We Quit The Plain

Clayfellow

He wound the loose leather of the buggy whip in a series of loops and tied off the coils with a clasp. He eyed the grip a last time. Satisfied with the tackiness of the wrap, he set the whip to lean against the carriage’s goose-necked shifting rail. He relaxed into the cushioned back of the carriage seat, happy with the shade and the gentle afternoon offshores that swirled under the canvas top. He rubbed an apple on the lapel of his jacket and watched drops of water break apart on his boots propped against the dash rail. His gaze followed the drops up to Clayfellow, already racked atop the carriage but still sweating the day’s surf. Beads of seawater clung to the rails of the board and refracted the sun in urchins of white light. Without taking his eyes from this kaleidoscope, he set the virgin fruit into the tuck ‘n roll and reached below the seat cushion to slide forth his ipad. His fingers deftly cross-stepped apps to finally come upon the desired tool and he did no fewer than nine and six contour studies until he was satisfied he had captured the sight, filing away in his mind colors of note that when matched with the sketches later would form the skeleton of art. He returned the ipad to its recesses and took up the apple and bit into it. He swallowed and whistled for

his dog and Dylan looked up and lingered a moment as if to excuse herself from the children with whom she played in the sand and heeled at a trot to the side of the carriage. She stood with straight legs upon the long-step and met his palm with her forehead. “Where’s monkey?” he asked. Her ears peaked. “Where’s lobster?” Her tail in wider arcs. “Where’s China?” She leapt and spun from the step racing for the water’s edge and tumbled through the sand, digging and throwing great pawfulls behind her. Alright, he thought, and swung out from the cockpit and balanced on the axel nut as he loosed Clayfellow from its braces. As he paddled he watched the water dangle and drop diamonds from his fingers in their half-work, the prisms viscous and suspended as if extensions of skin, nail. Now make the world of me as I have made a merry manshape of your walking circle, he thought and grinned as he matched the sea, stood, and walked upon it.

Brough to life: July 2010 // Photography: Sarah Wilkinson

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The Evening Bell

Grease had long settled in the cracks of his hands and in the cracks in the molded steering wheel that the cracks in his hands wrapped around and matched in a gentle symmetry. The headlights, tired like the man and yellowed like the truck, labored to keep pace with the truck and advance light across the asphal

t like yellow seafoam up a black-sand beach and the man thought the truck of its heavy inertia downhill may overtake its own light. He downshifted without thinking about it and felt the burden of the flatbed shift and settle into a new shape. The split-pane

windshield plowing the thick summer air was as murderous as he’d seen, and he thought of the truck’s light and that even in its inadequacy, it was yet the brightest piece of the night and life was hurrying to end itself against it. But the man is a father, and as a father he goes into the night. He doesn’t blink at the snap of the tarpaulin catching the wind and ignores the rearview in favor of the glow advancing on blacktop, assured in the security of his load.

Brough to life: July 2010 // Photography: Sarah Wilkinson

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Zoé Omaha

The girl crested the almond dune for her first look at the sea. The offshore breeze brought her hair around her face in wisps and the air carried the bright grey mist and the tang of sheep and the duller smells of cattle. She dropped to her knees and in doing so cratered the summit of the dune and sat on her heels and began to unpack the meal her mother had prepared for her. She picked at the wax paper around the cheese and furrowed her brow in the attempt to get her newly trimmed fingernails under an edge and thought of how she wanted grown-up hands that worked better. She had said

as much to her father the night before as he clipped her nails and he said that all children want to be bigger and that’s why they grow. She sat and ate the buttery cheese with crackers and watched the emerald sea rise up in low jade walls and tumble white over itself. She watched the waves and thought of the waves watching her and wondered how old the waves were. She wondered at the age of all the things around her and remembered her parents telling of young people not much older than her who came to this beach without having ever seen it or anyone who lived near it to save it and the people near it from bad people and that many of the young people died before the bad people left. Her parents said to remember these young people for they had died on this beach for this beach and so one day two people from opposite sides of the world could meet and start a family just like theirs and that without the sacrifice of these young people their family would not be and many other things would not be. The girl rocked gently back and forth on her heels and felt the tops of her feet pressing against the dune and watched wave meet beach, wave meet beach.

