Dora

Preamble: Jonah Barber, Egan, Unreliable first-person narrator persona, Past and Present Tense. Tone: Informal, descriptive. Mood: Egocentric, scattered, reflective.

Dora

We sat on a bench ribbed with saguaro, which the desert light made amber, and this is what I said to him.

“Ok so get this, he comes in four o’ clockish. No no, I’m serious. So he comes in guns blazing, as usual, mouthing off on the homeless encampments right outside the window. At the Ronstadt Center Bus station, where they usually get together, although those purple vested security guards have been beginning to crack down. Like just last week I saw one woman getting sprayed by one of their hoses, just awful shit. And he mouths off, spittle flying off that part of his upper lip where that odd scar is formed, actually so much so that I had to close the glass windows over the ice cream, because you know these downtown customers, their dairy palettes are exacting. Fine I’ll skip ahead. I subtly enlighten him on when his shift was supposed to start, no comment. Just more jabs at the Ronstadters. There are of course avenues of opportunity within his rant in which to speak, because of that delay between his pea-sized brain and his words. I’m in those avenues, skulking around, dropping hints about how the last two hours have been slammed, how I had to fulfill two Cowboy Cookie milkshakes while the DoorDash tablet was practically shaking the shelves from its ringing. And you know what he said to me?”

But his face was turned away. And my best friend and freshly fired co-worker looked through the creosote bush and into the jumping cholla. A cactus wren. Arizona’s state bird, its song the sound of a rusted Toyota starting up. The evening’s light had that special grade when focused through a glass pane, the kind that reveals dust mites, and it swathed the cactus spines in thin golden cloaks.

“Ok stupendous, a cactus wren. Now listen up sweet cheeks.”

No dice. He didn’t appear to have taken in the wren at all, and his brow was instead furrowed towards the asphalt hiking path that leads into the upper slot canyons of Saguaro National Park.

“I think there’s a child over there, sweet cheeks.”

“Probably a stray. I’m bashing on the guy who had you canned, so pay attention.”

Instead he approached her. She looked lost and scared, dried wet rivers of tears smeared by caliche. Of course, like any Sonoran Samaritan, the right thing to do was to approach, kneel down maybe, issue encouraging words, ask for her parents’ locale, point to the darting jackrabbits to get her mind off things for a while. Any other time I would have done this reflexively, it’s practically been in my DNA since those gnarly family Tucson hikes I was dragged along in my youth, but the story was about to reach its highest pitch, I mean for god sake the amber light and everything was just right there. By now the place was coated in it, the basal sandstone of the Catalina mountains kaleidoscoping under purple and orange hues. Pigments everywhere. This was the guy who berated us for earrings, who gave us a detached mop handle with the words just in case of those bums, who ignored Kent’s hurried tear wiping to just yell and scream to then just firing him, as if gelato superseded loss.

Kent got up all gentle and close, on bended knee, parentally scanning the path. His face was level to her Dora shirt, the pink design its own desert sunset. Needless to say I’m gentle too. Needless to say if my boss had done that to me, right after something like that happened, I would be just as gentle, at least for a while. The story would be spectacular, maybe a couple months after processing, you could find another bench maybe in the western hills, though not in the shade because by now it would be winter, but that cold would sharpen all of those ways you could tell that story. The story that the desert tram and relieved cries now interrupt, Dora parting into the honey glare now faded.