Chapter Seven

With swirling winds and the thick clouds separating earth from sky like a curtain dividing the profane from the sacred, Lyle had trouble figuring out which way was east.  He lumbered through the deepening snow for what seemed like ages, feeling like he must be at least a quarter of the way to Rocky Ford, only to slide down an embankment and almost into the icy current of the Arkansas River.  

At first he cursed every drop of water that ever carried away an ounce of dirt over the millions of years to form that damn river, and he hated every step he’d walked in the wrong direction.  He sat for a good while resting against the frozen embankment, which gave him a break from the full force of the relentless winds.  He ate half of the beef stick, wanting so badly to devour the other half, and wanting even worse to wash it down with a nip or two of the Wild Turkey.  Once again he could almost hear the laughter, the clinking of glasses, the rhythmic tap of his boot soles two-stepping on a wooden dance floor, and the music. The taste of Jack and Coke on his lips and the voice of Lyle Lovett in his ears.  What's so wrong about that?

Although his body had stopped falling some time ago, Lyle realized his thoughts and thirst were plunging toward a much more dangerous river than the one that sprayed him every so often with frigid water caught up in a gust of wind.  He pulled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and after lighting five or six matches from the book, he finally kept it lit long enough to breathe in a little calm.  The smoke sometimes fooled his body into thinking the hole inside had been filled.  After he ground out the half smoked cigarette, he reached back into his flannel shirt pocket and held the photo of Maricruz in his trembling hand, which along with the nicotine coursing through his veins, helped him to forget his predicament for just a moment.

As he held the photo close enough to his eyes so that he could see her crooked smile in the solitary darkness, he tried to figure out what to do next.  It dawned on him that instead of cursing the river, he should have been blessing it.  The Arkansas River snakes southeast out of the jagged Colorado Rockies all the way through Kansas, Oklahoma, and finally into Arkansas.  On the way there, it flows just a few miles north of Rocky Ford.  The river also—and this is what was most important to Lyle that night—flows parallel to the county road he’d been on when he hit the patch of ice.  Although he wasn't where he wanted to be, he now actually knew where he was.  The terrain along the river would be too rough to traverse for as many miles as he needed to cover, but he finally had his bearings.  So he placed the photo back in his pocket and, still feeling he might need it for something at some point, tucked the bottle back within the torn lining of his coveralls, and turned back the way he came to begin retracing all two miles worth of laborious and frozen steps.  If he did this, he knew that eventually he had to run into the county road, and that county road was his only chance.

Although he would have never imagined it possible, the weather seemed to worsen as he headed back toward the south.  The wind pounded the right side of Lyle’s face with a barrage of snow that felt more like frozen bullets from a Gatlin gun than the heavy flakes that descended slowly toward the hills outside of Bethlehem on Christmas cards.  He could never see more than just a few feet in front of him.  He had to rub his eyes continuously to keep his eyelashes from freezing together and the bandana over his nose and mouth was soaked through with breath and had frozen to his beard.  The canvas of his coveralls had reached its saturation point from his ankles up to his knees.  The leather of his boots seemed to be only another thin, wet layer of his own skin.  The nerves in the tips of his toes and fingers argued about whether they would go numb or light themselves on fire.  He’d barely slept the night before from excitement, and with only a half of a gas station beef stick in his stomach, he was growing weak, hungry, thirsty, and wondering if—he tried to convince himself it was when—he’d finally run into the road.  If it wasn’t soon, Rick just might have to write that eulogy after all.

His knees were stiffening, causing him to stumble and fall like a drunk, which is something he’d spent a lot of time practicing over the years.  He must have taken a million steps, but on step number one million and one the ground suddenly gave way beneath him and he fell onto his back, his entire body going under the snow like it was water.  The snow must have been four feet deep in that spot and it formed a kind of frozen sarcophagus around Lyle.  With his head dazed and aching, Lyle lay in the snow, overcome by a warm blanket of the thought of how good it felt to be lying down. The longer he lay there, the less he tried to coach himself to stand and the more he started to reflect on how sometimes a man just has to humble himself, bowing down, or in this case falling down, and admitting that the battle is lost.  He’d probably walked close to four miles already—more than two of those in the wrong direction—and he still hadn’t found that damn road.  He started to comfort himself that there are worse things in life than dying. 

   

Lyle decided that he wanted his body to be found with the picture of Maricruz in his hand so he pulled it out again and held it to his chest.  As he did this an impulse came over him, an impulse that he’d felt for the first time in his life just over the past ninety days, especially in those moments when he found himself staring at his own reflection in the water of a toilet boil, heaving out the residue of years of poison.  He started to use his cracked and scabbed lips to form a prayer—maybe to God, maybe to the night, maybe to Maricruz, or maybe even to himself; he really didn’t know.  “Help me get up,” he mumbled aloud.  “Please, help me get up.  There’s no more left in me.”  It was more like he was breathing the words than speaking them.  “I don’t care who it is, just send someone, anyone, to help me get up.”  Lyle kept whispering these words over and over until the weight of his eyelids was heavier than he could lift any longer.  The bawling of the wind above him and the soaking chill of the snow all around him drifted away, forgotten like they were in the distant past. 

