If you haven’t checked out the beginning of this evolving story, feel free to do so prior to reading Chapter 5! Here is the Prologue, Chapter 1: Falcon, Chapter 2: Ghost Town, Chapter 3: Onward! and Chapter 4: The Inevitable End.
August 8, 1971. Morning.
The Bellamy brothers were on foot, marching through the boiling morning heat. It was four miles from their backdoor to the mine, southwest, down a crudely constructed service road cut in a line across crystalline crust. The sky, a deep endless blue, offered no protection from the rising sun. As Paul and Roddy trekked further from town, the screaming grew distant and shrill, like the cries of long-dead ghosts. The Bellamy’s horses had bolted during the quake. Paul thought he saw one of them disappear over a far-off hillside, a dark dash destined to become a meal for mountain lions, a pile of bleached bone.
Without speaking, Roddy pulled a small paper bag from the back pocket of his Levi’s. He offered Paul a taste. Raw salt, a hydration trick passed down from early settlers desperate to cope in a landscape not only capable of killing a man, but drying his corpse like leather.
When Paul and Roddy were kids, their father offered a stark warning: he brought the boys out back to the dirt yard, where he’d trapped a rattlesnake in a metal pail. The old man made them watch as the rattler struggled under the burning sun. Crowded around the bucket, two generations of booted toes an inch away from the metal, the Bellamy men peered down at the defenseless hissing creature until, after twenty minutes, it was dead.
“That will be you,” their father told them, grabbing the serpent’s tale with his bare hand and tossing it into the burn pit, “if you get caught out there unprepared.”
Paul never forgot the snake’s mounting panic or its desperation as it tried to escape the heat.
He pressed the tips of his fingers to his tongue so they were moist, then pushed them into the bag until they were coated in white. Roddy did the same. Both boys lined the insides of their cheeks. They had already sweat through their shirts.
They trudged on, Paul clutching the family Bible, and Roddy with a dozen or so albums tucked under his left arm, his portable turntable safe in a cloth satchel roped around his chest. Their neighbors’ cries dimmed as the distance grew. Roddy imagined what this moment would sound like on vinyl, sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor, slowly turning the volume dial down on the record player until the small built-in speakers switched off, leaving only a series of tinny notes bouncing off the physical intersection of the needle and the groove.
He could picture the cover art: Ghost Town’s general store with a split down its center. Hemorrhaging supplies like a living, breathing thing. Canned goods, Coke bottles, motor oil, bundles of rope, all of it oozing out onto the cracked earth — one half of the building raised up, the other sinking down into a craggy trench. The heart of their little desert community, bleeding out in broad daylight.
DISASTER IN DEATH VALLEY, the cover would read, A Tragedy In Two Parts: Earthquake & Earthquake Aftermath.
The mine was still more than two miles up the road, hidden by a slight slope in the landscape; town was about two miles behind them. A wash of heat-haze lined the cracked desert floor. Reality blurred. The boys could have been in a dream; their sun-beaten bodies felt surprisingly light, separate from the crunch and drag of their heavy boots through the hard sand, a communal rhythm ebbing and flowing as they moved; side-by-side, their legs rose and fell in near-perfect union. Neither Roddy nor Paul felt the need to speak; they had no water with them and knew not to dispel more energy than was necessary for the task at hand, which was to recover their father, hopefully alive.
The faster they walked, the more untenable their thoughts became.
Paul’s mind was whiplashed by the day’s events. Ghost Town was a world he never thought to look far beyond. The teenager couldn’t make sense of what the earthquake would mean for him or his future. For now, the truth remained a sensory experience. He could feel it, the deep roots of his adolescence tearing and fraying at their seams. His life was splitting apart, much like the album cover assembling itself in his brother’s imagination. As Paul moved alongside Roddy, as they inched further into the desert, each step in the sand shredded an essential connection between his life as he’d always known it, before the disaster, and whatever madness lay ahead.
In a way, Roddy had already come to terms with the fallout. His thoughts were hundreds of miles from Ghost Town, recalculating plans he’d already made to leave this godforsaken place. If anything, Roddy viewed the earthquake as an unwavering sign that his long-awaited departure, his decision to go, was supported by fate, something bigger than his own disdain for the life he was born into. The plan was still on. He would go tonight.
During the earthquake, before rousing Paul from his wet dream, while their childhood home was starting to shake, Roddy had grabbed more than just his turntable and a handful of records. Hidden inside the sleeve of his favorite album — The Beach Boys’ Surf’s Up — was a thin leather envelope containing $150. These two bills — a $100 and a $50 — made up nearly half of what the 17 year old desert boy was able to save over the course of his life. Ever since his feet could reach the pedals on the church’s beat-up, out-of-tune piano, Roddy had played every steamy Sunday morning service.
