Read by Lin Sagovsky
The moon had hidden itself somewhere. Perhaps it had moved behind the Santa Rita Mountains to the east where it could sulk amongst the sycamores, or perhaps it was chuckling at its own cleverness down inside some concealed box canyon. But it was nowhere to be found when that night began and the desert was dark as it stretched out in all directions. Dark except for the incandescent yellow light that passed through the six windows of a double-wide mobile home that stood in a clearing cut a quarter-mile from the highway. The curtains in the windows were of a red and brown Navajo pattern.
An hour or so later, after the moon made the decision that enough was enough and lifted itself up off of the horizon and shone down a dim blue on Creation, one of the mobile home’s Navajo pattern curtains moved and the sash behind it was carefully slid open. A little cowboy boot appeared, then a second little cowboy boot, and then the rest of a little cowboy as he slithered himself through the small opening and into the night. The boy, who could not have been more than six, reached back inside and grabbed his old bent Stetson and placed it on his head before closing the window behind him. He’d been taught since birth never to go outdoors without having a hat on.
The boy walked slowly, his heart pounding in his chest with every step, as he made his way past the white Chevrolet truck and the horse trailer that were parked near the rusted propane tank. He felt for the first time in his life how threatening the world could be when you didn’t have permission to be in it. Every footfall seemed to cause an avalanche of rocks to fall. Every few steps he turned to look back and make sure that no lights in the mobile home had come on. Weaving his way between the cholla cactuses he made his way deeper into the desert. Coyotes and jackrabbits screamed with life and death until the ammonia smell of collecting manure grew as he neared the back gate a way at the far end of the property, where the horse pens were. One last time he checked the mobile home for lights but it was still very dark, and now very small.
The four horses inside the pen swished their tails and ambled cautiously towards the boy, craning their necks over the steel tube fence to take a closer look at him. He was sitting down in the dirt by the hay bale stack that was covered with a tarp meant to serve as protection against the rainstorms that never came. He wiped the tears from his face and apologized up at the sky for what he was about to do.
The boy heard the sound of the fighter jets from the Air Force Base roaring off in the distance, a sound that he loved and heard every single day, at all hours of the day or night. This was a sound that the boy had always found comforting. Every afternoon he would lie down in the back of the white Chevrolet truck and watch the aircraft manoeuvre across the sky, just for him. These Blue Angels impressed him with their acrobatics and the exhaust trails they left that stretched into infinity. The boy would wipe the dirt from his glasses and know that he would be up there too, one day. The sounds of the fighters stopped the boy’s tears but he still shook with fear. At the fence the horses continued to watch him, never having seen something like him in the middle of the night before.
Inside the boy’s left front pocket was the only friend he’d ever known, a barn mouse he’d found underneath the mobile home the previous summer. He removed his friend and held him in his hand, petting its back with a finger. In the boy’s right front pocket was a small pocket knife that he’d taken from the drawer next to the television. He took that out too and stood up. Still shaking and still apologizing up at the sky and now to the friend in his hand, he walked over to the horseshoeing anvil and placed the docile rodent and the small knife on top of it.
Then he asked the Devil for help.
“Excuse me, Devil,” he whispered in a falsetto Arizona drawl, still stroking the mouse, “I need yer help, please, sir. I‘d seen on TV when I wasn’t supposed to be watching that you’ll trade me my soul fer sumthin’ that I want. I want to trade it for you to make my dad the best bronc rider there is. Please, sir. He’s only happy when he wins. I’ll trade you, please.” His voice shook and he barely got the words out, “I asked God and Jesus for this but nothin’ happens. My dad keeps getting bucked off and then hurts us.”
The boy took the knife and struggled with getting the tiny two-inch blade unfolded.
“I saw on TV too that you need me to do something like this so you’ll listen.”
He held the knife in his hand and squeezed his eyes shut. He apologized one last time to the sky and to his friend and then he brought the knife down and into the mouse. There was a squeak and the boy gasped at learning what death was. Not knowing how hard a living thing needed to be stabbed, the boy had brought the knife down so hard that it glanced off the anvil and the mouse, who had died instantly and with pain that only lasted for a moment before it was lost into eternity, slid off the knife and into the dried brush. The boy’s legs gave out underneath him with fear and he fell to the ground, expecting fire and hands formed of bone and scales to rise up from the ground and drag him down into the earth. He whimpered at the thought of fire.
