Texas Drawl
A green pin-dot of light flashed in the darkness, a bright Christmas tree green. Pop- gone. Dry thunder at high noon openly interfered with my thoughts as I gazed through an open door onto a burnt sepia, Texan landscape. Late afternoon subpoenaed me to a small, chlorine pool.
I sat on the bottom of the deep end listening to water pressure-sizzle inside my ears, like medical tests done on me -before I could remember- by a medical research facility in Iowa that could only be reached through an underground tunnel. Neon navy blue streaks swizzled down an invisible screen inside my head. My submerged thoughts imagined an unknown teenage boy whose eyes reflected chronic trouble he couldn’t do anything about. He flinched from a flood of salty perspiration pouring from his burning eyes.
More parched thunder ambled across the sky, the sizzling in my ears continued, drowning out personal thoughts, distracting my mind from my body running out of oxygen. A promise is always coming, but never gives an arrival date -You’ll know it when you see it- Lone Star, too-hot-to-touch, faded car-hoods propped open to jump lead acid batteries. Alligator cable heads glowed on the posts. Twelve feet down, all I could feel was gradually increasing pressure on my eardrums.
Watch, wait- a repetitive process I was all too familiar with. A young woman with long, fawn-toned hair, wore a white cotton top and Comanche skirt inside a shadow cooled adobe ranch house. Paisley drapes barred sunlight entry and kept room heat satisfied to a minimum. She smiled and let her hair fall in front of her face as she thumbed through an outdated phonebook.
Outside, population zero. Abandoned sage and mesquite stretched out, puzzle-linking a local ghost town. Cacti bordering a vanishing point highway melted into waxy green puddles. Rough-feathered gargoyle buzzards relocated to the square adobe’s Spanish tile rooftop. A bank of mica-thin clouds appeared like the snap of a magician’s cape. The sun graciously allowed them to linger, even smiled before extinguishing them into shimmering vapor like so much photographic flash powder.
The young woman lounged crosswise on a long horn, cowhide chair, her hair dangled near the floor. She used an old landline phone to order Chinese take-out and let perspiration on the back of her delicate neck cool her. Ice cubes had almost formed in freezer trays and began to rattle in the fridge like rocks in a cocktail glass. Cold clinking was the only music drifting over the desert as the sun traveled to the next town, the next state and made a hollow promise not to be back for hours. Searing temperatures radiated everywhere, off everything, leaving no escape.
Oxygen leaked from my nose as I imagined Chinese food cooked in desert-fired woks, steam rising from cartons of fluffy white rice and egg foo young…I wondered if take-out was still delivered by rickshaw. A slate blue sky slowly erased to reveal rough streaks of indigo scuffing through from underneath. Low on the horizon, a narrow train of popcorn clouds scuttled to catch the sunset. The first evening star flashed, a quick, bright Christmas tree green… Twilight started to settle in early, but the other stars wouldn’t attend for hours… the Milky Way might RSVP… no one could say.
Our promotional bank calendar broke sometime back in April and the seasons refused to change, that was the story anyway. Someone opened a bag of marshmallows outside, the microwave air puffed them caramel brown. The sweet, beguiling scent penetrated the pool surface. I pushed off the bottom of the deep end, and dried my hair as I returned naked to the house. Inside, the woman sat cross-legged and naked on a crocheted rug eating chow mien with fluorescent yellow chopsticks. I humored myself, it all could’ve happened this way.