The night found him groggy by the time he drove the steep section of Highway 385 that crested through Persimon Gap. Hatchet broke the park rules by setting up overnight in the first available picnic area. He would regret this in the next morning as he thought about park rangers and their federal authority. He stuffed the cash and egg under the seat in the hidden pocket he had fashioned for them. Through crackling static, a radio news report stated that local law enforcement had failed to produce any leads in the Calvary Fellowship robbery. As he suspected, his phone lacked a reliable signal. He activated a satellite phone. A thing that reminded him of its price every time he saw it. It functioned through a quick test and then he shut it down to preserve the battery. A symphony of light and unconquerable distance played over him in the bed of his truck. The cosmos lay bare with its falling stars and orbiting satellites cruising their lines, reiterating themselves in strange colors against the deiform stripe of the Milky Way.
He dreamt the park rangers roused him in the night and made him empty his truck but the truck wouldn’t empty. He just kept pulling things from it, piece after piece in the dark where the items seemed to disappear as fast he dumped the sleeping bags and clothes and wooden crates and dead animals and a samurai sword and a stack of old vinyl records and a ticking time bomb when they finally stopped him and slammed him against the hood of their huge SUV and asked him for his birth certificate. When he told them he didn’t have one and didn’t know where it could might be, they cuffed him and kicked him around on the ground then they drove off with him into the elastic fabric of the night to do what with him he would never know...
Damn shame there’s only one body in this bag, he thought when the cold woke him before the sun rose that next morning. He theorized the warmth of Delilah’s body as he stood over his propane burner, warming his hands. The youngest rays of sunlight struggled over Klippe Peak and he pleaded aloud for his coffee to percolate. After coffee and a quick breakfast of eggs and bacon, he covered his license plates with a pair he had stolen from another truck of the same year and model. A quirk in the parks’ system of information gave him the idea, a bureaucratic glitch to cover his tracks. He drove another 30 minutes south to the headquarters at the foot of the mighty Chisos Mountains now bestirring in the morning blue. An attractive young ranger helped him decide which primitive campsite he would be living in for the next fifteen days. And there are two sites here, he said, does that mean if I wanted to stay, I could just hop over to this one and stay another fifteen? She had been looking at his swollen eye with pity. You could do that, she said, but you can only be in the park twenty-eight days total. She laughed a little too willingly at his jokes and he half expected her to come wandering into his camp later that evening, especially since he offered. But she didn’t. And it didn’t break his heart.
He dreamt the park rangers roused him in the night and made him empty his truck but the truck wouldn’t empty. He just kept pulling things from it, piece after piece in the dark where the items seemed to disappear as fast he dumped the sleeping bags and clothes and wooden crates and dead animals and a samurai sword and a stack of old vinyl records and a ticking time bomb when they finally stopped him and slammed him against the hood of their huge SUV and asked him for his birth certificate. When he told them he didn’t have one and didn’t know where it could might be, they cuffed him and kicked him around on the ground then they drove off with him into the elastic fabric of the night to do what with him he would never know...
Damn shame there’s only one body in this bag, he thought when the cold woke him before the sun rose that next morning. He theorized the warmth of Delilah’s body as he stood over his propane burner, warming his hands. The youngest rays of sunlight struggled over Klippe Peak and he pleaded aloud for his coffee to percolate. After coffee and a quick breakfast of eggs and bacon, he covered his license plates with a pair he had stolen from another truck of the same year and model. A quirk in the parks’ system of information gave him the idea, a bureaucratic glitch to cover his tracks. He drove another 30 minutes south to the headquarters at the foot of the mighty Chisos Mountains now bestirring in the morning blue. An attractive young ranger helped him decide which primitive campsite he would be living in for the next fifteen days. And there are two sites here, he said, does that mean if I wanted to stay, I could just hop over to this one and stay another fifteen? She had been looking at his swollen eye with pity. You could do that, she said, but you can only be in the park twenty-eight days total. She laughed a little too willingly at his jokes and he half expected her to come wandering into his camp later that evening, especially since he offered. But she didn’t. And it didn’t break his heart.
Edit 11.19.2018