i am indisposed

The place was spotless. A little dusty, but out there it’s hard to tell the dust from the air, if there is a difference. There was a box labeled Original Turkish Delight on the coffee table, and a bit of white powder beside it. The name meant something to me, but I couldn’t say what. There was an illustration of some kind of candy on the box representing, not in actual size, the boxes contents.

“I apologize for the mess,” the boy said after we had been inside a moment, but it seemed more of a formality rather than a sincere concern for appearances.

“Oh, no,” I said.

The boy said to make myself comfortable, and I tried my best. The couches looked like they weren’t meant for that. There was an arch-backed settee and a claw-footed coffee table both faded and old, but perfectly intact and preserved. There were old photographs of people smiling in that stiff artificial way people used to smile in photographs that took too long to compose and capture. When photography displaced painted portraits, the new technology brought with it a fraudulence compared with the oil and brush that evoked in that kids common-folk ancestors a look of stoic horror.

There were also pastel colored paintings of cowboys roping cattle or breaking mustangs in a pen. Paintings like that are called western Americana and sell at auction for high values (according to Antiques Roadshow).They show a scene of simple existence made up of discrete activities and moments then fade just off to white and then the wood frame hiding or denied the larger insidiousness that orbits other worlds.

“I’m gonna go find Momma,” he said.

I’d always said if I were ever in the wrong situation I’d act as if I were in a horror movie. I’d do things the way they should be done: run as fast as I could and never look back; leave closed doors closed and kill the bad guy several times over before turning my back. I sat down and the boy went back into the house and disappeared. I heard him talking quietly to someone back there, but couldn’t make it out. It started to give me a strange feeling. I was out of my element.

I feared the kid was talking to himself back there, and there wasn’t anyone but him left alive on that ranch. I feared I’d crossed over into Nevada Noir horror movie in that lonely valley when I broke down and sat all night way back out on the highway without seeing another living soul cross the black-top until morning.

I’d been caught off guard. My pulse quickened and immediately slowed. My eyes moved about the place and took things in. He came back a few minutes later. Holding his hat in his hands, he walked into the parlor area where I sat, and looked me hard in the eyes for an impossibly long instant.

“I’ll be a couple of hours,” he said. “Got to take care of a few things.”

“Oh,” I said, getting up.

“You can wait here if you want,” he said. “Or you’re welcome to walk around the place. Momma’s not up yet. She’ll be along to see if you need anything.”

I looked out the front window of the house to the farmyard. I wasn’t sure what to do. I saw someone move across the hall behind the kid deeper in the house. I hadn’t seen anyone outside. The boy moved to the door and opened it.

“You need any help?” I said.

He stepped outside and let the screen door snap shut. “Nope.”

“Thank you kindly,” I said using speech I’d heard in a cowboy movie.

“Yep,” he said and went to the truck.

Outside I could see a green pasture with a creek. There was a group of horses, mares maybe. For some reason I thought I could tell the difference. Might have been a family, or brood, or whatever. They were hopping across the creek and scrambling up the berm on the other side. Once they got there they looked around and mulled about eating grass and pawing at the mud. Some way from them was buckskin, probably a stallion, heading off over a rise. The rise was a terrace from when the river was bigger and the pasture was green and rich with flood soil. It wasn’t clear where the stallion was going, or why, since presumably, he shouldn’t leave his family.

Sitting on the ground all night had been more work than rest. I sat on one of the couches in the kid’s dusty ranch house, feeling like a character in a diorama. I laid my head back on the settee and closed my eyes. There was a faint smell of sugar, like a mix of marshmallow and gum drop. I think it was the Turkish Delight. Before I could think about Bedouin lords being hand fed by a harem of heaving breasted lovelies draped in sheer scarves under clouds of hookah fog, or worry about the unknown old woman somewhere back in the dim dusty house with me, I was asleep.