The Man From Saccaton 

by Teresa Allen 

Synopsis of The Man from Saccaton

I wrote the Man from Saccaton prior to events foreshadowing my most recent novel, The Desert's Edge.  In the story, a middle class woman from Phoenix stumbles into the life of a Pima man living on the Gila River Indian Reservation.  He has rescued her from the scorching desert and subsequently becomes her guide through a difficult time in her marriage.   

The Man from Saccaton is based on a Death Row Inmate that I met during a Law School internship (I helped with his appeals process).  In a 4 foot by 4 foot concrete prison cage, I spent two hours interviewing this Pima Man.  His spirituality and positive attitude astounded me (though I don't belittle the crime).  

"It may be death row, but my life is a life and every day I do what I can to make a good life."  

Though I promised never to publish the letters he wrote to me, I offer through this book the essence and power of his Native American spirit in a world all too often dismal from despair.

Chapter 1

Dust swirled high into the open blue sky.  It aimlessly twirled across the desert until vanishing into the hot dry July morning.

“I'm fucking crazy,” she said aloud.  Her arms gestured high as she walked across the harsh raw Sonora Desert toward the dust devil.  “I have really gone crazy," she nodded and walked.  "That’s what this is all about," she shook her head from side to side and clenched her fists in rage.  "It's happened to me.” 

The desert stretched all around, ending in distant foothills and mountains.  She had plopped herself dead in the middle of a harsh nowhere.  No other people were around.  Only sage, creosote, and the rusted out remains of pickups, cars and other human discards.  

I must still be on the reservation, she thought.  She did not know how far she was from the nearest little town or Pima or Yaqui dwelling.  The sun blazed heavily across her back so at least she knew she was heading west, probably toward St. Johns.

Her hair was dyed red and cut short, no more than an inch in length, and her skin was fair and freckled.  She wore clothes from the morning before -- jeans and a sports bra under a short sleeved shirt.  The shirt hung unbuttoned in front, to help her keep cool. 

The day before she had been in Portland, Oregon, attending a friend’s wedding.  A wedding in a hot air balloon.  A wedding she had rushed to Portland to see.

Then, she had changed her return flight so she could arrive home two days early.  Why?  Partly because of her law practice, which demanded all of her time.  Mostly, however, she had wanted to surprise him?  Surprises were good for marriage.  So was spontaneity.  She had read that somewhere.  And so she had spontaneously thought of a surprise.  To return home early.  To save a marriage lunging toward retrospect.

They used to be spontaneous.  Her and Bob.  She thought as she walked step by step, watching for rattle snakes or scorpions near the rocks and stones.  Certainly, we were spontaneous in Boston.  

She stopped and looked back at the sun, her hand shading her brow.  "This is a cartoon, you know," she spoke.  "I'm going to expire like the cartoon guy dragging himself across the desert."  

She turned and continued away from the sun, remembering spontaneity that day, at the exit to New York.  When they lived in Boston years before.  

“Let’s go to New York,” Bob had said, he was driving the Mustang.  He always drove in the early days.  Especially the Mustang.  Really, he drove whenever she didn't feel like being assertive about driving.   

It had been a late afternoon on a Saturday, she recalled, trying to keep her thoughts off the dreadful, suffocating heat.  

In one enchanted moment, they were on I-95 to New York City, where they harrowed down Main Street Mahatten then dashed up the World Trade Center, took in the view, then ran back down and drove back to Boston.  That was marvelous, she reflected.  No time to mull over the idea.  On a whim, we see the lights of Manhattan.

"Yeah, I'm crazy," her voice cracked as she spoke aloud.  20 years with the same man, 40 years old and no longer of sound mind.  She walked, dragging her aching feet.  Her ears pounded from sunburn.  Her throat was dry and swollen.  Her stomach cramped as the sun now sucked away her very breath.  People don't die in the desert of thirst, she thought.  They die because they can't breathe. 

A shack appeared in the distance, then she saw other dilapidated Pima dwellings, not much different from what they had been a hundred years before.  She headed toward the nearest home.  

