Crackling Remnants

Dust in my mouth and in my nose. Struggling for breath. Can’t spit. Charred earth pressing angry against my weak jaw, my chary chest, my bulbous belly, my knock knees. Nature too disdainful of me to push back. I am a lonely curiosity-seeker. She has other prey recumbent before her.

Crackling remnants; detritus of exploded trees and burned up brush, little lost teeth, still clinging to the discarded, crunching jawbones of little creatures, half hidden in the ash. The smoldering carcass of a great beast, the crinkling, burned up and discarded skins of snakes. The lost lowing of roasted cattle.

The rhythmic plink-plink of my F-150’s hood and fenders, expanding against their bolts. My labored breathing.

The already distant front, racing west upon the sage, discovering another Mountain Mahogany, its peculiar chemistry now bituminous fuel for the storm's consumptive hunger. Ravenous embers arcing into the dawning light, moving toward a stand of desert willow striving just beyond the exploded tree. She breathes through each new conflagration. I watch the fire front galloping toward Caballo, Rough Riders pillaging the sage.

Struggling for breath, lungs compressed between swayback ribs and rock-bound earth. The bruit smells of devastation. Emile Peynaud comes absurdly to mind, elucidating the empyreumatic elements present in aged Bordeaux. Mutton roasting in a clay pot, angry pyrolysis of the lanolin in this smoking blanket, freed sulfur carried along with everything else in the fire’s wake. I laugh through my dry-cracked lips, spitting the dust and ash and dirt adhering to my lips and front teeth. What would Peynaud make of this? The high octane sweet and acrid smell of melting plastic components, like cut marigolds. Or had I soiled myself? Sticky wet in my crotch. Another Mahogany has ignited; the unmistakable sweet and savory guaiacol signature which characterized so many of the 1998’s I had tasted (particularly the Aléxander Valley bottlings) drifting on the terpene breeze.

An ember strikes the blanket, gamely gleaming in the rising breeze. The front seems determined to reach Caballo by sunrise. The smoke from the burning blanket blows over me. I sneeze and I cough, dust and ash against the hard earth. I spit. I wipe my face with the back of my sleeve, pressing myself away from the hard earth.

Rising to my knees I look back to the eggplant F-150, now fully consumed in orange flame and glowering black plumes. A low, rhythmic whumph as the flames pulsate out the windows. The horn offering a long, low, discordant moan. The windshield wipers brush once in a whisping death rattle. The polyurethane foam of the bench seat liquifying into a tarry black bitumen, dripping through the floorboards to the overheated earth, where it renders, hissing back into the undercarriage. The sound of guitar strings snapping as the tire’s internal steel belts begin to fail, and a short sigh as the air hisses out. The truck settling against the earth.

I follow the breeze and blowing ash west toward Caballo Reservoir. The sage and creosote basin is dotted with salt cedar, and the cottonwood approach the shoreline like cattle to a salt lick. She has reached the basin, the mule deer rushing headlong across the highway, where there is never too much traffic, but if there were, the deer would rush across just the same, oblivious to that alien danger, for the ancient evil licks greedily their hind locks, and the coyotes emit the knowing laugh of the dead. I follow the breeze and the blowing ash, and the turkey vultures and ravens circle overhead, so thick that the sun, now rising above Caballo Mountain, casts but a mottled glow upon the black. Evidence of the head tax they’ve collected is visible throughout the ashy black. A pair of vultures alight, a coyote is crying to his band across the basin. A diamond back, fully extended, it’s long body conspicuous and vulnerable to the red hawks and golden eagle circling in the updraft. A string of berrendos silhouetted before the grinding orange. I follow the breeze and the blowing ash. My throat is parched and my eyes burn. The ravens and the turkey vultures, the golden eagle and the red hawks, the great birds, so thick as to block the sun. A kangaroo rat emerging to sniff the fecund-roasted air. She should have stayed safe in her burrow, for a red hawk is upon her almost before she emerges – struggling pathetically as the great bird beats its wings, forcing itself back into the atmosphere. The rat breaks frantically free, falling to the hot ash, terrified hungering into the nearest burrow, while the furious hawk circles back up.

I am standing in the ash, on a ridge overlooking the basin.

I had returned to Sierra County with my laptop in a canvas satchel and a carry-on stuffed with clothes and toiletries. After more than 20 years of building up my place and reputation in Napa, I now live much as I did when I first turned up out there - a New Mexico refugee in the valley of possibility. Now I have returned to the Land of Enchantment a fugitive, and it is as though that arc of my life never occurred. I am Edmund Pevensie returned to the schoolyard – my exploits in that other land - the naturalness with which I donned the royal raiment, my reputation for skill and honor – all unknown to my peers who observed me leaving Raymond’s with that kid just last night. Yet my Napa life was real. It happened. And the evidence for this are the Dockers and Polos, the leather loafers and Polo-branded ankle socks, the Versace-branded tortoise shell glasses which still cover my body. Now they lay upon me soiled, and wrinkled, and frayed; sad reminders of a life I have squandered.

Now I stand on the ridge with my hands on my hips, surveying the devastated field. The fire front is spitting embers high above the highway, a chimera blowing raspberries. The embers are now small fruits in the creosote and sage across the highway. She is blossoming there.

