Joshua Tree

by Lisa Beatman

Oh oh oh, I yelped, feeling my thighs burn with exquisite torture. . .hell, this was no Barbara Cartland novel. Torture, yes. Exquisite, no. I was afraid to look down. Afraid to see. . .what? Tooth marks? Fangs? Blood running down into my just-bought custom-made hiking boots? Afraid I wouldn't make it back to camp? Afraid Sam couldn't hear my call for help? Well, that was one thing I could do something about. OW OW OW, I screeched into the lengthening shadows. SAM? SAM! Silence. The dry desert silence loomed over me like a hawk's wingspan. . .

Every girl has a rescue fantasy, even ardent feminists like me. It may vary as to gets to be the White Knight, who is the damsel in distress; even the genders may get flipped about. Deep down, everyone wants to be carried away from danger in a pair of strong, gentle arms, or to possess those sheltering shoulders. I'd cultivated some vivid rescue fantasies of my own, since I was just a pup, involving firefighters and the like, though when I was ten and my clothes caught fire, it was only my dorky brother Herbie who wrapped me in a rug and saved the day. Sigh. And now, at dusk, out in the middle of Joshua Tree National Park, where the southwestern California desert wends its way to rendezvous with its eastern Nevada compadre, in pain, the temperature dropping like said hawk spying an exposed field mouse, it didn't seem you could squeeze one drop of romance out of this stone of a predicament.

Where the #@^%! was Sam? Last I'd seen of him were two oversized ears behind the mega-zoom lens he'd insisted on buying before agreeing to come along on this camping trip. We'd been hiking all day, marveling at the stunted trees that looked as if a cactus had done it with a palm tree, and spawned such spiky offspring. Hauling ourselves up rock formations like none back east, sheer-faced, tumbled like prehistoric Legos, piled atop each other in a precarious balancing act that one good Santa Ana wind might. . . I shuddered to think. Compared with the Massachusetts hills, few life forms seemed to thrive here, but those that did were tenacious: barbed, serrated, spiked, fanged; don't mess with me, don't even come close; that's my drop of water, the thorny sagebrush and chalk-on-blackboard-voiced ravens seemed to say. And the baleful-eyed slink of the coyote.

Fauna, two- or four-legged, had never grabbed my interest the way flora always had--the naming of it, and its safe beauty. Its lack of motility enabled one to observe it, without being observed. Train a rose-vine up a lattice, and at worst you face passive-aggression, a wilting, an unbudding; no poop on your hardwood floors, no midnight cries, no gun at your back. Of course, there were the poison ivies, the blackberry brambles, but all you had to do was know what they looked like, where they grew, and simply steer clear. They never came after you, or called you at home.

Botany was so. . .orderly, and better yet, involved employment of a language only dead Romans could talk back in. Though I loved my work, it was work, after all, and I had come west to get away from green dripping creatures for a spell, a dry spell. Still, I couldn't help but bring along a field guide, and got a kick out of the lyrical nomenclature used to define the scrubby little native plants dotting this stark terrain.

Fanciful names like the Wishbone Bush, mirabilis californica, frequent on dry canyon slopes; the Mustang Mint, monardella lanceolata, occasional in sandy banks; the Southern Sun-cup, camissonia bistorta, the Turkish Ruggins, chorizanthe staticoides, Our Lord's Candle, yucca whipplei, the Wild Hyacinth or Blue Dicks (heaven knows where that name stemmed from), the Foxtail Fescue, festuca magalura, the Zygadene Lily, azgadenus fremontii, infrequent in chaparral or dry ridges. Then there was the Dragon Sagewort, artemesia dracunculus, better known as tarragon—oh, Sam had used that to herb up some stuffed Cornish hens one Thanksgiving. Glossy Silver-puffs, microseris linearifolia, occasional in grassy places among shrubs; Guadeloupe Crytantha, which thrives in dry sandy soil. The last few days my tented dreams had been purified by the pungent smoke of salvia apiana x mellifera, the Hybrid Sage, a handful sprinkled on the brief, tiny cook-fires we'd tamped against the hot, scouring winds.

Sam and I had been following a coyote, youngish with a yellow pelt that had silver overlays. Sam had been snapping that fool shutter over and over, and as the coyote understandably picked up speed, I did too. I wanted to see where such a wild creature might go to get away, where it would feel safe, where it could rest. I thought it might tell me something I needed to know. All of a sudden, something sharp had stabbed my legs, and I was down, no longer thinking about getting away, just thinking about where the nearest hospital might be, and if I could make it that far. I couldn't see even one twinkling beacon that wasn't a star. And where was Sam?

A large silhouette emerged from behind a rock, and thankfully it was Sam-shaped. Jessica? Jess—? What happened? By then, I was fighting back tears. I had never worn pain in a plus size before. I don't know—something just jumped out and bit me! I didn't hear a rattle, but do you think. . .? Or maybe, do scorpions make any kind of warning buzz before leaping onto their prey? Should I have read beyond the poetry page in that "Desert Habitat" book? I wondered if the Swiss-army knife had made it into the camera bag, or was it one of the "nonessentials" jettisoned to make space for the mega-zoom lens? Sam, do something! Silence. Well, not quite. My eyes had been squinched shut against the pain, but I opened one of them when I heard a tinny ratchetty sound only one thing could make. Sam! He was pointing that damn lens down at my thighs, thighs that I now saw were completely covered in cactus burrs, burrs that hadn't been at all stymied by a wall of denim but had thrust long spikes into my sensitive flesh. Let me take one quick shot, then I promise I'll get them off you, ok? I swear he was grinning. I must have run into the damn plant while obsessed with following the damn coyote.

Say cheese! My lips bared into a snarl. Gotcha! Ok, let's have a look at that, now. Sam tenderly tucked away his Canon, and brought the Mag-light over. He crouched down. Wow, those are in really deep. Hurt any, Jess? I just bared more teeth. Sam stripped off his sweatshirt, wedged it between my back and the boulder I was leaning on, and got down to business, extracting the thick long needles from my bruised soft tissues. Neither of us spoke; me, just whimpering every now and then, Sam, intent on the task. I snuck a look at him, then turned away. He looked so impersonal, like he'd forgotten I was even there, as if he was doing any job, fixing a car or building a shed, focused only on the task, the tools, and the end result. Ow, ow, ow. It was pitiful. I was pitiful, looking for sympathy from a guy who would probably rather be back home developing film, than stuck in a canyon with a girl who got herself attacked by inanimate objects.

A long time passed. There were a lot of needles. No words, just those big stubby fingers, fingers that could be so spastic in bed sometimes, gently working the spikes out, using the denim for resistance, pulling quick and purposefully so that the pain was mercifully quick. Almost an hour had passed, I figured, and realized it was the most intimate hour we'd ever spent together, at least for me, me and Mr. No Feelings over there, that is. Wasn't he even getting cold? I sniffed back tears, snot, and something clenched inside that was threatening to loosen up and leak out. What could you expect? Sam looked up, and said, think we're getting the best of these varmints!

The moon was rising. Great, let the whole desert get a gander at the sniveling greenhorn. Sam's eyes were moonless nights. He was squinting so hard in the narrow beam of the flashlight, they were getting watery. The tips of his fingers must have been hurting as much as my legs by now; there was no good way to get a purchase on those spines, they were as prickly on one end as the other. But Sam would never admit it, damn him. I untied my head bandanna, the one with the constellations printed back and front, and tossed it to him. It was the least a damsel could offer.

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