BY DILLON HORNER
Dillon Horner is traveling writer from North Texas. He is a Hunter Thompson fan, so said that “this would be a dream come true”. He is a serious writer and has been working for the past six years. He has two novels, multiple short stories and is currently working on his third novel.
Another busted night in my pick-up truck speeding down the foreign
asphalt as I turn over our demented pasts and dubious though absolute
futures alike. I can’t get it down fast enough now. I’ve been driving through
the fog for hours, the headlights damp and not nearly projecting enough light
but we press on all the more in desperate and pitiful hopes of finding a
landmark for Pineville amid the growing dark. Just this morning we had
stuffed our bags in the back of the truck and said goodbye to our folks before
we lit out south down Highway 75 at a ripping speed while I smoked with the
window rolled down slightly and radio blaring as William read from one of
his books. How one can read in a moving vehicle without their
head feeling like a shook soda can is beyond me. We exited off at a gas station
for a piss break and freshly-brewed coffee and kept driving south into Dallas
for the east turnaround heading for Louisiana.
I didn’t pretend to know what driving around with my brother was
going to entail. He said that he was tired of school and wanted to do ‘my
traveling thing’ for the season, my parents reveling at the idea of course. I
never thought they would hire him so I foolishly encouraged William to apply
as I often and continually misjudge the creative capacity with which life sees
fit to change my carefully made plans. William and I have never really been
interested in the same endeavors, though, I suppose we do share a passion. A
certain, how do I say, lust for adventure, that was not unnoticed by our
teachers growing up. We are three months apart but do not look similar in
the least. In fact if you put us together with a few strangers then you wouldn’t be able to know we were kin.
I enjoy my time outdoors like hiking
and football, spending the weekend getting drunk with my friends. But my
brother William spends almost all of his time in school it seems. And
when not there, he’s inside reading or watching movies on his computer. He
tells me, “James I don’t understand how we can be so close but so different.”
Our dad would just tell him that it was one of life’s unalienable truths, a
subject with which is considerable and impactful though cyclic in nature. Our
dad always talked like that. William would nod and I would listen and stare
at the flickering fireplace in the falling dusk.
Our family grew up in central
Oklahoma in a trailer park community and they liked to spend their
evenings under the star-flecked sky sitting around a stack of burning wood
drinkin and talkin with their neighbors, back when people did that sort of
thing. We came into the picture around the time Reagan was leaving office. William and I were kids playing outside when the 95′ bombing occurred
nearly thirty miles from us in Oklahoma City. We only remember ’cause our
parents got real upset, telling us to come inside. Things seemed to change
real fast after that. When I think back on it now, I realize the change was a
lot bigger than just William and I. We grew up as kids playing outside, I
mean we had television and video-games but it was just different. Us kids
somehow internally knew that playing outside was the better option when
the sun was shining and warm — the brittle wind flushing through the waving
Carolina Anemone. Today we have somehow let technology come into our
daily lives to such modern degrees that I don’t believe we are yet fully aware of the repercussions.
I say these things and William sees that as an invitation
to debate, though he knows I dread the thought. He’s the college grad, so I let
him flab at the mouth all he wants. But I digress, my sloppiness of describing
him only fully bares my desperate frustration and inevitable confusion with
my brother. Things change and ‘normality’ paradigms fluctuate with such
fluidity that we couldn’t keep up anyway so who cares?
It didn’t start out well for us, I’ll say that for him.
I didn’t hear a word
until we were on Louisiana soil, and then, just a mere plea to pull over at a
station. For long miles I drive us onward with the sounds of James Taylor
projecting from my worn speakers, he never saying a word but just
studying the brazen earth as we glide along like weary sailors adrift. By
nightfall I was worried that William wasn’t enjoying himself at all, so I
pushed my foot on the accelerator, hoping to get us to our destination sooner
rather than later.
“James slow down…you see it?” he asks as we approach a blue-colored
sign that flares from our headlights. “Finally,” he says. “We reach the levee.”
I nod and tap on the brakes while rolling down the window to smell the
fresh oak sap but nothing short of a hot blast of humidity was there to greet
us and William cursed me for letting out our rationed air. On down the levee
we went into the night. A long gravel road plagued with pot-holes and
surrounded for thirty long miles groups of beech trees that ran up several
meters high and grouped around were bunches of Spanish moss that curled
up cypress trees and thorny honey locust caked in mud amid that sticky morass.
It called to us from both sides of the levee and William squawked
when his cellphone lost service. But we had traveled too far and risked too
much to turn back at this late a juncture.
