Monsoon

I removed my rings to hold the steering wheel more tightly and placed them in the empty cup holder where they jingled with each bump. It didn’t help my grip very much—more of a ceremonial gesture—but my bare hands felt stronger, like they could do anything that needed doing. The weather alert on the radio began to hiss with a damaged signal and I turned it off.

The approaching storm clouds inspired a premature dusk, marking the arrival of monsoon season. The wind was hot and dry like devil breath and the rain fell cold as if in moral protest against it. I had my window down and was taking in the smell of wet creosote bushes before rolling it up and driving into the wall of rain ahead. Dynamite Road stretched onward through it to the horizon lumpy with mountains bruised purple in the light. The desert on either side of the road was a hilled mess of cacti, boulders, and desert broom. In the dips, shallow brown rivers ran across the road. Sediment and rocks covered the asphalt; the yellow and white lines were almost completely hidden, but I was having trouble keeping the truck from hydroplaning and was thankful for the added traction.

When the rains come, so do the winds, the tornadoes, and the floods. The year before I had seen an entire palo verde tree uprooted and blown onto the I-17. It tumbled against a car on the southbound side, sending it careening into the yellow Fitch barriers near the exit ramp. Each plastic barrel erupted with more sand than the last until the weight of them stopped the car completely.

The Sonoran desert floor doesn’t soak up a lot of water. The ground is mostly granite—a hard, granular rock with little patience for absorption. Without warning, rivulets of water can become a flash flood three feet high. It happens too quickly to close the road in time. It happens too quickly to do anything, really.

Once the glow of the sunset was extinguished there was nothing for miles but the soaking black desert, rain beating out the last warmth left in its soil. I crested a hill, my headlights catching only the static of rain as they pointed to the sky. I focused on the stretch ahead of me, trying to make up in attention what I lacked in perception. The white flash of a thunderbolt provided a fleeting visual sobriety; I could see each saguaro, each boulder in that surreal, sideways light. I counted the seconds between the lightning and thunder (only reaching four one-thou—), a childhood habit. The activity served no practical purpose; even if I had known that the distance from my front door to the Circle K was equivalent to one one-thousand and to the Albertson’s was two one-thousand it’s not as though I could’ve effectively utilized the data, done some relative calculation, and gotten a handle on the storm. Really known what it was all about. But I didn’t know how fast sound travels, anyway.

I also didn’t know how fast I was traveling when I struck the blue Plymouth Neon. Probably no more than 20 miles per hour. I was rounding a corner and didn’t see it in time. I pushed the brake pedal to the floor but my truck still skid into the bumper and I was thrown into the steering wheel. I sat with my forehead on the horn for a few seconds, my head vibrating with pain. I was suddenly so aware of my skull: its thickness, its shape, but particularly the sound it makes when it collides with plastic.

I flipped down the mirror, saw the makings of a nice bump, and pulled the car onto the shoulder. From there I could properly diagnose the situation: someone had driven the Neon nose-deep into the torrent of water ahead and abandoned it to look for help. The doors were still ajar. The impact had pushed the Neon in further and water had begun rushed in through the passenger’s door and out the driver’s. Every July during the first big rain they fish cars out of these flood zones, mostly with out-of-state license plates. I took small comfort in the cushion the Californian driver’s misfortune afforded—if the Neon hadn’t been there, it would have been me plunging into that water.

I was about to call my wife when an old woman slammed her hands against my window and yelled, “Are you okay?!” She exaggerated her mouth’s movements in case I couldn’t hear her but was up to the task of lip-reading in my post-collision daze.

I rolled down the window reluctantly. The rain was cracking against my truck and I wanted no part of experiencing it firsthand.

“Hi, yes, thanks. I’m fine. Wasn’t going that fast, I guess. Just going to turn back and go the other way, I don’t really feel like swimming,” I said, forcing a laugh. There was no other car around besides the Neon, looking like a stink beetle with its butt in the air. The woman was on foot. She was dripping wet and must have been for a while.

“Oh, okay! Some mess we’ve got here. Just thought I’d ask! Things seem to be happening all over.” She was still yelling, even with my window down. Her graying hair was long and matted to her head. She was stout in an Eastern European way, couldn’t have been more than five-foot. She had those old-lady lips, the kind that seemed to have curled back into her mouth over time, and it was no easy task telling where her mouth ended and the rest of her face began. When I didn’t respond, she turned to walk into the bushes. I saw the backs of her feet in my headlights as she walked away, the white arches luminescent, the rest caked with sand.