Lyle stood in the midst of an infinite field of waist-high wheat as the sun rose warmly, filling the sky with a spectrum of reds and yellows, flowing together into a canopy of orange.  The golden heads of grain, heavy with kernels ready to be harvested, bowed and bobbed in the dry early summer breeze like square-dancers to their partners.  The sun warmed the skin of his clean shaven face as he walked slowly through the field, holding his arm out, letting the palm of his hand roll over the bristly hairs of the heads of grain as though he was petting them.  Lyle felt like he had been in the field since before he was born and could remain within its boundaries long after he died. 

He’d thought he was alone until out of the corner of his eye he saw that someone else was in the field with him.  As Lyle approached the figure, he made out that it was a man about Lyle’s age, lean and sinewy, with a parted and slicked palm aid haircut.  The man wore denim overalls, a white undershirt, and boots, and he sipped a clear liquid from a mason jar.  The look on the man’s face made Lyle feel uneasy like this field belonged to the man and Lyle was not welcome there, that he would not be tolerated.  The man’s eyes, with blazing serpentine veins spreading from bourbon shaded irises out into the yellows that should have been whites, resented Lyle, maybe even hated him.  An ancient fear boiled Lyle’s insides, and he needed to get away from the man as quickly as he could.  As Lyle turned away to run, the man’s coarse hand grabbed Lyle’s forearm so tightly the man’s thumb and fingers pressed against Lyle’s bone like a vice.  Lyle tried to pull away, wanting to scream for the man to let him go, but when Lyle opened his mouth the voice was not that of a man, but rather of a boy, of himself when he was a boy.  The man’s grip was inescapable, strong and painful, simmering and familiar.  In his struggle, Lyle saw a tattoo on the man’s forearm, a faded image of an American flag and an anchor, and Lyle recognized who the man was.  Lyle jerked back violently, breaking free and falling to the ground.  His father stood over him menacingly as he had done often and when his father opened his mouth, Lyle heard a voice he had not heard in twenty-seven years, except for in his nightmares. 

“Get your sorry ass up off of the ground,” the man spat onto Lyle, throwing down his jar and spilling what smelled like grain alcohol all around Lyle. "Are you still worthless, still a waste of air?”  Lyle tried to crawl away.  “If you don’t get up I’ll beat the life out of you.  Is that what you want?  I said get up!”  The man continued to berate Lyle, growing louder and more venomous with every word.  The figure of his father seemed to grow larger and larger as did the sun behind him as it rose into the sky like a film in fast forward and grew in size and intensity so that it enveloped the sky and turned Lyle’s father into an obscene and malignant shadow.

Lyle yelled out in the boy’s voice words that were the refrain of his childhood, “Leave me alone!  Get away from me!"  The wind grew so strong the grain was forced over so it nearly touched the ground and the heat of the blast on Lyle’s face was like the opening of an oven door.  The scorching wind seemed to thaw Lyle’s frozen synapses and allowed a thought to blow throughout his mind, maybe in the wheat field, maybe in the snow.  He shrieked at his father above him, “I hate you, you sick bastard!  I have to get up—not because you told me to, but because it’s worth freezing my ass off all night and having my toes cut off from frostbite and walking ten miles—I’d walk a million miles— just so I don’t have to see you again!  If this is hell, then I’ll do whatever I have to not to come back here, but if this is heaven, I’d rather burn!”  Suddenly his father was gone.

Lyle’s eyes blinked until they opened.  The scorching heat had departed, replaced by frigid cold.  Snow surrounded him on all sides as though he lay down in a tub.  Above him he could see the snow blowing, but for the first time all night he was completely protected from the wind.  He propped himself up on his elbows, and his head began to clear.  After he’d considered the situation, he said aloud, “Son of a—I bet I fell in a ditch!”  He thought for a moment and a smile formed beneath the bandanna on his face, and he cried out so loud they must have heard him in Rocky Ford, “And, I’ll be damned!  If I’m in a ditch, that means I’m just a few feet from a road!”

Lyle found new strength to climb out of what had almost become his own shallow grave.  As he pushed and crawled, he made out a rusty old section of barbed wire fence in front of him.  After catching his coverall leg on one of the barbs, ripping another small hole in the canvas, he stumbled and fell onto the road.  Frantically he dug through the snow and placed his hand on the surface like he was pressing his palm against the stones of a holy temple.  Asphalt!  Surely he'd happen upon a house at some point and some family of good prairie folk would take him in even though it must have been close to one in the morning.  He dreamed about it as he walked--the hot shower, the bowl of steaming soup, the sound of Maricruz's voice on the phone, and a few hours sleep on the couch beneath a home-knit blanket.

Once again, though, he walked and walked, yet it seemed like he was on a vast frozen treadmill, going nowhere, finding nothing.  He considered eating the other half of the beef stick, but decided to wait just a little longer.  Trying to keep his spirits up he started singing old Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings songs to pass the time.  He was about halfway through croaking out "Good Hearted Woman" when he saw it.  He rubbed his eyes at first and checked the bottle to make sure it was still full.  Yet there it was just twenty feet or so in front of him like a steel and glass oasis on wheels, just off the road and held in place by a fence post. He took off running toward the car and as he approached the rear end, he told Rick to put that eulogy away, because this car had exhaust coming from the tailpipe.