Jonesville, Louisiana, Winter of the New Year, 2021
A nearness through a view that instantly instills a mix of both genuine
nostalgia and immediate calm as William looks out at the lake amid a myriad of
reflections that slates against the evening dusk. A mist floats over the water now
and it inks along while the toads croak in the faint distance. Bawling of coyotes in
the growing stillness as the earth silently moves, a murky residue building in the air
hovering over the channel. The red sun shines across Larto Lake and it shimmers
now, a crimson glare expanding over the reservoir. Soaked spring leaves hold their
color until the fall and during this time they fade to a honey brown and this blends
with the remaining sage and ferns, fluttering down until they sit on the water now
causing the slightest ripple that meshes until absorbed by an oncoming wake. And
on a night like this, when the sanguine horizon peers over the waves of Larto Lake
out here, the florescence accentuates the honey oak trees in such a way that William can’t make up his mind on the almost indecipherable construct of
magnificence in front of him. This construct, this view, this lively wild scene
moving in front of him now makes his mind wonder and dive in thought as he sits
with his brother and four fellow employees as they lay on maroon-colored leather
couches watching a mounted television, drinking red wine and whiskey. In the
lodge, after work hours, they sit in this vast living room and it is a grand sight
indeed. A collection cast with fine nature paintings and maple plastered tables that
wrap around the edge of the room. A gas fire burns and flecked flint rock funnels
the smoke black up through the ceiling.
Kate and Rose are sleeping together and are never seen apart for very long.
Both wear designer jeans with band-shirts and long hair like something out of the
80’s. They sit on an aged and weathered couch directly in front of the television and
whisper with each other, looking on as William stares out at the muddy water
surrounding Cyprus trees poking up through the top like bent spears that grips the
viewer who sees the impending obscurity breaking against the residing light. It
fights and pleads against the oncoming darkness causing a break in the sky while
William watches as a white-bellied crane swoops down from its lurch, lazily hanging
above. The two girls whisper something more and bust out laughing. James drinks
from his cup and wipes his clean-shaven face, grinning, waving his hand now,
“Hey…Will…come back to us.”
William comes to and nervously wipes his glasses, avoiding eye contact, “Just
look at the lake…see the colors?”
“Very beautiful. Hard to beat a scene like that.” Lisa comes walking up, her
brown hair flowing down to her shoulders.
“Do we have more wine?”
“Yes Thomas,” James says. “Upstairs.”
“Pace yourself,” Kate says sucking from her vape pen. “The game has just
started ya know?”
“Ah…who cares.” Thomas gets up and walks over to the counter bar where an
island sits in the middle of the kitchen and he pours himself a couple thumbs of
Woodford into his wine glass and walks back to the chair beside the couch. He sips
and smiles, “This will do nicely.”
“Really? You can’t even get a proper glass?” Lisa asks brushing past James. Her
slender body making his pulse twitch, moving slightly closer.
“This is proper enough.”
“Where is Rich?” Kate asks.
James says, “Oh he went into town to get us some smoke.”
Thomas plays with his neatly trimmed goatee, “Nice.”
“Don’t act like your getting any of it.”
“Seriously?”
Kate laughs and the others smile at the hidden symmetry. As young travelers
all in the their mid twenties and thirties and usually traveling alone (more and more
for the first time), community is highly treasured almost as much as drink.
Peculiarly, the two fit like a glove…until they don’t. Some sort of cheap American beer like Coors, Lone Star or Pabst is most common. Liquor of all kind and color can
be found smuggled in every dorm room, cabin or bunkhouse across the country as
the routine (and by far the most commonly used) methods of entertainment. That
and sex. Cannabis sometimes if one is lucky. This pretty well goes for every young
group of workers in the country that live close together doing seasonal work
whether it be a National Park or some kind of recreational resort. A certain kind of
occupation that attracts workers in the hospitality industry like grad-students
looking for a good time away from their normal studies.
Aspiring chefs, and travelers, vagabonds or exiles — People that maybe are lost souls, risk-takers,
or addicts, a forgotten body searching for perhaps their last chance. A place for
outsiders still searching for a way of life that draws more on the primitive than the
modern. These kinds of people who just don’t understand modern society (or reject
it entirely) and who have come together at these places to find sincere and earnest
communion and, likewise, a family. Like nomads forever longing but finally at a
place where they can breath and stretch themselves. All across America right now
are bodies of people that travel around this circuit that never stops but just burns
from season to the next. Forever yearning that next dawn and celebrating alike the
come of every night.
James sips his wine and for a reason he will never understand suddenly thinks
to himself of when he was a boy, pondering in his cotton mattress on an early fall
morning back home when he couldn’t sleep. He would get up and sneak outside
and sit on the porch in the still and silent dark, just rocking back and forth
watching the stars beam in the swollen distance. Inside the kitchen, it was quiet and
through the window past their garden and fence-row he knew that somewhere out
in that obscurity was the red river and it was quieter still. On mornings like this, one
can look out at the blanket of rising creation as the hot star heats the earth and you
can hear the croaking of toads and see hens grazing on dried grain amid the
morning dew. The chirping of crickets as the light slowly burns into the air. All of
this eventually drowned out by the sound of running motors skating past asphalt,
an inevitable cycle that happens every morning that he noticed even back then.
James sat in their rocking chair out on the porch and took in that view that seemed
to meld both the modern and the primitive together for just a spec of time, vast
with its infinite of histories shaped in blood. He sits with a cup of milk and slowly
eats a cold biscuit, soaking in his inherited though docile remnants of an Oklahoma
plains once mired in sin.
