entrance of the store, she dragged the heels of her Dingos across the pale tiles, enjoying the black scuff marks they left behind. She had cleaned and polished both her and her grandfather’s work boots early that morning so they would be dung-free for their trip into town. She had wanted to wear her blue plaid shirt, but Bud was wearing his blue one with the pearl snaps so she wore her brown one, and both wore their stiffest pair of Levis. They entered through Bordona’s automatic doors and Bud doffed his second best straw hat, the one without the sweat stain at the band, baring a buzz cut and uneven ears. He hadn’t gone with the black Stetson because it wasn’t a wedding – they just needed to buy a deep freeze. Since girl hats only came in the color of Easter eggs, she didn’t wear one.
They walked together down the center aisle of the store, the Barcaloungers lined up on their left and the La-Z-Boys on their right. The whole place reeked of lemon furniture polish and synthetic leather and high prices. Asa Bordona approached down the aisle to meet them in fancier boots and dressier pants. He gave his hand-tooled leather belt a tug so that his gigantic sterling silver eagle buckle would show above his paunch. “Young lady!” he said to Lily June. “Have I got a deal for you on a butfor.”
“What’s a butfor?” she asked, backing away as Bordona squatted down in front of her. He wore a pomade in his hair that smelled like expired medicine.
“For crapping!” Bordona laughed and tugged one of her pigtails before he stood back up. To her grandfather, he said, “Freezer finally conk out on you, Bud?” Bud’s real name was Leroy James, but everyone called him Bud because that’s what they had called him in the Marines. Lily June had no idea why the Marines called him that because he never talked about it.
The truth was that their deep freeze had conked out on them, leaving them with almost a whole steer thawing in the kitchen at that very moment, but Bud knew better than to sound desperate. “Burtschi told me that the trade-in he gave you was in good shape. I figured it might not hurt to have two. Lots of pheasants this year. Geese, too.” He tilted his head towards Lily June. “L.J. here keeps me in bass and catfish besides. Some as big as she is.” He exaggerated, but she appreciated it.
“Only bass and catfish? Too little yet to shoot, I guess.”
Her grandfather nodded. “I guess.” There had been hell to pay at school when she had trimmed a thread from the hem of Miss Trudy’s skirt with Bud’s hand-me-down buck knife, so she kept her mouth shut now concerning the .22 rifle he had given her this past Christmas. He had taught her how to fire it at cans, but she hadn’t killed an animal with it. She wasn’t yet sure she wanted to kill something that was warm and had rust-smelling blood like hers. Even Bud had warned her to take her time – that once she had killed an animal, it was killed and she had to live with being the one who killed it.
Bordona walked them past sofas, loveseats, end-tables, and lamps on their way to the appliance section of the store. Across from the dining room suites, he pointed to a waiting area next to the office. Twin girls wearing identical department-store dresses sat crosslegged on the floor and sifted through a mound of Barbies and Barbie accessories. One of them stared at Lily June, then whispered to the other one, who smiled. “Do you want to play dollies there with Randi and Candi while Bud and me talk business?”
“No.”
“Oh, go on. Their grandma and me buy them more doll crap than they know what to do with. They’re happy to share, right girls?” The twins scooped their goods a little closer in quiet suspicion, their eyes not leaving Lily June.
“I don’t like Barbies. Their feet are deformed.”
“Is that so?”
“They have lotus blossom feet. I saw a picture under China in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Sasquatches have huge feet. There are drawings of sasquatches under Bigfoot. That’s the scariest entry so far, but I’m only up to Daoism.”
Bordona looked to Bud for clarification. “Jolene’s old set of encyclopedias. Hauled all eighteen volumes from the house to the shed so she could read them while I work. She’s going in order.”
Bordona stared at her a moment, then said, “Huh.” To Bud he said, “Maybe you should buy her some real toys if the best her mamma can do for her is an outdated set of encyclopedias.”
Bud’s expression changed just enough to show that the cut had its intended effect, but Bordona’s was the only game in the county for used freezers – any appliances at all, for that matter – and both men knew it. Bud said, “Just show me the trade in.”