Brough to life: July 2010 // Photography: Sarah Wilkinson

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Ol’ Grandad

Ol’ Grandad woke to a nosebleed that he staunched with his shirt tail and as he did so he swept the bits of straw from his neck and shoulders. His shoulders were square and solid for how his elbows creaked and locked as he saddled Water Back. The latigo swung loose as he led the horse out of the stall where they had slept a windy night in the dark of the hills just off the plain.

Grandad stood in the sun, his hand on Water Back’s face and he thought of his youth and the early surfs and barrels he pioneered off the coast, down out of the scrubs and at the end of steep trails that were muddy in the winter months. He thought of his youth before the sea and early and only love and a family sown and lost in the deep gorges outside Pigeon Falls. Water Back whinnied and he bound

the latigo and mounted. He sat the horse and reached without looking to the saddle bag behind him and produced half a bar of wax and rubbed the wax on his calloused palms and the pads of his fingers and returned the wax and rubbed his hands together and breathed deeply into his hands. The oils of his calluses blended in the blueberry scent and the coconut bled over his gnarled fingers. His cloudy eyes glistened pale like the wave crests he imagined and his ears echoed the crashes of whitewater and he looked on as he rode the hills.

Brough to life: July 2010 // Photography: Sarah Wilkinson

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Lord Baltimore II

Lord Baltimore was the most revered tracker of the Plain. The winds whispered the footprints of outlaws in his ears under the stars next to the crackling warmth, and in the morning he found the scents of men’s spurs on the blades of each tumbling weed over the land, gunned them down and collected his bounty. Like saddle’s wear across the life of a once wild stud, he quit the plain one winter, shacked up in the shop of his nascent glassing, covered in dust, unhealed and scathed from so many climbs over the pinnacles dividing the Plain, always in search of the toob that would deliver him from a torturous and leashless being.

Drew pulled him down one day, Nate pulling at his shirtsleeves to leave the old bones be up in the webs and rafters of the shop. But Drew laid his hand down on his revolver at his belt, and a new life bequeathed Lord Baltimore. In a new shape and resin-pelted spring sheathing Lord Baltimore II is feared, shredding.

Brough to life: July 2010 // Photography: Sarah Wilkinson

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L’Autruche

Much obliged to Lil’ Sar 6-Guns for her work with quill and camera.

Brough to life: July 2010 // Photography: Sarah Wilkinson

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Madeleine, gracias a dios

Iridescent spheres of oil, speckled red and brown with spice, drifted about the surface of the broth like the slow wandering of planets through the heavens. She twisted the spoon, cutting a gentle wake through the soup, the oils colliding and reconstituting in larger forms and separating again with centrifugal pressure against the ceramic keep. With each revolution the pale cliffs of tripe were too transformed and she focused on the colors of the soup while she worked. She thought of his hands, all

day in the red-brown earth to be soon stained with red-brown soup, and so sustained. She anticipated the door but did not turn to it when it creaked open and let briefly in the sound of tires across gravel. She smiled to the soup and listened to him inhale the room. “Art,” he exhaled. “You abandoned the recipe?” She did not answer, did not turn. “Of course,” he said. “La evolución es sofocada por la instrucción.” He stood behind her and bowed his forehead to rest between her shoulder blades. “Gracias, Madeleine. Por todos.”

Brough to life: July 2010 // Photography: Sarah Wilkinson

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Jacqueline hugs The Boyd Model II (with boot)

Found little Jacqueline nursing a tired mare down the dusty highway off Two Bar Road. I knelt down on the dirt and scooped her up in a swaddling mildewed towel used on so many bodies cold from Pacific toobs, her pucker still aggressive on my shirtsleeve, and folded her into the bed of the pickup. The Boyd Model II waited by the fire when I brought her down off the ridge and it eyed her gently as she slept deep into the morn dreaming maybe of the mare or of the dusty

shaping room in ivy or the ride up 1o1 through the plain and rolling oaks to the North Coast. They have since felt akin, crafted from a like and talented hand that scoured the foam and sheared the glass noses of many before, and they have yet to be parted except on firey days of 8′+/10+sec.

