Back of My Neck, Getting Dirty and Gritty

Summer in Encinal. The two big goats are lying in the shade under Pasqual's trailer; it is so hot, his improbably-mixed group of lame, limping dogs ignores you as you walk by. You are determined to adjust to the heat—not to succumb, but to invite it to enter you, to acknowledge that heat is a thing not of the air so much as a thing in the air, a substance, a presence, a consequence. Everything appears to be dying. You put basil out hopefully yesterday in a pot in the shade of a tree; today it is a small black smudge on the soil, the shadow it might have cast. Tomato blossoms last set in mid-May; the plants themselves—gaunt, brown, brittle—haunt their cages sadly. Fine, reddish-brown dust scours everything: dust collecting in doorways, dust covering discarded, brightly-colored plastic garbage and toys along the streets and in driveways, dust in the air, along with the heat. Light ferrying heat batters all it can, relentlessly, finding its way between blades of brown grass, finding its way into the soil. The water lines, just beneath the surface, absorb heat: you brush your teeth for weeks with hot water from the cold tap. Trash lay everywhere, but especially in the usual places: on all sides of badly-used trailer homes, the interstate underpass, blown up against fences (stuck to barbed-wire fences like yours), Wal-Mart bags caught, blowing, in trees. If you pick up the trash—a beer bottle, say, or a plastic bag, or a wadded-up mass of fast food containers, stuffed back into the paper sack that had held so much promise, initially, or the compressed, unpleasant ball that is a used diaper—if you pick up trash this time of day it is hot in your hand and if you put it into a big bag that bag rubs hotly against your leg, sticking if you are foolish enough to expose your skin to all of this. If you pick up all the trash you can see in a half block, more will arrive tomorrow, the child of the wind and an attitude, familiar to places with extractive economies, that prefers trash in an already-depleted landscape to trash in the car: the wind will blow the newly-discarded to replace what you have collected; the wind will blow the dust to reveal trash you had not discovered.