But he was still there, in the desert and on the ground next to the anvil. There was still a sky that had stars were in it that formed a Milky Way that separated the sky in two. The dull roar of the jets flying overhead was still there and he still smelled the horses.
Which meant that nothing had happened.
“Please? Help my dad, Devil,” he whispered into the dirt.
“Please. He hits us when he loses. Make him happy, please. He never wins.”
“Come out, please.”
The dirt made no attempt to respond and the horses had lost interest, gathering instead at the water trough.
The dull roar of the fighters began to grow, filling up the sky as they approached low over the mountains, soon growing into the deafening sound of ripping paper and hissing. The force of their propulsion systems washed down over the desert, causing the alarm on the Chevrolet to go off. The boy’s father lived in constant fear of the Mexicans who wandered north through the desert, positive that these human waves of migration were all focused on taking his truck back down into Mexico and exchanging it for drugs.
The boy was still on the ground, still pleading with the devil for help, when the lights in the mobile home came back on, one by one, illuminating all six windows. After a moment the alarm stopped sounding and then the lights went out once again. The boy turned on his back and lay there, letting the nearby insects who had detected his warmth crawl over his arms and legs.
He may have laid there for twenty minutes trying to figure out if he’d done something incorrectly, wondering if he needed to sacrifice something more, something larger. Then the boy heard rocks moving and dried plants snapping; a soft voice, his mother’s, calling out his name. She was whispering, but even the boy could tell how afraid she was at that moment, how she wanted to scream out his name, desperate for him to appear for her.
Whenever she could, she had always told her son to wait down by the horses when her husband would begin knocking over the furniture or throwing whatever was at hand. But that night her husband was drunk when he came back from the rodeo in Tucson, fists clenched. She’d told her son to go to bed and then told her husband to play the stereo. She fantasized about killing her husband when she showered after. In the blue moonlight, the red marks on her neck from the way he’d held her down were visible.
“Come out, please,” she begged, tears moving over her lips.
The boy, like the moon, raised himself up off the horizon. When she saw him by the anvil, his mother ran the rest of the way through the desert to him.
“What’re you doing out here, baby?” She picked him up. They both felt the tears on one another’s face.
“Prayin’ for Dad. I want him to be ok. I want him to win.” The boy still had the knife in his hand. The fighters, somewhere in the darkness, turned around for another pass before heading back to the Air Force Base.
“You are a kind boy, did you know that? A very good boy. No matter what. You remember that, ok, baby?”
“Ok.” He kept hearing the final squeal of his friend, whose body the ants had just located, continuing the cycle of life. He felt his mother squeeze him.
And as the fighters passed overhead, the sixth in the formation experienced a sudden, irreparable, and catastrophic failure of its engines. Power failed, the fire went out, and the jet began falling silently from the sky. The pilot was able to eject before the unoccupied jet fell directly on the mobile home that was occupied by the boy’s sleeping father.
The boy felt the heat from the explosion on his face, like when the oven door was open, and his mother ran carrying him through the desert. He saw the horses on the ground after having tried to jump the fence in wide-eyed terror, breaking their legs. The engines in the sky drowned out everything as they passed. She carried him barefoot deeper into the desert to safety until, finally, she put him down.
“Are you ok?” He’d never seen such terror in his mother’s face before, like the horses.
“Yes,” the boy answered. “Are you ok?”
“Yes, baby.” She looked at the fire where the mobile home used to be. The flames rose up in great blooms that opened for a brief moment, curling at the ends like smiles. The four horses writhed inside the pen. His mother put her hand to her lips and the boy could hear her laughing softly. He saw the bruises on her forearms and the laugh lines in her red eyes.
“Are you happy?” he asked, confused.
© Craig Calhoun, 2012
Craig Calhoun left Tucson, Arizona to live in Toronto, Canada in 2007. When not writing, he enjoys screaming at the politicians on television and weirding out his adopted countrymen with fantastic tales of the rifle ranges of his youth. His work has appeared in several North American literary journals.