Shelly hadn’t been to Barstow in years, and being driven through the town, she remembered why. Dust devils competed with 4x4s on brand new, soulless roads. It was a place of chain stores, fast food joints, and mini-malls, each with a slight rustic flair so the natives could be proud of the past they’d paved over. Probably paved it right over the flattened coyotes and tumbleweeds.

For someone who hadn’t been in town for, well, a very long time, Doud certainly drove like he knew where he was going. Cruising through downtown after sliding off the freeway, they worked their way out to even dustier back streets. Even though Shelly had questions piling up in her mind, she didn’t say anything. Doud’s nervousness was palpable, solid. His knuckles were tight on the wheel.

The town vanished bit by bit, replaced by low, rolling hills covered by dead, yellow grass, stitched together like sections of quilt by sagging, rusted chain link fences. Occasionally they’d pass a cinderblock and plywood building—a bar, feed, or auto parts store—but otherwise the road was deserted. The questions cramped her stomach, but she stayed quiet, just watching the road go by. A billboard: I CARE, SIGNED GOD. Another question was added to the ache: Was he proof of something, or proof of the absence of something? Did this mean that some myths were real, or that Doud was completely new? The outskirts of Barstow were hot and dull, the people shuffling through the heat, proudly wearing their unremarkableness. Another question: What else have I been missing?

“We’re here,” he said, turning the wheel sharply. She twisted her view from the side window as well, looking forward.

Off on a dusty, pothole-mined side road, a few hundred or so feet from the paving, the house was simple, just two stories. Three windows on top just below a gently peaked roof with two modest dormers and a stubby brick chimney. Two windows below, between them a thick oak door without a knocker. If it had ever had a color, it was long gone, harshly scrubbed, bleached, and cracked from years of incessant sunlight. For old architecture, it was free of ornamentation, the slightest taste of gingerbread. It didn’t have character, or even any sense of being a ‘home’ for anything except some tree rats and raccoons. As they pulled into town, he mentioned that he paid a person regularly to give it light maintenance. Although it was stark, she realized it wasn't completely lifeless; just short of it, lean on life. The dead weeds on either side were cut short, kept back by a leaning wooden fence. The front yard, what there was of it, was also close-cropped. The windows were all intact, the interior hidden by thick, faded Army-green curtains.

The house was alone, on the side of a low hill. Beyond it, Shelly could see the pale geometry of the freeway, the darker streaks of Barstow’s surface streets, and the dull rectangles of buildings and houses. Between there and here was what seemed to be an endless field of even more weeds, wild, tall and brown in steadily descending death down the sloping hillside.

Doud parked with the Lexus’s nose pointing toward the front door. “Well,” he said with a slight grin. “This is it.” He seemed embarrassed, as if he were worried their final destination might not have been worth the trip.

The house was old, and so, supposedly, was he. There was ample room for laughing, but she couldn’t quite do that. She smiled and said, “Let’s go in. I’m curious to see what you’ve done to the old place.”

Outside, morning air was warm, dry, threatening to be a hot afternoon. The sky was piercing blue, an oppressive aqua. She began to dig through her purse for her sunglasses, an unconscious LA thing, but then stopped when she realized they would be inside in just a few seconds. She snapped the bag shut, slipped it over her shoulder, and trotted to catch up to Doud, who was already climbing the creaky wooden steps.

“The lock should be okay,” he said, on the porch, ring of keys in one hand. “It’s one of the things I have them check.”

Steps groaning in accompaniment, she was next to him in a moment. He was talking out of discomfort, she realized. What must it be like? Back here after all this time? With me? With psycho ex-boyfriend somewhere out there?

Am I really believing this?

Finding the right key, he slipped it into the brass keyhole, gave it a turn, and shouldered the door open. Cool, stale air met them, carrying the faintly sour smell of dust and mildew. A flight of stairs headed up to the second floor, a faded burgundy runner of carpet held down by tarnished brass rods, all revealed by light coming from a window at the top, framing blue sky and the corner of a cloud. Leading the way, he headed toward the living room. Turning to close the door behind her, she noticed that his heavy, drumming steps had stopped.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” was Doud's voice from the living room, bass and thunderous.

Pulse fluttering in her neck, she spun to look. He was in a dim, sparse room, faded rug on the floor, the only furniture a huge old sofa tightly wrapped in clouded sheets of plastic. Overhead, an ornate frosted glass fixture, unlit. On one wall, a square marked where a painting had hung for a long time. In the middle of the room, facing the dining room, was Doud. His body was rigid, stiff, his hands tight fists at his side.

Standing in the doorway toward the back of the house was another man. Not Sergio, she realized with some relief, feeling her body slacken, but mind still racing. Homeless creep, bum who'd found a safe place to sleep. No time to really get a good look, though. Just barely enough time to see torn jeans, no shirt, no shoes, dirty streaks across a young, surprisingly well-defined chest, scraggly beard, knotted, filthy hair that could have been brown but was probably just unwashed.

