9
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Jack.
“I believe it with all my heart.”
“I’m sick to death of it.”
“It warms the cockles of my heart.”
“That’s your second one in a row about hearts,” Jack said. They’d finished the leftover tequila before even getting into the car, and had, on the drive, somehow started listing clichés.
Jo sat in the back seat, and hadn’t said anything. For some reason, all the ones Jack had thought of were negative, so Micah’s upbeat clichés made him feel like a downer. Jack glanced back and saw that Jo was looking out the window into the passing blackness, her forehead resting on the glass. She didn’t seem upset, per se, but she wore a wistful look; Jack sensed that she was disappointed in their lightheartedness.
A woman had just lost her home, after all.
“Yeah, well, I’m all heart,” said Micah. “Ha!”
“I don’t want to play anymore.”
“That’s not really a cliché, is it? Did you mean ‘Don’t let’s play games’?”
“I mean no more clichés.”
Having successfully spoiled the fun and removed, thereby, whatever doubt remained about his downer-status, Jack frowned. He thought about Desmonda sleeping at her son Prince’s house tonight among unfamiliar things. At a certain age, unfamiliarity must feel like both an insult to your achievement on this planet, and a callous reminder of the Great Unfamiliar you’ll soon have to face. It was a pity, and Jack made a mental note to try and set up a collection for her during the Busk. She’d come through for him before, had always been extremely generous, and it was crucial, he decided, to repay her kindness.
“Desmonda took us in, remember Jo?” Jack looked back, but she didn’t acknowledge him. He continued for Micah’s sake. “She took us in when most folks in town still weren’t sure about Jo. They knew me, of course, but Jo was something else to them. Something they didn’t know what to make of.”
“Obviously,” said Micah, “they just hadn’t talked to her.”
“It was about a year after we’d officially moved into my father’s house, and we’d settled into a pretty slow pace. I was doing some work here and there for people, putting up new roofs, pulling junk around, and Jo was trying to get a Yoga class going, but most of our time was down-time.”
“Well it’s not like you had rent to pay.”
“Exactly. But the point is, things were quiet. We’d go for days without hearing a noise we didn’t make, let alone a voice. So one night we’re woken up by a cacophony of squealing, grunting, stomping and a strange clicking sound.”
“God, that clicking,” said Jo, finally listening. “It gets in your brain.”
“Like what,” asked Micah, “fingernails tapping?”
“Louder. It was Javelina, a whole herd of them. We couldn’t see them until the morning, but they sure as hell made themselves known.”
“Of course, I didn’t know what they were yet,” Jo said.
“Right, Jo was terrified. I had to explain to her what they were.” Micah shrugged.
“Well,” he said, “what are they?”
“They’re a kind of bristly little wild hog. They’re skittish alone, but a herd of them gets a little bolder. They’d run tightening circles around us as we walked up the path, making their clicking noises and darting out. One stabbed his damn tusk into my boot.”
Micah repeated the slow, low whistle he’d given at the end of Jack’s last story. “So what did you do?”
“Well, my first thought was to run them off, just start shooting. But Jo didn’t like that idea, so—”
“I just didn’t see the need for bloodshed,” Jo said.
The car was quiet. Up ahead they could see the slow burn of a high light at Border Run!, and the car wove back and forth with the curving road so it appeared off to the right, then to the left, then back to the right. Jack could tell Jo was upset by the direction of the conversation, so he let it be. He wasn’t interested in arguing. He’d just wanted to tell a story about Desmonda, but he felt like he’d botched it somehow. Like it had become about him, or about them.
“I was right, in the end,” said Jo. “They moved on.”
As they rounded the final turn before Jack’s driveway, the light they’d seen before, now to the right, was joined by another opposite it. The new light, or lights, for there were a few of them scattered low across the land north of the road, flickered and danced. It was fire. Jack’s first thought was that there must be a wildfire. He grabbed the dashboard, adrenaline making him sober, before seeing that the fires were contained, and revealed the forms of men walking before them: they were bonfires.
“Shit,” he said.
Micah slowed the car. “Who are they?”
“Tohono O’odham and Navajo, mostly. They’re protesting.”
They passed the first fire, then the second, and then turned down the drive. There were no more than a couple dozen people, all told, but Jack knew that by morning there’d be more. He hadn’t thought to warn Micah about it, or tell Jo that their numbers had gradually grown. But then, they were early this year. They got to the parking lot before anyone spoke, and Jack felt as though the car were flooded with judgment.
“Okay,” Micah said after putting the car in park, “I’ll bite. Protesting what?”
Jack remembered the first time they’d showed up. They’d come the night before the first Busk and were only nine or ten strong, and at first he thought they’d come to join the festival. But after staying for it and leaving soon after, their true opinion of the goings-on became clear.
“They come every year for the Busk Ceremony,” Jack said. “Has Jo told you about the Busk? Anyway, they’re harmless, except for my ego.”
Micah looked in his rearview mirror for a moment, then shrugged. “Yeah, she told me about the Busk. Frankly, it seems like they should support what you’re doing.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s the what, so much as the who.”
Micah opened his door and began to climb out. “See,” he said, “that’s what you’d call a genetic fallacy.”
They all stood in the darkness outside the car, and the last light of Border Run! shut off. They turned away from the bonfires and headed down the path.
“What’s a cockle, anyway?” Jo asked.
