Groundwater
by Camille Meder
Sandra Dal Poggetto, The Stillwater, 2005, wild turkey feathers, thread on paper, 31 x 22 inches. Collection of Nancy Brown Negley.
The cinder block cabin was on a wide sand road past five miles of juniper and yucca that speared perforated grocery bags that ripped through the Mojave like tumbleweeds when the wind blew.
James drove me to see the house in the time of year when wildflowers and chia bloomed vibrant in the depressions where soon they’d die when summer came. That day I met him at his place nearby after my long journey from the city and he took the wheel. When we went somewhere together, he always drove, but it was always my car, never his. His work truck was a sacred thing and he made clear it wasn’t for me. While I walked through the bright kitchen and dark bedroom with my potential landlord, Sal, James eyed the threshold as if it were a rattlesnake and waited outside. This was supposed to be our place.
Sal was in his sixties, walked with a slight limp and had a leg that bowed out like he was making a circle with his foot on the carpet. He was laconic. Grunted with distaste when I said I was working on a PhD in literature. I changed the subject. What did it matter. Drove down Highway 66 to get here, east from the Los Angeles lights, east through the desert halfway to Nevada, like a Kerouac who had to go somewhere but was afraid to go anywhere. Here was where I would write my dissertation, an obscure topic no one would ever care about, and maybe—just maybe—one day it would be published, printed on cheap thin paper no one would ever read.
While Sal told me the rent price, I looked out the kitchen window above the white ceramic sink. There were no plants in the backyard, only miles of sand and the rusted tank of a well biting thousands of feet into the earth to suck what was left of the Southern California watershed so I could scrub clean my fleshy writer’s body.
I took the house while James waited outside. I was moving a hundred miles from school on a promise of living together once I was settled in. But I also knew this wouldn’t come true. After the lease had been signed, James entered through the doorway, came into the kitchen, caressing me from behind at the kitchen window while Sal drove away in his pickup. “You look so beautiful in the desert,” he whispered breathlessly, putting his hand into my jeans. I felt myself become fluid under the coarseness of his hand. Moaned as he pushed me up against the sink; it was performative, my mind was flying elsewhere like a crow above the landscape, but I let him slip in and out of me while I leaned on my hands and fixed my gaze on the cracked white paint and corroding metal of the pumphouse. Behind it, the land dipped down and a sandy wash twisted past hairlike brush that swayed darkly.
His hands were leathered, a rancher’s hands. He was a vet, a horse vet. The years he had spent working in the sun had hardened him. Out here, people didn’t call for frivolities the way they did at the sporthorse barns in the suburbs. Horses here were working horses. When someone called him, it was life and death: birth, euthanasia. The timing was different, too. There was no let’s plan something, schedule Thursday, see what you think. When you made the call, it was time. The hands that caressed me now had touched hooves, dirt, blood, amniotic fluid. Dying souls, birthed foals, struggling free of the cauls and their mothers’ bellies.
When he had finished, he looked out the window. He had come inside me; I could feel it spilling out. “By the way,” he murmured, “I wouldn’t drink the water.” Before I was born, he said, there was a landfill not too far up the dirt road. Filled in. He remembered—he had lived nearby, then. The water that flowed from the faucet smelled pure. But there was no knowing what traces it carried with it.
Last winter. “Move in with me,” he murmured while his hand kneaded the small of my back. I giggled. “Here?” His hand clenched, tensed. “No,” he said into my neck. “I’ve been here too long. It would be too weird. We’ll get our own place.”
The smell of age was in the earth walls of his desert home. Like the sand had risen up into the air. The taste of sweat and skin in the bedroom. He was right. There had been too much time here, past lovers, past memories. Outside, a December wind called a familiar sound like a word almost remembered.
“Will you look with me?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, with his lips on mine.
He never let me stay with him more than one night in a row. Deep in that place inside us that always knows, I knew.
