Two Men And The Desert

Eight litres.

That is what the Australian told him to carry when they woke in the cool of the dessert morning. They were pitched atop yesterday’s rise which they had climbed by car and sat now overlooking the trail yet to come.

‘Eight litres?’ the Irishman said. ‘For me to carry?’
‘Course.’
‘And we’ll swap halfway?’

Then the Australian, near on the height and width of a doorframe, leaned back as if to accentuate his size and laughed with his great hands on his belly. The folds of his small eyes were wide and alight and he walked through the sanded earth to the edge of their camp and out at a yellow sea before them. The Irishman sat watching. The Australian walked the circumference of their camp whilst the sun unobstructed through the blue sky beat its great weight atop them, the Irishman’s hair wetted with sweat and the Australian’s cap soaked and darkened, a blueish baseball cap with a Union Jack on the forehead. He sipped from his canteen and his lips were surprisingly petite, delicate. Finally the Irishman joined him to watch the landscape and the Australian told him this.

‘That eight litres is all yours. It’s eight each.’
The Irishman shook his head, he shrugged. ‘If you say so, buddy.’

But before they set about preparing for the hike they stood and watched the desert shift with the haze, the sky falling and pressing heavier upon them a heat which was somehow concave in the frame of that day and all days. And as the Australian considered that which he would only lay eyes upon, the Irishman wondered for a family yet born and if in meeting them he might kill all that he was.

They stood together a moment, then walked on back to their tents and packed up their things into large backpacks, expensive and designed to look so, and they wore them on their backs. They lathered suncream on their arms and covered the rest of themselves in clothing. The Australian briefly took down his baseball cap and wiped the dark sweat from his bald brow. Their site was a known one, with a red and white flag the Irishman did not recognise flying from a thirty foot flagpole and it was this flagpole the guides used to find them. The climbed the gradual hill from the east and reached the summit to meet the Irishman and the Australian just as they were packing their final litres of water.

The two guides were small and deep brown in colour from a life under the sun, a colour the Irishman was approaching after all his travelling. They were delivered by a tall pale man with curly blond hair and wearing an airy beige shirt whose place here seemed alien even perhaps to he, for quickly the man absented himself with a wave after a brief instruction to these small brown men in a language high pitched and unintelligible.

Their guides then led them with a wave and paced off fifty yards ahead and the Australian laughed.

The land sprawled flat for miles as they set out one foot in front of the other like prisoners bound and searching out freedom in a land bare of exit and shackled single-file by each’s respective destiny ahead of them in the sand, the sun a blood red sphere whose watch broke their brows and underarms to floods of sweat in the midday when the heat was close and heavy. The land did not rise or fall. The desert paths were well-trodden yet this place was more alien than any yet. He kept close to the centre of the trails, away from cacti ten feet tall and thorn bushes of mesa or which at least seemed to be mesa in his limited and simulated vision of a desert, bushes in which he imagined crickets the size of fists and snakes whose bite could bring down an elephant lay in wait for prey naïve as he. The air was hot in their lungs as their breathing turned laboured, enslaved, and the water was consumed not only to relieve thirst but to cool the chest cavity, this so for the travellers but not the guides. They drank sparsely and told little for they could not. Their instructions were few, merely turning from their place fifty yards ahead of the men to check they still followed.

Soon they came by what the Australian called a billabong but before so the guides, small and so previously browned that the sun could not burn them further, had louted and pointed out to the east and gone all but ignored. Upon seeing the reservoir in a nest of tall palms the Irishman told his large companion that must be what the guides had been after. The Australian replied that those men could perhaps smell water, and at this the Irishman shrugged.

‘Last bit a-water for the rest of the trail maybe. What’s you reckon we have a ganda?’
‘Ay, I’m behind ya.’

They caught up to the guides and told them they wanted to go to the water. The smaller of the two seemed the most confident, standing ahead of his friend and leaning in with an ear, a gesture which the Irishman understood as well as any.

‘We’re going for the water. The water.’ He mimed drinking before retrieving a bottle from his pack and pointing to the liquid inside. ‘Water.’

The larger of the guides came from behind speaking some omens which went unheard before his boss, the smaller, pulled him back, told him something, and shrugged his shoulders. He pointed towards the reservoir and said, ‘Okay.’

