Down the mountain stood the boy who stood there every morning. Every single morning. Before the rooster called out, before the sun could steal a glance over the horizon, The Old Man stared down the warm, rocky drop towards the road at the boy. He isn’t really so little, the old man thought to himself, aware of his ancient status while his blurring eyes ran over the details he could make out of the boy. The buzzards circled in the desert beyond, their shadows looming like the dark shadow of fate, or death. In the parlor, a slick LP spun round and round, the small needle of the record player swimming through the grooves on the disc. It was an old Johnny Cash tale, the kind The Old Man would’ve sung in one hell of a drunken passion on the set of some film or another, surrounded by other men like him. Now, though, most of those men were gone. Hell, the old man thought to himself, most men are gone, period.
Beside the record player, and not to mention all over the walls, was paraphernalia from eons past. Cowboy boots, spurs, masks, bandanas of almost every color (though a pal of his had told him not to hang ‘em in that order, “just not like a rainbow” he had said, laughing and patting The Old Man on the back, “it’s a lib thing, something gays go around doin’,” and The Old Man had laughed, a little bit confused, but acquiesced nonetheless), guns, tattered flags, and that one dusty old set of moccasins he stored in the basement, from some Indian he worked with once. Of course, the crown jewel of the ranch were those towering posters with his sharp jaw and twinkly-eyed smile plastered across all of them. In the style of “Wanted” posters or in elegantly painted American epics, there he was, iron on his hip, wind in his slick chestnut hair. “It’s like lookin’ in a mirror!” he liked to joke, sometimes when he had guests over, sometimes when he was all alone. Sometimes he said this loud and jovially, sometimes quietly, while he lit a cigarette and started coughing before it even made it to his lips. He’d sigh as best as he could, then, and turn his back to it, that picture of youth looming over his shoulder. The Old Man watched as the boy down the mountain shuffled his feet, kicked at rocks, and batted away the mosquitoes which were surely pricking him left and right. The Old Man reached into his jean pocket and pulled out a carton of cigarettes, trying to pick one out with his lips as he fought against the trembling of his hands. Giving up, he picked one out between his fingers and perched it gently between his lips, lighting it with a match from his back pocket, just like he and the boys used to do back in those days when people still did that sort of thing.
Up the mountain, through the angular windows of the old man’s house, The Boy stared up at him. It was not with a particular violence or menacing nature that The Boy stared, but it was a stare that was meant to convey a purpose, one larger than either of these two men grappling with each other with only their eyes, their traded stares traveling over the hot sand and scattering critters of the desert.
The Boy left his reservation every morning at sunrise, after having picked through the garden’s offerings, set out the feed for the chickens, and made sure the generators for the school were connected and working properly. His family’s morning prayers were not said until his two younger sisters had packed for school and were seated at the table, which meant The Boy had two hours or so to wait around outside of the old man’s house, just outside of the padlocked iron gate at the bottom of the driveway. The boy rode his bike most of the way and left it off in the bushes to the side of the driveway. Mostly, he wanted to make sure that if the old man ever called the police on him, they wouldn’t take the bike. His family used it, and didn’t know about his excursions in the morning. Not really, anyways.
Before the house on the hill had been built, The Boy remembered, you could watch the sun crest right over the ledge of rock, and if you looked back behind you as the warm tendrils of sunlight melted into the very air around you, you could watch the shadows of those cliffs rise higher and higher before they disappeared completely. The Boy remembered his grandmother telling him about Balance, about how the snakes at our feet were equal to us and the birds in the sky and the fish in the rivers. This place up on this cliff was not Balance. This man wanted to be higher than the birds, higher than the snakes, and higher than The Boy and his family, too. The Boy knew this much without needing so much as a second thought.
And The Boy remembered something else his grandmother talked about, her husband who went to Hollywood, left her behind with two children. This man she loved very much, and after years of never hearing from him, there he was in the local cinema, just outside the reservation. He had a pistol and a headdress and some tattered old Hollywood Western clothes but there, there on his feet, were the very same moccasins he had left home with. The same moccasins The Boy’s grandmother had followed the tracks of for hours, over her neighbor’s fence, through the rushing river and rocky hill, until she reached the tall grasses where the tracks disappeared and the blades were blowing in the wind, like co-conspirators covering all traces of his getaway.
The Boy’s grandmother was sick now. The Boy’s mysterious runaway grandfather had never returned, but a check was sent back home from somewhere in Los Angeles after the film. It wasn’t clear whether he had sold the moccasins willingly or somebody had convinced him to part with them. Soon it would be his grandmother’s birthday, and The Boy could think of only one way to find that Balance again, and the weight of those moccasins was heavy enough to topple that whole damn cliff over.
No ratings yet.
You must be logged in to rate this post.