•
In May, Rina came to town in a red Jeep with a dent in the back bumper. She had straight, dark brown hair. I woke up that morning to a flat tire, the glint of a slim copper horseshoe nail sticking out between the threads. Damn. Still unused to the self-reliance that was needed here, I had never replaced my spare after the last time. Something I regretted now, as I considered whether to walk the two miles to James’s house, ask him to loan me his tire pump and give me a ride back. Something I regretted even more as I sweated through the heat of early summer after beginning the walk, which started in the wash behind the house. My calves ached as I fought my way through the deep sand while it wove beside cacti and juniper bushes. When it rained—which it seldom did this time of year—the water from the hills and rocks and canyons would run down this route, picking up sand and silt and coursing through the wash like a brown cascade of long hair falling down a woman’s back. The desert would be still and silent but for the rush of water and crack of thunder, the ravens hidden, the jackrabbits and deermice already fled to safer ground.
I felt relief as I staggered up an embankment, branches scraping my legs, into the sideyard of his one-room house. Was surprised to notice the red Jeep beside his truck, their bumpers practically touching.
As I neared the two automobiles, two human figures came into view near the front door. Their shoulders were turned toward each other, and he was taking what looked like a large rock from her hands, fascinated. A juniper branch snapped under my foot and they looked at me quizzically. I felt a cold stone in my belly at odds with the heat of the day when she smiled at me, as if amused. “Who are you?” she asked. It was I, then, who felt like an intruder. But, stumblingly, I introduced myself as James’s girlfriend and James introduced Rina as “an old friend.”
“How often do you visit?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said. Her eyes flitted to James. “You know. My grandparents still live in town.”
She came hiking with us that day, my need for a tire repair put off until tomorrow.
•
In June, I finished my classes, and the summer was time off from the undergraduate courses I taught. So now I was free to stop driving once a week, free to settle in. Nothing but writing.
The first day of summer, I filled a bucket and wiped down the counters and shelves. Scrubbed the chipped dishes and polished the kitchen window and the sink, looking out at the pumphouse. Folded all my laundry into complicated squares. Put it into my one dresser, the only sturdy piece of furniture I owned, where the clothes only took up half the drawers.
Somehow, the sand covered everything, the rag coming away beige as I cleaned. The desert has a way of being that infuses everything. All suburbs look alike: my parents’ house in Santa Barbara could have been anywhere—Dallas, Detroit, New York—sprinklered green lawn and antiseptic air-conditioned air. Here, even the well water I brushed my teeth with tasted like sand and Joshua trees, though sometimes when I held my cupped hands to my face, I smelled sulfur.
When James came over, I could tell that he had had a bad day at work. “Lost her.”
I knew what that meant. His neighbor’s mare had been getting ready to foal but her abdomen had been swelling—too much. When her udders began to drip, he had gone right away. When he didn’t come back in an hour, I knew it was bad. Horses give birth quickly—labor is vulnerable. If it lasts too long, they are in danger, from predators as well as from the perils of making new life, so some inborn terror of hemorrhage and predator urges them to hurry.
But I knew he wasn’t surprised. I had gone with him last time he saw her. Seen in his eyes. Seen in the affectionate way he slapped the mare on her plump ass that he suspected the next time he saw her would be the last.
The foal made it. I pictured it on spindly legs, trying to nurse from a stranger, some horse who had lost her own young. Wonder if it even knew the teat it sucked was not from she who carried him, birthed him. Understood the sacrifices that had been undertaken for him.
•
Fall came with cold winds that sent me indoors under the covers. James didn’t follow me.
Late one morning when the wind was whistling outside, I had just resolved to work on my dissertation when my phone buzzed. “James is busy. You want to go for a hike?” The text came from Rina. She never messaged me.
The hike was not for just fun; it was work, for her. She was a crystal miner, no better way to put it. I saw a piece of shiny, translucent rock with a growth on its side that made it look like a lopsided heart dangling from her necklace on a piece of wire and wondered if she’d found it. That’s what she looked for: trinkets extracted from the earth to sell to the hippies in the polished, windowed stores of Los Angeles.
