30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 21, The Barrel Flats

The Barrel Flats lay on the South side of Downgil town, flat and dry and never a soul had gotten out alive they said. But for Cargill Watts, that's just what he was going for. His life had been hard, and he was ready for it to end. He had wandered for the last year and a half after his wife had died. Nothing had changed, and the ache in his heart had only worsened. He wondered often why it didn't kill him, and as he had grown
skinnier and skinnier with starvation, the dingoes seemed to have gotten closer and closer to giving him his wish.

Now wherever he went their footsteps and sniffing noses and calls of greeting seemed to follow him like so many reminders of the life to come, and he accepted their presence the same as he had eventually accepted the death of his wife: as the reality of the situation, and yet the dream of life he was trapped within and not really the
life he remembered living.

Noone had ever crossed the Barrel Flats, they said. And so he decided to give it a try.

His beans were low and he couldn't work this late in the year to stock up for a long, dry
winter to come. His whiskey, moreover, had run out.

He started across in the late afternoon. People got stuck out there, driven mad by the flat of the landscape, but he soon realized, as he had realized with his own sadness, that it was not flat as it looked. Actually, it sloped inwards. Probably the whole thing. The ground definitely sloped down under one foot and not the other. Again, like his misery, it probably also sloped toward something very deep in the middle, and the unsuspecting, therefore, were bamboozled into endlessly circling the packed dirt and sand.

Cargill kept straightly heading. He took two steps to his left every twenty steps forward, and by his innate sense, he felt that was just about right. And then the ground, the whole thing, began to slope down. Damn. Now it would have to slope back up again. He hated a climb in the dark.
He could cover, now, about four miles every hour. It had been about three when he realized the slope just started back up again. He began to pant, slightly, and heard the panting of the dogs
behind him. Hah. And they wouldn't be long now. His thighs were sore, he was thirsty, his
alcohol was gone, and more importantly, his wife would never return. That sadness bore him to the ground like no dog could have done.

He sat on the dirt and scratched, very slowly, her name on the ground in front of him, bending his fingernail and breaking out in a sweat as he said it slowly. This must be the first time since she had died.

"Maria," he breathed into the thick, deep silence, only lit by the radiance of his own eyes.

He heard the sound, like deep thunder, rumbling in the distance. Surely no storm had blown up? He wasn't sure, but stood and climbed quicker, a flash of lightning would be something akin to his mood. The dogs, he heard chirruping and keening to themselves no more than a quarter mile behind. He waded up the slope, and cast his sight beyond, to the North.

Nothing. Except... a band like silver was wending - here and there, he saw it in the dark. Shining in reflection...of what? The stars? He peered, and climbed a little higher to get a better look. Strangely, it reminded him of one of the ribbon she had worn in her dark, dark, midnight hair.

He climbed one step higher, and then, the first dog was upon him. Before the pack, young - yet he was there, and he was biting Cargill like nothing else.

Cargill fought him half-heartedly, knowing a full pack was too much for one man. The thunder was nearer, now. The thunder and a shaking. And then, after a few seconds of struggle with the angry dog, who ran off with a yip after a shove by Cargill's shoe, the water was rushing almost right beneath the toes of his shoes. Water like he had never seen before.

He looked at it, stupefied. Then he scrambled a few feet higher, until he could see it, stretching down below him now. Flash flood water. Muddy, dark, shiny, dangerous. It had saved him. He trudged to high ground wearily, and with a sigh, collapsed on safe ground.

The brush was growing, and he saw, beyond him, a tree. And he went to it, and in the morning, the shade of it sheltered him from the blazing sun, and he saw, there in the water, the shine of fish and the lifewater of plants, and behind him, the same, reflected by the end of the Barrel Flats.