Outside Spinole Texas by Ivan Davenny

36 He cut away from the road with his head down, his jaw set rigid, wading out among the arid chaparral and the chirp of bats, the liquid swish of passing pickups behind him, the crickets setting to sing. After a few hundred yards he turned and walked along a serpentinite outcropping parallel with the road. He crossed the flat floor of the valley stumbling occasionally through dried arroyos hidden under scrub. He sweated, and insects left smudges against his gritted temples and down the sandy red of his neck, floating around him in the changing light as though pinpricks of darkness had already invaded his eyes.

Sheltered at the end of the valley between hills like two waving curtains of patchy earth was a culdesac, a ring of houses facing inward with only a bare dirt work road leading to it. They had been painted in pastels, greens and pinks, but stood crooked and warped like mausolea sinking into the sands in the shadows of the hills. He stood between two setting suns, pinks and oranges streaked white blazing out in front of him and behind him.

Ahead, two pickups swerved off the tarmac headed for the abandoned suburb, racing one another and tearing through low shrubbery, digging into the thin dirt, treads rumbling through nests of roots. Over the sound of their engines he could hear hooting and trills from the cab. Dust billowed. He ducked low behind the shag of a ribbonwood. One of the trucks slid sideward and something tumbled out of its bed. The trucks’ tails settled and he continued.

When he came to the deep ruts of the tires he found a six-pack golden and strewn amid the brush. Two of the cans had burst, superating into a tuft of thin grass, but the other four cans lay intact, bloated and glinting like beetles. He picked these up, brushed bits of sand and foam from them and stuffed them into his pockets then followed the tire tracks like a game trail. The hills behind him swallowed the sun, and the valley floor was doused in blue, and the tracks extended below him like some unextinguished shadow.

He entered the development and could hear the party already begun, echoing through the unpaved boulevard, through the empty bones of the unfinished manses unsuccessfully holding the world at bay, sand and dodder creeping along the edges of the streets, along the walls. There was no glass in the windows and he peered into their sockets where sandbanks leaned against walls and where countertops of raw wood ached empty, stroked by the trailing fingertips of ghosts. The specters of expectation wandered their empty halls, ambled through their sunny block parties, their TV dinners, their wallpaper patterns. Field mice rasped through the swollen wood. The trucks were parked in front of a house near the center of the ring along with several others, all sprawled over what would have been the front lawn but was now only withered unprecious weeds. He approached slowly, cautiously, finally caught up with his quarry. The cabs were empty, the doors were open, and music played from their speakers all ratty and tinny and grating in the night rattling with bass. The headlights spilled and pooled among the teeth of the sapling scrub oaks and nestling in the flowered shoots of the buckbrush and the colorless light that struck the house made the wood seem even older. He could see the shapes of the partygoers in the windows but they were moving quickly, a flash of a striped cardigan here, the back pocket of a pair of jeans, a white hand shading eyes against the glare.

He snuck behind the truckbeds, moving around to the side of the house, where he ducked beneath a window and sat in the bare dirt with his back to the peeling panels. He could feel shrieks through the cracks of the dry wood as the building rocked against his back and trembled through the sand beneath him as if the rapture of those inside spouted from the earth itself out some geyser. Voices were indistinct and spoke not in words but in droning waves of sound. Swallows shot in and out of their muddy nests above his head and their yellow bellies swung through the gloam as if on the ends of arcing strings and he sipped his scavenged beers slowly, pulling the tabs gently, letting the pressure ease out in long low hisses, the sighs of metal. Light shone through the window above his head, a faint splash onto the wall of the neighboring house before him, partygoers passing over in washed out shadows, eidolons broken into planes over the paneling twitching in murmured laughter. Darkness settled.

He heard a pair of voices suddenly become clearer and a truck door slam. He pushed himself to his feet, hunched himself against the wall and twisted his head around the corner just in time to see a leg slide into the cab of a truck and the other door slam behind it. He paused and glanced back at the party that, untroubled by the departure of these two, rambled on. He bit the skin next to the nail of a thumb already shredded and raw. He edged Ivan Davenny

toward the vehicle, shoulders still hunched, eyes still sidled towards the party. He paused again at the window then put his forehead to the glass with his hands cupped to the sides of his face.

She wasn’t wearing a shirt and the boy on top of her had his left hand pushed under her bra. His mouth worked at her neck and he pulled his hand out to support himself as his other hand moved down to work at her pants. She opened her eyes, giggling as he hit some ticklish spot.

She saw his face, peering over the boys shoulder, the lower part of his face obscured by his breath steaming over the glass. She blinked and opened her mouth and let out a short breathless yelp. She struggled against the boy’s weight on top of her and slapped his shoulder. She yelped again, more of a growl this time. He pushed away from the window. He could see dark shapes moving behind the fogged glass. He turned and ran back into the chaparral. The brush rattled and whipped his legs and his eyes struggled in the darkness. He could see a pool of light moving along the road in the distance, a beacon slipping through the darkness, and did not look behind him but if he had he would have seen a great column of dust rising like dim smoke. The stars gazed untroubled and hard and there was no moon.

The truck that headed out after him rumbled and swayed. A boy’s torso rose out of the passenger side window. Two more lurched in the truckbed. The windows of the cab were deep black and impenetrable. Yeah you better run! He retreated back into the truck then reemerged swinging a bottle still heavy with beer by its neck as a knight would swing his mace or a wrangler would swing his lasso. He tilted his arm and hurled the bottle sidelong towards the running figure who, though it landed only a few feet behind him, did not hear it over the sound of his wheezing or the thumping of his chest or the encroaching roar of the engine. His body flailed before him swimming over the earth in the glare.

The two boys in the bed, stumbling and laughing, followed suit. One flung a few empty cans that flipped in the wind and landed short. The other found a baseball rolling and thumping crazily against the metal walls and caught it and with practiced fluid ease he fingered the ruddy stitching, swung his arm back and let fly. They were very close now and the ball struck at the neck just at the base of his skull. When it hit he could not hear the sound but the pitcher felt the thud vibrate in his fingertips.

He stopped running, his head jerked and he collapsed at once. The truck flew past in a straight line then twisted and made a sharp turn heading back into its own dust trail. It approached slowly and stopped, the body in the thin loess puddled in white. The doors opened, and four boys got out followed by the girl her shirt now on but misbuttoned. Her eyes would not move from the body. One of the boys hopped out of the bed, but the other, the pitcher, stayed back. Moths writhed through the pale lights around them. The doors were open and tinny music played, ignored and swallowed by insects’ nighttime thrummings. They were about half a mile from the empty road. They stood around the body. Shit he looks dead man.

One boy prodded him with his foot. The body would not move, no matter how hard he prodded. It seemed too heavy.

What do we do? The boy who had nudged the body backed away and tried to put his arm around the girl, but she shoved his ribs and stood away from the group, still staring. Jesus man, you killed him. The pitcher said nothing, his white shirt was all they could see floating over the cab. So what do we do? One by one they looked over in the direction of the road, then back to each other, then back to the body. The darkness rose around them like walls.

The baseball sat a few feet away, unnoticed and monstrously white. Fuck. The girl swatted at the moths around her face and went back to the truck. A boy knelt, and went through the pockets, all empty save a dull pocketknife which he put back. No wallet. Nothing we can do. They stood bathed in light for a moment longer then moved into the darkness of the cab, tires spluttering grit, taillights bleeding over the body nestled amidst the roiling viscera of roots.