ROAD TRIP (4) Still 1895 As ill defined as the track was Zeke managed to follow it, or at least he hoped he was following it. Every few hundred yards he passed a boulder daubed with white paint. He assumed these to be markers thoughtfully left by the residents of Pueblo Flats, probably to aid their own navigation as much as to assist strangers approaching the town. If he stopped seeing them he didn’t know what he’d do. His horses were making good progress, better progress than he expected. The absence of wheel ruts made the going smoother. His wagon lurched and bounced less, the horses had less pulling to do. After he’d gone a mile, or maybe two, the landscape began to change. It was still desert, but the flatness he’d become familiar with took on distinguishable features. Low, rocky escarpments reared up from the desert floor, they were distant still, but he could see them well enough in the late afternoon sunlight. The trail he was following appeared to be heading for a point midway between two of these features. Their distance was hard to guess, but—and he hoped he was right—they at least provided him with another point by which to steer. Minutes dropped away. Shadows lengthened. Daylight was gradually yielding to twilight. The desert surface on either side of the trail was beginning to perceptibly rise and Zeke realized he was about to enter the cleft between the escarpments. Surely there’s not much farther to go, he thought. He glimpsed another painted boulder. The land continued to rise. Within minutes he entered a gloomy canyon barely touched by the last of the day’s sunlight. Looking skyward he thought he saw the twinkle of a star. He blinked and looked again. There was no star, but the sky was turning a deep, deep blue. The canyon walls were not high, fifty feet, sixty feet, and ahead he could see a patch of lighter sky that grew steadily in size as his horses plodded forward. He didn’t know what lay at the end of the canyon, but he hoped it was Pueblo Flats. Coming out of the shadow of the rocky cleft the light almost blinded Zeke. He screwed up his eyes, squinted as they adjusted to the change. There was another white trail marker to his right, just ahead, its paint luminous in the disappearing sunlight. He scanned the landscape. There were more escarpments rising from the flatness, long shadows stretching out to welcome the night. There was something else too, a patch of green, just discernible with a few dark shapes rising from it, so regular that he thought they could only be buildings. Pueblo Flats, Zeke thought, at last. A place where he’d hoped to build a future, but where he now felt certain there was no future—for him at least. He heard the distant call of a coyote, and then another—unless it was just an echo of the first, bouncing off the rock walls. What had brought people to this godforsaken place! Godforsaken or not he suspected that someone would tell him that it was God’s will that had brought them here, and God’s will that had brought him here as well. Given the combination of circumstances that led him to undertake his desert journey, Zeke, although not a religious man, could not say for certain that they were wrong. The last time he’d come close to praying it had been out of desperation not conviction, the same kind of desperation that had brought him to Pueblo Flats. Nothing had come of his prayers then, of course, and he feared, he really feared, that nothing would come of his being here and that the last of his resources would have been squandered for nothing. He tried to assess the distance between him and the town. With the darkening sky distance was difficult to judge. It was less than a mile he believed, based on the distance he’d come, the speed he had made and the time that had elapsed since he’d turned off the trail from Albuquerque. Urging his horses forward, trying to make the most of what little light remained, he told them that they would rest soon. ****** Zeke made it into Pueblo Flats on foot. With the darkness complete he’d climbed down from the wagon to lead his horses. He could see the trail better that way. He could watch out for obstacles that might have deprived him of what little he had. He couldn’t tell how many buildings stood in the cluster before him, not more than five or six, he thought. There were only seventeen people here, maybe a few horses, a goat or cow for milk. Lamplight shone from a couple of nearby windows, flickering, sending him a message he couldn’t understand, although he hoped it was ‘welcome, stranger.’ He could hear laughter, a suggestion of music. No one had rushed out to investigate his noisy arrival, but perhaps it hadn’t been noisy enough to be heard above the soundtrack of these isolated lives. He locked the brake of his wagon in place, left his horses harnessed, and walked towards the light. He’d need to introduce himself.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 13:21:44 +0000
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