Gardening in the Desert, The Art of Tiny Moments Part 1

[poetartist]

“Brother Elder and Brother Younger were born from the union between Father Sun and Changing Woman. When they were young, Changing Woman told Father Sun that the boys would grow to be great warriors, but they had a long road to travel. Father Sun told her not to worry, he would teach them the ways of the warrior and of the world and those that lived in it. Changing Woman was happy with this.
“Soon, the Creator called Changing Woman back to the spirit world. She cried to leave her young ones, but remembered Father Sun’s promise and knew they would be cared for. Father Sun taught the brothers how to use the spear and bow. He taught them about the spirits and the monsters that preyed on The People. He taught them how to walk in the dark and the light.

“One day, Brother Younger came to Father Sun and told him he wished to prove himself and become a man. Father Sun did not believe Brother Younger was ready yet and told him to go back to camp and tend the fires. Angered, Brother Younger took his spear, his bow and his pack and left the camp. Afraid for his safety, Father Sun and Brother Elder followed. When they could not find him, Father Sun and Brother Elder fought and went on separate trails.

“Brother Elder searched the mountains and the plains for Brother Younger. He asked the four winds to watch for him. He asked the rivers, the buffalo, the deer, and the rabbits if Brother Younger had passed them by. He went as far as the great waters and sang his prayers to the Creator for his brother.

“One day he woke to find Coyote by his fire. Coyote told Brother Elder he knew where Brother Younger was camped and would take Brother Elder there on a condition: that Brother Elder leave his weapons.

“I know you are a great hunter, Coyote said. You have collected many pelts, and you count me among your adversaries. So leave your spear and bow and I will take you to Brother Younger.

“Brother Elder hesitated. He knew Coyote was a trickster and caused much mischief wherever he went. How do I know you are telling the truth?, Brother Elder asked Coyote.

“Coyote smiled. You must choose to stay or follow, he said and walked away. He could not stay behind, so Brother Elder left his camp with nothing and followed the trickster into the wilderness. They walked together for many days, crossing rivers and mountains so high they touched the stars. Then they came to a large cave.

“Brother Younger is inside, but you must defeat the monster that dwells there, Coyote said. It will devour Brother Younger unless you find him first.

“Brother Elder knew of the cave. Many told stories of the creature living inside, how it lured people away from camp and killed them so it could wear their skins and use their teeth for its rattle sticks. Why did you tell me to leave my spear and bow, Brother Elder asked.

“Coyote just laughed. You will not defeat this creature with those weapons, he said. Coyote went back down the mountain and Brother Elder walked into the dark cave after Brother Younger.”

#

Part One

Somewhere in Texas, 1860

Dean thinks of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne as he crouches behind the boulder. There have been worse odds in the history of gunfights, much worse. He ignores the fact that they were Hollywood standards; some were based in fact and right now that’s good enough for Dean.

He counts out his bullets- seven left- and it’s only one man he’s up against, but the guy’s a piece of work and he probably entered this world with a six shooter in one hand, and possibly a Bowie knife in the other.

What Dean wouldn’t give for the Duke to come striding in about now.

The sun burns the back of his neck and the air tastes of acrid gunpowder. It sticks in his throat and gets in his eyes. He hasn’t slept in three days; he may not live long enough to get any tonight, not if his luck doesn’t change soon.

A chunk of rock explodes next to his head, slivered shards pepper his skin. Dean curses and ducks low. He crab-walks back and tries to get a line of sight on the guy. Everything is rock and sand and sage bleeding into the canyon Dean was heading for. If he can get into it he’d have a better chance at disappearing, at least until the sharpshooter is gone.

Dean aims and lets off a shot at a flash of brown hat. It hits dirt and kicks up dust.

“I know you didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” comes the whiskey rough voice from across the way. “But you’re making it worse for yourself by resisting.”

“It wasn’t me, god damn it!” Dean says, and he’s desperate; for a miracle, for an extra bullet, for Sam to-

The warm press of metal at the back of his neck brings thought to a stop. There’s the drawback of a hammer, so loud and final.

“Drop iron.”

Dean drops the guns and holds up his hands. The man behind him is a portly guy with a handlebar mustache and a tin star pinned on his jacket. The other is younger with a patchy beard eating his face and the semi gaunt look of someone who’s never known anything but a hard life.

“Funny lookin’ gun,” Patchy stoops to pick it up.

