CAMERON

It wasn't long after my brother died that I left for the desert. I had been planning the trip for some time, feeling the urge to sleep under the star-dome on the still warm sand, wanting to let the sun pound its potent common sense into my uncertain mind, needing to relearn the miracle of water and life.

When Paddy spilled his Harley and didn’t get back up, I was left with a hole in my spirit that cried out for healing. Confession, Absolution, Communion and Redemption, to put it in the easy Catholic jargon of my disintegrating family - my empty gesture, echo verse, hate-sprung love, ad hominem blood.

I use their words because they once were my words and my tongue stings from their taste. But Confession is the first station at the beginning of my inbred redemption cycle, so I have no where else to begin.

I was an “altar boy” until thirteen years old. Altar Boy, class clown, malleable and acquiescent, the way St. Boniface's nuns loved boys to be: "Surely Martin is meant for the priesthood! He has the Call!" Obviously those tired Dominican women were hoping to hand select, groom and "show the way" to boys who might become the men who would eventually order their nunnery lives.

It took my fiery, red-faced renunciation of the tenets and dogmas of Mother Church to spare me from the horrors of LaSalle Military Academy, the Seminary and a life of celibate service. During my repudiation, my own mother - the woman who sat at the Formica kitchen table with me and led me through the Baltimore Catechism - finally broke down, teary-eyed, and whispered, "All right. It's okay. I don't believe either."

That stopped my young heart cold, but I continued to argue and struggle like a victorious prize-fighter, swept up in the heat of the bout, too busy dancing and jabbing, too punch drunk to let the referee lift his arm in triumph.

An uneasy moment blinked by before I realized that my hot words were now hollow, my protestations unopposed.

Because the impact of her words was not a victory, not a triumph of honesty over blind faith or even a moment of shared empty-soul camaraderie between mother and first son. We believe in nothing. was her message, As a family, we have no faith.

The plummeting chill of that thought re-wrote volumes of my memories. Mom's simple homilies - meaningless. Dad's big show of "going to church" and belonging to all the right religious organizations - sham. My time as an Altar boy? Jesus! Those incensed mornings and weekends would have been better spent in the service of a stage magician, some tuxedoed illusionist, running props on and off stage, reacting with sham-faced surprise when the body is finally beheld, unsawn.

But the framework of my life was already Martyr-oriented, sacrifice driven, given to expect the trials of Job when all seems to be good and happy and prosperous. I want to spit in the face of the person responsible for rigging me this way, for putting my piece of cheese at the end of the electrified maze corridor, for setting up my savings account in the great beyond, so there is no interest, just penalty.

I know that I can no sooner change my past than I can grow wings or live underwater. A man is a man built upon other men and their laws. So, to the desert - the waste land that knows not waste - the barren, fruitful, empty, enriching, desolate, spiritual desert. Where we see our mortality in the evaporation of morning dew and the watchers watch the seekers seek.

As my departure day neared, I felt as though I was embarking on a pilgrimage, a spiritual journey with physical destination, under a full moon, with no god or goddess to please.

This was to be my sojourn into the cauldron; alive, aware and open to whatever lies in my path, lies in my past.

I wanted to record everything I encountered, fearing that some tiny puzzle-piece might slip past me or fall thought the net of my senses, mixing with the dust-rake of my feet along the way.

I would bring video, film and audio recorders, notepads surely, but what of the touch, taste and smell? Could I trust my memory? Would it present itself to me in that way? Would what present itself to me?

My preparations questioned the goal of my search. What imprint on the senses does one’s soul make?

On the highway, each expectant mile brought me jagged pieces of an unseen puzzle; casual observations of seemingly unrelated elements that, when held in concert, bore the mounting heart-tremble realization that there was surely some connection just out of the reach of my reason.

Fields of russet car hulks, the breathtaking scurry of road game, the toneless murmur of my tires on the highway and the throbbing whistle of the radio antenna ripping through the pollen-heavy air brought on a warm, sun-dazzled intoxication; cast loose from the steering wheel and pedals and instruments of the car, somewhere far below me.

