Read Online Keys of Babylon by Robert Minhinnick - Free Book Online

mesquite around me, we’d been chewing it. And every inch of me ached and ached. I had cholla scratches all over. Every patch of my skin. There was a prickly-pear needle in my wrist. Look, there’s the scar. Those thorns were like fish hooks, Larry. I know how a fish feels. I see the girls now who pierce themselves with studs and rings and I can’t believe it. I have to turn away. If you’ve been in the cholla, you don’t do that.
    Our clothes were rags. We’d all run in different directions. What we had agreed, if we split up, was to wait till morning, then look around. So that’s what I did. I could see a water tower in the distance, hear traffic on the blacktop. I searched everywhere. Then waited, looking out. But the others didn’t come. Juan and Juanita, they must have been together. If they weren’t, one or the other would have showed up.
    That was it. I’d made the crossing. But I was on my own. On my own in a foreign country, Larry. Somehow we’d crossed the border but there was no sign on the ground to tell us that. The heat was the same. The thorns were as sharp. I watched an eagle overhead. It must have crossed that border twenty times a day. And you know, right then, I didn’t care if they caught me and sent me back. What could they do? Take me to Sonoita and put me over the white line?
    Yes, I could speak some English. Yes, I had a little money left. Hadn’t lost my hat either. But I knew Juan was with Juanita. She was pretty. Like a cactus flower. Not like me with my big feet, my desert boots. Juan was with Juanita and my mouth was full of ashes. Maria touches Larry’s brow again.
    Okay, let’s go in. That’s my personal DVD for you. Enough for now, I think.
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    The next afternoon Larry is not so well. He sits in his armchair with head down. A mummy in a tartan blanket. The Rocky Point film is playing again, ‘The Breeze and I’ filling the room.
    Such longing in that music, she thinks. But a yearning for what? How the chords cascade. For two minutes she allows the old-fashioned organ sound to swell the hollow of the heart.
    On the bed is a scattering of CDs, a talking book of The Grapes of Wrath . But there are no real books or magazines in the room. Since his second stroke Larry has difficulty co-ordinating his eyesight. He can see well enough but cannot follow print.
    Maria turns the volume down, glances at Mrs Chernowski outside Sonia’s restaurant in Gila Bend. That day Mrs Chernowski did not touch the complimentary salsa but chose instead two little white hens’ eggs that came from the battery farm. With toast. With coffee which proved too strong. A flan, no, a crème caramel , that she enjoyed.
    Wasn’t it today the Chernowskis moved into their new home in Anthem? Frank had told her about Anthem years earlier. ‘A new community for vibrant seniors.’ I’ll stay in the trees, he said.
    The city replanted the barrel cactus and saguaros around Anthem. But not the rotten ones, the dead ones, the colour of old men. Those were dangerous cactus that could topple and kill. She’s seen a man once drive a Grand Am straight into a dead saguaro. It exploded into splinters. The whole tree, pale and bone hard, came up by the roots.
    Maria can visualise the house in Anthem now. It’s too big. There’s too much space between all those houses. Outside is an empty street that will stay empty all day, and in the kitchen a refrigerator full of food the Chernowskis will throw out. All that lettuce in its polythene. Even though the blinds are pulled down, the chrome on the four toilet seats gleams in the desert light. Outside in the mailbox are national magazines that will never leave their envelopes, on the kitchen pinboard the couple’s medicine regime in a laser-printed grid.
    Hey Larry, Maria says. Look at this. She takes a towel off a casserole dish.
    Yo. A present. For you. It’s steak. But not like you