Kevin Lichty
Nothing Ever Drains in Maricopa
When delivering in the desert roads south of the Ak-Chin Casino in Maricopa you can’t trust an app to tell you where to go. It will show that a road continues when it ends in the desert, or say to go straight through a sign that says “Danger: do not take path deep sand and steep drop off ahead!” You could be sent to the nudist colony just west of the reservation, or straight through a flock of tens of thousands of cows wondering if you were meant to be there. I delivered to a recreation of the Bates motel, complete with fake gas station and fake burger joint. The house, the real one where the package was meant to go, was behind the fake motel lobby. On the way out, I noticed Norman Bates in full costume waving with a chef’s knife in his hand. His skeleton mother sat in a rocking chair beside him. Out in the desert there are cactus nurseries, a shooting range, a sky diving school. Once, my truck overheated and died in a customer’s driveway an hour from anywhere. He let me in, gave me a bottle of water, and while I waited for someone to rescue me we talked about his job, which was to lay fiber optic cables, and how the infrastructure bill was going to keep him busy for the next five years.
There is a makeshift church built under the carport of a house I am supposed to deliver to. The pews bolted to the concrete are filled with people. A woman at the front sits in a chair with her eyes closed telling a story. I make myself as inconspicuous as is possible for someone wearing a high visibility vest, creep around the tangle of overgrown bushes leading up to their front door, and drop the package. On the way back to the van I see a baby resting on a man’s shoulder near the back of the church, her eyes wide and burrowing into my face. I want to tell the baby that I’m not here to judge, my purpose is not for judging you or what is happening, but that I can’t help but observe, that ancillary to my job as package man, tiny slivers of your life get poured into me in ten second increments—a Norteño musician practices his accordion in his garage, a woman complains on the phone about her husband’s frivolous spending, two teenagers sit on the curb and flirt with each other in the heat of the summer, a couple sits on the floor of their garage and repacks shotgun shells with a press.
I can hear the storyteller’s cadence of the woman at the front of the church. Her eyes are closed. Her hands are resting in her lap. Her body is leaned forward, and her head is tilted to the side and I can hear her tell her parishioners that she doesn’t have to worry anymore because she can give it all to Jesus to worry about—where her next meal was going to come from, whether the weakness in her heart was going to kill her, if her children still loved her. I want to tell her that these are things that are dangerous to hold onto, that to pour them out and let them go is a good thing, I agree, but nothing ever drains in Maricopa.
Secrets of the Sonoran Desert Frogs
Those who do dirt road routes claim to see skin walkers out in the desert of deep Maricopa after the sun goes down, shapes watching in the darkness between the islands of light that are the houses. These are ghost stories for newbies, but if you ever let the sun go down on you on a route in the desert, there is density to the darkness that warps perception—a javelina considers me with a little too much intelligence, a coyote spies from behind a copse of creosote. Does it move with too much human purpose? Does its gait belie a desire to get up, walk on two feet? When I open the side door and step out of the van I feel small and vulnerable and alone. The longer I am away from the van, the longer I scan the dust for snakes, scorpions, centipedes, the more I can feel something—some local fauna, or resident, or skin walker—watching. This is where people are killed in the movies, where something with an ax or a machete or a saw blade waits for someone small and vulnerable and alone to cross their path. An orange line of LEDs outlining the roof of my van does nothing but announce to whatever is out there beyond their thin glow that I am here. I peer into the dark and see afterimages of all the movies I loved as a kid ghosting just beyond my field of vision. I can hear dogs barking, but I don’t know where they are, if they are fenced or unfenced, if they are getting closer or farther away, if it is the lights of my truck they are attracted to.
We talk a lot about dogs, those of us who have been out here beyond the endless subdivisions. Every dog wants to rip our throats out the second I get out of the truck. The box truck definitely pisses them off more than the vans do. You can tell some of them have been abused. When I buy a house, I’m going to randomly come home with a new dog every day.
We tell stories of the times we were almost killed by dogs. For me, I missed a handwritten message on a sign on a closed, but unlocked gate. I looked for signs of a dog—a frayed rope, a chewed tennis ball, a shadow of a body lounging in the shade of a tree. The house is thirty paces from the gate. All packages must be scanned at the door. A chicken pecks into the dust. I get onto the front porch, pull out my Rabbit, and scan the package. The volume is turned up just enough for the beep of the scanner to alert the dogs inside that there is an intruder at the door. I hear a bark, the scuffle of claws on the floor. A Great Dane emerges from a dog door I did not know was on the side of the house. It comes at me, teeth bared, barking. I hold it off. I make myself big, backing toward the gate. It lunges and barks and bears its teeth, but doesn’t close the distance, doesn’t make contact. A single dog I can handle, I think. Stay calm. Stay locked in. Get outside the gate and you’ll be fine. A second Great Dane emerges to my right. Now I am in trouble. Two sets of teeth, two angles of attack. I can no longer hold the gaze of just one dog, hold it at bay with my unconcern for its size, its bravado. And then a third dog emerges behind the second. This one is more aggressive, a German Shepard, marshaling the Great Danes to order. “It is not enough to herd. There must be blood. I want to see some pain.” One of them takes an adventurous nip at my hand, its teeth graze my skin. I throw my hands up. I am only halfway to the gate. I do not run but walk casually. Running turns this into a game, or worse triggers a hunter versus prey instinct in the dogs. With my hands in the air (I am not here to hurt you or your owners), I tell the dogs how good of a job they are doing (I am going. I am going. I am going). At this point if they wanted to kill me, I would not be writing this.
