tractors

It had broken down the night before, and I thought surely someone would have come along and driven me into Tonopah, but no one ever did. Towards morning it became a game, and I stayed awake just to prove that no one would come down the highway. I was alone, so I wasn’t sure who the proof would have fallen on, but it ended up not mattering much. I eventually fell asleep sitting against the flat tire. The grit from the road ground into the skin of my butt so that I could feel it cold and numb when I finally stood up.

What woke me was the sound of leather soled shoes coming across blacktop. I opened my eyes and looked left and found nothing. Looked right and saw a pickup truck pointing north with a door open. I heard a gasp and saw that a person wearing cowboy boots stood and watched me. My vision focused and the lack of sleep and the contorted position made wakefulness come on like I’d been buried alive and disinterred at the last possible moment. It wasn’t day yet, only a hint of the sun from the mountains in the east made it light enough to see, but the red taillights of the pickup truck were bright in the dusky morning. I said hello.

The cowboy said hello. “Thought you weren’t going to open your eyes,” he added, and I could tell from the way he looked that he was a cowboy, though he spoke only like a boy, no more specific than that.

I couldn’t get up yet. My knees weren’t moving, and mostly below my waist I couldn’t feel anything because I’d been sitting that position for so long. “Seen that before?” I said.

“It happens,” the boy said.

“Going to Tonopah?” I said without much hope looking at the pickup which was pointed towards Ely.

“Not directly,” the boy said putting out his hand to help me up.

“I see.” I took his hand and he levered me to my feet which I was just able to hold as blood rushed back into my knees.

“You got a spare?”

I hate obvious questions, but stifled my sarcasm as it was still early in the morning. Plus this kid could be of some help. “Old lady left me without one,” I said getting up. “Or rather, that is the spare.” I opened the trunk lid to show him the chewed up tire in the spare well that I’d been left with.

The boy moved like he had said something but I didn’t hear anything. The kid wore a straw cowboy hat with a wide brim, and a decorative strap around it. He had on jeans and a polyester shirt that fastened at the openings with mother-of-pearl snaps instead of buttons. He was only 16 years old, eighteen at the most. My Grandfather had had shirts like that; shirts that haven’t been made for decades, years at least I would think. Shirts that hadn’t been in style for even longer. Anyway, I couldn’t imagine a place where the boy could have gotten a shirt like that. It was clean and shiny and looked as young as he was, in shirt years.

“I got to go down the road to the house,” he said. “To town in a little while. You can come, and I’ll take you, but I ain’t coming back this way. Got to go out West a couple miles.”

I wondered what a couple miles meant to a kid like him. “How long?”

“Be in town around 3, maybe 4.”

I looked at the car and back up the road and down it.

“You could wait here for someone else to come by.”

I remembered the night and the flat sound of a road with no cars beside the row of creaking of the willows and the open trunk with the chewed up tire. When I set the locks and alarm with the key fob the kid gave the car and then me a funny look, like he couldn’t figure out what I’d done, or maybe why.

After a mile or two heading back in the opposite direction I’d been going the night before, the boy began to slow the truck and I saw something lying on the shoulder. It was big and white and puffy like a balloon. When we got closer the boy turned down a dirt road opposite the thing.

“Is that a dead cow?” I asked incredulous. The boy looked over and caught my eyes.

“It happens,” he said

The truck sped up again, and I saw that the road we were on was long and straight and headed West down into the valley and back up the other side to where only sage and rabbit brush was collected like a reservoir, contained between mountains and lava flows, of nothing at all.