Enoch

(published as part of the novel EYES, 1993/4 by xaos Books/Chaos warrior Productions)

"by Cadmann Warner"

Heat waves shimmer and distort visions in front of him. They turn the desert to dun-colored illusions.

There are no oases ...



His boots scuff across the grainy sand. Water has come, has fled, has left the earth to dry. The ground is cracked into patterns that do not match. It is nature's form of tile floor. Perfect, fashionable tile for a perfect, fashionable four-bedroom rambler in a perfect, fashionable suburban cul-de-sac.

He has three layers of cotton socks. All are damp and make his feet itch. He needs the socks. He needs to prevent blisters from his heavy boots. He needs.

The boots. There are snakes in some places. He has heard this.

The buttes are towers of sienna and burnt umber rising from the floor of the desert. They were towers. They seem towers.

He thinks of dragons and kings. Stories. Parables. They are only images, caused by desert heat.

Patches of dry grass grow more frequent. The boy looks to the horizon. Just over it the terrain varies even more. He knows this. He knows much.

He stops. He removes his olive-drab canvas backpack. He uses the pack as a backrest when he sits. The slightly rolling, dry fields are where he will set up his pup tent.

He reaches behind, unstraps one of three round canteens from the backpack. He drinks. The water is lukewarm. It is sweet. It hurts when he gulps too hard. The flesh inside his throat is dry and raw. But he thirsts.

He wets his palm, with it his cracked lips and the skin near his eyes. He sighs, and he coughs.
The boy's thin legs are sun-bronzed. The cutoff wool military pants offer no protection from the sun. The face is young and not yet angular. The hair is bleached now, by sun. The gaze is dull and too-aware. He has had German classes but does not know about angst. His feeling is unnamed.

He looks up. He sees a figure move slowly across the desert toward him from too far for the figure to have whispered and the boy to have heard. He hears the whisper retroactively. The stranger's gait is casual. He has his hands in his pockets. His outline is distorted by the heat waves. His shoulders are broad, powerful, but the man seems incapable of harming anything. Or simply unwilling.

Aura, the boy thinks tangentially. But perhaps, he thinks, it is only the impression from the heat waves.

The man strides forward without blinking or averting his gaze. He comes close enough for his face to be visible. His hair is medium length. His beard is trimmed close to his face. The face is neutral. It does not yet smile, but seems to. It says hello.

The boy responds. He does not wish to avoid response, but could not hold it back even if he so wished. The distance between them is too close in the vastness of the desert. The stranger asks if he is going up to the buttes.

Yeah, the boy says. He guesses so.

The stranger's face does not change. An impression of a smile intensifies. The boy feels relieved. He has been told "yeah" is a bad word. One must only say "yes, sir." Especially when one does not mean it.

The stranger asks why. Why does the boy go to the buttes? The boy shrugs. It was nice, being out there alone sometimes.

Alone, the man ponders out loud. Out here, there is not much else.

"It depends on what you know to look for."

The stranger's nonexistent smile widens. The boy feels the man's comment was a test and the boy has somehow responded correctly. The boy knows this is only a feeling. He knows he is an unnecessary romantic. Or, more correctly, he has been told he is a derogatory word meaning "unnecessary romantic."

"There's an eagle that nests on one of the buttes. I watch him sometimes.

"Want to walk over there with me? It's still early."

The boy starts setting up his tent a distance from the cliffs. The man watches. The boy says he needs some distance to see the eagle well. He can't see anything looking straight up. The man nods.

"You can see him too. Just wait." The boy brings out something swaddled in heavy padding. He unwraps it. He does so gently. It is Christmas season. He cannot afford the risk of breaking this thing. He is only allowed to ask for something during Christmas.

On Christmas Eve the boy goes to church. He does well in Sunday School. Everyone there says he is such a good and smart and polite young man, but he knows they lie. If they did not they would not just tell these compliments but fight if need be to make them believed in the boy's house. But it was good that the church-people lied. If they did not, what kind of home would he have? It was so good that church-people lied, thought the boy, or he would have to admit that he had no home and be without it and soon starve, in the desert of the world.

He was in the desert now. He had often been here, and knew to find food. But this desert was only a game. He had been told that any desert he walked in was only a game.

He unswaddled his baby: a spotting scope, 5-30X, with zoom magnification. You can use it too, the boy says to the man. "Just be careful. I saved up summer work money a long time for this."

"How long?"

The boy shrugs. "Does it matter?"

"How long?" The man repeats so softly the boy can hardly hear him.

"Three years."The boy whispers back.

The man's sad eyes say that three years is a long time for a boy. The boy shrugs. He is used to it. The hard part was not the saving. The hard part was having such a prize and having to keep it hidden at a friend's house. The friend was good but might still steal the scope,though the boy shared it often.

If "the old man" had known of the scope he would have broken it before the boy's eyes. His "old man" is a priest. He is also an electrician but he preaches of the value of a dollar. He harasses the boy with chores so long as he is at home and is angered at the boy's sometimes-habit of going off without permission; he made the boy toil at the local work farm each summer to pick string beans and told him this was necessary employment for the boy would amount to no better. The boy picked beans in the autumn too, when he was ridiculed for being no good in the sports he was not allowed to play.

He should have been good at these games without playing. He picked beans when he should have been doing his work for school, but made top grades anyway. This was good for had he not it would confirm he "would amount to nothing." At least he was not in the deserts, and starving.