I am halfway to the exit. The owner is out now. He’s shouting something about a sign as I exit and close the gate behind me, trembling in body and mind and voice I tell them it’s my fault for missing the sign, tell them that they can add a note to their delivery instructions to warn every driver. I feel those teeth on my skin the rest of the day.
I peer into the infinite black space between the islands of houses and listen to the dogs moving out beyond the lights of my van and wonder what happens if they come for me out here while I’m groping my way toward the front door of someone’s house? A hummingbird moth alights on my phone. I can feel the hum of its wings against my hand. It came to say hello to my home screen, to wonder what the home screen had to give it, to perhaps charge its body on the soft vibration of its CPU, perhaps, like me, the moth was looking for an island of light in an ocean of darkness, or perhaps it came to take my soul, burn it and hollow me out until I was just a husk leaned against a saguaro in the morning. A Sonoran Desert frog lands at my feet by the garage. This is when I am most vulnerable, too far from the lights of the van to escape back into them, too close to the house to abandon the delivery. This is when I was most afraid of being shot. Once I delivered a package to a front door after dark, my flashlight on to take a picture, and I heard a quavering voice on the other side of the door ask me “What are you doing?” I replied, “I’m delivering your package, ma’am.” To which she said “Jesus Christ” and sighed. In that moment I knew a gun was pointed at me from the other side of the door. So dogs, yes, scare me, but also their owners.
The frog considers me from its position in the dust, says there are secrets written into the wrinkles of my back if you look close enough to read them. There are other secrets, too, but you have to use your tongue to discover those. I look around and am surrounded by toads and I wonder if skin walkers were solitary witches or if they traveled in packs.
I Am Here
When I take a picture to show where I have delivered a package I concentrate on my composition, pay attention to the rule of thirds, so that your package is dynamic within the frame—an envelope riding a bronze bicycle, a package in the oxidized arms of a boy on stilts, lounging on a chair by an outside table so that perhaps you might have tea with it before bringing it in, a bag hiding amongst your garden gnomes, in the mouth of a carved bear telling me to go away, a box leaning in repose on a pillow on an outside bench, a box admiring your front porch garden of elephant ears or sweet potato vines or aloe, a plastic bag just beneath the sign that says “we don’t call 911,” or “house protected by the second amendment” or “before you step inside get right with Jesus and let him know you’re coming” so that when you look at the picture of the gun pointed at me it is also pointed back at you.
This is my way of communicating to you—ephemeral, transient—my way of saying I am more than a machine that drops off packages, more than a complaint in your app. I am here. I think and feel and love and pay attention to the fantasies you have built for yourselves on your front porches and honor them in my placement of your package, in my documentation of this moment we share together.
Maybe one day I will have the chance to take a picture of your dog, teeth bared, in mid-leap, right before it rips at my throat. I promise I will try to swipe to finish before it bites down.
Moving at the Speed of Stillness
A crayon melts on the street, a molten yellow sludge crusting the asphalt. The sky is a glass marble. A hot wind blows. There is no shade in Maricopa. The temperature gauge, long since useless, in the van reads 131. At some point the heat becomes a meditation. All other senses wilt in its presence. I feel the wind enter my body, make jerk of my skin. It becomes me. I am hot wind and sun and melted glass. My footfalls are weighted, each one pulled up from the core of the Earth and dropped down again by the heat’s gravity. When a car comes, I can neither look up nor shuffle my feet faster to avoid it. I am the byproduct of molecular thermal exchange, a morass of wet meat boiled by the sun and poured into the mold of a body. The air moves through me and I move through the air. My body is no longer solid, but a convection, a gradient of refractive heat moving across a lawn. I am wind and heat and boiled meat and sun. I want to grow roots, shallow and unfurling just beneath the surface, grow my skin thick and corrugated so I can swell and shrivel with the water I collect, bloom at night for the bats to suckle and pollinate, hold my arms toward the sun in supplication, move and grow as glacial ice down a mountainside, wither and shed my skin so people can take my bones to decorate their front porches. This is my meditation, a sludge of movement across the street, a pooling of heat around me, my brain obliterated into silence, into a contemplation of the sun and air and hot breath of the earth rising from the black of the street. I am melted glass and sun and air and heat and silence stepping up to your front porch. I am a creeping cholla moving across your lawn carrying a package in my folded tubercles. My bones decorate your front porches.
Earlier there was something about hydration, something about electrolytes, about standing in the shade, about being in the back of the van for more than one minute; if you stop peeing, if you feel disoriented or dizzy, if your shoes begin to melt into the asphalt it might be time to find a spot to cool down. It was 96 at 10:00 a.m.
Later, I will bathe my hands in the crushed ice dispenser of a gas station. Later, I might wonder why I was put in this danger, or maybe why I accepted it? For now, all that matters is that I finish. So I will drown my face in ice water. I will move at the speed of stillness. My mind will blink and reset to this singularity. The sun will creep behind the mountains and take its sting with it. And while the temperature will still be 113, the back of the truck will no longer feel like a death sentence. I will survive another day, or perhaps barely, or perhaps not at all, perhaps I am still on the side of the road—dried husk, a corpse still wet with decay—rooted and swelling in the sun.
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Kevin Lichty was born and raised in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. He received an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University where he currently teaches composition. His work has appeared in Palooka, Broad River Review, Hawaii Pacific Review and elsewhere. His debut novella The Circle That Fits was published by Driftwood Press in 2022.