Inhabited. Charlie Quimby

into rust-colored slurry. Runlets babbled past, gathering momentum over the slickrock. Down the wash, he heard the clack of stampeding stones. The air seemed carbonated. He stripped off his clothes, let the mist kiss his skin with breaking bubbles.

      Isaac woke to the flush embrace of parched earth and rain. A solitary bird called chu-wee, chu-wee, ruhruhruh, and then answered itself. He stepped past the curtain. A thin cascade spouted at the canyon’s head and dropped to a grey-green welcome at the bottom. The cistern barrel was full now, the water settled and clear. He could not see the wash, but he heard its flow, cheerful after last night’s roil. This minute, Isaac liked living here. He liked it very much.

      A wind-chime tinkle of faraway voices. He fixed the source, two ant-people daring each other on the canyon’s opposite rim. Something flew apart from them and settled into a long glide. Not a drone—a yellow Frisbee heading his way. He swallowed his shout of protest. Sound had located them; they might spy him. His solitude was an illusion, his effort wasted. He had come this far only to find another place where he did not belong.

      The approach he’d taken over the hill would be treacherously slick and his mud-clogged boots would leave an indelible trail. He could wait a day or two for the ground to dry, or try the shorter course down the wash now that the flow had subsided. He explored as far as the first drop. Twelve feet or so with an uneven landing. Rugged but doable. But suppose he encountered completely impassible stretches further down. Could he climb back out or would he be stranded? Not a risk he was prepared to take. He turned uphill, resigned to wait for the mud to dry, and spied the crafty boatman’s solution. Snagged in a piñon, a length of line secured to the trunk, a casting weight on its free end. With the aid of the rope, Hefner could go straight up and down the shortcut.

      Isaac appraised The Mansion a final time. He might be the last visitor to know who had lived here. A hundred years from now bits of Hefner’s stash could turn up like arrow points or shards of grey ware. He checked the date on the canned peaches, popped the ring, peeled back the lid and sniffed. Still good. He raised the can to Hefner before drinking off the sweet syrup.

      Down the wash he encountered sections scrubbed clean, brown sugar sand and pebbles packed into former potholes, crevices jammed with gravel, mud and twists of grass. Cottonwood saplings bent sideways, latticed with sticks and branches and clots of roots dangling like Druid ornaments. One chute required butt scooting in the stream to fit through a slot. He dragged his pack behind. Where the wash met solid granite, the declivities sharpened and became less forgiving. Twice more, Isaac used lines Hefner had anchored in the bedrock.

      A shining quarter moon glinted in the sandy bottom. He kicked away enough overburden to identify a chrome headlight ring. Maybe an entire car lay buried there. He moved downstream, alert to other newly exposed prizes. A flash of milky quartz winked from a packed bed of fine gravel. Its thumb-shaped contour seemed too polished to have been tumbled in the stream. Perhaps a broken dish or chunk of kitchen sink. He dug away the binding crust and pried under its concave back. The palette-shaped fragment flipped free, revealing a grey-green circle with an obsidian center. He bent to make certain.

      He’d always pictured glass eyes as marbles.

      Isaac cupped the eye in his palm and stroked the smooth curvature. Fine red vessels threaded the white. The iris feathered into grey and yellow vanes that plunged into the pupil’s dark crater. He met its blind stare with a gaze of wonder. What use was another eye? He saw too much already.

      Fun has always been part of our hardworking western heritage.

      —“Home” with Meg Mogrin, Grand Junction Style

      Years had passed since Meg last attended the Barclay’s annual barbeque at the Crown B. A party that once celebrated the end of spring branding, it had been nudged into July for warmer evenings and in recognition that most of the partiers no longer came from the branding crew. Their ranch skills inclined more toward drinking, dancing and shooting fireworks. Since the winding drive back to town challenged even the sober, all were welcome to stay overnight in one of the houses, the barn or the meadow, thus averting one danger with another.

      Meg had come early under the pretext of helping Terri Barclay prepare the feast, which also gave her the option of departing before things got too wild. There was not much to do since the food was catered by a chuckwagon outfit run by a Barclay neighbor. Donnie asked the caterer if he would be serving Donnie’s own beef, since a few head were missing last fall. Meg sensed some tension behind the joke since neither party treated it as very funny. The alleged rustling could have happened fifty years ago. Change came slowly in Glade Park, and its history was sometimes indistinguishable from its grudges.

      Terri herself looked out of time but at home under a broad-brimmed hat, her long Emmylou Harris hair pulled back in horsewoman’s tresses. She bore her grey not as an erasure but as an underscore. Women in Terri’s family, which had been around as long as the Barclays, had never been expected to rein themselves in and even when she met Donnie at seventeen, it was too late for him to try. Her name was on half the Barclay property, fifty-one percent in the case of Barclay Enterprises because it gave the company woman-owned status for bidding on government contracts. Donnie was pragmatic. While he didn’t want a woman or the Feds telling him how to run his business, he was willing to listen—especially when the government suggested easier ways to take its money.

      Terri eyed Meg’s black pegged jeans and embroidered corral boots. “You want to go for a ride before it gets too crazy?” she said. “I haven’t got Roamer out all day.” Donnie had named Terri’s gelding Roamer after a former Democratic governor. He had not intended it as a compliment.

      Meg enjoyed Terri’s company but the boots were for show and she did not consider a rocking saddle five feet off the ground to be a relief. “Thanks. It’s enough just to get back up in this clean air.”

      They moved instead to the kitchen where they mixed punch and cut key limes for the moonlighting school teacher who would be tending bar. He wanted to practice his cocktails and they agreed to be his judges. Before long they were happy, chattering guinea pigs.

      “Donnie said you needed a break. What’s going on?”

      “A bunch of different things. It’s a busy time.”

      “He’s got a big soft spot for you.” Terri’s frown seemed to be working out the reason. Meg wasn’t sure how she had earned his attention. It was as if one day Donnie had walked up and introduced himself as a long-lost uncle.

       God, Terri didn’t think something was going on...

      A lime rolled under Meg’s paring knife. The blade snicked the pad of her thumb, drawing blood.

      “This is probably enough limes.” Terri examined the wound. She wetted a tea towel for Meg and went in search of a bandage.

      Meg dropped the knife into the sink and put pressure on the cut. A dull summer house knife meets a round fruit in a tipsy moment. Now the hand holding the towel reacquaints itself with the bloodied one. Easy to blame the neglected blade or the tough rind, but her wound resulted from losing awareness. Was that the purpose of pain, to bring us back to ourselves? Was the purpose of inattention to escape our pain?

      The kitchen clock read twelve forty. It had to be later. The second hand ticked against the seventeen and did not advance. She heard its faint buzz now, like a fly tapping the windowpane. She ran cold water over her thumb. The cut didn’t hurt any more but the idea of the laceration opening its tiny mouth turned her stomach.

      Terri returned with a Band-Aid tin. “Let’s see. Good and clean. All I found for disinfectant was horse liniment so we’ll forget that.”