On the Back Roads Read Online Free

Nobody worked or wandered. They just sat in front of their crude quarters with no clothes on. It was hot, though. These people were in no way related to the organized nudists who spend family weekends at health spas and earn a living fully clothed the rest of the week. This scruffy bunch was a long way from earning anything.
    This was a sight indeed, a site of insignificance. No stone pyramid with a historic marker at this spot. Just a weathered sign warning of a health hazard.
    Tragically, I suspect the road ends here for some. I mean the big one, not the mere tracks in the sand on which I drove in, and fortunately, would drive out again. My good fortune was not just that I could leave but that I had a place to go.
    I parked and walked to the thermal spring. It was surrounded with tall vegetation. Propped up on one side was a plywood windbreak. The hot water bubbling from the ground was diverted into a hole that someone had dug. Around the top, the hole was lined with flat rocks.
    Gathered were a half dozen well-sunned people, some in the muddy hole, some sitting on the side. Everybody had long hair. Empty Old Milwaukee cans floated in the brown water. No clothes in sight. Not even towels.
    An ample woman, half in the hole—I would guess her age somewhere between thirty-five and sixty years—was tracking me with sunken eyes even before I got there. No one else, though, seemed to care about the arrival of a newcomer. She asked me, “Do you know how to fix a
tellyvision?”
    â€œNo, don’t even watch it much,” I replied,
    â€œWell, I ain’t watched a bit since Friday. Quit dead in the middle of
The Flukes of Hazzard.”
    One of the guys said quietly, “It’s
Dukes,
Dummy.”
    â€œWell, it quit in the middle, and I’m after someone to fix it.”
    A head of hair moved from the side to the center of the hole. It was a husky fellow in his late thirties. His arms and hands were half the normal size. Waist-deep in the hole, he moved to the edge, bent over, and picked up a pack of cigarettes with both of his tiny, deformed hands. Tapping the pack on a rock just once, a cigarette popped out. He put it between his lips without touching it with his wet fingers. Using a butane lighter, he lit the cigarette in a single, fluid motion. He had this procedure down to an art form.
    A man with his back to me turned his head my way. “Did ya bring the beer?”
    â€œForgot it,” I said, assuming an honest answer wouldn’t work.
    â€œThe guys in helicopters never showed, neither. We is gettin’ really low.”
    Dummy said, “There ain’t no helicopters. You thought that up, just like always.”
    â€œThey was here…when was it? They brought us that whatever it was. We played that good shit-kickin’ music you like. Remember? Where the hell was you?”
    Dummy didn’t answer. She was sinking in the hole.
    â€œThey promised they’d come back and bring some more.” Pointing at me, he said, “I thought he was one of ‘em.”
    He rose on one elbow to face me, surfacing multiple tattoos, “You sure you’re not one of ‘em?”
    â€œSorry!”
    He studied me for the longest time, then sett led back in the hole.
    I drove to Salton City, depressed by what I had just seen. For centuries, people have gone to the desert to lose themiselves. The desert makes it easy. It happens almost as a matter of course.
    Unable or unwilling to play the cards dealt them, lost souls drift from one shuffle to another in a desperate search for better ones. For many, the hunt invariably ends here in the desert, where the days are warm and life is undisciplined, unpoliced, and simple. In the vastness of the desert, a man can walk away from life yet still never take that last step.
    â€œThere is always hope,” you might say. But only if you look for it. The ghettos, the mud holes, the pits of the desert are filled with those who have