Letter from the desert: Pie
Posted by Chris Clarke on August 28, 2008
The mountains are a hell’s rainbow, greens and reds and blues in layers dredged up from some unfathomable depth. I watch them, imagine climbing from the pediment up into the folded and crenellated side canyons.
I stir my coffee absently, though I have added neither cream nor sugar.
In the booth behind me a woman berates a man in measured tones. I try not to listen in. The pauses between her sentences are long, freighted, her voice curling upward and inward like cigarette smoke. “So when did you start dating her?” He mumbles a reply.
“Is your coffee okay, hon?” It is, more or less. I smile at the proffered pot, at tired blue eyes. Two more hours’ drive ahead of me, and my eyes heavy-lidded against the desert sun. I consider pie, but the offerings look desiccated.
Cigarette smoke curls behind me. “Not even a week after we broke up.”
He answers more distinctly. “After you broke up with me.”
“So?”
The pie crust peels, flakes of it wavering in the breeze of the kitchen fan. Layer on layer of apple dried in thin skins in the desert heat, peeled back. What was once sweet now seems inadvisable. I decide against pie.
“You told me I had to move on. I moved on.”
An old man who looks like he could have ridden with Zapata ambles over to the jukebox, puts in a few quarters, pushes a few buttons. “Good, some Norteño to drown out the misery next door,” I think, and am taken aback as Patsy Cline warbles decades’ old heartbreak from the box. Ah, well. Whatever works.
There are layers upon layers in the mountains across the way, old sweetness congealed in suffering. A million years of lakefloor sediment, one mortal heart’s cessation layered upon another a billion at a time and then hardened over, and then an age of infrequent rains began to wipe out all evidence of their lives bit by eroded bit. I would lose myself in quiet joy to walk inside the clefts the rain has carved. I think sometimes that the only sure happiness is anchored fast in old heartbreak. The sharp happiness I have felt these last weeks grew in soil well-limed with sadness.
I get up check in hand, turn toward the register. In the booth behind me he sits alone and calm, gazing out the window at the mountains, part obscured now in the dust cloud from her car’s fishtailing out of the gravel lot.
