Assumption

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Dusk came on and the pinacate bugs were out of their holes and trudging along the wash. Ogden Walker pushed his toe into the path of one of the large beetles and watched it stand on its head. He glanced up at the shriek of a chat-little and noticed the pink in the sky and though it showed no promise of rain he walked up to higher ground to settle in for the night, remembered how quickly desert floods could occur, how his father would not drive across a dip in the road if there was even an inch of water standing in its trough. The chill of evening was already on him. He built a fire, ate the sandwich he had bought some miles back near Las Cruces, and then rolled out his sleeping bag. He stared up at the new moon and the clouds that threatened to obscure it and tried to recall the last time he had been able to sleep in the desert. The desert he and his father had shared was not like this one. The high desert was not so severe, was not so frightening, relentless, was harsh only for its lack of water. His father spoke to him, a dead voice telling Ogden that he was a fool, a fool to love the desert, a fool to have left school, a fool to have joined the army, a fool to have no answers, and a fool to expect answers to questions he was foolish enough to ask. And his father would have called him a fool for working as a deputy in that hick-full, redneck county. His mother would be waiting for him in Plata. She wouldn’t call him a fool. He thought about the desert around him, thought about water and no water, the death that came with too much water, flooding that carried mice and snakes and nests and anything else in its way. To drown in the desert, that was the way to die, sinuses replete with sandy water, dead gaze to dead gaze with rattlers in the flow. Ogden closed his eyes and thanked the desert wind that it was all over.