‘We won’t be long.’
‘Okay,’ said the guide, and still pointing.

The Irish and Australian went east to the reservoir. The ground was as it had been, hard and dried and cracked in the sun and their bodies also, laboured in breath and strength and drenched in their own saline excretions under the arms and across the chest and in turn slicked on their brows. The sun was sinking into an evening redness dating man and beast and rock alike and too about its business observed or not. The water was clear and shallow at its perimeter and the Irishman removed a shoe and sock and dipped his blackened toes in. ‘It’s freezing,’ he said, looking up to note the shade of the tall palms. The Australian wandered off to a grove of pygmy date palms and picked said fruit from beneath the dry leaves. He ate whilst the Irishman filled their water bottles one by one until they were restocked again with eight litres each, so heavy a load that the Australian had to return to retrieve it bringing two large handfuls of dates with him. And by then the sun was almost gone entire and the night wind was upon them, coursing between the palms as if diverted from the men, swaying the branches slightly askew and creaking like the breaking of bread. They sat beneath a great boulder in the softened earth there and this rock was so shaped in the fashion of a breaching whale that some thought it entombed in stone at the whim of a deity who couldn’t bear such magnificence be free.

But not these men.

They ate the dates together and built a small fire with wood gathered that morning. Before lighting it the Australian said, ‘I know what’ll be around here.’ He stood and undressed until totally naked, the great cheeks of his backside swollen and tanned. He went into the mud banks of the reservoir and plodded about with his arms cocked up to his shoulders ready to pounce. And when a long, flat stone moved and revealed itself to be living he did so and held his prey up over his head like a prize, a blue crab soiled by the mud, squirming in his hands and reaching with its claws to break his fingers. He waded further into the water and immersed the crab entirely until the mud was gone then waded back through the water and the mud, stepping around on his toes. A second crab snapped at him, so he chuckled and jumped over the top of it, dainty for his great size. Back at their small fire, he sent the Irishman to fill a cooking pot and get it boiling.

The Irishman did so, placing a metal frame over the fire and the full pot of water atop it. Soon the water was bubbling and gurgling and the Australian holding the crab over the water as if the crab might consider his fate before it found him. The crab began making flatulent noises intelligible only to its kin and the Irishman said: ‘He’s saying “Don’t boil me.”’

The Australian laughed quietly, almost a hiss. Then he watched the Irishman a moment, grinning, the crab clawing and squeaking, its black eyes rolling in its head but looking at no particular thing. Then he was bathed once more and for the last time and ten minutes later was bright red and being torn apart, transformed to meat.

In the early morning they saw smoke from the fire of the guides but not the camp itself. It was over a small bluff which obscured them. The Irishman stood with his pack at his feet in the shadow of the great rock under which they had camped, and the Australian with him.

‘This really the last water?’
‘I’d say so.’
‘So you know this land, do you?’
‘Not this land. But lands folla patterns, don’t they.’
‘Ay. Sometimes do.’
Then he traipsed off a moment and unzipped his trousers to make water, but had to force a drizzle of yellow out with such straining it ached in the pipes. When he returned the Australian was laughing. ‘You won’t need to piss much out here, mate. It’s all sweated out.’
‘If you say so, pal.’
They went on towards the guides’ campsite. ‘Wonder why they never joined us.’
‘Well we wouldn’t have a lot to talk about with them, would we?’
They laughed together. The Irishman said, ‘As long as they’re friendly, that’s all I care about. I mean just look around. A man could do anything out here.’

Soon they reached their guides who were all but packed up and looking back the way they had come. When the Australian crossed the bluff and waved to them, one little man began poking the other until they were both looking with peeled eyes loose lips, open-hanging mouths and a constant, twitchy blinking as if something that ought not be there was revealed, for to the ignorant protestations and warnings differ so little as to be interchangeable. And yet their wards lived, not knowing how close they’d come.

‘What’s the look for boys?’ the Australian asked them. They squinted and tilted an ear up at him, as expected. Then he laughed and they all moved on again.

‘There,’ said the Australian, pointing out at a distance so great the Irishman couldn’t make out the ground from the sky. They squinted together and moved on towards where they watched and the Australian said, ‘See how it’s a bit darker over there?’