“Wait!” I shouted out the window, unbuckling my seatbelt. She didn’t turn—either she didn’t hear me or ignored me. I gave myself a quick glance in the rearview the way robbers do in the movies just before opening the car door, walking into the bank, and running out with the cash without ever having closed it, so confident in their success. “Hey! Come back!” I yelled after her, wiping rainwater from my mouth.

“You decided to stay?” She continued walking, patting her hands against her wet clothes. I was frustrated with her lack of urgency. We were walking through the bushes and sheets of water were whipping against my back.

“Stay? Do you need a ride somewhere? I didn’t think there were any houses around this—”

“There aren’t,” she interjected. I decided to operate under the assumption that she was delusional, and use that as an explanation should any of my actions be considered rude from that point forward. We were standing just barely beyond my headlights’ scope, a little ways up a hill. I heard a tree branch snap somewhere nearby. “I don’t live around here. You should probably head home, boy, and get that head checked out.”

“You’re wandering the desert in a monsoon storm? Who does that?” I asked, both squinting and snarling—the expression about which my mother had always complained but to which I was oblivious. Its power didn’t work the same way on the woman—she seemed entertained by my question rather than insulted by the judgement inherent in my demeanor.

The rain was dying down and her voice softened. “Do you know the story? The story of the poison ocean?” The irrelevance gave me the impulse to call 911 but my phone was in the car. I felt I had an obligation to bring this woman to safety since I followed her into the bushes, but she didn’t seem concerned with neither the storm, nor my good intentions.

“If I let you tell me, will you let me take you home?” I asked, hoping the story would be brief. She nodded, and pulled me under the partial umbrella of a palo verde like the one I saw on the highway. I imagined the palo verde crushing us both. No one would ever have known why I was there, what I was doing with this old woman, that the last thing I ever heard was the story of the poison ocean for God’s sake. She was slowly swaying back and forth; I thought she might be drunk but her eyes were alert and her speech clear.

“They don’t tell children this in school,” she prefaced.

Another thunderbolt struck. In its flash I saw how dirty she was, the droop of her eyelids, each of the white hairs around her face like a strand of light. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three—. I was shivering. She was still. I felt like the white man, escorted out into the fields by the Native American to plant corn, forced to come face-to-face with his relative inability to ‘connect with the earth.’

“A long time ago, there was a boy, a farmer’s son, Homer. He didn’t want any of that life; he was a real head-in-the-clouds kid. Didn’t have the stomach for delivering calves or mulching or the like. His job was cutting down pine tree trunks. The trick was to leave the tops fine and just take the thick bottoms. The family was a large one—Homer had six brothers and sisters, and everyone had his place at the table fifteen feet long. His mom and dad were that strong-ankled, cornbread type. They lived a short ways from an ocean, and Homer would wander there a lot when he wasn’t chopping off tree trunks. One day, a new family moved in to the house nearest to them, another family with kids by the bushel. They had a girl about Homer’s age, Delia, and the two hit it off just fine. In fact, they fell in love and wanted to run away together, as kids tend to do. All hands and mouths, those two. But Delia’s father was a real ox of a man—he’d have had horns if the Lord let him. He didn’t like Homer’s family, in the way some people just don’t like other people, for no reason at all. Not even a people as nice as Homer’s family. Delia threatened her father with running away with Homer and he, fearing she’d end up pregnant too young, took no time in moving the girl away to live with her uncle on the other side of the ocean. People just did things like that—moved people to the other side of oceans. There were more oceans back then. Homer was mortified. He was sick with love. One morning he was at the beach, staring off at the line where blue meets blue, hoping Delia was doing the same, and talking to himself about how much he hated her father. Because he was a fisherman, Delia’s father had to come down to the shore sometimes and check how the tide was doing, make sure the ocean hadn’t gone still overnight since fish died in still water. He overheard what Homer was saying and worried the boy’d try to kill him so he decided he’d get the boy first. But he had to make it look like an accident. He went into the woods and he caught a snake, one that was real poisonous. He planted it in Homer’s bed when the family was all out farming or churning butter. Meanwhile, Delia’s uncle was even more strict than her father. He’d locked her in the tower of his sandcastle house. She felt permanently damp. However, she knew that if her father died, her mother would be free to send for her to return, so she plotted to kill him. But she didn’t have any way of getting to him, being across the ocean. She knew he’d get out on the water soon enough to fish or drink. People drank ocean water back then—this was before salt. She bartered with one of the maids for a vial of snake poison and poured it out the window and into the ocean. Back home, Homer was bit by the snake her father left in his bed. He recognized what kind it was and realized his goose was cooked. His whole body ached and burned. In a last act to be close to Delia, with his last strength, he ran out to the beach and threw himself into the surf, moaning her name and swallowing water in his theatrics. In that water was a small dose of the poison that Delia had thrown into the ocean, and that dose started to cool the burning, dull the aching. He lay in the sand and felt the evil writhing in his body quiet and die. She cured him with his own disease—that evil poison inside him was beaten by the tiniest bit of its own evil. And it didn’t matter that the ocean was big and fat as it was, that little bit of poison was still there. The two of us, we’re small in this desert, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t a part of it. A part of the world, even. The thing is, boy, you can cure anything with that same thing itself, that very same thing just real watered down.” She waited for a sign of understanding. When I offered none, she directed her gaze out onto into the dark.