They tie Dean’s hands until the rope bites into his wrists with sandpaper teeth and lead him to the horses they have waiting. There are only two, so the rope is lengthened and tied to Handlebar’s saddle horn. Patchy empties Dean’s pockets taking his wallet, his change, his useless cell phone, and the keys to the Impala. Patchy puts it all in his saddlebags and Handlebar tugs on the rope. Dean walks.

The sun is setting when they finally see town again, the light casting shadows that swallow chunks of desert. Ash like demon smoke floats on the air. Three houses are charred to nothing. Soot streaked faces watch them pass by. Fingers point and down-turned mouths whisper.

Three white sheets are wrapped around still human shapes and laid out in the bed of a wagon.

One is less than three feet tall.

Dean’s legs are jelly when Handlebar dismounts and leads him into the jail. Dean’s knees scream under the strain but he won’t show it. The air is cool inside the building, the jail bars even cooler. Handlebar takes him in, cuts the rope, and leaves. The iron key grates against the lock, a harsh click as the gears slide into place.

“Get comfy, stranger. We got questions for you in the morning.”

There are people at the door asking questions. Angry voices rise like the buzz of so many wasps calling for answers, for a name, for blood. Handlebar goes out and shuts the door. The light goes dim.

Dean sits on the sparse bed, nothing more than a straw-filled sack that smells of mold, piss, and rotgut booze. There’s a bucket in the corner. A handful of flies circle and land on it lazily.

Dean rests his head against the cool wood and rubs his wrists. His eyes fall closed and he sighs. He sees the sheet wrapped bodies in the back of the wagon. He sees their faces twisted in agony with flames spreading like disease over their skin, turning them black and throwing the smell of roasting meat into the air.

Their screams are loud in his ears.

Their black eyes stare at him with unvoiced confusion.

Dean stretches out on the sack and breathes through his mouth. The murmur of voices fades away after a while. Crickets and wind rattling the roof replace them. Handlebar and Patchy come back sometime during the night. They light a kerosene lantern and move around the main office of the jail. Dean pretends to sleep as they pour his belongings onto the table and sift through them, their tone melting into curiosity. Dean digs his fingernails into his palms. He’s never had much, and now he has even less. Knowing that those men are pawing through all he’s got left is almost enough to throw himself at the bars until he’s broken them down or broken himself against them.

Almost.

The men shuffle off to their cots eventually. The crickets fade away. The wind twines through the cracks around the door and window outside his cell, a gentle caress of invisible fingers, a low whisper of endless miles of freedom beyond the wood and iron.

Dean thinks of Sam, thinks of the idiot dancing in the rain and the sweet and tangy cherry burst across his tongue; he thinks of the Impala and how she purred smoother with Sam back in the passenger seat, how she felt balanced again. He thinks of watching Sam sleep in that hospital bed; he thinks of the moment he burned the missing poster he made up in his head, the one he imagined up when hope ran dry and John got quiet. He’d held Sam’s hand while the heart monitor stayed steady; he’d closed his eyes, lit a match, and watched that poster curl in on itself until the black letters saying Sam was gone had been taken back.

It didn’t matter that Sam hadn’t come back all the way.

He came back.

The wind rattles the roof. The flies buzz in the corner. Dean ignores his aching, burning bones and tries to sleep.

#

The tree was old and twisted, its branches like fleshless fingers reaching for the stars high above. Great swathes of sand surrounded it and disappeared into the dark of the desert. A few leaves, curling and dry, clung to a single branch still alive with sap flowing in its wooden veins.

Dean stood at the base, his hands on the bark. He could feel the pulse of life, a low heartbeat thrumming. Dean ran his fingers down the scores in the bark as deep as claw marks.

“Come home, Dean.”

The dark shape of a man leaned his back against the trunk of the tree. In the dim light Dean made out a hat pulled low over his face and long hair curling over his shoulders. He put a cigarette to his mouth and the end lit by itself. He took a drag, breathed it in, and let the smoke curl out of his nose.

“This isn’t home,” Dean said.

“Isn’t it?”

“I’ve never been here before.”

“Not in a while,” said the man. “Why do you think you were sent here?”

Dean sighed.

“I know why I’m here.”

He chose his fate, he accepted the consequences. He would never regret it.

“You are a drop in the ocean, kid. You know nothing.”

The cigarette lent a faint glow to the man’s face. His eyes were like knives in the dark. He regarded Dean for a time. Dean stared right back. What else did he have to lose?

The man finished the cigarette and flicked it away. It burned bright for a moment and disappeared.

“Take care of the seeds, Dean. Give ‘em a chance, then come home.”