They wound through the washers and dryers and past the refrigerators until they got to the deep freezes. Bordona pointed towards the back row at a scratched and dented avocado green Kenmore. Its rubber sealers sagged around the lip of the door, and it sat crooked because one of its bottom corners was rusted almost entirely through. “That’s Burtschi’s. This here,” he patted the side of a gleaming white Frigidaire on the aisle directly in front of them, “is what you’ll be missing.” The pristine Frigidaire had its top propped open like the hood of a sports car to reveal adjustable chrome shelves, an automatic ice maker, and several intriguing dials and thermometers. Bud glanced with appreciation over the newness of it all before his eyes landed on the price tag and dimmed. “Burtschi’s will be fine.”
Bordona allowed the drone of the store’s easy-listening music to settle on the three of them for a minute before he squatted down and said to Lily June, “What if I told you that I’ll give your granddad this here Frigidaire free of charge? All you have to do is answer one question for me. An easy one for a smart girl like you.” Lily June could tell right away that Bordona was setting her up for a scam. “Trust me, any moron could answer this question,” Bordona said, less to reassure, more to taunt. “You’re not a moron, are you?”
“Knock it off, Bordona. She doesn’t need more people making her deals they don’t plan on keeping.”
“Aw, come on. I’m just having a little fun with the kid.” To Lily June he said, “How many fingers do I have?”
There was definitely a trick here – she was certain of it, but she couldn’t tell what it was. She had once seen a cowboy’s finger pop off like a bottle cap when it got tangled in the rope he was using to tie down a calf, and she suspected that Bordona’s con might likewise involve a missing digit. She said, “Let me see your hands.” Bordona wiggled his fingers in front of her. To her dismay, they were all intact. “So you just want to know how many fingers a normal person has?”
Bordona nodded. “That freezer’s top of the line. Think about it.”
Lily June wouldn’t have let Bordona rope her into his stupid grift if she hadn’t seen how Bud looked at that Frigidaire, but now she was stuck. “On one hand?” Bordona nodded again and she felt her face get hotter as the moment stretched outward and grew deeper with her silence.
Bud said, “I don’t have the time for this, Bordona...”
Even though she was sure that the obvious answer was likely to be the wrong answer, she knew that the slim chance she had of winning that Frigidaire for Bud was slipping away and that she had to say something. “Five? Is it five fingers?”
“Aw...” Bordona said. The look of false regret that washed across his face made her want to stab him in the eye. “That’s a shame. Everyone knows you have four fingers and a thumb. I would have thought you would have got that one, no problem.” Bordona laughed.
The fact that she had expected to lose on just such a technicality only made her feel like more of a chump. “Thumbs are fingers,” she argued, peeved, determined to beat Bordona at his own game. Thumbs were fingers. She was positive.
“No point in getting riled up,” Bordona said, laughing, holding his hand in front of her face and peeling down the digits one by one as he said, “We all have a pinky finger and a ring finger and a middle finger and a pointer finger, but we don’t have a thumb finger. The thumb is in a class by itself.”
“Thumbs are fingers,” she insisted, steaming forward with the full fury of her conviction. She was right. She was sure of it.
“Why don’t you go wait in the truck?” Bud said to her – a demand, not a request.
Her throat tightened and her face burned. “You’re nothing but a greedy Portagee,” she shouted. Her rage only made Bordona laugh harder.
“The truck,” said Bud.
She kicked the Frigidaire hard enough to leave a mark, but not hard enough to dent it. “Hey, now!” said Bordona, no longer laughing. She turned on her heel and stomped towards the front entrance as if to leave, but while the two men bent down to inspect the freezer for damage, she hid just out of their line of sight in the trash compactor aisle.
Bud pulled a red bandanna out of his back pocket, spat on it, then rubbed out the scuff. Both men stood and he said, “When you can spare a minute away from picking on little girls, I’d appreciate it if you’d write me up a tag for that Kenmore.”
“Picking on little girls, my ass. What kind of kid can’t take a joke?” Bordona pulled a receipt book and a gold pen out of his shirt pocket and began to write. “Her mama still camped in that rusty Airstream parked out on the Lazy H?”
“Yep.”
