Send a Postcard From Where You End Up

Stunted sage brush thrashed in the wind. The sun dipped below the distant mountains that ran unimpeded through the expanses, they faded as the light of the day burned out from red to dull brown-gray to black. The sleeve of a wind breaker, cheap fluorescent green, whipped in the wind, the rest of the coat tangled in a patch of sage.
The jacket was torn in a hundred places by its course through the desert. Thorns and edges of sharp stone pulled and pinched the fabric as it had blown along, until it was caught in the brush where it lay stranded. It was the garish, nomadic tombstone of the man who had worn it.
Its purchase had been a necessity. Something to shield him from the sun and wind and sand, something he thought would lend him protection from what it was he had set out to know. He had finally learned what the desert meant.
His bones had been bleached by the rolling sun. His skeleton scattered slowly, traveled in different directions on the backs of ants or in the currents of roving dunes. His ribs jutted up from the earth like a cage trying to trap the sand. There was only desert where his heart had beat. He would have taken some solace in that.
The jacket would whip in the wind until it unraveled, strand by bright green strand, and then it would simply not be a jacket. Woven into some bird’s nest, maybe, or one more piece of trash choking a river somewhere on down the line.
A solitary coyote prowled the brush, eyes slitted against the wind. It looked like a piece of the desert itself, its bones sliding visibly beneath its tight, sandy pelt. The green sleeve snapped once in the wind and the coyote stopped, ears pricked. The sleeve cracked again like a whip and the coyote moved on without recognition, following the same old deer trails he’d walked down. The jacket was nothing worth eating.

Two
The man’s pickup truck was where he’d left it. ‘79 Toyota, busted fender, a light blue paint job that mirrored the sky. The windows were down, and the interior was flooded with sand. A miniature desert had formed on the dashboard, tiny dunes shaped by the brushstrokes of the wind.
The passenger’s side had sunken into what had been mud and was now just hard, cracked earth. The tires that weren’t buried had dried out and split under the sun, steel wheels gleaming through the ruined rubber.
The door on the driver’s side was dented from where he’d kicked it closed, given up and set out on foot, by himself.
But the truck wasn’t entirely empty. The registration was in the glove compartment, keys still in the ignition, the radio would have buzzed with static if the battery hadn’t died. What was missing was what was necessary. Canteen, first-aid, the bolt-action Winchester from the gun rack in the rear window.
He had always been prepared, his truck always ready to leave. Maybe it knew even before he did when he would finally ride out alone. He put faith in the unalive, like sea glass, the beauty that the oceans wrought from what man threw away.
The tracks from the truck and the tracks from the man who had left it were long gone. There was little permanence in the desert aside from the permanence of the desert itself. Sun and wind, heat and cold. Bone dry. Empty. That’s what he found so dependable about it.
Snakes and scorpions and ants inhabited the shadow of the pickup truck. They came and went with the years, burrowing under the sunken wheels until their tunnels collapsed under the weight of the steel carcass and then they dug again. It was as if the desert was consuming the truck whole, little by little.
The wind-driven nails of sand stripped the blue paint from the truck’s body, etching it slowly away. Spider web cracks in the windshield grew with the fluctuations of the days and nights, winters and summers. One of these days it would crumble and splinters of glass would fall and be ground away into sand, like the sea glass, but in the desert’s eyes. A fitting end, and what he had wanted for himself. To go farther and farther from the cities and streets and super markets until there was only the desert.
The pickup had come a long way. It could be seen for miles from every direction, but no one had laid eyes on it since the man had left it behind when it had quit on him. Maybe someone in a plane had spotted some dark shape below, but maybe not. There wasn’t much flying done above the sand, only commercial flights five miles above, too high to really see anything anyway.

Three
When he’d lived in the Airstream he was the closest thing to a nomad left. The Comanche and the Sioux had long since settled down and the man wished that maybe they hadn’t. He wished the structuring of the world had gone a little differently, too.
The trailer sat in the dust. Ragged curtains flittering in the open windows, years of sun burning the red fabric to pinkish white.
A photograph still hung inside the camper, nailed to a wooden shelf. It was a picture of a woman and of him. He wore a red flannel shirt and had long, curly blond hair. His belt was made out of rattlesnake skin. Her black hair hung down her breast and her blue eyes glowed. They were smiling and he had his arm around her, but even then his eyes had been distant. As if he was already looking out into that desert. Gauging it.
A pot sat on the stove, a few tin plates were stacked on the counter. Dirty silverware left in a full sink had rusted over as the water evaporated. It was as if he had simply vanished between heartbeats, and life had tried to go on without him.
The animals avoided the trailer. To them it still stank of man. The coyotes and foxes trotted past, ears tuned towards the site where he had once lived, but they’d never truly investigate the place. There was no food to be had, no scent of true prey in the wind. There were no sounds when they listened.
Maybe they could feel him there, as if the land had leeched part of him away and kept it for itself. Feel his envy when he’d wake at dawn and see the desert, and watch the newborn sun rise and glow rosily over the sand and the mountains so far in the distance, so far from everything else.

