In the Valley of the Sun

Memories, monsters, they are in our blood, and theirs are the faces we find staring back at us in broken mirrors.

It’s a hard thing on a man,” Calhoun offered, “to watch his dreams wither on the vine.” “A man’s dreams are hard on a woman, too, Mr. Calhoun.

She saw an older wound near his groin and palpated it and saw into the slit where layers of pink tissue should have been, but there was only an ashen sheaf of meat, like the pages of a book half-burned.

He's alone. He's got a mother but she's up thereand he's down here, and down here, he's alone. Travis touched the hilt of his knife. He drew his Ka-Bar from its scabbard and turned the blade. There was a dark thing in the boy, born in a dark shed, a sadness too big for one so small. Travis remembered the lonely smell of moldering canvas in his own father's shed. Gasoline and grease. He wondered if one day the boy would ever look in a mirror and see a stranger staring back.

And when the night was not gone yet, the creature Rue left him, and he lay awake shivering and reckoning all through the lonely hours with the choices before him, none of which, in the days to come, would seem like choices at all.

A man’s dreams are hard on a woman, too, Mr. Calhoun.

He had come looking for the woman and the boy, but he had already forgotten. He would not find them now, before the end.

The Gaskin woman and her boy are the light behind the dark, The stars behind the sky. They are ever thing I never had, they are warm and soft and the word love is not a word you understand, and it's not a word I ever understood until the boy, because the boy is my friend, and they are the place I'm going, and I will kill my way back to them.

And love? What had love ever been to Travis but harsh peals of laughter, a glare of hate from behind a cigarette, held in hands with sharp red nails?

Here she had stood, waiting. Waiting on Tom. Waiting on men. Always waiting, she thought, staring down at the cowboy's camper.

It's a lonely word out here. Takes things right and left.

Momma just got saved. I got saved a while back. Preacher said the story about a wee little man called Zaccheus. Said he climbed up in a tree to see Jesus and Jesus said ”I'm eating at your house.” I think if Jesus came to eat at my house, I'd shit. Anyway, that's how I got saved. You ever been saved?

The cowboy's last thought before death: he is a boy standing on these feet, his small arms tight around a slander waist, he and his mother dancing in a gray living room on a gray afternoon and his mother smiles, and her smile is a lie.

Rue understands: He is not like me, but he is. Because he is a killer.

Secrets, she thought, are almost always sins. Otherwise, why keep them?

Today, she had let herself be bathed in a promise to give her son the hope she lacked, hope for a place beyond this thin life where the boy would see his father again and sickness did not separate sons from fathers or wives from husbands. But in truth, she thought this all to be a cruel lie, and she knew this river could easily drown her and damn her if she let herself be swept along in its currents.

The hunger came on: an absence eating at him, like teeth with nothing but their own mouth to chew or the mechanism of some great engine turning over inside him only to sputter.

He thought of Rue. A dried rose dropping brittle petals.

A splay of lightning like veins lit the sky. Travis fled the porch and did not look back. Annabelle sat in the swing.

No one misses them. I once ate a priest in Savannah, Georgia, she thinks. Christmas, 1954. I lured him down to the river, away from his Bible and his God. I touched him and he saw in me the true eternal.

smelled of booze and smoke and rotten meat and he felt its corn-husk skin against his own, hands groping at his belt, loosening his buckle, sliding it free.

Reader backed slowly down the drive and cruised through the empty, dark streets, feeling, as he always did when waking in the early a.m. hours, that the world did not belong to men but was somehow its own keeper, and he was but one small part in some greater mystery, and the silence of everything was but a solemn hush before it. He

At twilight, he pulled off for gas in a wasted town where the wind never ceased banging metal against metal.

A cage is safety, she thought, but safety is a cage.

Travis gathered them both into a stall, mother and boy, and put the boy in his mother’s arms on the toilet. Intertwining their limbs, their bodies cold. The woman held her son against her breast, protective of the child even in death, the boy’s cheek resting on her shoulder. He had never done anything like this before and he did it now for reasons he could not have said. It was how he had always imagined his own reunion: he would find her, she would hold him. Mother and child, together forever.

There is no comfort to be had in any truth here. I hope you’ll remember that when you write your reports.

Sunglasses to hide the burst capillaries in her eyes, the ones that come when the blood no longer tolerates the hunger and turns its red teeth upon itself like the mad, crazed thing it is, and the body turns to dust and dying. Four days now without fresh blood.

For him, the world was now a picture knocked crooked. He could barely judge the ground beneath his boots and the stars in the sky shimmered and blurred and became long straight lines of light, as if time itself were stretching to the breaking.