“She never did go back for her GED, I take it.” It wasn’t a question meant to be answered, and Bud didn’t. “She still running around with Bobby Sykes?” This was a question meant to be answered, and when Bud remained quiet, his silence drew a smile from Bordona. “No, that’s not it. Last I heard it was John Ray Fugitt, wasn’t it? Or did someone tell me that it was Nate Emory this month?”
“As the son of a whore yourself, I’d think you’d have more sense about what you say to a paying customer.”
Bordona snorted. “Paying customer.” He tore off the receipt and handed it to Bud. “Could we settle the bill now, your majesty? I’d like to go out and buy a platinum Trans Am during my lunch hour.” He pointed at the freezer with his pen. “My bet is, that sonofabitch’ll crap out on you within the week.”
“Anything wrong with that freezer, I’m bringing it straight back here.”
“Like hell you will. Used merchandise is sold ‘as is’ in my store. You bought that second-hand piece of shit; now it’s yours. I’m not your delivery boy, either – you’ll haul it out of here by noon tomorrow or I’ll sell it to someone else. I’m not running some sort of charity pawn shop here.”
While Bud paid up, Lily June slipped unnoticed out of the store ahead of him, and trotted across the parking lot towards the primer-colored Dodge pickup. With no small degree of effort, she wrestled the passenger door open, scrambled up to her seat, then wrestled it closed behind her. She rolled down the window just as the shift horn at Gilbert’s Feed sounded, and even from where she sat in the parking lot a mile away, she could hear the men banging on Gilbert’s towering hour-glass silos, the gonging vibrations loosening the grain so that it would slip down the sides and into the waiting trucks. She bent over to feel around under the seat, careful not to tip over the Folgers can of brown spit and spent chewing tobacco that rested on the center console. She fished out a long length of chain, a box of 12-gauge shotgun shells, a broken hotshot, a roll of duct tape, a half-empty bottle of bourbon, a crow bar, and the binoculars before her hands finally found her Webster’s. She settled back into her seat and opened the dictionary to ‘t’. She flipped pages. thrum... thrush... thrust...
Bud appeared at the driver’s side window. His door was harder to open than hers because the bottom hinge was actually baling wire, and as he struggled, the redness of his face deepened. He talked out loud, but not to her. “Platinum Trans Am, my ass. That arrogant sonofabitch. I could have bought and sold that bastard twenty years ago if I wanted to.” The door sprang open and he planted himself on his side of the bench seat with such vigor that Lily June bounced. “I’d sure like someone to tell me what it was I ever did to him.”
“There was that time you told him you could break that sorrel mare of his and you ended up hitting her in the head with a shovel,” she offered. If she could have guessed how this remark was going to be received, she would have kept her mouth shut. She decided to change the subject. “I was wrong about thumbs being fingers.”
He put the key into the ignition and made sure the clutch was in neutral. “What?”
She read to him from the Webster’s: “thumb: the short first terminating member of the hand, opposable to the four fingers.”
“Look up finger.”
She did, and read the entry aloud: “finger: any of the five terminating members of the hand.” The possibility of redemption flared through her. Slamming shut the dictionary she said, “We have to go back in.”
“We’re not going back in.”
“But we have to do something.”
“Doing nothing is doing something. Besides, according to Webster, it’s a draw.”
“Draw goes to the house.”
“Don’t be so ornery. This isn’t blackjack, so be happy with a draw.”
“But it doesn’t feel like a draw. It feels like Bordona wins.”
“Someone getting the better of you isn’t the same as them winning. Winning doesn’t mean anything without the chance of losing. If Bordona sets up the game so that he never loses, he doesn’t win. I don’t know what it is, but he doesn’t win.”
“He thinks he won.”
“Everyone thinks he’s the one wearing the white hat. Nothing you can do about that.” The truck started without protest for a change, and while they waited for the engine to warm up, Bud reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a rock. “What do we need with that Frigidaire, anyway, when we have this beauty here?” The oblong quartz stone was pinkish-yellow in color and opaque, veined throughout with rust-colored marbling, and it had a round brown flaw on one side. It looked like a rheumy eyeball that he’d plucked from the head of some sorry creature. She loved it immediately. “I carry this around with me as a sasquatch repellant. It’s yours if you want it.”
She took it from his hand and said, “Bigfoots don’t come down to this elevation.”
“Works good, don’t it?”