Sotto Voce by Neala Ames

I HATE IT WHEN people come here uninvited. They always make crude comments about my house. It’s my home, not theirs, so why do they care? They laugh at my broken windowpanes, They cross over my splintered threshold and curse when they fall onto the packed earthen floor. So why do they even come?

It’s the legend, I guess.

These ghoulish tourists want to be frightened. They want to see the spot where the bones were found. They hope to find an overlooked fragment, to gawk at it, fantasize about it, hold the crumbling piece in their hands.

They are mostly young people, barely adult, and are curious about their world. They bring red candles and sit on my floor, chanting nonsense. Though that is annoying, it isn’t really terrible. It’s the vandalism that disturbs me. When their chanting brings no results, and the copious amount of alcohol they’ve brought is consumed, they turn to amusing themselves by destruction. Such disrespect, such dishonor to us both!

The ones who really disturb me, though, are those from the realm of paranormal investigators. These people aren’t rude. They are very careful. They are so focused on their FLIR devices, their EVP’s, that they cannot see what is right in front of them. They ignore my home, built with such loving labor, so many glittering dreams. Why are they so interested in my non-corporeal being? It’s my life that is interesting, my life that has meaning.

You know what death is? It’s a change, largely unwelcome, that comes to us all. We can’t ignore the laws of nature. What we can do, and try to do, is change ourselves inside. We do it by labor, by loving, by living. Not by dying. People value the strangest things.

This expanse of sage and rabbit brush and Joshua trees, the stark volcanic mountains to the west, these form my reality. Speculation has run rampant for years about the reason I chose to prospect in such a bleak and forbidding area. The real reason was simple. I wanted to be far away from my fellow man. You see, I found that many human beings, especially male human beings, were wicked at their core. They were greedy, selfish, and often brutal.

My shack of stone was just right for me. I liked it. It was authentic, unpretentious. It provided me with shelter from the stinging dust devils and the scorching July sun, an orb so bright that it was capable of searing unprotected skin like meat over an open fire. A hundred yards away from my door was an arroyo that ran bank to bank during the summer monsoons. I carefully stored the water underground. I constructed a series of underground pipes to bring water from the arroyo to fill my hand-dug cistern. Even the sparse rain that fell during the rest of the year was collected and stored. Since I was only one person, the water lasted until more rain fell. I got by.

Sally and I made the trip into Kingman twice a year to replenish my stores. Along the way I sang to myself and watched the buzzards ride the thermals high above me in a sky so blue it resembled a painted mural.

My time in town was spent having a bath, shave, and haircut. Then I’d pick up my items from the general store, pack them on Sally’s back, and return to my personal oasis. I interacted with as few townspeople as possible. I had a good life.

All around my homestead swirled the noise and strife of what people call modern life. My isolation was a gift given thoughtlessly. I relished the abandonment that isolated me for months at a time.

My shack wasn’t visible from the newly graded road a mile to my north. Sometimes the desert silence was disturbed by the grumble and cough of a passing automobile, but usually I lived undisturbed. I laughed at the jackrabbits in their play, watched the bobbing road runners chase lizards, and listened to the mourning doves while the last orange rays of the sun faded into purple twilight.

I am not certain how it all changed, or even in what year. What I do know is, one day late in summer, a man approached me through the desert mirage. I paused in my digging. He was even more ragged than me, and his almost colorless eyes darted furtively from side to side restlessly.

His entire aspect made me wary.

He greeted me politely enough. I tried to stay upwind of him, his rank odor inescapable in the nearly still desert air.

“What are you doing?” he asked, eyeing the shovel in my hand. “Panning?”

The arroyo contained a small running rivulet in the center of its course. I had been reinforcing the pipe bed from the flow to my cistern. The stranger, having noticed the shovel in my hand, wrongly deduced that I was searching the bed for gold.

“I’m storing water,” I replied truthfully.

Angrily the stranger advanced toward me. “Water? You expect me to believe you are in this arroyo scooping up water?”

“That’s what I’m doing,” I said, my calm demeanor an attempt to diffuse his unexplainable anger.

“Do you take me for a fool? This is gold country!” he shouted, balling his fists. “You’ve got a stash here somewhere. I know you do!”

“I don’t want any trouble. Look around. You’ll find no stash of anything but water.”

My answer seemed to further ignite his rage. He rushed toward me. I backed away and got tangled up with the shovel still in my hand. The stranger loomed above me, blocking the sun. My vision was filled with his unshaven face, crusted with a dozen meals caught within the whiskers. He wrenched the shovel from my hand, raised it high above his head, and brought it down with such force that the blade sheared from the handle.

I felt my skull cleave in two. An animal instinct took hold of me, and I crawled toward my little house, my refuge, my home. Though I was quickly losing strength and blinded by blood, I managed to pull myself across the threshold and push the door closed. There I lay while the sunlight faded into blackness.

I lay alone in my little shack for decades. Finally, a road crew laying asphalt discovered me when they were seeking shelter from an incoming storm. The story of their discovery raced through all the mining camps in the western portion of Arizona. The Mojave County sheriff arrived and took my bones into Kingman. There was little doubt about the cause of my death. A furrow extended for six inches across the top of my skull.

So much time had passed while I lay dreaming that justice could not be served. Stories circulated about me, each one embellished in the telling. Soon the curiosity seekers began to arrive. I have known no peace since.

My shack is, itself, only a skeleton of its former self. We are a pair, the two of us. We know well the rattlers and the pack rats, the centipedes and the scorpions. Together we experience the heat, the blast-furnace dryness, the bone-chilling winter cold. We endure the occasional prying humans, waiting impatiently for their departure.

With our silent voices we beg for peace.

Neala Ames is a retired teacher who has loved to write since she was five years old. While on a family vacation she saw the Washita Massacre site in Oklahoma, and it affected her deeply. Growing up in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Ms. Ames enjoyed all the television westerns, and the American West captured her mind. She loves writing stories about the American experience. Now a resident of Arizona, she is surrounded by the history she loves so well. She lives in the central highlands with her husband and her three dogs. Ms. Ames maintains a Facebook page where she keeps her followers updated on the short stories that find a home. She has recently placed stories with Soteira Press, Ariel Chart, Scarlet Leaf, and Wild Violet. Work on more short stories as well as a full-length novel occupies much of her time. She welcomes all new readers to join her established base. “Sotto Voce” is her second short story to be featured in Saddlebag Dispatches.