A rush of cool, dark shadow swept in through my window, climbed up the side of my face and spilled across the windshield so abruptly that I flinched and stiff-armed the steering wheel; pushing back into my seat to avoid the impact of whatever unimaginable object might have caused such darkness.

Above me, up through the moon roof, a growling black shape rose, slowing as it wheeled upward, soaring into the brilliant noon; its voluptuous roar swooping into a disappointed groan that sent tremors through my cheekbones, back into my head, down into my chest.

It fell back on itself, turning end over end as it dropped from the sky; an electric blue plume of smoke left at the vertex of its climb, another throaty growl swelling as it dove back toward my van like a great bird of prey having looped into attack trajectory with an effortless pirouette.

Its wings were trussed top and bottom strung with long cable sinews that thrummed and sang out their own cry as the weight and wind and speed turned mounting tension into deadly accurate, rock-steady flight.

Twenty-five, possibly twenty feet above my head I saw the pilot's face, calm and indifferent, as he rolled into straight and level flight above the highway, zoomed out over a bean field and spewed out a white spoor of death.

I felt gut-punched; panting, nerves tingling from the unconscious demon fear my mind had thrown down into my heart, an unwarranted, self-defeating emotion for a man committed to walk heavy in the heartland of spirits. I slid my foot off the gas pedal and coasted onto the fast lane shoulder of the road; scatter gravel over dusty packed clay. Each passing car created a highway speed slipstream at pulled at the van, rocking me, tugging at me to get back out onto the blacktop and continue on my way.

Stop here for a minute, take a drink of water, collect your wits -- miles to go before the high desert, but truly, this is all desert.

The crop duster continued to swoop, roll and loop; plowing its mid-air field deep with insecticide and high octane exhaust that settled to the ground and wafted steadily back across the center divide stand of oleander hedge, giving each shrub, in turn, the appearance of smoldering, like the burning bush that was not consumed.

I shut off the engine and opened my door, letting a blast of dry heat lift the sweat from my face; drops evaporating quickly in the traffic troubled breeze, cooling me with their sublimation into vapor, their absorption back into the endless cycle that falls from the clouds to pour from a bottle only to begin the cycle again.

My legs ached and I needed to stretchwalk, but when I swung my feet out to slide off my seat, I was stopped by a sight that once again brought blood rushing to my head.

On the litter strewn shoulder, under my boots, next to a strip of twisted retread, lay a dead hawk. Had I slipped off the seat I would have stepped directly onto it; the tip of my toe at its beak. I spread my feet and, to my surprise, a gray field mouse struggled to get free of the bird’s clenched black talons - bleeding its life out into the parched clay, in the final spasms of death.

When I pried open the hawks death grip, the sunk-eyed mouse was unable to escape, so violent were its throes. I carried it into the oleander shade out of some sense of naked pity and vulnerability, so that it might grow cold before the earth sent up its horde of relentless scavengers.

I remembered the pet funerals of my childhood, when I learned the ritual and respect afforded even the smallest living thing.

And how we held sacred the miracle dark passage of house cat or yard dog or storm-struck bird or aged hamster with a shoe box and paper shroud, with life photo, flower or chew toy, with garden grave and twig marker or cobble headstone - our tears and prayers. For we already feared that the inconceivable passage of our own Grandma and Grandpa, maybe even Mom and Dad or a friend in the hospital, car wreck, plane crash, would eventually bring not a few moments, but years of tear-stained bereavement. Few of us, in our callow rehearsals of inhumation, ever stopped to consider our own frailty and hazard in such a precarious world and our own eventual mortal throes.

But I did. And I still do.

So, Mr. Mouse was laid on the shade cool earth and, as his life drifted off, I remembered that anything more that what he had right there, at that moment, is window-dressing and illusion. As it will be with me.