He was smiling. The guides were well ahead and still giving that sulking look back over their shoulders. The Irishman saw a grey sky at which the Australian was pointing and they went on in the mute desert behind their small and brown guides, growing browner themselves by the day. By the end of that day they were blind to the smell of their own sweat and could evacuate their bladders only once before the sun was down and the four of them this night were about a fire which couldn’t pick up flame for the wind. A pit of soldering embers. A pit of ash beneath, like a sinkhole to a whole world enflamed.

The Irishman looked at the fire and then about him. The Australian was naked save for boxer shorts, the great mound of his body not unlike the boulder under which they’d eaten their crab the night before. The guides with their thin black whiskers ate roasted lizards caught bathing that day atop rugged sandstone. They nibbled at it like cats, and as their jaws clenched about the meat their eyes came occasionally up to watch their wards.
‘So was that definitely rain clouds earlier?’

‘No,’ said the Australian. ‘Storm clouds, mate. Much worse. We’ll have swimmer’s ear when that thing reaches us. A day, maybe. Two or three if we’re unlucky.’

The guides muttered to one another. The Milky Way was stretched in observance across the deep black sky.

‘Unlucky? I’ve come all the way from Belfast.’ He laughed. It was a slow, deliberate laugh and none but he knew if he thought himself to be building suspense. ‘I wouldn’t call myself lucky if we’ve rain. Anyway, how would you know? I mean…’ He glanced at the guides and whispered then. ‘What are they here for if you know the land well enough to tell me it’s going to rain on my holiday.’

The Australian sat up with his hands on his knees and he faced the sky, that great and mysterious fallout. And he did not whisper. ‘Whisperin’ll only make it more suspicious, mate. Don’t bother. I don’t know the direction we’re goin but the place itself isn’t so different from where I grew up. I know what a storm in a desert looks like.’

‘Well it’s different for me, I’ll tell you.’ And that laugh again, drawn out as if to spite his listener and yet so sincere. The Australian looked at him and couldn’t help but smile.

‘The closest I’ve come to this was the time I spent across America. It was probably something like nineteen-ninety. Aye. Over ten years now. And…’ He laughed silently again, to himself. ‘I found the most wonderful bike hire shop in all of Oklahoma. That’s where I started out, you see. And when I handed him the money, and when he gave me the keys, I had the helmet under me arm and my wee leather jacket on, aye, the full works I got because I wasn’t going to do it any other way. And I said to the man running that wee shop. I said, “Thank you. This is just business to you. But this is a dream come true for me. A dream.” And as I sat in the saddle before my arse started hurtin, you know, he asked me if I needed a map. And I told him. I said, “No. You’re all right, buddy.” And I could see in his eyes he knew. He just knew. I was going where the wind was takin me so to speak. And I just went. I rode as far as that wee thing could take me. And the wind cooled me down despite the sun. And when I finally stopped to stretch my arse more than anything, I lay by the side of the road and I watched the sky. So blue. So beautiful. And I said aloud, I said, “I’m just so lucky.”’
‘And where did you end up?’

The Irishman cocked his head, thought a moment. ‘All over. But I hit me head, you see. Got some amnesia. It’s kind of weird now to think about.’
The guides spoke to each other some more and absented themselves without warning or farewell to their accommodation beyond the firelight. The Australian was still smiling. They sat up hours longer eating beans from a tin and hearing thunder roll tens or hundreds of miles through the terrain chasing a wind which misplaced whole mountains of sand. The fire remained embers. The country went for miles in no certain direction as did they the following morning following the guides who rose and went out hours before their wards who were drinking and talking less now as they trekked in search of nothing about which to loiter. It was country but hardly a nation, that desert. The land rose and twisted in an incline and the Irishman turned atop the peak they’d climbed and reviewed the land behind them. ‘So lucky,’ he said. And they went on again, up through the dry snapping bushes and the hard cracked earth, country so barren it imbued those on its back with its very own indifference so that by nightfall about their fire the Irishman sang out of tune aloud.

The guides made their own camp far away and its flame was tall and spewing smoke and the Irishman and Australian both watched and wondered what kind of guides they were.