The wind rattled the dead branches. A lone coyote howled in the distance.

The man turned toward Dean. For a moment there was a play of light and shadow over his face, and Dean felt like he was looking into water where the man’s features rippled and changed.

Something was pressed into Dean’s hand, something leather and small. The man blew smoke in his face. Dean caught it mid-inhale.

“Come home, Dean.”




#

Dean wakes with death in his mouth and grit ground so far into his skin that it’ll take ten showers to get it all out again. He still hears screaming and the sizzle-pop of burning flesh. History repeating itself backwards and forwards, he guesses. Ironic doesn’t begin to cover it.

The sheriff and his deputy are still asleep in their respective cots. Handlebar wheezes on every other inhale. Patchy is curled tight in on himself; if it weren’t for the slight rise and fall of his shoulders Dean would think he’d kicked off during the night.

Dean runs a hand over his face and by the lack of light he guesses dawn must still be a ways off. Great.

“You just gonna sit on your ass and wait for the noose?”

Dean jumps as a figure steps out of the shadows near the front door.

“Dude,” Dean heaves himself to his feet, biting back a groan. “Who the hell are you?”

“Friend of a friend, he asked me to get you out.”

It takes Dean a minute to comprehend that. He lets out a sigh.

“So Jimmy made it out okay?”

“Well enough.” The man tugs on his gloves and swipes the key from a peg on the wall. “First though, you and I need to come to an agreement before I let you out.”

Dean regards the man, uneasy.

“Agreement?”

“A deal.”

Dean’s lip curled up.

“Christo.”

His eyes stay the same.

The man snorts. “Ain’t a demon, boy.”

“Makin’ a deal is what got me sent here in the first place, had to check.”

“Another just might get you out.”

Dean considers it.

“What’s the deal?”

“I let you out and you stay out of my way. You don’t interfere with my business or try to shoot me. It don’t work.”

Dean looks him up and down, his mind running down a list of tests and creatures.

“What are you?”

“Somethin’ that’s saving your life.”

“And you want to help me?”

The man meets his eyes. “I’m a man of my word. Jimmy seems to think you are, too. So what’s it gonna be?”

Handlebar lets out a loud snort and Dean startles. A check of the window shows the shadows to be getting lighter.

Dammit, Jimmy, he thinks.

“Yeah, alright,” he says. “Deal.”

The man’s lips quirk up into what might have once been a grin but now only cut a grim line deeper into his sallow features.

“You got a name?” Dean asks as the man approaches.

“Elias Finch.”

Neither Handlebar or Patchy stir as Elias turns the key in the lock. It clicks back like a gunshot, or at least it does in Dean’s mind, and the door pushes open with a small squeak.

Dean goes to the table and pockets all of his stuff, kissing the Impala keys and checking through the wallet out of habit. The money won’t be good here, but the picture he keeps in the side flap is still there and that’s what matters.

Elias makes a move-your-ass noise and they sneak out of the jail. It’s all very nerve wracking and anti-climactic without background music and only one close call.

“Here,” says Elias when they clear the town and head into the open country.

Dean turns in time to catch a small leather pouch. A look inside shows him a handful of seeds.

“You dropped it in the jail.”

#

Sam grinned at him when Dean started belting out CCR completely out of tune with the tape. After a minute he even joined in and they could have been fourteen and eighteen, seventeen and twenty-one, or nine and thirteen after school and soaking up the summer sun from the back seat of the Impala with the windows rolled down.

Sam stumbled over some of the lyrics he used to know by heart, but he didn’t get self-conscious. He kept on with la-la-la in the places his brain skipped and he stayed.

Sam stayed in the moment.

“We need to go to South Texas sometime when it’s cooler,” Sam said when the song ended. He turned the volume down with the twitch of a finger. It was a little disconcerting at first, but that gave way to pretty freaking cool early on. There were just so many applications for that kind of talent, like sudden bursts of wind near women in skirts. Sammy vetoed that one, but Dean’d planted the seed. It would grow. “I was down there for a bit. They had this place, Mama Rita’s, it has the best chile rellanos I’ve ever eaten.”

“Oh yeah?” Dean shot him a grin.

“Yeah. Two words: deep fried.”

Dean groaned in time with his stomach.

“Dude, no fair. You can’t tell me about a place like that when we’re driving in the opposite direction.”

Sam got a weird look on his face, still smiling, and made some kind of twisty motion with his hand.

Dean let out a string of curses as the road disappeared and the world shifted. They came out at a standstill in a parking lot that faced an unassuming white building. A neon pepper flashed in time the word ‘Open’ over a red door.