After their mother died, Roddy decided that this portion of his cache would go to his brother. Once Paul turned 18, Roddy would leave the money somewhere his brother would find it and then he would leave for New York City. Despite being a year younger, Roddy had always occupied the role of the older sibling. Putting off his departure from Ghost Town until Paul became an adult in the eyes of the law made the guilt of leaving easier to endure. Roddy hoped Paul would read his note and use the money to buy himself a plane ticket from Las Vegas — the nearest airport — to New York, once he’d settled in.
Roddy often lay awake at night, picturing he and Paul on a long hike. Climbing Funeral Point in the Black Mountains, their scrambling bodies lit by a blood-red ball of sun. Cresting a boulder that touched the sky, then looking down its opposite face to discover the essence of a completely foreign world. A thriving metropolis hidden in the desert, eight thousand times the size of Ghost Town, with towering buildings that reflected the setting sun’s glare like a million vertical mirrors, with cobblestoned streets and clubs that never closed, where you could listen to music being played live on any given night, where you could loiter in the trimmed grass of public parks, passing joints with strangers, where you could meet someone special and never see them again not because of a snake bit or bad directions, but because they were on alive, off on their own adventure. Roddy wanted for Paul what he wanted for himself: to get lost in a lifestyle almost too incomprehensible to imagine in a place like this.
The boys were struggling to maintain their speed. They were on the verge of exhaustion, two snakes in a metal pail. Paul, unwillingly shedding his skin, and Roddy strangled by a single notion: I’m still here, in Ghost Town.
Despite their differences, the Bellamy brothers were eternally linked by blood; more often than not, they moved as one. At the same time, their brains reached a boiling point, their gaits slowed, and their footsteps came to a halt. They had yet to reach their destination. Instead, it was silence that beckoned them to stop, a formidable stillness inherent only to the desert.
Roddy and Paul had grown up fighting off Death Valley’s isolation, overriding the desert silence with card games, friends, music, liquor — any available distraction. But now, for the first time, the silence was revealing itself, not as an obstacle, but as a cure. A limbo. A void. A vacuum devoid of destruction and change and humanity. A brilliant emptiness in which they could physically exist, anonymous and voiceless, together.
If their current moment existed within Roddy’s imagined Disaster In Death Valley album, these two desert boys would be somewhere between Side A and Side B. Detached from the turntable’s fleecy platter. Floating above the needle and its sharp clarifying tip. Flipped by the hands of God.
Standing there, sweat-stained, the sting of salt against their tongues and a sizzling breeze at their backs, it was almost as if nothing were lost. Ghost Town stood tall, as tall as it ever had. Bella Fust — the gorgeous green-eyed bank teller — still lived in a house with all four walls. The Bellamy horses — Daisy and Blaze — ate grain from the same pail once deemed a rattler’s coffin. The old man was alive, excavating raw boron with a pickaxe from the deepest level of the mine. Balloons and paper streamers bobbed and drifted in the back room of Cheeky’s, awaiting Paul’s surprise birthday party, while his first, second, third, fourth, and fifth legal pints of lager waited in the keg, ready to be poured.
Fixed to the ground, like stalled hauling trucks, Roddy and Paul avoided eye contact. They stood still for an unknown amount of time, letting their sightlines zone out and play in the distant mirage, a wall of ambiguity vibrating gently in a steady gust of wind. This was No Man’s Land. A settlement of two. A momentary utopia beckoning the embrace of impossibility, of ignorance and bliss. Both brothers could sense, for the first time in their short lives, the seductive draw of this brutal, barren land. They were crazed desert statues, with heartbeats. Maybe the clear-eyed ancients in town — the old prospectors loafing around the general store — were right. This was “the land of continual surprise.”
As the boys sunk into accidental meditation, visions of their father crept through the heatwaves. A helpless sight, undercut by a lonesomeness so heavy it almost broke the spell. The brothers were in mourning, for the old man’s life. Empathizing. Overcome by the moment and the endless reality of this hard, chalky earth. All of it conjured a strange freedom in their bones — that’s what they were feeling: a strange, gritty freedom. The draw of this land, the reason why their father, a broke barback from San Francisco, dragged their mother out to the desert, deciding to risk their futures under a wide open sky, rather than continue toiling in a dank overcrowded cityscape. The boys always knew why the old man had dragged their mother out here — the mining company posted flyers all over San Francisco, promising a job, a home, a fresh start — but they hadn’t understood what kept them here. Until now.
“He came to the desert, and the desert took him over,” Roddy said aloud, mimicking one of the lines he’d heard the drunks spit in town while passing a bottle under the branches of a screwbean mesquite.
“Wherever he looked, strangeness bloomed,” Paul replied, doing the same.
Their father’s sinewy figure danced along the horizon before them, hooting and howling at the sky, exuding the same vigor he’d possessed before the passing of his beautiful wife, their cherished mother.
Whether or not Roddy and Paul were suffering from the early stages of heatstroke, they knew what they saw shouldn’t be ignored. They didn’t need to walk all the way out to the mine; both boys understood that their father was gone.
But they continued on anyway, trudging toward the mass grave.