Sonoran Dreams: Three short stories from exile

SONORAN DREAMS:

  Three Short Stories from Exile

  Copyright 2012 Robb Grindstaff

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  COVER DESIGN BY CALISTA TAYLOR

  Table of Contents

  Desert Rain

  Cordelia lives alone in a shack miles from civilization, somewhere no one can find her--except for a very determined suitor. This award-winning story first appeared in Horror Bound magazine in February 2011, and selected for its 'Best Of' edition 2008-2012 as one of the top ten stories ever published by the magazine.

  Desert Walk

  Denny has lost everything in the recession--his business, his home, his wife, his ambition. With nothing left to lose but an injured foot, his sanity, or his life, he sets out to cross a hundred miles of wilderness to find Hope.

  Desert Nights

  When the sun goes down and the scorching heat cools to an uncomfortable swelter, bored teenagers gather to party out by the power lines, drink some beer, and argue over the best rock bands of all time. Maybe shoot at some rattlesnakes and jackrabbits. Nope, nothing could possibly go wrong here.

  About the Author

  Desert Rain

  Desert Rain

  Nothing smells quite like a desert rain. The drops fall on sand and dirt and dried scrub brush, release the odors of life from blossoms and fruit, from the dry, cracked earth and the brittle, brown branches of mesquite and juniper, of saltbush and creosote.

  Cordelia can count the number of rainstorms each year on her fingers, even with the missing index of her right hand. She learned to shoot left-handed after he removed her trigger finger with a pair of pliers.

  The pungent but pleasing aroma reaches her front porch on the breeze before the rain; sometimes the rain never arrives, but the sweet air provides evidence that it has indeed fallen somewhere in the Sonoran. The grackles and doves flutter about in anticipation, locating the nearest cover from the rare precipitation as a precaution. But even they don't believe it. They will only take cover after the first fat dollops of water hit them and turn to glass beads hanging on wing or tail feathers, like something a roadside vendor would imitate with clear glue and sell to Midwestern tourists in their RVs.

  Cordelia always follows the birds' lead. She sits on the porch, ready to move inside if needed and inhales deep through her nose, holding in the scent before releasing. The ragged porch roof provides no quarter when the sky erupts, but she's never bothered to fix it.

  She has no neighbors on this northern slope of a gentle rise, capped by an outcrop of boulders and wind-hewn stone which keeps her ramshackle two rooms in at least partial shade during the hottest part of the year. If she did have neighbors, she didn't know quite how she would explain her relationship with Raymond. Not truly an ex, as he'd never consummated the marriage, but it didn't feel right to call herself a widow either.

  Her eyes track the thunderhead as it moves north, off to her left. Jagged, angry sparks crackle across the horizon. A few assault the earth with violent jabs. The juvenile breeze matures into a wind, and nomadic shrubs rush ahead to escape or to warn the others of the coming storm.

  Cordelia sits in the rocking chair she built with her own two hands, her own nine fingers, rough pieces of twisted wood for arm and crest rails, planks from a fruit crate for a seat and back slats. It wobbles a bit from left to right, and one runner holds a knobby lump which thump-kathump-thumps with each pass, but it serves as a small bit of comfort in this inhospitable land. She prides herself in the workmanship, imperfect as it is, because it was the first rocker she ever made. The first piece of furniture, in fact. All from scrap lumber and pieces of sun-dried desert flotsam gathered from the wash at the bottom of her hill.

  When rains come, her '73 Ford pick-up can't make it across the wash. Rain would also dampen the lone road that stretches along the distance, cutting a straight line at an angle from the southwest to the northeast. This two-lane dirt road once served the noble purpose of carrying supplies to, and ore from, a mining camp that had gone dry in the 1920s. Now it serves only Cordelia, and the occasional mule or coyote who uses the abandoned claim as a way station in the underground transportation system. A far cry, Cordelia thinks, from anything Miss Tubman would recognize, then she thinks it perhaps not so different after all. Once the rains come, the rooster tails of dust won't signal the approach of vehicles, but the wash will deter any would-be visitors.