I squint through the haze. I remove my glasses and mist hot breath over the lenses. I try to clean them with the inside of my polo shirt, riding above my expanding, ashy middle. All this accomplishes is to smear the accumulated oils from the top inner part of my lenses onto the ash that has accumulated across the whole surface. I look at my loafers, dusty in the dead soil. But the soil is not dead. In fact, it has come alive with bright red, beautifully articulated harvester ants, scavenging the roasted carcasses of grasshoppers and other less adaptable insects, now become mountains of biomass. A line of ants making its way up my instep; the first sting on my ankle. I jump and slap. Another sting further up my leg. I kick off my loafers and strip off the dockers. Standing now in the ash in my sock feet and soiled underwear, the same I’d been wearing at Raymond’s last night, the cool wind raising goose pimples on the back of my legs. I shake the dockers violently, trying to rid them of the ants, even as I hop away from the scorched colony, heedless of where my sock feet may land. A coyote laughs and the line of berrendos lite as one away from the reservoir, moving north along I-25.

A bruit of flashing, buzzing wings and gleaming black, a whirring splash of orange like a sling in my eye. Mechanically, I whip the dockers against the buzzing bright. A piercing, an excruciating, a devastating shock, like an electric prod thrust against my neck. A cracking pain in the vertebrae, my vision greys. I don’t know where I am; I am screaming against the pain; yet no sound comes, because I cannot breathe. I am screaming, but I cannot breathe, and no sound comes.

I am crawling and I am grasping my knees to my chest. But breath does not come. I am beginning to panic. I am rocking in the ash. I am screaming but no sound comes, because I cannot breathe. Searing, ripping, electric pain, extending from my wounded neck. My ears and my brain and my mouth.

I am licking the ash from the earth, and the electrical pain is in my ribs. The electric pain is in my calves. It is in the arches of my feet, and it is in my eyes. I am pressing dirt into my neck, and I am convulsing in the dirt. I cannot breathe. I am shaking and I am pushing the dirt into my ears and my mouth and my eyes. I cannot breathe.

*****

Sun on my face, breath has come back to me. A persistent campfire breeze. Roast mutton and pungent terpenes, cut marigolds. Earth hard against my scalp. I blink. I try to raise my hand against the dirty sun, but my spasmodic muscles don’t oblige. I am shivering in the breeze, chilled with sweat. A great bird circling through the haze on a rising current, causing the sun to blink. A turkey vulture.

The wound site is tingling. The muscles have contracted themselves, I cannot straighten my head. Throbbing heartbeat even in my fingers, in my ears. I have soiled myself, ashy dirt adhering to my crotch. For a second time I push myself away from the seedless earth. She is having hot flashes. She disdains me.

Now I stand on the ridge with my hands on my hips, my head cocked involuntarily over my right ear. I have mislaid my eyeglasses, although I think I see a lense glinting the filthy bright. My dockers lie abandoned, crawling with harvester ants. My loafers are nearby. I struggle first to the glint of my lens in the soil. I squat down over the lens, supporting myself with my right hand in the dirt. The lens is still attached to the frame, although it has lost an arm and the other lens is missing. I balance the broken frame on my nose. I cannot keep it in place with my head cocked like this. I lift my right hand from the soil to hold my glasses in place, and I lose my balance. My right hip, my right shoulder, my right temple, once again pressed hard against the disdaining earth. The second arm now splayed, broken, under my temple, the lens now facing the earth beneath my nose.

I raise myself from the dirt on an elbow, cracked lips grimy smile. How have I become so small? My loafers are not far from me. I crawl to them. I slap them together at the sole. I bang the heels on a rock. Struggling to put them on, for a third time pressing myself from the earth.

Now I stand on the rise with my hands on my hips, one loafer thrust imperiously before the other, my filthy polo riding above my belly, pointing west, tits chafing against the soiled fabric.

The sun has risen, dehydrating the valley like a heat lamp over a LotaBurger. The fire has fully enveloped Caballo. Although the vista is obscured by the oil-thick immolation of creosote and sage, I see flaming rooftops. Occasionally a bright flare erupts as the beast finds novel sources of carbon, food she has been unaccustomed to in this Chihuahua chapparal. Headlamps emerge from the thick haze, perhaps fleeing Caballo toward Las Cruces.

I have staggered down the ridge and across the burned-up basin to the edge of the reservoir. The Chihuahua has taken my truck, my phone, my pants, my eyeglasses. I stand at the edge of the reservoir in the shade of a cottonwood that somehow survived the fire front. There’s a metal rowboat moored to the tree. The beast passed right around the res; the sage and the creosote, the cottontails and the snake grass are now carbonated whispers. The tall cottonwoods are burned to the ground, smoking stumps punctuating a wholly digested meal. Yet somehow this cottonwood, and its little rowboat moored with a rope to its broad trunk, has survived.

I unmoor the boat and push her into the res, scrambling in behind her, splashing through the warm water. The oars are stacked in the hull. I pull them up and row beyond the shadow of the tree, into the dusty sun baking up the valley through the smoke. I am in the hazy sun now. I wrap my arms around my legs, and I allow my torso to sway along with the boat.

I remove my loafers and take my socks in my hands, diving into the green water.

The water fifty feet from shore is cold and bracing. I take a few strokes toward the center, and I feel almost young again. I could swim clear across the water, like I might have done when I was a kid. The cool water. I feel a little of my juvenile hubris – that confidence folks once found so charming.

I take a few strokes back to the boat and haul myself over the side. I remove my underwear and polo shirt. I lay the shirt over the side of the boat and bend over to scrub my filthy soiled underwear in the cold res. I fold them over the side of the boat and then plunge my polo into the water and scrub it against itself. I lay it in the sun beside the underwear, and I drape my socks beside them. Then I sit back on the bench and gaze down at my naked belly, the very tip of my penis emerging between my bare legs. Even now, when the cold water has sucked me up some, my penis still extends a little beyond my folds. So there's that.

Sun warm on my face; drifting cool upon the res; breathing in the crackling remnants.