Mindy McGinnis - In a Handful of Dust

Fletcher put a hand on her shoulder, one of the few times he’d touched her. “Losing people, that’s something I understand right down to my soul.” He leaned forward in the saddle and she slumped against him, crying so hard Spatter turned his head to glance at her quizzically, which only made it worse.

Lynn nudged Mister over to them, holding a water bottle out to Lucy. “You’re wasting your water,” she said.

“You would be practical right now,” Lucy said, pulling back from Fletcher and taking the bottle.

“Somebody has to be,” Lynn said, doing an exaggerated eye roll toward both Fletcher and Lucy.

Fletcher smiled back and tipped his hat. “So,” he said. “Sand City?”

Lynn patted the map tucked inside her pocket. “Seems that way.”

“Maybe I’ll…” He trailed off, an uncharacteristic blush spreading across his features. “Maybe I’ll find my way back there someday.”

“Maybe that’d be all right,” Lynn said, and Lucy could see the muscles in her jaw twitching in an effort to stop a full-fledged smile.

Fletcher had no such compunction, and his ear-to-ear flashed once again before he spurred Terra Cotta and they headed north.

Lucy’s sorrow was lost in a sudden rush of curiosity. “Shit, Lynn, how much talking did you two do?”

But Lynn had already urged Mister into a trot, and Spatter hurried to catch up.

Lynn had called it “the nothing” long before they reached it, a land where even the brush tapered off and the red rocks reached for the sky. The mountains had frightened Lucy with their vastness; their towering heights had persevered for thousands of years, reminding her she was a breath on the wind. The desert made her feel like even that breath was stolen, and the dust filling her lungs taunted her with the reality that one day she’d be reduced to the same.

The highway stretched to the horizon, an unbroken black strip that burned so hot in the afternoons, the heat shimmer reached upward for miles. The landscape was equally monotonous, the stray breezes blowing up dust storms to compete with the mirages. The only thing that broke the view was the marching electrical poles, skeletons from a different world whose veins had been emptied of their power long ago.

Lucy reined in Spatter next to Mister and looked to Lynn, wondering why she had stopped. But the other woman’s eyes were rooted on the horizon, focused on nothing. “Lynn? What are you thinking?”

Lynn startled and seemed to struggle to focus on Lucy. “Just this—

“I think I like Walt Whitman better,” Lucy said.

“You would.”

Spatter and Mister ducked their heads low in the heat, their noses leading the party to the ever farther springs of water, some of them nothing more than a brackish trickle. For nearly a week after Fletcher had left their company Lynn kept her mouth shut, and Lucy knew she was waiting for her to make the right choice and unburden the horses. Her silence made Spatter’s nickering all the more precious. She twirled his rough hair in her fingers while she rode, putting off the inevitable for as long as she could. She was so focused on every aspect of Spatter—the sound of his hooves, the feel of his movements underneath her—she didn’t notice the speck on the horizon behind them until Lynn pointed it out.

“You’re lost in your head over there,” the older woman said.

Jerked from her reverie, Lucy was suddenly very aware she hadn’t spoken since they’d saddled up that morning. “Sorry,” she said, clearing her throat of the dust first. “Just thinking.”

“I’m not pointing it out for the sake of talk,” Lynn said. “There’s been someone behind us for a good two hours, and you’ve not spotted him.”

Lucy turned in her saddle, shading her eyes against the harsh midday sun. There was a black figure, barely discernable among the heat shimmer. “You’re sure it’s a person?”

“I been watching. Wasn’t much more than a dot, but he’s moving faster than us.”

“So he’s mounted?”

Lynn nodded gravely. “And on a horse that’s better suited to the desert than our own, I imagine.”

“Any chance it’s Fletcher? Maybe he changed his mind about going north.”

“Don’t think so. Terra Cotta was the slowest of the three, plus he knows where we’re going. No reason to push his mount to catch us.”

Lucy turned back in the saddle. “So who is it then?”

“Nobody we know. And if we can see him, he can see us.”

The fear of the unknown swooped back in to trump the nothingness of the desert. Anything could be done to them in the emptiness, and their bones left to be buried in the dust with no one the wiser. “So what do we do?”

Lynn’s brows drew together, and Lucy understood she’d been thinking over their options long before starting the conversation, weighing the choices that could end in life or death while Lucy had been making fine braids in Spatter’s mane. “I’m sorry I didn’t see him,” she added quickly.

“Don’t be sorry you didn’t, just be glad I did.” She looked to the bleak landscape around them, devoid of even a tree for shelter. “As for what we do, we can try to outrun him, which’ll likely kill the horses and land us helter-skelter in the middle of nowhere with no idea where we’re going… .”

“Uh, there’s an ‘or’ coming, right?”

Lynn inclined her head toward Lucy. “ Or we hide.”

“Hide?”

“We need to get off this main road. There’s been unpaved ways breaking off here and there, but a lot of ’em aren’t on this map. Don’t know if I’m more comfortable being lost than being followed.”

Lynn unfolded the map as she rode, looping Mister’s reins around the pommel. “If we split off to the south up ahead, we’ll come across some canyons before long. I know you don’t like the idea of the rocks hanging over your head, but if we got down in one of those little mazelike canyons, he’d be hard-pressed to ever find us.”

“And we might be hard-pressed to find a way out.”

“That’s where me asking you to start paying attention comes in.”

A flush crept up Lucy’s cheeks that had nothing to do with the sun. “All right.”

Lynn watched Lucy for a second before continuing. “I want to get over the next ridge, and then we’ll cut to the south. I can’t imagine it’d be easy to track us down in the rocks, ’specially if that cloud there graces us with a bit of rain.”

An unassuming storm cloud was rolling in from the west, and Lucy licked her parched lips as she glanced at it.

“Let’s hope so,” she said.

They broke away from their path once they crested the ridge. Without the baking road reflecting the heat back in their faces, the horses picked up the pace. But without the familiar snake of blacktop, the sameness of the desert made the word lost seem too short to capture the enormity of their situation. The only hint of the road they were traveling was an old fence that ran parallel to it, remnants of a pasture devoid of animals.

“If someone kept their herds here, there must be a creek nearby,” Lucy offered, hoping perhaps the horses had sped up for more reason than one.

“Makes sense,” Lynn said, her lips pursed so tightly the words came out in a growl.

The road met up with the creek shortly, and the horses stumbled wearily into the cool water, Spatter wading in up to his knees. Lynn and Lucy slipped off their saddles as well, filling their near-empty bottles and thirsty mouths. Coaxing the horses out of the stream was tricky, and Lynn caved in to their mournful eyes.