The instant his death rigor came and passed and there was no more, I turned to the hawk. Using the knife left to me by my long dead brother, I cut off both its feet just above the talons and wrapped them in a sheet of wind torn newspaper. I didn't know what purpose they might serve, but a compelling urge to take them along with me rendered the blood and gore merely color and particles on my hands, not the flesh and blood of a noble bird of prey that probably looped into attack trajectory with an effortless pirouette.

Then I stepped up into the van.

I wiped the gore onto the leg of my pants while starting the engine, taking a brief moment before driving off to remember the beauty of the hawk and its magnificent bird-ness as it lie on the ground. I thought of the Cochiti legend of the neglectful mother Crow who abandoned her nest and lost her hatchlings to a Hawk that took pity on them. When I glanced down at the legless carcass looking for faint signs of that mythic devotion, a blast of car-wind rolled it into the oleander shade. So I began to drive down the shoulder of the road.

At fifty, I nudged a front tire up onto the road's fast lane and turned on the radio. A deafening thump shock wave hit the front of my car and mixed with a blare of Mexican accordion music, as a blue pickup truck exploded through the center divide; a spray of oleander leaves and flowers blasted high into the air as it set down onto the road in front of me sliding sideways.

Roaring, howling, it's tires liquefied and burned furiously as it cut a path across my lane, out of control and about to roll over. My own tires screamed -- I stood full weight on my brake pedal -- but we hurtled toward each other, locked on a course I knew I could not survive. For the briefest split-second I saw the pick-up driver spin his wheels into the slide, pointing the truck toward the cinderblock sound wall that at the outer edge of the highway.

This simple correction, this panic reaction, unbridled the pick-up's momentum and it rocketed through my lane, past me, and straight into the wall.

I couldn't not look as he hit the masonry barrier head-on. The shiny metal fenders and hood of the truck crumpled, rammed flat back into its cab; chrome trim, glass and plastic erupting in a shower of fragments that rebounded from the wall and bounced across the roof and bedcover, then showered down onto the ground.

He's dead. I thought, skidding to a stop just past where our coal black tire tracks crossed. I'll try to help him, but I'm probably going to watch him die.

The traffic kept flying by and I had to dash to avoid a long line of cars. I stopped at the skewed door of the wreck when the driver kicked it open and hopped out.

I said, he hopped out.

I watched, speechless, a sinking feeling in my gut, as he walked up to me, hand extended as though we had just been introduced. Short, five, five-two, brown with a thatch of hair that stood up like it had never known a comb. He was forty, maybe fifty. I couldn't tell because he was... intact, uninjured, perfect; a front gold tooth shining in the noon sun above a sparkling crucifix on chain that bounced against his coffee tan chest. He was happy!

" Milagro!" he shouted, " Viva los Angeles!"

We were hundreds of miles from L.A., so I assumed he was in shock or disoriented, shook into confusion by a blow that should have killed him.

The truck had punched a grotto into the cement block wall and stream rose from the hot fluids that splashed down out of the crushed engine compartment onto the clay.

His hand was warm and callused and he pumped it up and down with what must have been pure adrenaline overload. My hand started to hurt, but I was so amazed that I let him continue until I was sure I wasn't missing some tiny, vital fact that might drop him to his knees before the rush wore off.

"Amigo!" he shouted, "Hagame usted el favor de venir!"

He lead me back to the wreck, pulled a photo down from the visor and held it in front of my face. It was a stiffly posed portrait of himself in a suit standing behind a chair where an angelic Mexican woman clutched a swaddled infant to her breast. In the foreground, a pudgy girl of eight or nine wearing a lacy white dress knelt on a pillow holding a bouquet of camellias. Her eyes were cast upward to a superimposed cameo of the face of Christ, bleeding from the thorn crown, above heavy-lidded eyes that showed the very soul of compassion.

"Mi hija. Se llama Pilar. Tiene nueve anos."

That was when I understood "los Angeles". His angels, his little girls. He was alive and he would see his little angels again. Milagro, miracle. No shit.

There was no way he could have been sitting behind the steering wheel on impact, for it was buried into the seat-back with so much force it had buckled under the pressure. And he couldn't have fallen to the floor, because the engine, still clicking as the heat ran out of it, filled the entire lower section of the cab.