Mother said nothing, or sometimes a little. The boy knew he had to be grateful. If he was not, they said, no one else would have him. No one but the desert.

All knew and hated the boy for getting top marks, for he was as a sissy and a nerd and a freak; all thought this, the old man sneered, did not the boy realize all thought this? No one at school said this but the boy knew him right.Despite their words of praise the church-people thought this.

However, the old man is equitable when he sneers at the boy for being "sensitive." It was not only men who are not supposed to cry. Women also. Women should not cry because they should not think big thoughts, or know anything but elation in his presence, and at the things he can buy them. The old man has no daughters. It is better that way. Perhaps the old man would make a radical exception with daughters, but the boy does not know what good that would do.

The boy is not allowed nice things. He is not allowed nice things, even though the old man is "well off." The boy saved three years and three days for the scope. That he already understood how to work hard and be a man would not have pleased the old man, who is not really the boy's own "old man," and not so old anyway.

"I like your scope."

The boy shrugs. It is a common reaction of his.

He cannot keep the scope in his room. He cannot look on it with pride as he lies in bed and the lights wink out. The scope is not an object but a free and conscious friend. The boy does not consider it his. In this world, he possesses nothing. He has grown to like things this way.

The man walks from the camp. The boy is surprised. He follows to the foot of the pillar of rock. The man unslings his backpack. He removes rock-climbing gear: chockstones, nuts, karibiners, webbing, nylon rope.

The boy asks, You're going to climb the butte? The stranger nods. Alone? the boy asks. The stranger takes the circular piece of webbing and folds it into a diaper harness around his waist and legs. and connects the harness with a locking karibiner.

"Why?" the boy says.

The man shrugs. He starts to climb.

The boy returns to his camp. He positions his spotting scope to watch the man's progress. The man's advance is slow. He places very few anchors at the low points on the rock. The boy does not know if the man is reckless or conserving them for when the need is greater.

The boy repositions the spotting scope. He aims it to where the eagle's nest sits on a small ledge near the summit. He focuses. The bird is present. This is unusual. The eagle likes to soar on the updrafts at this time of day. It hunts. He is unsure what it hunts for. Sometimes it just circles the butte.

The boy zooms in. The movement of the eagle's wings are wrong. The boy refocuses. One of the wings hangs at an odd angle.

The boy licks his lips. The eagle is too high. It cannot return to ground. The precision needed in the descent is too great. It cannot descend. It cannot return. But the break is too large. It will not heal of its own accord.

With no other choice, the Great Bird of Prey might try and fall and crash, pained and delerious.

It is later. The climber moves up the rock. The boy sees him place each anchor. The man is halfway to the summit. It has taken until noon to get that far. His path will take him up through the ledge where the eagle roosts.

The boy wishes he could call up to the man. A wounded eagle might strike out. It might not comprehend that no harm was meant. Such a bird's talons could cause much damage. And this eagle can go nowhere. The man could easily avoid it if he so wishes.

The boy does not so wish. He does not want to warn the man. He hopes the man would come upon the bird. He wishes the man will save the bird. The boy knows it is unrealistic to hope. He knows he only hopes because he is an unnecessary romantic. Or a derogatory word that means "unnecessary romantic."

The eagle is clear in the lens of the scope. The wing is broken midway along its length. When the bird tries to move the limb the outer portion flops.

Dusk comes when the man is twenty yards from the summit. Darkness makes viewing through the spotting scope impossible.

The boy can see the man reach the ledge. The eagle will not take kindly to the intrusion. The boy expects commotion.

He looks. He sees none. He listens. He hears nothing. It means there is nothing. Sound carries far in the desert.

The moon happens to rise behind the butte. The boy sees the man and the eagle silhouetted. It does not lash out at him.

The boy does not sleep. He writes in his journal. He writes poems. He writes them in a notebook always kept hidden lest it be ripped before his eyes: the eyes of a sissy, and a nerd, and a freak.

The boy wakes. He sits up. The sun tops the butte. The brilliance sits upon the ledge. It blinds him. He still cannot see the man or the bird. The man will die. He has not come down. He has no water, the boy remembers. It has been three whole days, or perhaps four.

He must thirst, thinks the boy, for I do. I thirst. The boy cannot wait much longer. He will be missed. He has left without permission. "The old man" will be angered. The old man does not care about the boy's welfare. But he has been gone without permission.

The boy walks north. When he goes a mile he can see the ledge. He sets up the spotting scope. Looking through it he sees neither bird nor man. He does see the man's climbing rope. It is just now cut loose, though the boy can see no one release the top end. It tumbles off the butte to the ground.

The boy scans the butte. Nothing living clings to the rock. He looks up from the scope. The eagle, circling off the butte, is a familiar shape. It flies strangely as if in pain.

It tries to soar. You cannot soar, the boy thinks, it is too late and your wing is broken. You will fall and you will die. The boy does not speak, however; not that the eagle could understand such speech. But the boy does not speak, for he understands that the eagle would die anyway, in the desert, in the nest. It merely would not fall.

The boy sees the eagle's wing buckle at the apex of the ascent. Momentum carries the shape into the glare of the sun.

The boy waits and watches, though the light burns his eyes. He waits for the bird to fall. It has to. He knows it has to. He has been told it has to.

The bird does not fall.

The boy waits for perhaps a half-hour but the heavens are silent. He wonders what to do. But he is still a boy, and this desert only a game.


He takes up his pack. He starts to return.

He has been gone without permission. He will be punished.