R James-Jacob

41. Said that God must have put them there to watch over us, these ancient sentinels at the top of the world. Looks to me like they’re trying to escape. Half their roots have already left the soil. Pretty sure they’ve just about had enough of our bullshit.

40. The Bristlecones stand before us all dry and wrinkled,
their bare wood branches and trunks contorted into a slow,
thousand-year dance. She loved them. Said they were the most
beautiful thing she’d ever seen—the living manifestation of
Nature’s sovereignty.

39. He gets out of the patrol car like he’d learnt how to do it
from a movie, grabbing his belt, checking his gun, and swaggering over to the information board. A kid doing dress-up.

38. We pull into the empty parking lot.
‘You been here yet, Officer?’
‘Been in the job two weeks. First week was all deskwork.’
‘Only place like it on Earth. Bristlecones’re as old as the Egyptians. Imagine that? They live up here on stony soil so poor it might as well be crushed concrete.’

37. I said, one day… one day you just dry up and try as damn hard as you might, you won’t be able to squeeze one single salty tear outta your eye.

36. I told her. I said this is what would happen, but she didn’t
believe me. She said it wasn’t the desert that had dried me out, it was my spirit, said I never let anything in to nourish it. I told her straight—that’s just bunkum.

35. ‘This land’s always been barren. Something ‘bout this
place… we shouldn’t be here. This stony desert ain’t for
the living. The skies are dead, the sandy soil’s dead, and the rocks might as well have come from Mars.'

34. I tried. Went looking. Bust
my thumb. I glance down at my left hand. Should’ve gotten it
seen to. The nail never grew back and now it doesn’t bend enough to even flip a dime.

33. Hammer your way
through the miles of rocks piled up in those ranges and you won’t find any dinosaur bones or fish fossils, no shells—not even corals. Not in the ironstones, not in the sandstones, and not between those black basalts that cap the mountains and soak up the sun like a metal plate.

32. You’d come back with an eyeful of grit and a hunger deep in your belly. Was saying this just the other day.'
Fact is, life's never liked this land. As long as this patch of ground’s been yanked ‘round the planet by those tectonic plates, life’s just shrunk before it.

31. ‘I told her. Can’t nurture out here; can’t plant and grow; can’t think anything’s gonna flourish here. No. There's no life out here. You could stand stock-still for a week as the sun swung over your head and under your legs and all that’d pass before you’d be dust devils and tumbleweed.

30. ‘Two. Five and three.’
This ain’t no place for kids. Whole valley’ll be dry in a
decade. He’ll move on soon enough. Once the kids realize there's nothing out here but dust and ashes and failure, they’ll leave.

29. ‘Oh, it is. We sit and watch it on our porch most evenings.’
‘I told her—happens every day. Then she got charmed by
the little cacti in folks’ yards. You seen those, Officer?’
‘Yes, Sir. My wife's planted a load out front. Kids dare each other to prick their fingers.’
‘You brought kids here?’

28. Said she came out west because her doc said the heat’d help her joints. Settled in town after she saw the setting sun light up the range like a firestorm. Said it was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen.'
'Oh, it is,' he says, 'we sit and watch it on our porch most evenings.’

27. Tread on one and all you’ll get is a boot full of bony splinters. Hit a coyote out on the highway and it’ll just mummify in the heat. Its bones’ll bleach to that vulgar white as it lies in the sun and grins at the sky. Fur’ll still be stuck to the blacktop twenty years later.

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26. The fate of everything is to become brittle, to split and
crack and flake to dust. She didn’t care. I tap the window of the patrol car. ‘Take that sagebrush with its woody branches—baked during the day, freeze-dried at night. In stasis. The best you can hope for out here.

25. ‘I don’t know why she came or why she stayed. I mean,
I told her. I tried to warn her about this place. How hard it is.
Said it just as plain as day when she moved to this forlorn little
town. Out here in the desert nothing lives. Things just dry up. Desiccate.'

24. ‘You not thought of moving somewhere now you’re
retired?’
‘Just me in my family now. Too old now to start anew somewhere I don’t know anyone or anything.’
‘And Ms. Fontana?’

23. ‘Driller. Spent decades drilling wells to keep people living where they shouldn’t. Each year you drill deeper and deeper and you get less and less. LA steals it for their damn pools and lawns and they flaunt it back at us on TV. Sucking us dry. The snows don’t come like they used to.’

22. ‘What brings you to this dusty corner of the country,
Officer?’
‘Moved from Baton Rouge. Last hurricane left us under water. My wife didn’t want to live the rest of her life at the end of hurricane alley. So I transferred.’
‘Nobody's ever drowned out here…’
‘And you, Sir?’

21. She loves this road. Says it's like a burning-black ocean wave rolling right into the dark heart of those ancient mountains. She can always find a nugget of gold amongst the dust and stones.

20. I sit in the back, dozy, feeling sick, as the road rolls over the gravel washes and swishes back and forth across the canyon from the shadows to the sun, the sun to the shadows, black-white, white-black, dark-light.

19. Walters drives like a one-man rule book, blinkers tick-ticking at every damn intersection. I never seen anyone use them out here. Tumbleweeds don’t care to know which way you’re heading — they just go where the wind blows.

18. No doubt she’ll be camped out under her favorite
tree, cross-legged on a yoga mat, some incense stinking the
whole place up, maybe high on weed and with all her days the
wrong way around.

17. I tell him to head up to the White Mountains, to the old
Bristlecones. It’s a day’s hike straight up through Silver Canyon, or an hour-thirty drive down the valley and up over the pass. It’s cooler up there.

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16. I stand to the side. Doesn’t bother me.

15. His eyes narrow and he points his pencil at my door. ‘You mind if I take a look
around?’
Some folks out here would just as soon shoot a cop dead than let him snoop around. Another one of those little roulette wheels we all get to spin.
‘Routine, in these circumstances,’ he adds.