Four
It was the brief sliver between night and day when no sun burned and the street lights had not clicked to life. The stars had not yet come to wheel in arcing constellations in the dark sky. It was the dusk of dusk.
The pawn shop was like that passing hour. Empty, despite what had been left inside. Made empty by the people who passed through, like the man who had come in a blue pickup truck and left a quarter of an hour later with a few more dollars for gasoline and a bite to eat. Road money, easily made and easily spent.
The pawn shop was the closest thing to the highway that unspooled from the east and dwindled away into the yawning horizon westward. He had pulled off the road because now he sought the immutable. He wanted to cut the threads of sentiment. He had learned the trick of unowning.
The owner of the shop knew his kind of man. Industrial racks held tattered fatigues and shelves of boots with worn heels. Glass cases where knives sat like teeth, butterflies and Ka-Bars and pig-stickers with polished blades. Sport rifles hung from hooks on the north wall, yellow price tags fitted through the trigger guards. The south wall was a congress of the heads of dead elk and deer, lorded over by a bull moose with glass eyes as black as the night that had finally rolled in. Those decapitated beasts were strangers there, ornaments carried down from green mountains to collect dust.
The man had seen the stillness of the ornamental herd when he’d entered the pawn shop. He felt the urge to tear the heads down and truck them out to the desert where they could become nothing but strands of hair or flecks of bone. He wondered if the right place existed for such mass disintegration. An ocean of sand? All of the dunes alike except for the mountain of dusty heads fading away?
He wanted to find those dunes and let the heads stay where they were on the wall and bear witness to the comings and goings of other restless men. He turned his eyes from the walls to the fat old man behind the counter who owned the place.
Well hoss, the old man said, she’s only fourteen karat. The man shrugged and pocketed the folded bills. She always was, he said, and left without another word.
He was an unraveler now. He’d let go of what he didn’t need for fifty dollars. No haggling, no questions asked. That piece of him lay in the pawn shop in a cardboard box with all the other wedding rings.

Five
There was a camera sitting in a woman’s attic with a half a roll of film left in it. She’d forgotten about it, and the images would be erased when someone went to check whether or not the thing was empty. That flash of sunlight would wipe the last photograph of the man in the green wind breaker from the face of the earth.
But the photograph was still there now. The shutter had blinked open and shut as he had loaded that ‘79 Toyota, long before it was resigned to its destruction by the desert. Before it was rust. He had a box in his arms, several more were stacked in the bed of the pickup.
The boxes in the photo were taken from an alley behind a liquor store. They held what had made the first cut, what he’d decided to keep as he gave away his old life. Mostly things of practicality, a few of sentiment. If the photo had ever been printed, someone could have taken a razor blade and sliced the boxes out of the frame as the man grew closer to the desert and threw more of himself away.
Clothes from his father stuffed into a Pacifico box would sit on a curb in Taos, New Mexico. A box with the Anheuser-Busch eagle stamped on the side held family photo albums. They would rot in a dumpster in southern Utah, outside Moab. Shoes in a gutter with soles worn paper thin. The rifle in the gun rack would lay buried in the desert until men from the Bureau of Reclamation would toe what was left of the rusted barrel out of an irrigation trench they’d been digging.
Slowly what was left in the back of the pickup truck would become only what he needed to survive, and then less than that. The photo held evidence of the man shedding himself already. The sidewalk where the truck was parked was obstructed by a dumpster where bodies wound up sometimes. Scavengers had already found it, they rifled through his things looking for pieces of him they could claim as their own. Clothing and furniture. A thirteen inch black and white TV without rabbit ears. A medicine cabinet with shards of a shattered mirror clinging to the caulk.
The woman behind the camera was the same as the one in the photo that he would nail to the Airstream. She would never be more than a stranger because that wasn’t what he was looking for. When he kicked the door of his truck closed, he’d forget about her entirely.
In the photo, his face was calm. It was as if he didn’t recognize the things around him being pawed through, things he’d owned not fifteen minutes prior. It was like seeing vultures picking flesh from the bones of something still alive.