‘‘The Great Scrupulizor’ is a statue in the style of gaudy highway cowboys, built from the crotch up and hunched over a hill to hide the birds that live in the empty stumps of its legs. His shirt, once a deep navy, has faded to baby blue and the jolly red handkerchief about his neck has run pink in the sun. ‘The Scrupulizor’ holds a magnifying glass above the desert wastes, the thick fingers of his left hand prodding the sand for something he lost eons ago.
Locals tell the story of a woman who was immolated under the glass, evidenced by a dusty, black stain on the ground. They say she was a witch (implying ‘The Scrupulizor’ serves as bait and trap for vampires, wayward spirits, and other sun-sensitive evils). They say she wanted to die, that she was good, in life. They say she was beautiful and wanted the best for others. They say she was ugly and as hollow as the great statue that killed her.’
I dig in the sand under ‘The Scrupulizor’s’ glass, my back itching under the scrutiny of his great, magnified eye. Not a single grain of it turns up black, not after thirty minutes of scrabbling. A man across the highway takes note of me and stares from the diner parking lot, leaning on the cab of his semi and lighting new smokes with the butts of old ones. The ground becomes hot and the sun collects in prisms around me, shifting like the aura of a man possessed.
I give up before finding any evidence of the immolated woman and scrape the sand out from under my fingernails with the latest of Alice’s picks. When I’m through, I check the bike to confirm it still won’t start. The speedometer waggles in the direction of ‘The Great Scrupulizor’ and settles weakly to ‘0’ when I switch off the ignition.
Alice doesn’t want me going anywhere.
I drink the last of my water and prod the earth near ‘The Scrupulizor’s’ left hand, near where its index finger disappears into a tuft of dry brush. Something shudders inside the knuckle and heaves itself up through the palm, shaking flakes of paint from ‘The Scrupulizor’ and shrieking.
The man across the way lights up again and coughs.
The bike won’t start.
Once the thing inside the statue has settled, I walk the length of ‘The Scrupulizor’s’ body and plod my way up the hill where a vulture clutches the statue’s right buttock, balanced on a copper rivet in the jeans. It spreads its wings as though to fly away but, seeing I’m no threat, reconsiders and wraps itself tightly in its feathers.
The legs of ‘The Great Scrupulizor’ are modeled through the thigh but taper off after the knee, his bleached denim giving way to rusted metal before terminating entirely in two, man-sized holes. The birds that inhabit this statue have mostly gone about their day but evidence for their numbers remains in feathers and dripping white stalactites. Nobody has thought to barricade these entrances, the dark of the inside of ‘The Great Scrupulizor’ should suffice in turning away any straight-minded visitor.
The treads of my boots gunk up pretty fast with bird shit which leads to a lot of slipping and brushing up against bird shit covered walls, but past the lower calf and in the shallow cap of ‘The Scrupulizor’s’ knee I have the time and the space to consider the climb up into his torso and the shrieking thing exists somewhere beyond.
The climb isn’t so bad, aided by jutting rebar and sharp corners. Would be a real cheese-grater on the way down, though, a real tetanus gauntlet.
Things flatten out in the ass, again. The claws of the vulture scratch nervously above, aware that something shifts beneath it. I rest and start to wonder if I could make a life in this thing- a thought that comes to me in any tight space. I wonder if it’s water-tight. I wonder if someone would find me eventually.
Stuffy, though. Like all tight spaces.
And there’s the shrieking thing, of course.
I’m a careful person, but I make mistakes. I make one when I bring my flashlight over the arch of ‘The Scrupulizor’s’ waist and lose my grip on it. I make a mistake when I leap forward to grab the light (this cheap, totally unworthy piece of plastic) and feel myself slide past any hope of stopping. My body bounces about the metal skeleton of the statue like a pachinko ball before settling on a course that takes me down the left arm.
Something screeches past me on the way down, going the opposite direction, something that’s all fur and wide-eyed terror. Then I hit the bottom, twisting my ankle something nasty on the inside of ‘The Scrupulizor’s’ curled pinky. Below me, the skeleton of a woman in a scorched dress has pulled its way up through the unfinished point of the index finger. Alice rattles in her picks, content in having me witness another like her- someone lost in the wayside.
-traveler
