The nighthawk arrived at the end of April. Nights I sat outside and listened as he sang for a mate. It is a strange song, a bass drum lightly struck, a boom that splits the night, even in the thrum of this Midwestern city, a thousand miles from South Texas, and you. His call changed when the female arrived, it became more like hers. To hear the hoarse and homely song of two common nighthawks calling to each other is to know it immediately. It is a singular sound, and their only song. All summer, I listened without ever really seeing them. The nighthawks’ flight is quick and fitful, and my eyes are failing more quickly now.
In South Texas, where you are mending fences and tending the animals and hoping for rain, the nighthawks are smaller and tougher, same as many animals in that part of the world. There, they dart and weave among mesquite and hackberry, divebomb the buffelgrass and horse cripplers. They leave their eggs on the dusty ground and hope for the best. Here in the city, their eggs are left on the flat roofs of nearby buildings, atop fallen leaves or next to small piles of gravel left behind by workers, who can say how long ago. They don’t build nests, you wrote, in this way they remind me of you.
Tonight, the moon is paper pale and huge, the stars thin and scattered. I’m so far away from you, and that spiky, dusty land where we lived together for a time, in your small house filled with shadows and dust, and love. Tell me what I’m missing, Marie, what I can’t see, and I’ll tell you what I remember.
Sunrise through your bedroom window, moonrise through that same window. Stars sprinkled like freckles across the night sky, a lone pauraque haunting the night, the wind steady through the leaves of a persimmon tree. Prints of a large cat just outside the horse corral, a vermillion flycatcher blood-red and brilliant, setting a mesquite branch ablaze. A few deer carefully picking their way through the scrub to stand at the water’s edge, their tongues elegant as they drink. A perfectly white pelican trembling above the water. And you, gathering small stones and tiny bones and stray pieces of barbed wire to carry home in your pockets. Oh, Marie.
If you want to know the truth of this land, you told me, look to the mountains on the other side of the river that is also a border. Keep an eye out for the thunderstorms that sometimes stall over those mountains, captured by the jagged peaks of the sierras, like a woman’s thin skirt caught on a saw’s tooth. A hundred miles away, we stood in the desert and looked west toward those mountains, and you reminded me that some words are more beautiful in a different language—milagro, morado, my name. I don’t know how I could survive anywhere but here, you said, on this land. And I knew it was true, true as the dust and wind, true as a light dimming slowly, slowly, before darkness comes all at once, true as my leaving one day soon.
We’re not kids, you said, we knew what we were getting into. You meant that we were not twenty-five or thirty-five, or even forty, that we were old enough to know better. We had been driving the land for hours, keeping an eye out for a little bull calf that had gone missing and arguing about what next. The night before, we lay in your bed listening as the mama wandered the fields, calling for her calf. By then, there was already a small hole in the center of my vision. But if I turned my head just a little, looked at you sideways, I could see the deep lines across your face and the dark shadows beneath your blue eyes, the long scar on your right hand and the shape of your body when you unfolded yourself and stood next to your truck.
I watched you walk across the scrubland, long legs that could keep pace with any man, and I watched you climb to the top of a hill next to a small pond. You stood for a few seconds with your hands at the sides of your mouth then began to call for the animals, two notes long and low—ayyyy ohhh, ayyy ohhh. I listened as you sang to the mamas and their calves, calling them home. In a few days, we would park next to that same pond and lean against your tailgate and watch the sun sink into the earth. A song we both loved was playing on a radio, but we kept the volume low so as not to disturb the animals, or the night. We knew the words, even if we could not remember the name. It was you, breathless and tall. I could feel my eyes turning into dust, and two strangers turning into dust.
Story by Elizabeth Wetmore
Lyrics, “Into Dust” by Mazzy Star
