Williams of the Dog Days
I. Jonah
His beard is coming in
red. I can’t see the stubble any longer, his face beginning to lose its
subtleties. We determine not to look at each other. Or night determines for us.
Bill Williams, the mountain overlooking, the mountain hanging, is prefaced by
four lesser peaks. Ours is not the least, not the lowest, although ridged by
telephones poles—a far running wood-and-wire spine— it is possibly the
ugliest. The snarl of ponderosas and black-eyed aspen have been
felled to civilize this foothill. It protests, downing barbed fences. Angry
grasses needle. At the apex of its shaved head, a stump is humbled beneath the
whine of electricity. We hear it too from our boulder, Jonah with his knees
pulled up, me stretched out, lying back, shifting to match my bones to rock.
We are both Mick’s this
summer: his archies, his interns, his crew, his kids. Mick gives us the Kaibab
National Forest, lets us feel it through our boots, our backs, our bodies, and
we take it—I take it, it becomes mine. In various ways, we become each others
too. Jonah has seen me every morning for the last forty-nine days, watched me
build peanut butter and jelly structures in the North House kitchen. He lends
me his fleece when it is cold, his button-down when it is wet. I pick up his
smell almost without meaning to, add it to the accumulation of details that
make him Jonah. When I lean my back to tree bark, he picks up my spinal column—a fractured impression, a
rendering in beaded sap—in the fine grains of his fleece. I apologize for
altering it, speaking as though it matters, as though he might care.
Tonight we look west as
the sun slumps behind the backs of mountains, cars and trucks on I-40 lighting
up like bugs. From here, I can see the highway, the Williams Ranger District,
Bill Williams Mountain, and Williams, the town of three-thousand that I won’t
think about, won’t realize I'll miss, until five months after leaving it.
Malformed and backwater, Williams has dug itself into me. No longer a town but an intimation, a site of memory.
In the dark, Williams
spreads itself open like a net, a fluorescent tangle. The streetlights push out, roping in houses,
Route 66 stores and the Grand Canyon Railway depot. I look for the familiar
things, the Sultana and the Safeway, the restaurant that serves seventeen kinds
of pie. Beside me, Jonah shifts, crosses his arms, settles into night. The words "A Treasure in
Our Own Cool Pines" present themselves in block letters on the Williams' highway
sign. This is the closest I will ever come to believing them.
Continued: II. Milo - VI. Clare at http://plainchina.bennington.edu/pieces/williams-of-the-dog-days/?doing_wp_cron=1365689474.2230050563812255859375
"Williams of the Dog Days" was selected to appear in Plain China: The National Anthology of the Best Undergraduate Writing 2012: http://plainchina.bennington.edu/
*Names have been changed