The wind had picked up gradually over the course of her story; the rain felt like it was coming in sideways, or even from beneath us. My fingers, toes, and the tip of my nose were numb. I tried rubbing my hands together but the cold water thwarted my efforts.

“What does this have to do with you wandering the desert?” I asked, sidestepping the entire story, not wanting her to detect my fascination.

The woman sighed and seemed soothed by doing so. Minutes passed, punctuated by lightning and thunder. One one-thousand, two one—. I didn’t think she’d ever speak again. Her naked feet looked thick and calloused, as if she could walk anywhere, over a bed of jumping cholla and feel nothing.

“We’ve just got the deserts. I can’t walk an ocean, boy.”

Before I could respond, I heard a smash, the sound of metal against metal. I looked over to my car and saw that it had collided with the Neon, again. The water had risen and was carrying our cars downstream. I sprinted down the hill, my legs stretching fully, my arms held out for balance. I hadn’t run like that in a long time, especially downhill. It was nice to think nothing of the rain once I was wet enough. Once I was real watered down.

When I looked back to the palo verde, I saw that the woman was following me, though much more carefully. I surveyed the scene and determined there was nothing I could do to save my truck—it was nearly tire-deep and had been turned parallel to the current. Stepping into the water meant risking being swept along, and crawling into the bed of the truck to snatch my phone through the window meant risking being carried off with it. The woman caught up to me on the asphalt in time to watch as the flood pushed my truck and the other car completely off the road and out into the desert, my truck’s headlights still beaming above the water’s surface for a few seconds until they went out completely. Our only light was the periodic lightning strike.

I cursed, knowing then that I was stranded out there. The wind was blowing hard to make up for the easing rain. I was so cold that walking back into town seemed like a day’s journey and taking shelter the only resort. In response to my panic, the woman pulled out two small glasses, one from each pocket. They looked like shot glasses, and I thought she was proposing we celebrate my misfortune the old-fashioned way. Instead, she bent down to the water and dipped each glass into it and filled them. She handed one to me.

“If this desert’s ailing you, boy,” she said, finishing with a nod, as if to imply the rest. There was a satisfied smile on her face—the kind of satisfaction you get watching a kid fall and scrape his elbow for the first time. You know it’s just something he’s got to learn how to do well if he’s ever going to have tough elbows like you.

“You want me to drink that?” I asked, fearing it wasn’t a joke, focused still on my sinking truck.

“What? You want a spoonful of sugar?” she laughed.

I took the glass from her hand and held it up to catch the most of the lightning’s flash. One one thousand. It was cloudy and brown, the sediment still churning around.

“Let it settle, first,” she said.

I put my hand over the top so the rain wouldn’t get in and stir it up. The churning slowed and the water at the top of glass became clearer. The sediment continued to fall until it was only a thin layer at the bottom. The rest of the water looked only mildly opaque, like beach glass which hadn’t come from the usual green beer bottle but a set of eyeglasses—a glass which someone had trusted to be so clear he wouldn’t be able to see it between him and the world. I glanced back at the road in the direction from which I’d come, then at the spot where my car had been, at the palo verde on the hill, at the brown river before us, and finally at the old woman. Her drooping eyelids seemed arrestingly sad, but the satisfied look on her face had only intensified with a half smile. I held out my glass and the woman lightly tapped hers against it, the first collision of the evening that I had willed to happen. I drank it down. It was cold and somewhat metallic. She gave my arm a slight squeeze.

“We should find somewhere to wait this thing out,” I said, surprised by my own composure. She nodded, and we walked toward a heap of boulders down the road to get out of the rain.

— 2011