Sand

1 • The Brief Hiss of Life

“You’re letting the sand in,” Conner warned, as Rob returned from his piss.

His little brother fell into the tent and onto his ass, remembered to knock his boots together before swinging his feet inside, then wrestled with the canvas flap. “If we aimed the door to the west, the wind wouldn’t get in,” Rob complained.

“We always do it this way. Just don’t dally when you go in and out.”

Rob sulked while Conner readied the lantern. Outside, the world pulsed red from the dying fire. The wind rocked the tent and sand hissed against the canvas. “Did you go?” Conner asked.

“Yeah.”

“Will you need to go again?”

“Not until morning.”

“Good. Let’s begin.”

Rob situated himself on the other side of the tent. Conner adjusted the wick. He pinched the top to feel that it was wet with oil, held his flint and striker above the wick and scraped them together until the fuel caught. He turned off his dive light, and the tent was filled with the more primitive and inconsistent glow of a beating flame. It was the light of childhood and nostalgia. The ephemeral light. That which does not last.

Both boys stared at the living flame for a long while, drawn back in time to simpler days, family days, when the concern for light meant another jar of rendered fat and not some rechargeable battery.

“This was Dad’s lantern,” Conner said. “He left it for us the night he departed so that we could find our way home.”

This was how Conner began the yearly ritual. It was how he always began it. His older brother Palmer had said these lines before him and their eldest sister Vic had spoken them before that.

Conner looked up from the lantern, breaking the spell, and realized suddenly that Rob would never have a reason to speak these words. There would be no one to listen. No one to care. Rob coughed into his tiny fist, almost as if to say Let’s get on with it.

“Dad left us … twelve years ago today. We will never know why. All that remains is our memory of him, and that is what we honor. This tent … our father’s tent … was the last place we saw him. It was less crowded in the morning when we woke. You were sleeping in mother’s womb. Palmer used to say that I kicked him all night and stole the blankets. Vic says she awoke as father made ready to go, saw him in the moonlight when he flapped the tent, and that his face told her everything. In the morning, we all knew. I was six. Palmer was little older than you are now. Mother was young and beautiful. And breaking down the tent that morning was the first thing we ever did without him.”

Conner fumbled with the canteen. His hands were shaking. His convictions, too. He poured water from the vessel and into the lid, rationing as was proper. He handed the cap across to his brother, who drank it down in a gulp. Conner poured a cap for himself. “The last night we were together, father shared his canteen, and he told us stories. Mom was given two caps that night, one for you.” Conner tipped the water into his mouth and swallowed. He poured another.

“The first time Father brought Palmer and Vic here, it was before I was born. He and mother spoke of their parents, their past, the need to remember. After he left us, we made a vow to come back once a year so that we don’t forget.”

Conner caught Rob looking to the side where Palmer would normally be. Gone, just like Vic. So much for promises. Conner dipped a finger into the cap and held it over the open flame, ashamed of his plans, of growing up to be like his dad. “This is the hiss of life,” he said. The flame ducked and sputtered as the water hit, and then it leapt back up. “Our lives are the sweat on the desert floor. We go to the sky, over the jagged ridge, and we fall in the heavens where it rains and floods.”

He passed the cap to Rob, who repeated the ritual and the old saying that went with it. They were, the both of them, religious for one day of the year. There was no pastor to finish the cap, so Conner told Rob to drink it. And he did. The cap went back on the canteen.

Rob studied the flame for a long while. His eyes shone in the beating light. And then he looked up at Conner. “Tell me about Father,” he said.

In that instant, Conner was peering at his old self. He was young again, and his older brother was telling him stories of Father back when he was Lord of Springston, before the land was corrupt, before the wall took its lean, before Low-Pub took its independence, back when their dad walked the streets and clasped hands and clapped backs and privately wept while his hair fell out, back before the office of Lordship and the suffering of his people drove him to No Man’s Land with all the others who leave and never return.

Across the recovered lamp-flame, a younger Conner sat, eyes aglow. He could see himself huddled there beside his older brother while Vic told them both about Father when he was younger still, the great sand diver who shunned tanks of air for the sickness they caused, who could go down for ten minutes at a time and bring back wonders from impossible depths, who saved the water pump of Low-Pub and discovered the hills that became the western gardens. Father when he was young and reckless and bold.

But Conner remembered a different man. His last memory of their dad was of a man gray and weathered, like a piece of wood exposed to the wind and sun. He remembered his father that night in the tent, kissing them all on their foreheads, whispering that he loved them and to be safe. He remembered that terrible year as they were forced to leave the great wall and began a slow drift westward, with the wind, through the best and then the worst parts of Springston and out to Shantytown. He remembered thinking they would never use the family tent again.

And yet they had. Every year since, while the family dwindled and promises were unkept. There was that first fatherless year when their mother had come along and had helped them figure out how to erect the tent, the last year she would ever come. That night, she had told them of their father when he was a boy, the oldest stories of him any of them had heard, how he was forever in trouble, wrangling goats and taming snakes, and burying sarfers in the dunes, mast-first.

Conner had woken early that year before the sun was up, had found his mother gone, had thought she’d left them like their father had, but there she was outside in the starlight, rocking and weeping beyond the tent, her feet dangling in the Bull’s gash, clutching baby Rob to her chest and moaning in tune to the drums of the east.

Conner remembered all of this, but these were not the stories he told. “This is what I remember of our father,” he said. And he whispered memories of memories, only the best ones, because after that night they would be for his brother to recall and no one else.

2 • Sissyfoot

The monster squealed and bucked its head beneath the canvas shroud. With a hideous screech, muffled by the tattered burlap, the monster bent its long neck down, driving its steel beak deep into the sand. It did this over and over, like a thirst-mad hummingbird probing the same dry desert flower for what little nectar it held.

Conner watched these gyrations while his buckets were filled with sand. The wind lifted a loose corner of the protective shroud, and he caught a glimpse of the mighty water pump beneath, the heavy plated head with its rusty rivets rising and falling, the grease-streaked piston pushing in and out, water flowing through pipes like coins pouring into pockets.

“Whatcha waitin’ on, boy? You’re topped and ready. Get to it!”

Conner turned his gaze to foreman Bligh, who leaned on his shovel and slid the long splinter between his lips from one corner of his mouth to the other. Conner knew better than say anything and get another mandatory load. Besides, this was his fortieth haul of the day, enough to fulfill his after-school requirement, and quite possibly the last bucket he would haul for the rest of his life.

“Sir, yessir,” he barked, and foreman Bligh showed him the gaps between his teeth. Conner stooped to collect his buckets. The fine sand was piled up in flowing and shifting cones, precious veils of it cascading over the sides. Balancing his haulpole across his shoulders—the two buckets swaying from notches at either end—he forced his sore legs to straighten, turned to face the outhaul tunnel, and staggered up the long sloping walk out of there. It was programs like these new work requirements that made him itch to leave, even if he never came back. It was programs like these that made him feel less than sorry for the Lords when rebel bombs clapped over in Springston and someone was violently voted from office.

Above him—farther up the gentle slope of sand that rose on all sides from Shantytown’s lone water pump—he could see tomorrow’s work blowing over the lip and drifting down on the winds. What he carried up in his buckets was replenished by the minute, the grains rolling over each other like marbles, all seeming to seek the pump like thirsty little brigands rushing down for a sip.