I wrote this story a few years ago. Every year, on Aug. 16, I think of Elvis, Moses, and Curtis.
Moses
by
Judy S. Lentz
Curtis Martin gave me my first kiss. We were standing
next to each other, straddling our bikes, when he leaned over and our
lips touched. He turned beet red and took off on his bike, while I
stayed there, feeling the hot breeze mark a cool wet spot left on my
bottom lip. It was the summer of ‘77, in a trailer park on the
outskirts of Tucson, Arizona.
When I first saw
Curtis, I thought he looked like Elvis. He had dark hair, blue eyes,
and dimples when he smiled. His family was from Texas, so he talked
with a southern drawl and wore cowboy boots everyday. We were both
eleven.
Our families moved into the trailer park
around the same time, in early June. Curtis and I met while riding our
bikes, and we spent that summer cruising around the dusty gravel roads
separating the single and doublewides. Sometimes we ventured outside
the park and hiked through the surrounding desert, looking for
tarantulas and scorpions. Occasionally, we snuck out after bedtime,
to meet behind a carport and smoke discarded cigarette butts. We would
stare up at the stars, picking out constellations we convinced ourselves
we recognized, and following the Milky Way path across the night sky.
Curtis had a small transistor radio, and he would bring it out if the
batteries were working. Curtis liked country music. I liked rock. But
we could always agree if we found a station playing an Elvis song.
We talked about a lot of things. Curtis had a soft voice, and I loved
his accent. Both of our families moved around a lot, and we discovered
neither of us enjoyed these moves. We both loved animals, and Curtis
had spent years trying to convince his mom to let them have a dog.
There wasn’t a certain moment when it happened, but it was soon apparent
to all the kids in the park that Curtis and I were
boyfriend/girlfriend. We were inseparable.
One
day, as a bunch of us played together on somebody’s patio, a girl from a
neighboring trailer park climbed through a hole in the fence and
approached us. She was crying, and proceeded to tell us how her father
had put her dog and its pups into a garbage bag full of water, and
tossed them into a dumpster. Curtis and I took off toward the hole in
the fence, with all the other kids trailing behind us.
We followed the girl to a large dumpster, and tried to figure out the
best way up and in. Curtis pushed a box over to it, and we both climbed
up to look down into the smelly mess. We couldn’t decipher anything
from there, so Curtis gave me a leg up over the edge. I sank into the
garbage a bit, before I got my bearings. I started feeling around,
trying to find the bag with the pups. Sure enough, on the top, toward
the back of the dumpster, I discovered the heavy bag. With all my
might, I hauled the bag over to the edge, where Curtis helped me lift it
over the side, onto the box. It was leaking water from some holes
created by all this movement. I jumped to the ground and ripped open
the bag. Water gushed out, and I reached in, hoping to feel life.
Instead, I felt cold, slimy little bodies, all mangled up together. I
gripped one and pulled it out. I held it in my hands to see if it was
breathing. There was no movement. So I did what the
paramedics on “Emergency” did.
I put my mouth over the tiny, cold nose and muzzle, and blew air into
its lungs. I tried this a few times, and heard one of the watching kids
say, “Gross! Why is she kissing it?”
“SHUT
UP!” Curtis hollered at the kid, and nobody said another word. I
silently handed the lifeless puppy to Curtis, and he gently placed it on
the ground while I reached back into the bag. Once again, I performed
CPR, and once again, no luck. I repeated this scene a few times. As
Curtis took each little body from me and lined them up next to each
other, I was getting sadder and sadder. When I took out the momma dog,
the little girl cried so hard it broke my heart. I willed that dog to
breathe as I blew air in its lungs, but it did not. Curtis took it from
me, and I reached back into the bag. One more pup remained.
I pulled out the tiny white pup, put my mouth over its nose, and blew.
I did not expect anything to happen. I gave it a second breath, and
that’s when the tiny body jerked in my hand. The kids all jumped back,
startled. The little pup’s mouth opened a bit, and I held its head low,
so the water could come out. I kept rubbing it and talking to it, and
it moved more, and started to breathe more. Curtis took off his shirt,
and I wrapped the puppy up in it, to try and get it warm.
“We’ll take it to my house,” he said.
Curtis helped me through the hole in the fence, and we walked toward
his house, hoping we could convince his mom to let them keep the puppy.
When we got there, she opened the door and looked at the crowd of kids
on her patio.
“What do you have there?” she
asked, and a chorus of voices explained what had happened. She listened
for awhile, and then reached down to take the bundled pup from my arms.
I watched her eyes as she held the little pup up to her face, and
suddenly I knew she was going to keep it. Curtis knew it, too, because I
heard him sigh with relief. She ran us all off, so she could take care
of the pup properly, without us all underfoot. We dispersed, and
Curtis and I went to their shed to get a shovel, so we could bury the
other pups and their momma in the desert. As we took turns digging the
hole, we tried to think of a name for his new dog. We settled on
“Moses”, because we had rescued the dog from the water. We said a
prayer as we buried Moses’ family, then took the shovel back to Curtis’
house, and went to play with the other kids.
A
few weeks later, Curtis and I shared our first kiss. The day after that
kiss, Elvis died. Curtis and I snuck out that night and listened to
the many different stations playing Elvis’ songs. We held hands and
laid on the ground, looking up at the stars. We stayed there until the
batteries in the radio died, and the sky in the east was starting to
turn pale.
A few days later, my father brought a
bunch of empty boxes into our living room. I ran from the trailer,
down the road, and into the desert. I did not want to fill up anymore
boxes with me, and move somewhere else. I did not want to leave this
desert, with the prickly pear cactus and tall ocotillo stalks, the dry
brush and the rattle snakes, the tarantulas and the scorpions. I did
not want to leave the momma and pups’ grave.
A
few days later, I sat in the front seat of the moving van, looking in
the side rear-view mirror at Curtis. He stood in the middle of the
dusty gravel road, holding a wriggly Moses in one arm, his other arm
raised in a final wave. I watched as his figure grew smaller and
smaller, and the dust stirred up by the van finally swallowed him.
End