  Thump-kathump.

  She plants her feet on the floorboards of the porch and holds the rocker still. She shoulders her Winchester 88 and eyes the sights to a stand of cholla a hundred yards away. Picking a single tubercle, Cordelia squeezes, and it explodes in a puff of silvery needles. She levers the next round without taking her eye from the sight, then sweeps to her left. The road is out of range, but the wash just inside. In a dozen years, she's become a better marksman southpaw than she'd been as a righty, but the lever action still feels awkward.

  When Raymond comes to visit, she'll be a better shot than before, but she won't be able to get off as many rounds. She'll need to make the first one count. Before, right-handed, she could have squeezed and levered three times. Now she must drop him in one. She can't miss. Between the eyes. At worst, in the eye. His one remaining.

  Raymond was there when Cordelia's mother screamed in labor and brought her into the world. He always jokes that he'll be there when she leaves this world. She, of course, doesn't remember meeting him then. Her mother continued to scream after Raymond cut the umbilical cord with his teeth. She screamed until he kicked her in the mouth. Then she lay on the floor and whimpered, blood trickling from both ends.

  Cordelia's mother told her the story from the time she was old enough to remember. The state eventually removed the mother from her parental responsibilities and assigned her a bed at the Phoenix Hospital for the Mentally Ill.

  Raymond didn't show up again until Cordelia's twelfth birthday. He managed to get past the security desk at Durango Juvenile Detention Facility For Girls without notice, well after visiting hours.

  "I'm sure you don't remember me," he whispered in her ear as he slid his hand under her nightshirt.

  The ward held fifteen girls in one large room, lined nearly wall-to-wall by single beds no bigger than cots with hard, thin mattresses. His breath smelled of the girls' bathroom when the toilets backed up. If she screamed, the bare fluorescent tubes would have flickered on and Miss Fulton would demand to know who was causing a ruckus after lights out. But by the time Cordelia realized she wasn't asleep—it wasn't a nightmare this time, he really was there, groping her, scraping her most tender flesh with his dry fingers—she could no longer scream. His hand clamped on the back of her neck as his thumb pressed into her throat and blocked any sound she tried to make, any breath she tried to take.

  She did remember him. From her mother's stories, certainly, but she recalled the smell. It was not a smell she could ever completely purge from her nostrils.

  Only in a desert rain would this foulest of odors dissipate.

  "I'm glad to see you're still a virgin," he whispered. Even as she faded from consciousness, unable to breathe, succumbing to the darkness, his scent permeated her soul. She felt, more than smelled, his stench. Her eyes burned, a thick heat pressed against the side of her face. It wasn't his breath, but a steam that came from inside him, escaped through his pores, through his eyes, through every orifice of his body.

  She awoke at
lights on. Miss Fulton made her shower after the other girls complained of her body odor, even though it wasn't a shower day. "Make her douche too," one tough girl suggested. "I think her pussy is rotten."

  Miss Fulton didn't make her douche, but Cordelia scrubbed herself raw from head to toe, twice, even between her legs where the skin was already red and painful from Raymond's brutal probing. That's when she knew for certain it had been no nightmare. She recalled his visit, his final words as he took his leave.

  "Make sure you stay a virgin until I return for you, my bride. You'll want your wedding night to be special."

  He visited every night for weeks, but only in her dreams. In her dreams, he raped her, his 'thing,' as she knew it by, larger than probability and covered in cedar bark or dried moss. In her dreams, his odor clamped around her throat until she could no longer breathe.

  Awake, while his scent gradually faded from her body to the point no one else noticed, it never left her nasal passages.

  Only a desert rain chases his essence from her. Cordelia sits on her front porch, sighting her Winchester at distant clumps of prickly pear or a jackrabbit venturing forth before the rains come. Normally she welcomes the rain, the relief from him, the momentary absence of him before the clouds depart, night falls and his putrescence returns to torment her sleep.

