I turn down the gravel road; the sound beneath the wheels always reminds me of walking on fresh packed snow as a child. By now I should be used to the serpentine wind of this road, but the whiskey has taken the wheel. There’s one slug left in the Wild Turkey bottle between my legs. Townes is on the radio singing a blues about a buckskin stallion. My eyes are beginning to sting beneath these blackout shades. By now I’m sure they look like raw oysters shot through with Louisiana hot sauce. I hear Townes sing “if I had a golden galleon/I’d sail into the light of day/if I had your love forever/sail into the light of day.” It’s my cue to raise the bottle and gratefully take that last slug; feel it burn its way deep down, hope it finds another wound to cauterize. I see the lake waving and collapsing in the distance, the sun shattering itself on its back. The light is weak, too soft, as if strained through silk. A heat mirage bubbles on the horizon. Visions of Starla start shooting every which way through my aching head. I wish they could slow down, move like honey, swim, dance, and maybe linger, but they never do. She’s a ghost now, nothing more than the smell of magnolia after a hard rain. Though I’ll be damned if I still can’t taste her, feel her and hold her for a little while; just not in the vital way I used to.

The gravel touches sand. I turn the key and there’s a violent shudder, I’m not sure if it’s me or this old machine.. The lake looks the same as it always has. It was here before any of us and will outlast all of us. There’s a lone blue heron, impossibly elegant, painlessly perched on the jagged brown tooth of the broken jetty. I step down out of the truck; the heat is equatorial. I feel it first in my throat, a cheap dry gulch thrown from the blind side by a coward that hits and runs. I almost pass out, take off my shades to cool my napalmed eyes and realize it’s much earlier than I had thought. I take the whole scene in with my eyes; I don’t want to miss a thing. I need to see it the same way she did. This is the last place her eyes opened.

I recollect the first time Starla and I came down to this silver lake. Fourth of July evening, buzzed on sweet, stolen wine and cherry flavored cigars. The scent of distant cooking fires in our noses, cicada serenades in our ears. Sky constellated with blooming fireworks and trembling stars, reflecting like the lights of a tiny city viewed from an airplane off of the lake’s living skin – Roman candlelight – Starla naked and sensuously shivering beneath me; a circumscribed flash fire, hotter than all the fourth’s firecrackers combined. My bone marrow igniting, my blood writing mad love sonnets; we were young, we wanted more of everything. There was a wild wire loose in our blood. We were reaching for the sky, never once seeing the shadow of surrender in that grand gesture. That dream was quick to evanesce. A reverse phoenix paradigm, a tragic pattern weaving itself through frayed, ugly fabric: marriage, miscarriage, me with a stab wound, she with a black eye, cold nights of distance and dreadful reality tv, neighbor slander, mortgage defaults, arguments over money – always over money, my cheating, her cheating, crude mechanical make-up sex and the occasional graceful blow-job – if I behaved myself.

It was money again that night. I blew too much of it down at the naked show, watching the electric gazelles plunge into the dream ether, for the benefit of lion eyes; while I hustled pool and tried to cool hand Luke it. I made it home just in time to see her leave with terrifying speed, to hear her say “I fucking hate your guts” with conviction for once. I felt it that time, worse than any enemy’s knife and not even from behind. She went down to this very same lake where I now stand a broken man today. Only she was not alone; a fox hunt cold and canned ended here. She surrendered herself, her body, gave herself to him. The traitor moon, the cinereous sand, hyena games; a final scene blurred with panic, bursting with pain. A stifled scream, a spastic, grasping hand, then stop motion and silence. They found her down by the water, naked and forsaken, twice her natural size; sad indigo bruises peppering her neck, her once flawless body – a mayfly prize.

They caught him soon after. His name doesn’t matter; anyway, I refuse to speak it… They painted a monster out of a man. He didn’t look like much; tubercular and shifty eyed, ferret-faced and acne-scarred; he could have been the boy next door. I hated him more than they did, but I knew he was no monster. He was a human being and that made it all much worse and, for me, more understandable. Wild animals know what we humans are capable of… They know to keep their distance. They want no part of our stain, our secrets. I’ve always felt closer to them for that very reason. I know all too well that we are the destroyers; mere men, each one just as scared and fucked up as the next, hardly monsters, shit, hardly even men.

I went down to the station; I had too. On the way, a story my mama once told me played all sad and gentle on my mind. It was about swans and how they mated for life. And how, if one lost the other to death, he’d return to the very spot where they shared their gift, their dream. Once there the bereaved swan would take his own life; you see, even the grief couldn’t compromise the bond, the circle that they formed together. I read the coroner’s report. I felt compelled to look at the photographs. Expecting a full on flood of darkness, instead I got Starla’s eyes staring back at me. They were still hers; she kept them. So dry and devoid of the light she once seemed to be the source of. Never again to close and find the dream beneath them, beneath everything; and like that solitary swan in mama’s sad old story, I felt eviscerated and bereft; mortally wounded by something that time wanted no part of.