They faced each other, the young man panting like a dog that’d been out running. Heavy, heaving breaths. “Get out,” Doud rumbled, stepping toward him. But then he stopped, as if hit by something only he could see, only he was aware of.

The man spoke, lips moving ponderously, but he was too far away. She couldn't make out what he said.

No words, but she did hear a low moan, an inhaling tone that carried easily across the room, growing quickly in intensity. The man's mouth stretched with the suctioning tone. It was a large sound, a hungry sound, and it needed a larger hole, so the man opened, and opened, and opened more and more and more to give it room.

Lips stretching, jaw hinging wide, he inhaled. She pictured the corners of his mouth tearing, ripping like soggy cardboard, blood pouring down his neck, dripping thick, heavy drops on his shoulders, sheeting his chest in red, flowing around the dark spots of his nipples, all from the stretching. But that was her mind, what she expected.

It wasn't what happened.

Instead, the hole of his mouth gaped wider and wider, revealing the wet pit of his ragged mouth, showing a cavernous interior of irregular teeth and shadowed pockets where others had fallen out. As his mouth expanded, he howled even more, an inexhaustible appetite’s bellowing roar, a storm of need that rose into a hurricane.

Through it all, Doud stood, braced against the sucking wind, arms locked to his sides, dusty air rushing past him and into the stranger's bottomless maw.

Then, in one moment, he wasn't there. He wasn’t facing that hideous, funneling draw, but instead had vanished with a clap of thunder louder than her cries, even louder than the blaring suction from the stranger's mouth.

Later, she’d be able to string it all together, to figure out what had happened. But that was later. For her right then it was all just a series of events in hot, quick seconds of time.

Doud disappeared, transforming into a blur that began where he’d been standing as he rushed toward the stranger. Then the stranger vanished as well, their sonic booms combining into an single blast that shook the home’s rafters, sending rivulets of dust spiraling from between ceiling beams and sneezing up from between floor boards.

Their blurred outlines spun around each other, tornadoes of half-seen, barely-glimpsed men: what could possibly have been arms, what maybe were legs, what might be fists, all through a haze of grit and acceleration. Then the twister of their battle canted, swung, and bolted out of the room, and back towards the kitchen.

Shelly ran after them, her heart an angry fist in her chest and her breath like a hot rasp in her throat. Didn’t know why, didn’t stop to think, didn’t deal with the insanity of it, she just ran. From the living room to the kitchen.

A window was gone, smashed out of the wall, frame and glass, plaster and lath torn, broken, and ripped away. Clouds of gypsum swirled in the air. The house complained of the loss in moaning creeks, a sound she could barely hear over the screaming winds. Still thoughtless, she ran to the hole, cautiously peering out: a short drop to still more yellowed grass, a sea of dead weeds, the city far beyond. But below her, below the destroyed wall, was a dust devil, a twister of too-fast-to-believe movements.

Within the tornado was a shadow play, their almost-forms and half-seen figures still battling. In accompaniment were dual roars of fury, explosive percussions of fists.

Then it was over. The winds eased, fading to lazy swirls of lethargic dirt. In the center of it all, no longer almost, half-seen, clouded, blurred, was a man.

He looked up at her.

And Shelly remembered her mother.

One night, when her mother was very, very drunk, she’d pulled a book from their lone bookcase, a thick book stolen from a school or library. Cracking it open, she'd shown a certain page to a twelve-year-old Shelly. “This is what people will do to you,” she said in a gin-drenched tone, directing her daughter’s attention to a plate of photos. Years later, Shelly would put a name and a location to the photograph: Dachau.

The man standing below her in a circle of torn and blasted weeds had a Dachau face, sunken, caved in, desiccated. Eyes like glistening blisters locked with hers. He was drained, vacant. He was an empty man, barely a shell.

In those gleaming eyes, a hundred or so feet away from her, she saw an unmistakable thing: hunger.

Then his mouth … opened: wider and wider, more and more, gaping, yawning, until there was nothing but a great maw, a pit to an eternal, infernal appetite.

A pause. A moment. A second. A new quality in those boiled-egg eyes, that callow and sunken face, easily read from even so far away and through the dust-heavy morning. Recognition. He knew her.

Tearing his gaze away from hers, he bolted, sprinting through the weeds. Too quick, inhumanly fast, he was a dirt trail through the wild field, away from the house, away from the town, up and over the hills, faster than even her eyes could track.

Gone. A cloud of dark yellow dirt and broken stalks were all that remained.

Shelly, frozen dead-still, looked toward where he’d gone. Shelly, with a single thought ringing too distinctly, too loudly in her mind.

That was Doud.

 

© 2006 M. Christian - Contributor's Bio

Read more about Running Dry at: www.mchristian.com.