The Canyon Wall

Duane Taylor stifled an urge to whistle a tune, all the while thinking what an odd start this was to his new life—dressing in the kitchen in the dark. He set his clothes on the table and walked over to the sink to splash his face. He mopped up the wet with a clean towel.

He grinned into the darkness as he dressed quietly. He slipped the blue polo shirt over his head and stepped into his khaki slacks. He ran his hands through his thick white hair, pushing it away from his forehead, and drew a deep breath that surprised him in its nervousness.

"This is it," Duane murmured. He walked over and opened the door that led to the carport.

He had finished packing just the evening before, while Verlene watched Jeopardy. She kept the volume up so she could hear the questions and answers if she stepped into the kitchen or the bathroom while the show was on. She called out the questions she knew—what is El Salvador!—from whatever room she occupied or repeated in surprise any question she didn’t know.

Verlene always watched the show alone, while Duane tinkered somewhere or got lost in a book, hunkered in his reading chair with the lamplight low. He had managed to finish packing the truck without her even taking notice.

As Duane walked down the steps and across the sweating carport to his pickup, he felt clammy even before the Mississippi damp set in. His heart raced. His fingertips tingled. But his grin broke into a wide smile.

He opened the door to the Ford and took another deep breath, as if to fill himself with the essence of this place before leaving it forever. He glanced at each of his neighbors’ homes, so much like his own. He nodded a silent goodbye to them, got into the truck, and snicked the door shut quietly.

Three traffic lights stand sentinel along Main Street in Sawmill, Mississippi. The first two caught him at red, stopping him, as if to ask, "Are you sure, Duane?"

"Are you sure?"

And the answer each time was yes.

Most definitely, yes.

* * *

Duane knew he could have tried to explain his journey—hell, this new life—to Verlene, but she’d never understand. She’d throw a fit. She’d just see the surface of it, like she always just saw the surface of him. And that was okay, for the most part.

It had taken him years, but he had finally started to understand that some folks have a kind of depth to them and others just don’t. Verlene’s world pivoted around running their lives, right down to the trivial details of sheets and dinnertime, or whether they should switch to a new brand of dishwashing liquid. He’d come to accept that she’d chosen these details to be her life, but he ached for something more.

And this wasn’t about Verlene—it was about something he needed to do.

It was about the dream.

The dream came most nights now. It was the finest part of his life these days. Whenever Duane woke from the dream he was smiling, an overwhelming peace filling him. All of the images—the deserts and mountains—well, they were like home, weren’t they?

But lately there’d been an urgency. He knew it was time to move on—to find those places in his dream. Because as pure and good as the dream seemed to be, a dark cloud now loomed in the background of it. Vague worry sketched across his mind. It was time to go.

* * *

The April dawn grayed up some, stretching and yawning as he headed southwest along Highway 7 out of Sawmill. In every direction the distant green fence of trees swam by. They’d hemmed him in all his life like an infinite green noose, those trees, and he was leaving them now.

Sheet metal roofs of sharecropper farmhouses glinted dully in the low delta sun as he guided his reliable blue pickup past glistening rice fields. Mounds of earth snaked through the fields, a wavy last goodbye. The bright green of the occasional new John Deere sat in stark relief against the rusted hulks of old farm equipment.

He drove past a chain gang. A dozen men stood idly in the highway median, two of them pulling tools and bags from the back of an old bus, their prison uniforms’ broad green and white stripes glowing in the early light. A trooper sat off to the side in his sleek silver patrol car and read the morning paper.

One fellow, dark as coal he was, caught Duane’s eye as he passed. The only witness to Duane’s escape.

Duane checked himself in the rearview mirror, studying the new twinkle in his own blue eyes.

"Hello, you." And he smiled. He liked the sound of his voice in this early morning. In the first morning of his new life.

The last wispy trails of mist lingered along the road, swirling in and out of his headlights, like ghost kids playing chicken in traffic.