She stopped.  The sun welded the shirt to her back.  Her nostrils scratched in the dry scouring air.  She stood there, facing away from the sun, looking down at the earth.  Did she even want help?  She wondered.  Or was she hoping to die?

She shook her head, it pounded in pain.  Now it seemed, in her crazy state of mind, she didn’t want any help.  She wanted to recoil and simply die.  And be left alone.  Forget about spontaneity, forget about practicing law, about forgiveness, even about happiness.  Just recoil and die.  

The idea did not seem all that crazy.  She needed to die now, especially if she had gone mad.  And she was mad.  How else could she explain the events of last night?  Anger.  Perhaps.  But anger seemed shallow and she had spent so many years trying not to be shallow, at least with herself, and not with Bob.  When not being shallow had mattered.

Mattered, yes.  It had mattered, until last night.

In the distance she saw something, not a shack but a car kicking up dust.  Then car headed toward her, driving on raw desert ground.  

She wanted to hide suddenly fearing the people in the car might harm her.  They could be men out carousing and drinking, even before noon.  

No, she wanted no part of whoever approached.  She sat on the earth, hoping, praying the car would pass by, go another direction.  Maybe they hadn't even noticed her out in the desert.  

But how could they not notice her.  Such a strange sight she had to be, even from a distance her short red hair would flash notice.  And she was all so pale white, a woman out alone in the middle of nowhere, in the midst of their reservation home. 

She was such an idiot.  So felt helpless, vulnerable and in such need of help.  She could not even cry, she was so dried out. 

The car, an old white Buick, approached like a resurrected junk heap abandoned in the desert.  

It slowed down.  The occupants, 4 men maybe, a family perhaps, had spotted her.  

She didn’t move, but peered at them with her head bowed.  If she waved them on, they would think she was waving for help.  She dared not move, could not move.  

The situation was not so odd, she told herself.  She was there, minding her own business.  She could claim to be an artist searching for desert junk to make into Southwestern Crosses.  Or perhaps they'd believe she was an archaeologist invited, yes invited by the Pima tribe to excavate the land.  Not so odd, even with her short red hair and skin dangerously exposed to the summer heat.  She could scarcely breathe, as if her body were turning to stone. 

The Buick stopped, about a hundred yards away.  Four large me with long black hair, piled out of the car and looked at her.  They couldn't drive their old junk heap any further out on the desert.  She thought as she sat still, sure now that the four men were drunk and looking to raise hell. 

She would run the other way, if they came toward her.  Run and run toward one of the shacks.  But how far could she go.   Already she could not budge from the ground.  Her throat painfully begged for water.  

One of the men began shouting, but she could not understand the words.  She would not move unless they approached, but it seemed they dared not drive the Buick heap any further across the rough desert earth.

The shout came again.  Just a shout, a war cry, a carousal of men.  She couldn't even sob because everything hurt so painfully.  Now she knew she was not crazy after all, for a crazy person would never feel so helpless and afraid.

Then, as suddenly as the car had stopped, the men piled back inside.  The Buick spun in a turn and sped away in a cloud of dust, back in the direction it came from.  Returning to town she thought.  For help, she wondered.  Where was  her own car now?  Really, how stupid had she been, leaving the BMW along the road, because of a flat.  She should have stayed with the car.  Oh how she could use some water now -- some wonderful, pure, cool water. 

Yes, she was not crazy, just stupid.  She well knew the desert was no place to challenge, having lived in Phoenix for twelve years, having heard stories every year of someone dying in the desert.  There was the story of a writer from back east who died in an hour of heat stroke, because he took a hike without water.  The desert, the great Sonora, did not care for the stupid and weak -- idiots who let the sun shrivel their life into the bleached white art of Georgia O’Keefe.

Jessy June Eckland, she thought, you are one big fool.  She wiped her tears with her shirt, wondering where in to go.  Head toward the hovels or turn back to the car.

As she slowly eased herself off the ground, she nearly blacked out, catching herself from a fall.  She sat back on the earth to cry.  And she put the shirt over her head, which now ached from the sun bearing down.  It had to be nearly noon, she thought from the position of the sun.  Those men are going for help and will be back soon.  Either I stay and wait, or head for those hovels. 