  "Why does it have to rain today, of all days?" she asks herself out loud before putting a single round through the left ear of the jackrabbit at thirty yards in full run. Thunder tumbles in the distance, merging with the rifle's report in an ominous drumbeat.

  She adds two more cartridges to the magazine even though she'd only have one shot. If that. If the rain doesn't mask his arrival.

  After three years in Durango, they let her live with a foster family who specialized in emotionally disturbed children until she turned eighteen. After a failed six-week stint at junior college, and an abysmal six-day attempt at waiting tables, Cordelia joined the Army, a most successful move. Made expert marksman back when she had all ten fingers.

  On the eve of her twenty-fourth birthday, the day most brides would be partying with their bridesmaids or having one last fling or rearranging the seating chart for the reception dinner, Cordelia sat in her barracks room alone, cleaning and piecing together her M16. Stationed in Germany at the height of the Cold War, she was unsure if Raymond had the means to travel overseas, but she took no chances.

  Nothing masked his arrival on their planned wedding night—his planned wedding night.

  The scent of him, ever-present, grew immense and choked the air from her lungs several minutes before he turned the locked doorknob and walked in.

  "My lovely bride," he said as the door closed behind him. Her vision blurred at the stench, but she blinked back tears and fired one round through his left eye, removing a goodly portion of the back and side of his skull and tossing them, along with bits of red and gray, against the cinder block wall.

  "Not tonight, dear," Raymond said as he gathered skull fragments and studied them like pieces to a jigsaw puzzle. "I have a headache." He shook from laughing at his own joke.

  He left before she could gather her senses and squeeze the trigger a second time.

  She sat immobile, weapon trained on the door, until his scent faded to the normal faint trace she carried with her. She cleaned up the wall and the floor, flushing his greasy hair and scalp and brain remnants down the commode, rinsing bloody towels in the sink, scrubbing until no trace of him remained.

  The bullet hole in the wall and the unauthorized weapon in her room brought an inglorious end to her military career. An honorable discharge for medical reasons, they allowed.

  She rocks again, thump-kathump-thump, and watches the barely visible tire tracks that lead from her cabin down to the wash and beyond to the mining road. At least the rain has yet to arrive, so she might see the dust his boots would kick up even while he is still too far away to see.

  He always entered through the front door, never sneaking around back or through a side window. He never made an effort to surprise as long as she was awake. Even though her bullets didn't destroy him, they always sent him away. A shotgun blast on her thirty-sixth birthday removed his right cheek, part of his jaw, and a piece of his tongue. She had hoped to remove his entire head.

  "'ow do 'ou espeth me to kith 'ou now?" he said as he picked up the side of his face and tried to put it back in place.

  Cordelia has never been kissed. She remains a virgin, but not for Raymond. In spite of Raymond. She assumed that if she were no longer pure, his interest in her might wane. But all her efforts, even surrounded by horny young men and boys in the Army, had proved for naught. She was not an unattractive woman, but most men were frightened of her. She intimidated them. Cordelia wasn't the friendliest, most approachable face in the room. The few who'd gotten close enough for her to nearly succeed in her quest had sudden changes of heart. Or turns of stomach. One threw up in her face and hair just as he grabbed himself to guide his entry—which at Cordelia's insistence was about to occur without the formality of a pre-coital kiss.

  "Sorry, way too much to drink," the soldier mumbled before he fled. She knew he only had two beers. But the hint of Raymond that drifts into her sinuses with every breath floated around her room in nearly visible waves. Not as strong as when it heralds his impending visits, but enough so the young, nearly sober man caught a whiff and assumed it emanated from her. Once a couple stories of that nature wended their way through the barracks, no soldier ever again dared invade her captured territory.

