Glass

Why I should recall his face after so many years, I don’t know. Dale White Sun is his name and I met him at the Stumps.

A Shoshone, he had never lived on a reservation. No, he grew up a suburban child in Glendale, Arizona.

Once his service was up, he left the Corps and headed off to the desert. I’ve never seen him since, though I did look for him a couple of times, including once the same year my brother died.

“Enjoy the rest of your time in the Suck,” he said, “And look me up when you’re out.”

Final last words as we shook hands and he climbed in his beater ‘73 Chevy Nova. The old ‘No-Go,’ as he called it.

As I lay in bed last night, into morning, I thought of him. I also thought how he’d given me a very small crystal skull.

It was on a piece of leather and was actually made of glass. I thanked him and wore it when ever I had the chance, which was nearly every time I was out of uniform.

It’s stowed in a wooden box among a hundred trinkets collected over a life time. I have since removed the piece of leather after breaking it one afternoon.

Also on my dresser are my tennis shoes. I put them there because we’ve had a sudden infestation of brown scorpions.

As a man of habits, some OCD tendencies, I rap the heel of my sneaker on the carpeted floor in my bedroom and out pops one those bugs. I’m quick about grabbing the bastard by its pissed-off stinger and rushing it outside to set it free.

“I can’t kill it, don’t want to kill it,” I think.

Had I slipped my foot in that shoe, it is no doubt I would have been stung. It is a juvenile in this case, so it would have unloaded all of its poison and my foot would’ve been swollen to twice its size in minutes.

There’s been enough death.

Search as I might, I could never find Dale. I located a bunch of people who know him, directed me out to a place beside a mountain in the Arizona desert, where I found the stone hut he’d began constructing.

But no Dale.

The hut was nearly complete. The wood slats that served as a roof had begun to warp and bend as the sun cooked them, no window panes, only wood shudders and an old bed, blankets and sheets filled with the sand and dust of wind storms.

I returned three times, leaving my skull where he could find it should he suddenly reappear.

After my first trip out, 42 miles one way, go to the right at the fork, half mile passed the new water tank, I started hearing rumors. They were not good rumors.

One afternoon, when I still wore the skull around my neck, now strung on a piece of hemp twine, I was working for a moving company. I casually jumped from the loading dock, a distance of three, perhaps four feet, and the skull rose up and slapped me in the front teeth.

There was a very small chip in my left front tooth, so tiny only I could notice and only when I licked my tongue over the upper bridge. I removed it.

That was a year after my second sojourn into the vast Arizona desert, following the hints I had realized tucked in the many rumors I had heard.

By this time I was certain he was dead. Murdered, either by accident, during a gang beating or purposely during the same violent act.

“If you’re lucky, you might find a bleached bone,” I was told more than one time.

With it came the finger of accusation and who might have done Dale in and why.

“He was an Indian,” this one stated, “He found gold,” that one claimed, “Water,” another said. I could never figure it out and as I skirted closer and closer to the truth, the more I found myself feeling threatened.

No one said or did anything. It was the silence I encountered, a deafening lack of sound, that unless you’re on point , you never hear coming till it is too late.

Years before this, I was hiking by myself when I found a prosthetic leg. Seeing it hung up in the scrub left me chilled, believing there could be a body nearby.

I backed out the way I came and notified the law.

Questioning ensued, nine-hours worth. Then, it was over — after someone looked up the serial number etched in the aluminum shaft and learned the man it belonged to was alive and that the ‘peg’ had fallen from an airplane he’d been in.

How it came to fall from a plane passing over the desert, was never answered. I had to simply accept it and move on.

The third time I returned to the stone hut, I felt the eyes of malignancy on me and I knew I had to beat feet from the area. I grabbed the glass skull I had left for Dale to find, the one he would never return to find and I left.

I’m sure Dale lays buried in shallow grave out in that lonely and mostly empty desert.

Shortly after coming home, where once again I felt safe, I consulted a friend, a Shoshone medicine woman and she performed a ‘closing ceremony,’ at least that’s what I think she called it, and I said goodbye to Dale’s spirit. Tonight, I’m going to place the glass skull in one of my shoes before bedtime.

I have accepted these truths and have learned to move on.