Is there a moral buried somewhere in the story of Dan Clay? It rattles in my head like a song, a sleeping ghost, returned from the back of some book I had as a child. Untitled and anonymously authored, I wonder if I am destined to write every story I have ever read.
My senses return, in time, though Clay and O’Keefe continue to trade bullets in the back of my head. I pull myself out of the mud and I search the valley wall for a likely ascension. It’s all mud, everything around and, behind me, the captive storm turns and approaches once more.
My backpack has burst at every seam, spilled itself across the wet ground. I gather what I can on the torn canvas and hold it to my chest like a child. I walk into the storm, toward the trees that form a paranoid huddle in the center of the valley.
There was a picture that accompanied the poem- I hated the picture and I looked at it often. It illustrated the climax, the turn of the second draw when Clay reappears from his year of torment to face O’Keefe, who would have only waited a terrestrial instant. The sheriff is lit up with fire and surrounded by smoke- deep, black, and toxic. Read as written, Clay’s reply to O’Keefe is solid and confident. It reiterates the notion that a good man can remain unbroken in hell.
The illustrator thought otherwise.
The drawn Clay is bent and burned, his face is twisted by a gaping frown, an expression normally reserved for cartoon ghosts. He is sorrowful and screaming or moaning in pain. The drawn Clay appears terrified.
I wonder about a character that would bear such suffering. I wonder why the author chose to repeat the beginning at the end.
I walk into the storm and am buffeted by rain. The soft ground becomes slick. I have nothing so clear as a destination, only the path away from a dead-end. There is still some comfort in that. I try to ration it. I spend much of my time rationalizing.
Clay is a reactionary man, a man molded by his misfortunes. He learns nothing but to be distrustful. He becomes untrustworthy himself. The author’s repeated lines suggest more sinister changes. Is there a monster shaped of Clay that we do not see?
I ask because I am a reactionary man and I am sure that I was pushed into the valley by the stranger. He has been in my shadow all along.
I am nearly blown over by the wind and I press myself against the rotting trunk of an old tree. My old copy of Autumn by the Wayside, the book given to me by a man who recognized my name, slips from my arms and explodes on the ground, its entries scattering into the storm. I catch a single page under the heel of my boot, an entry for a place called: ‘The Oasis.’
-traveler
