Nell drove up past Security and Memory, turned west on Aberdeen, then north on Avalon. Winters ran east to the landfill and west to Landers. Nell parked on Winters and climbed out of the car. She saw a ripple of pebbles in the sand and remembered. Seven months ago, Shiloh and Diamond had brought her here to get desert eyes. A dirt road took off north from where she stood. She started across Winters and stopped.
A dead bird lay at the edge of the asphalt, no mark on it, no blood or broken bone. Nell picked it up. The gray, black and white feathers were exquisitely soft against the palm of her hand. “I’ll take you where you can go back into the ground,” she said, crossed the road and walked north on the two-track. She found a cluster of ruined rock walls, then an intersection where a hawk nest sat in a telephone pole. She turned east, came round a curve and stopped. Someone was seated on a fallen Joshua just ahead.
She waited till her heart had slowed. The figure didn’t move. She waited. The bird was still warm in her palm. She moved a few steps closer to the figure. It was still. It could have been a gray Buddha. She remembered learning about the natural deities in Tibet, the rocks and trees and river eddies that looked like ogre gods and goddesses. She took a deep breath, left the two-track and walked toward the figure.
The Buddha remained still. She was about ten feet away when Buddha became a stump jutting up from the fallen Joshua. She let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and went to the old Joshua.
Nell tucked the bird in a space between the stump and a dead branch. He, for she somehow knew it was a he, lay just below what would be the head of the Buddha, facing east. She remembered one of the old medicine healers telling the Elysian crew that the direction of the afterworld was east. “Gate gate paragate,” she whispered, “gone, gone, gone to the other shore.”
She sat on the fallen Joshua. Something white flickered near her left hand. A tiny white spine lay in a crack in the bark. She pulled off her boots and dug her toes into the cool sand. She closed her eyes. The sun was a soft rose blossoming behind her eyelids. Nell touched the skull bracelet and began to wonder. What was the name for the gray, black and white bird? She had always been a girl who loved names.
Back at the cabin, she searched the Internet for gray, black and white birds, hooked beak, Mojave Desert. A Loggerhead Shrike appeared. “”(Shrikes): Songbirds with hook-tipped bills, hawk-like behavior. Shrikes perch watchfully on treetops, wires, often impale prey on thorns, barbed wire.” Nell was, for an instant, in love with the workings of the human mind. No matter what lay ahead, she knew that she was in love with knowledge – and with the pale gold light, the low indigo mountains, the certainty of the moon rising.
She drove back to the Joshua Tree near Wonder Electric and wrapped her arms around it. She remembered the rasp of the rusty wire in her fingers as she had freed the bark from a garrote of barbed wire; the softness of the shrike in her palm. Rough and soft had no meaning. Old and new were the same. Wire and bird were the same. There was only the Great Circling Around. Only that shape of love. —from 29
December 25, 2014: I walked out to the Joshua Buddha in the last gold of a Mojave sunset. I felt whole for the first time in months. I know those dirt roads as I know the lines and folds of my body. I walked past the tossed-out couch and bookshelf my son and I had named The Living-room. We had put the broken knick-knacks and dolls’ heads we’d found nearby on the shelves. The bookshelf lay splintered in the sand. There was no sign of the knick-knacks or dolls. There was a book in my jacket pocket.
I followed the web of roads, cut up away from them up to a yucca split in three sections. Once I’d found a dove’s nest in the hollow, no dove, but two pale eggs. A week later, the mother flew at me. A few days later the nest was gone. I walked past two big clusters of yucca, from whose hearts I had hauled away pizza boxes and shot-up beer cans. I dropped back down to the road, and turned north made myself wait to look east.
The sky had gone pale aqua. I stepped onto the sand and saw ahead of me the still figure of a gray Buddha. I found myself crying, felt my heart unclench. I walked toward the Buddha till it was a stump thrusting up from a downed Joshua. The rabbit cookie jar and the rabbit planter I had left there five years ago still crouched below the Buddha. The thick bark had fallen away from the trunk, and with it, the tiny reptile spine I’d tucked in one of its crevices.
I talked with the Joshua, the rabbits and the disappeared bones. I sat on the trunk and watched us all fall toward the horizon. I whispered, “Thank you.” It was time. I opened 29 and read: Nell drove up past Security and Memory, turned west on Aberdeen, then north on Avalon. Winters ran east to the landfill and west to Landers. Less than an hour earlier, I had done just that. I set the book on the cool sand beneath the Joshua Buddha. “I kept my vow,” I said and sat a little longer, feeling the air grow colder.
The dark deepened. I didn’t have a flashlight or headlamp. It was time to walk away. I looked back once and saw the faint shimmer of 29 beneath the old fallen trunk. You might imagine how that felt.
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