We drove out to the middle of nowhere, where she claimed to be aware of a pocket of crystal in the rock. Walked up a mountain where we encountered a dark, narrow cave, barely enough for her to wedge her shoulders inside. I watched her swing a pickaxe violently into it, feel around, grunt as she found nothing that satisfied her. At the end of the day, we drank a beer.
“You know,” she said eventually, “James is the one who got me into crystals, back when I was working as his assistant.”
I didn’t know that her many odd jobs had included being his assistant. I pictured her, arm gloved and buried to the elbow, feeling whether the foal was breech, the way she’d felt for the protrusions deep in the hole in the rock. She saw the question in my face but didn’t answer it. “It was fun, you know,” she said, giving me a knowing look that said she knew what I wondered, “I’d drive his truck up and he’d give me directions, tell me which road to take, until finally I knew this desert as well as he does.”
I said the only pleasantries I could, blood ringing in my ears. Yawning, she got in her car. Hips climbing languorously onto the seat, she freed her dark hair from its ponytail and it poured down her back. I lingered. The warm beer had run right through me. I squatted on the sand, urinated, then got in my car and turned the key in the ignition. Drove toward the sunset on the two-lane.
Suddenly a broad-shouldered, dark-clothed body loomed menacing in front of the car. I slammed the brakes. A figure was suddenly holding the passenger door, face against the window.
“Let me in. He’ll kill me.” The silhouette against the dimming sky abruptly seemed smaller and I saw it was a woman.
My heart was choking me. It was like everything going wrong had slammed against me in the same moment, forcing the breath out of me. Why was I here? What was I doing all alone on this road in this desert?
I checked my phone. No service. No way to call the police.
Her face was smeared with snot and tears, purple marks across both eyes.
“Please. Call the cops. Just take me with you. Please.”
I was shaking, sweating. My foot eked off the brake, toward the gas, just a twitch, just a second. It was who I was. A desire to run, to hide. Who can hesitate when a life hangs in the balance?
“It’s my boyfriend. He has a gun. He’s never going to stop.”
I saw her face against the starry sky. No cars were coming. It was us alone beneath the cold dry winds.
The seconds of my indecision were years, painful weakness, survival selfishness. I hated her, myself.
I unlocked the door. “Get in.” I should have been urgent, but I was murmuring, slow, uncertain.
She launched into the passenger seat and gripped its edges tightly with forearms taut and frantic.
I glared at her, raised my fist. Violent, fast. “If you try anything, I will fucking kill you.” I felt dirty, cruel, scared, desperate. She was no different from me—another woman—and yet I felt us in opposition, minds circling, both fearful.
She was shaking. I could see and smell the wet stain across her crotch. The dehydrated veins. She’d run for miles, unleashed her bladder, her body letting go of anything it had in the effort to escape. Imagine needing so badly to escape from someone you love. I started to drive, but I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing.
“The truck behind us,” she whimpered. She was wide-eyed, paranoid. But the bright headlights of a silver truck with massive wheels had come up quickly, taller than us, bearing down on us from behind, poised behind us like it had its big hands on the small of our backs.
“It’s him.” In the semidarkness, her face gleamed with tear streaks. She had taken my cell phone. She was trying to call the police again, but it wouldn’t go through. I felt calm, looking in the rearview at the headlights and the moon. There was something I wanted to say but I didn’t know how. In the distance it started to rain. And then we were driving through a flood of light mirrored on wet asphalt toward some kind of escape, or toward none.
Camille Meder is a literature scholar with an emphasis on modernism and an editor of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Before moving to California to pursue a PhD in English at Claremont Graduate University, Camille lived in Texas, New York (where she obtained a BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College and an MAT from Bard College), and Colorado. Camille currently resides in the Southern California desert and is an equestrian and rock climber.