The first of the rains were a sweltering mist falling sideways and twisting mid-air and sticking to their foreheads and chests like sweat. They held their tongues out to let the rain hydrate them. They were topping another rise when it started to fall harder. The sky was grey as a mule’s backside and the sheets of water grew thick and made the guides up ahead disappear into a grey swell as if they’d climbed all the way into the clouds.
The Australian was laughing. He was laughing and holding his arms out to the air. The Irishman took a few steps ahead of him and looked back, now laughing himself. ‘I came all the way from Belfast for this.’

‘Great, ain’t it.’

The Irishman was shaking his head. He smiled, and his big teeth shone with slick wetness, his mouth flooded and dripping at its corners. ‘If you say so,’ he shouted. They went on for several hours. The ground softened with the water, leaving the guides’ footprints deep and bursting their banks but easy enough to follow. And follow they did for hours on end until the fatigue in their knees signalled a nightfall overshadowed by the day’s grey thunderheads.

It was all too wet for a fire. They sat under the shelter of the Irishman’s tent eating canned ham and corn, and they did this two more nights before the rain stopped. The next time they built a fire it was with kindling stored in a waterproof pocket of the Irishman’s bag.

‘Where have they gotten to, do you think?’
‘The guides?’
‘Aye.’
‘Maybe they’re lost. And we with em.’
‘Rain set us off course? How’s that even possible?’
The Australian stood. After the rains the air smelled fresh and seemed cleaner, so a man could see further than before through that waste. Their clothes were soaked wet but their bodies were held a heat that itched even in the cold of the night. The Irishman invited him to sit again.
‘You won’t see them. I was looking earlier.’
‘How can we be off course,’ said the Australian, sighing into his seat by the small fire, ‘if we had no aim.’
‘We need to find our way back.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’
‘Why.’
‘It’s been nice meeting you and seeing this place but there’s plenty more to see, no? I wouldn’t spend a lifetime anywhere. Certainly not here. I’m going to Cambodia in a couple of years.’
‘Years?’
The Irishman smiled. The browned skin around his eyes contracted and seemed taught, crisp. He nodded in his slow way and said, ‘Aye. Shall I tell you something?’
‘If you must.’

His chin went up and his smile finally grew to its apex before he said, ‘I knew you’d say that.’ When he laughed the Australian tilted his head. ‘Aye, I did. Everybody does. I plan my holidays years in advance. Two weeks at an all-inclusive resort doesn’t cut it for me.’
‘Careful, mate,’ said his companion. ‘Getting close to condescending there.’
‘Oh. Big word, that.’

They laughed together, neither the first nor the last time, but it was a quiet and cautious laughter and neither knew the other man’s had any humour in it. Then the Irishman said, ‘I’m just joking.’

‘Me too. Course. I just couldn’t spend years workin for something that lasted a week.’
‘Aye,’ the Irishman said. ‘Suppose it’s each his own.’
‘Do the guides get holidays, you reckon?’

The Irishman looked in the direction the Australian had. He thought a moment and looked back at the fire. ‘Seems like it.’

The Australian chuckled. He was witling a metre-long stick with a sharp stone he’d dug out earlier from beneath a thorn bush. He softened his stick by dangling the end over the flame then worked at the sharpening. He chopped and chopped until the little shavings coming away grew to a pile at his feet, swept up every few minutes by a wind which lingered behind the storms. In the south the grey swell too lingered. When his stick was sufficiently sharp at one end he wrapped the other in bandages to make a grip and held his weapon up. It looked like a short baton sharpened at one end. He called it a spear.

‘Won’t do much good bein so short but it’ll stick a lizard.’
‘Aye but I’d say we’d need something bigger than a lizard, buddy.’
‘Sure we will. We’ll find something. We ain’t runnin out of food anyway are we?’
‘Not yet. That’s why…well we’ll find them soon. And we’ll get a lizard to go around for the four of us.’
‘Four? Those two can suck their mothers’ left titties far as I’m concerned, mate. They’ve bloody left us here.’ He stood, and despite his bemoaning the place and the isolation he looked not one bit anxious. He was topless. Beneath his liver was a swastika tattoo scrawled in cheap ink, choppy and amateurish work. A scar cut the trace of his left ribs, equally amateurish. He seemed somehow larger there before the fire, basking in its glow like a flabby serpent. The Irishman watched him brandish the short spear.