Brough to life: July 2010 // Photography: Sarah Wilkinson

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Jacqueline hugs The Boyd Model II (with boot)

Celeste

Mace folded his cards face up across the green felt landscape of the table and drew from his tumbler an easy draught of bourbon, setting the glass down softly and without sound. The spades like Comanche warriors, howling and painted, darting across the room and through the man at the end of their projection, caught building a small cooking fire at dawn, back peddling over pots and cans and saddles, clawing for his rifle, yelling for the children to hide, cards still in hand. “You know,” Mace said from behind his sleeve as the back of his hand moved across his lips, his palette hot and wet and full of blood rushed up from the darker spaces of his chest, “Celeste is expecting me home for supper, so I’ll need your payout.” The words left the room and the man’s hand fell from the ridge of the table in a dash, followed his sides to the top of his revolver. The chair was blown out from under Mace’s position, snake boots shifting across the floor and spurs tearing dust-laden strips of cedar from slats below the dancing and fistfights and mildew and barley of the

saloon, his legs released into a stagger, and his guns blasting forth. “Celeste likes my appetite on nights like this. And toobs? Well.” Mace scowled. He adjusted his hat over a wild nest of serpentine shag and collected his guns, smoke pouring from the barrels like the spirits of demons dispatched to tear open the chests of cowardly and lesser men, retracted them into their leather sheathes.

“Toobs haven’t been a-makin’ me a man.” The last of his bourbon he arced onto the floor. He spat and scraped the money from the center of the table, taking without hesitation the inked coins that lay in front of his opponent’s vacated post, the man’s leg entwined in his overturned chair, his vest open, hands laid palms praise to the ceiling.

The bartender heard a soft whispering “Hssssssssssss Hsssssssss” and pulled his face from the whiskey and glass and spit and ash that coated the old brown floor behind the bar. His face breached the countertop, the doors of the saloon swinging gently in the night as if a breeze had convinced them that to sway is to shred, the space in between these lesser spoke of by decent men.

Brough to life: July 2010 // Photography: Sarah Wilkinson

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The Decanter

Chickens scattered through the dust among the lame and mangy feral dogs and children stood stunned as their mothers screamed and fell to their knees. Men overtook elderly women prying at doors, tears streaming, bloody fingers clawing against hope, and crying in the heat.

He climbed down off his steed, the white mustang sweating under the heavy woolen saddle pad, leather riding harness, nylon track suit. The leather of his belt etched in years worn, “Paolino” scribed along its length to join the twin pistols slung parallel on his hips, holding flush against his thighs with animal sinew. The Decanter he pulled down and held it under his arm feeling the warm wax separate gently in his grip, the hot foil against his body and the shimmer of the rail like a heavenly port waning in the resurrection of a perfect saint’s ascent. Flies around a mule’s eyes collected in a toxic and bustling devilish hoard and sounded a lonely hiss across the silence of the dirt and heat welling up in the noontime. The cracking of a pistol cocked. He turned to address it.

The martini tasted of brine and the smooth sour of the olive, swollen and crisp with cool, fought off the day’s blood already shed by mid-morning. She forgot all of them. The begging, the wet trousers, a taste of liquor. The collection of gin in the corners of her palette, the smell of gunsmoke pouring skyward as the rigor of her aim, an oak branch, never shook in the wake of the blast. The thin and frozen surface of her drink, so delicate like the falling eyes of the doomed before death. After the yelling, the street outside grew quiet and she swallowed the last of her courage in the cool of the bar and set her glass down in the company of her Macbook. Walked the length of the bar, her eyes danced ahead and grinning, two men at the entrance holding their oily hats and thanking her, her hand resting fondly on her pistol that bore the name “STU.”

Brough to life: July 2010 // Photography: Sarah Wilkinson

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