She could not stand nor move now, so she did not contemplate the choice.  They had seen her, whoever they were.  They’d be back.

She closed her eyes, still sitting.  Dreamily, she though about when she and Bob first flew to the desert in 1985, he to apply for jobs, she to enroll at ASU college of law.  He, already set with his law degree and five years of practice, she, ready to further her professional life with a career in law.  Her first views of the desert, had been rich with the colors of hardened weathered stone in variations of red and oranges.  She remembered seeing her first saguaros standing tall, like gentlemen sentinels guarding their domain.  

Now here she was, another idiot who had gone beyond the limits.  The desert would take her.  Rightly so.  And now was the time.  The event of last night, the shock of yesterday, would all mingle with the death of Jessie June Ekland, age 40.  “Woman found dead on the Gila River Indian Reservation.”

Her head began to pound from the heat.  She tried crying again, not wanting to believe she would actually die.

“You’ve got to stand up,” an inner voice said.  She breathed deeply.  You really have no right to think about dying.   

But she could not stand, could not find the strength, the determination to do what she had to do.  Maybe it was best to just sit and wait, and hope that help would come.  So she sat, the sun beating on her covered head, bearing down on her back.  She curled over and held her stomach.  Waiting.  No more thoughts for now.  She felt too much pain to think about anything except, she did not want to die, after all.  

She awoke hearing a distant motor, a truck.  Her face pressed on the hard sweltering earth.  She pushed herself up and peered toward the road, squinting her eyes.  

A bright blinding beam of light burst from a truck crossing the desert.  It was an old green tow truck speeding to where she lay, propping herself up.

The tow truck slowed, then stopped about fifteen feet away, to keep dust from reaching her.  She squinted to see who had arrived.  Now I might not die, she thought, if it's not too late.

She saw him then.  A very large man sitting in the driver’s seat, staring at her for an instant, then getting out of the truck.  He wore sun glasses that hid his eyes.  His long black hair was held back in a pony tail.  He wore a workman’s shirt, opened, and a white soiled muscle shirt tucked into jeans.  

He reached into the truck and pulled out a colorful blanket.  Then he came to her, saying nothing.

She saw hover over her, the sun bursting around his head and large body.  His hair was oily, his hands held signs mechanical work.  His face was square, beardless, and slightly pocked.  

He loomed from above as he gently placed the blanket over her back.  It stung, the burn.  She hadn’t realized she was so burned. 

He helped her stand.  She dropped, but he held her up from under her arms, gently for such a large and bulky man.   

“Easy,” he spoke, his rough but calm voice echoed through her pounding of her head.  Easy, easy easy…

"You need to walk."  He stood her up and guided her to the passenger side of his truck.  It amazed her that she could walk without dropping into blackness.  But she could.  She was coherent.  Maybe, she really would be all right. 

“Slowly,” he said, continuing to guide her, step by step, while keeping the blanket secure over her shoulders.  He opened the door, it creaked.  He eased her into a torn vinyl seat, duck taped and soiled with oil.  The cab reeked of mechanic oil.

She leaned forward, because her back pained.  He reached behind the seat and pulled out a bottle of water, an old and soiled plastic bottle, used and used again.  He unscrewed the lid and held it to her dry parched lips.

“Slowly,” he spoke again in a voice that pierced her ears, echoing slowly, slowly, slowly.

He held up the bottled and the warm water ran in her mouth.  It tasted sweet, though it was almost hot and burning.  He poured only a swallow at a time.  Her throat was too swollen for any more.

“Slowly,” he repeated, touching her throat with his large rough and soiled hands. His touch eased the water down her throat.  It ached in pain, like bronchitis.  She ached for more, she wanted to drink it all but it felt like fire to drink.  He helped her with another swallow.

“Slowly,” his voice again echoed in her mind.  

She felt him touch her forehead.  Her head was so pained now, she could not hold it up.  She knew she was about to pass out again.  Then somehow feeling his touch gave relief to her pounding head.  He knows what to do, she thought before slipping into unconsciousness.  He had helped someone else out of the desert before.

© 2000 by Teresa Allen. All Rights Reserved.

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(last edit:  12-30-00:  Happy New Year !)