‘We’ll find something,’ he shouted, raising his weapon above his head. ‘My father was a lion-tamer. A lion-tamer,’ he went on, and the Irishman listened quietly.

A blood-red sun rose up over them and the reservoir miles behind was cast in a haem viscous and nauseas from which the crabs emerged dripping from their flat shells blue to keel over at the palms and with them came the catfish, the twenty-foot crocodiles. Flies ravenous buzzed and whirled at their eyes as they passed the ribcage of a whale preserved entire and laid out like a great and hollow cave beneath gargantuan dunes. A white fox with ears like wings lay dead with its tongue adrift and its offal like salted slugs spewed out in a blackening stench upon the sand and the dry heat cured and blotched their skin into raised and tense boils whose cuticles soon broke into blood and pus green and white. A desert wind kicked sand into their eyes like a typhoon and in a deeper crater to the east lay a meteorite, fifteen feet across and glowing in its pit as if within it were an alien honeycomb whose secrets contained their origins. They went alone for weeks. A swarm of locusts rose up following the floods and turned the greened land back to dust on the orders of a maker none knew but always heard. Their great silhouettes crawled and twitched and buzzed against the canvas like automata. The Irishman lay in a sweat and he watched. After, they pondered into the desert leaving one tent behind for its weight and their hunger had grown unbearable and they were lost without guides or any trace of guides. Their hearts screeched drumbeats in the white heat and the old grey swell was a memory and thus a dream, between existence and neverwas.

And in the darkness the sand did not stop. It scoured their eyes closed and blew out their fires gas and wood and finally when they retreated into the tent they were free from the pelting but not the sound. It whined on hours. Then it stopped. A silence like fine China. Something neither had known before. Afraid to breath and break it. A silence so full they began to hear the things their minds put there. Such darkness. The great incubator of nightmares.

‘Our cards were dealt face-down. But we’ll find something. We’ll get back.’
The Irishman hardly listened, did not watch. His stomach ached with emptiness. He talked of Belfast.

‘I was walking back from the Crescent centre. Must be twenty-years now. Aye. And I was going along minding my wee business. And do you know what happened? Three soldiers appeared from behind a car with their rifles aimed at my chest. Right here. And for a minute.’ He smiled, wide and bright. ‘For a minute I thought to myself: this is it. These boys are going to finish it all for you right here. But they didn’t. Aye, they took a moment and patted me down and let me on my way. And they were heading back to their barracks on the wee hill down the road and I said to those three lads, wee lads, eighteen nineteen, my age like. I said to them. Walk with me lads. Be safer that way. For us? they said. I just laughed at the wee lad’s face. Yeah. For you. And I took their names and I learned about their mas and their das back home. And I thought to myself: you go on and get home all right. They didn’t deserve to get shot any more than us like. And do you know what happened then? I left. I said, go on lads mind yourselves now. Because I tell ya if I’d have been seen by my community walking and talking to soldiers…well that’d be an issue.’ He paused, not for the first time. He watched the Australian holding his belly. ‘Eventually one of those wee lads got shot by a sniper. Like a mile off. Wouldn’t even know it was coming.’
‘Could you talk any slower, mate?’

The next day they were dry and restless as they stared down at footprints in the sand. The Australian slung the tent off his shoulder and let it thump into the ground. He raised his hard sharpened stick and squatted to draw in the dirt. ‘We can find em.’
‘They came first. They know their way. They’re long gone like. And we will be too.’

They went another day and rose a hill and caught and ate small lizards whilst on the trails of their guides. When the Irishman asked, ‘Were there ever any guides?’ the Australian took a look into him before slapping him around the back of the head.

The next morning they were awoken whilst it was still dark out. The Irishman crawled out the tent and stayed prone as he heard noises like animals giving birth in the night. The moon hung huge. The Milky Way once more in observance. Twenty yards out beside a cactus stood the silhouette of a small man. He spoke again. The Irishman’s eyes bloomed wide and white in the moonlight. He rose slightly but before he could stand he was knocked over by the coming of the huge Australian who bore his oversized shiv, naked and scared and stomping, rising and looming high and twisting then spear-in-hand with the athletic motion of a javelin thrower. And the silhouette made some unintelligible sounds, rose hands.
Later these wanderers built a fire.

THE END