Sam had an impish grin on his face as he beckoned Dean inside.

Sam was right; the deep fried chile rellano was freaking epic.

They ordered another one to-go and Sam dropped them outside the gates of Singer Salvage.

Dean took a breath, flashed teeth at Sam, and walked by his side up to the house.

#

“What the hell dude,” Dean says when Elias is out of earshot checking the trail. Dean’s horse snorts and dances under him, keyed up from Dean’s energy. “He’s not even human.”

Jimmy shoots him a nervous glare. The guy is a couple years older than Sam, compact and solid, and he’s hiding more than Dean can get out of him. He has this twitchy demeanor and spends more time dodging questions than he does being helpful.

Dean should have left him in that goddamn field where they woke up.

“He found me on the edge of town. I was trying to find a way to get you out and he said he could help.”

“Lemme guess, he made you a deal.”

Jimmy looks away.

Dean nudges his horse forward.

“You are one stupid son of a bitch. You’re gonna lose your soul or something worse if you don’t start thinking.”

“I was thinking that you were gonna get strung up or something if I didn’t get you out of there, then you would have died and I’d be here trying to figure this shit out on my own,” Jimmy hissed back. “You were the one that wanted to go demon hunting anyway. If we’d just gone on-”

“That town would have suffered more,” Dean said. Those demons had just gotten started turning people against each other, killing off animals, poisoning water. Dean had tried to exorcise the parents, but he hadn’t counted on the three year old being possessed, or for Jimmy to knock over the lantern.

Dean and Jimmy could run, but they’d drawn Devil’s traps over the windows and doors.

Jimmy sighs. “It wasn’t our problem.”

It takes all of Dean’s strength not to hit Jimmy upside his head. Hard.

“You aren’t mine, either,” Dean says. “You wouldn’t even be here if you learned to think.”

“Pots and kettles, man.”

“Hey,” Dean pulls his horse to a stop. It snorts and stamps its feet. “I knew what I was getting into. If I wasn’t here you would be in worse shape, kid, just like that town.”

“Stop calling me kid.”

“That posse is gonna catch up if you two don’t quit actin’ like a bunch of schoolgirls,” Elias calls from ahead.

Dean grinds his teeth and shoots a look at Jimmy.

“Just keep your mouth shut,” Dean keeps his eyes on Jimmy until he finally backs down.

Dean clucks to the horse and catches up to Elias. Jimmy follows and ignores Dean until they stop to sleep under a cottonwood for the night.

It’s so much like Sam used to be when he got in one of his snit fits that Dean almost tells Jimmy to stop being a little bitch. He clamps his teeth down over the words and swallows them back. He turns his back to the small fire and takes first watch, listens as Elias and Jimmy put away the rest of the jerky and water to bed down in their rolls.

The ache in his chest feels like a heart attack and he stares up at the sky, not wishing or hoping and damn sure not praying. He tries not to think of anything at all.

#

“Why am I here? What’s the purpose of all…this?”

The man is tuning a guitar, picking a string here and there to check his progress. He and Dean sat side by side on the sand. Above, the sky was turning like a lazy Susan spinning on its base, the stars leaving white streaks in the dark.

Time was passing all around them, moments slipping into infinities and back again. All the while nothing changed around them.

“Think about it.”

“It’s not what I expected.”

Guitar man smirked and tried another string.

“What did you expect?”

Dean turned the pouch of seeds over in his hands. He could feel them rattling around inside, brushing against each other with a faint whisper.

“Fire,” he answered. “Torture. Hell of a lot more demons.”

Guitar man shrugged. “Don’t need to go to hell to find all three.”

“But I should be there,” Dean insisted. Not here.

“Is that where you want to go?”

Guitar man stopped messing with the instrument and turned to him.

“No, of course not, but-”

“Then stop asking for it. Do something more worthwhile than lamenting that you did not end up burning for eternity. Most people would be jumping for joy at this turn of events.”

Dean snapped his jaw shut. Guitar man leaned back against the tree.

Dean crossed his arms over his knees and stared up at the sky, feeling agonizingly small in the great expanse.

“I want to go home. I wanna get back to Sam and Dad.”

Guitar man said nothing for a few minutes. He shook his head.

“Then stop wishing for it and make it happen.” He picked up the guitar and his fingers plucked at the strings. A lilting melody came out and filled the silence and the space around them. “The acorn doesn’t become an oak just because it hopes to be.”

      Part Two