Overloaded

The Nash, cut down into a truck of sorts and overloaded, rolled along on three tires and a rim that wailed a constant complaint.  Each expansion joint in the concrete punctuated the protestation with sharp metallic blows.  For all the noise there was not quite enough to fill the big quiet caused by a motor silenced by the lack of gas.  A hot breeze sanded over the sunburned faces of those passengers perched on the patched canvas covered remains of their lives.  Their dirty hands gripped the canvas tightly, their fate on the downgrade, brakes burning.

Al looked over at Floyd, but they were strangers again.  Their night on the Colorado River was a couple of hundred miles ago, and the Mojave had since sucked all the juiciness out of the memory.  Floyd looked resolutely ahead, knowing he was being watched.  The increasing wind whipped at his open shirt and the sunlight counted his ribs.  He was as dark as an Indian, except for his knuckles.

These mountains offered no reviving waters, no reliving the recent past.  They passed into them easy enough, but now they were being pitched forward---not into the green garden below, but off into eternity.   This family was not Al’s but something he bought with his canteen of water somewhere before Peach Springs.  At the river they had all given thanks but asked for more and so they were given this.  Al looked away from the curve looming ahead.

A flash of color registered out of the corner of his eye, and a sweet scent just barely broke though the stench.  The taste of Nu-Grape filled his dry mouth, and Al looked down to see a large shrub waving wands of lavender and white, like a frothy freshly opened bottle of pop.  These shrubs dotted the steep barren slope below, increasing in number as quickly as the pitch of the wail of the naked rim.  And then he saw why the stench had been momentarily replaced:  The brake beneath him had burst into flames.

Floyd screamed for his father, dead for several years.  Al knew it was Floyd, for it was the same strangled passion that rang in his ears that river night.  Time to let go.  Al’s hands relaxed and he started to float as the Nash dived.  For a split second he watched the car hurtle ahead of him, and then he dropped into the sweetness.

Al bubbled back to conciousness, smelling Nu-Grape and tasting blood.  Bees buzzed around him.  He could see the swath his body had cut through the shrubs and hear voices above him and then around and below him.  Slowly he turned his head, feeling twigs poke and comb his scalp.  Blossoms waved over his face, between him and the deep blue sky---and then, a wisp of smoke.  His head, unbroken, completed the radius and took in the view of shattered remains strewn far below him.  There was nothing left of the back of the Nash, only the differential remained, wicking a small dull orange flame and greasy thread of black smoke.  Only a few brittle branches held him back.