Scattered around the interior were holy pictures, rosary beads, palm crosses and statues of Jesus and Mary as well as a few others I couldn't identify right off. It was a dashboard altar that had obviously served its purpose before being demolished. On the seat, a Spanish photo pamphlet from the DMV was splayed open, showing a posed shot of Hispanic drunk driver being arrested by a Caucasian Highway Patrolman with a streak of gray in his hair where the part might have been.

A Highway Patrol cruiser and a tow truck pulled up behind the wreck and their drivers got out in such perfect unison that I almost missed the significance of their arrival.

It hasn't been more than sixty seconds since the crash. How can this be? Even a cell phone in the hand of the first person to see it would not have reached 911 yet, much less bring them both this fast. Speed trap? That wouldn't explain the tow truck. On the way to another accident? I can't imagine both traveling together, not to mention the remarkable co-incidence of passing right here, right now.

"Acabo de ver a diablo." the man whispered.

I went cold. "Diablo?"

He smiled weakly and straightened up when he saw the Highway Patrolman. I remembered the pamphlet in his truck and leaned closer to him to sniff his breath, but all I could smell was sage and Manzanita smoke.

His eyes stayed on the cop and he spoke softly as though describing a dream. "Si, si. La Cabeza de Vaca. Ojos rojo. Diente amarillo. Pene enorme..."

"Where?" I asked, trying to catch his attention, but he stood at attention, waiting for the patrolman.

"Please get back to your vehicle and be on your way," the Highway Patrolman yelled to me, "we can handle this."

I took the man's arm and asked him again, "Where? Cuando ocurri eso? Donde est Diablo?"

He stood ramrod straight, but pointed his index finger toward the cab of his truck. "Alli." he coughed, "Hace un momento."

"Please return to your vehicle, sir, and be on your way," the Highway Patrolman repeated. I glanced up at his face and smiled as calmly as I could when I saw the streak of gray in his hair where the part might have been. "We can handle this." he said, "Thank you for your concern."

When I got back to my van, I watched the cop lead the man back to his the cruiser and without so much as a question they drove off. Scarcely a moment later, the tow truck operator hitched up the wreck and sped off behind them.

I sat there, lost in a flood of feelings and incongruities, watching the traffic pass as though nothing had happened. When I started the engine, the radio blared up the end of the same song that was playing when the truck flew through my life.

Three or four minutes at the most, and you wouldn't know that anything had happened at all except for the...

I twisted my neck looking up and down that road.

Where the fuck are his skid marks?

I looked in my rearview mirror.

Where the fuck are my skid marks?

The oleander hedge was solid and so unruffled as to give no indication of me where the truck had come through. Only a pale flesh-colored plastic crucifix, shattered, flattened in the fast lane, testified to the location of the truck's touchdown point.

I got back out of my van and took the Polaroid with me as I pushed through the green stick fragrance of the hedge to the other side of the highway. Again I found no skid marks, no debris, no evidence that anything had happened in the last five minutes. I reeled under the possibility that I was hallucinating.

Nothing looked out of the ordinary, nothing had changed in the dry heat, pollen heavy air, under the crop-duster sky field, next to the mouse-hawk oleander shade death bush.

Just the heat rippled, grease striped asphalt crown of the highway and miles of tar patch squiggles that covered every crack, every fissure along the beaten wheel tracks, tar wiggles and lines and serifs and darts and wingdings that followed no pattern but suggested a trembling cursive hand or the squared calligraphy of Thailand or a bold flowing Arabic script revealing the vile name of some long forgotten demon, a sigil.

"Acabo de ver a diablo." the man had whispered.

I took dozens of Polaroids of the tar squiggles before a mounting fear churned in my stomach. I prayed to los Angeles for one more milagro as I climbed back through the hedge and drove away as fast as I could. The little square photos developed on the passenger seat next to me - deliberate black filigree on stained highway - and I knew I had passed into the desert, into the war zone... into my cauldron.

Martin Higgins