  Perhaps, she thinks, thump-kathump, she should follow in her mother's footsteps and remove herself from this life before Raymond succeeds in taking her virginity for himself. Why he would want to at this point, Cordelia doesn't know. Surely she can no longer bear him a child destined to become his next bride. Perhaps by now it is the thrill of the chase for him, the conquest, the principle of the matter.

  When she was forty-eight and premenopausal, she thought she might no longer be fertile and therefore of no use or attraction to Raymond. If not, she wondered, would he leave her alone?

  It was this, his third planned night of consummation, that her hollow-point metal jacket penetrated his chest and exploded out his back in a hole so large she could see the kitchen light shining behind him.

  "Bitch. Thith ith not funny anymore."

  He was on her in a flash, so fast she never saw him move across the room. He sat on her chest and punched her in the face. When she came to, the crunch and grind of steel against bone threatened to send her back to the hidden place in her mind. She fought against the darkness, against the suffocating stench of rotting flesh and fecal matter so vivid it coated her tongue. She forced her eyes open to defy him no matter what hideous torments he might inflict.

  "Thith will be the lath time I'll put up with thith nonthenthe," he said, his face a mere inch from hers, his spittle dripping onto her lips.

  He stood and waved a finger at her. Her finger. Her trigger finger.

  "Nekt time, I ekpect a little warmer welcome."

  Cordelia gazes out at the dirt road, the wash, the truck path to her front porch. No scent of him gets through the rain-softened desert air. A dark cloud bank on her left grows denser and closer. She counts the time between flash and boom on one hand. Her right hand.

  If the rain comes, she'll never see his footsteps kick up the dust.

  She sets the rifle across her lap and visually measures how it compares to the length of her arm. Could she place the barrel in her mouth and still reach the trigger? Would she have the balls to follow through? Or would Raymond show up in the nick of time to save her from herself and then shove something else down her throat when she is no longer in a position to shoot first?

  The first sounds are like approaching footsteps, huge round blops of rain that bounce from the hardpack every few feet. They grow faster and smaller and closer together. She moves her rocker a foot to the left to avoid the biggest leak in the porch roof. She cranks
a round into the chamber and lays the rifle across her lap. Thump-kathump-thump-thump she rocks.

  "You're looking ath lovely ath ever, my bride."

  He stands in the rain not twenty feet from her porch. His wounds never heal, but dry over in scabby crusts.

  Thump-kathump-thump she rocks.

  "What do you want with me, Raymond? I'm sixty years old."

  "Thikty? Why, that'th barely legal where I come from."

  "Why don't you go back where you came from and leave me alone?"

  "Aren't you going to try to thoot me again, love?" He moves about ten feet to his right in a blur. "Think you're quick enough thith time?" Before he finishes speaking he stands on the first of three wooden steps.

  Before he can speak again she fires from where she sits, never raising the repeater from her lap. Levers and fires again. Levers, rocks forward kathump and fires again.

  Cordelia stands and walks to the edge of the porch. On the ground below her, Raymond grumbles and tries to stand. She pumps the lever and squeezes the trigger repeatedly until his head no longer exists. When his arms push up from the ground, she removes them with a quick shot to each shoulder.

  One final round explodes in his groin. Even if he does come back, he won't have anything left to threaten her with.

  Cordelia sits down and watches while leg bones shattered by repeated gunfire push his torso across the desert floor. It takes him nearly an hour, and darkness falls as he hits the wash, now a raging creek. He slides down the bank into the water neck first and it sweeps him away to the Gulf of Mexico or perhaps a water treatment facility somewhere near Carefree. Or perhaps he's gone back to where he comes from and would scrape and crawl across her porch in a dozen years and gurgle sweet nothings to her.

  The sky lightens as pale moonlight reflects around the trailing edge of the thunderhead. Soon pinpricks of stars join in.

  Nothing smells quite like a desert rain. Even in the scorching furnace of the next afternoon's severe clear skies, Cordelia smells only the sweet cactus blossoms and hardy blooms of ironwoods and palo verdes.