The Flute

The Flute
This is the fifth night I’ve found myself in the desert miles from my home. This time, I was on my knees. I had evidently dug a small hole with my bare hands. The ends of my fingers are bleeding and my knuckles are raw. I am covered with sweat even though the cool of the pre-sunrise morning is still upon me.
I’m not sure what’s happening. Have I begun to sleepwalk at the age of forty? My bare feet and legs were covered with thorns, stickers and cactus spines.
I tried to retrace my steps back to my house, but it was impossible. I finally set off in the direction I thought my house to be. I reached home and threw myself onto my bed.

I moved to the desert a year ago, hoping to soothe my mangled ego and a new start.
My habits became simple in the desert. I worked in my garden for hours on end, laboring to do my small part in changing this dry desert to lush greenness.
I wasn’t always like this. I left a high-powered, highly paid job in Houston a year ago. I had great ideas then…ideas that I knew would benefit the company. New and innovative concepts to insure bottom-line profit. The only problem was: no one would listen.
I watched as employees, my wife, and everyone else circled around endlessly in their dead lives. I knew I was born to make a difference somehow in this world, but somehow I couldn’t make it happen.
And then, boom, my boss was transferred to London. And the company needed someone to take his place…someone who knew the ropes. Someone who could lead.
My time had come, I thought. But it was not to be.
They hired some bean counter in receiving to be the new boss.
So I quit. I took what money I had saved and escaped to the high desert of New Mexico. I had been there once, and liked the sunsets and sunrises, and knew deep down inside that it could mean a new start for me.
My wife, uninterested in the prospect of living in a desert, took the children and moved in with her parents in Ohio.
So here I was, living in an old three-room adobe house. I’d never been happier.
And I was putting my talents to use, although in a very small way.
I was changing the landscape. I hauled in tons of topsoil and compost. I used countless thousands of gallons of water to transform the desert into a lush green garden.
I haven’t heard from my wife and children in six months. I’m pretty sure my wife thinks her life better off without me in it. I don’t know about the children, but I suppose they’re in agreement.
The desert is quiet and peaceful. In the afternoons, the sound of a flute wafts down from the little mesa to the west, across the Mexican broom and chollo cactus and into my little paradise. It is a soft, quieting sound and sometimes feels as though it comes from the earth itself.
Not that there haven’t been problems.
I have had several confrontations with my neighbors about the use of water. The first time, I was unpleasantly surprised by a ragged old man with a heavy accent. What was it? Spanish? No, more probably Tiwa or one of the other Pueblo Indian dialects.
I heard his voice before I saw him. I turned and looked. He was leaning over my fence, saying something I could not understand. His face was unwrinkled, but tufts of snow white hair sneaked out from under his straw cowboy hat and somehow he looked very old. He wore a starched white shirt, and a bolo tie with turquoise slide.
Exasperated at being distracted from my lovely garden, I must have looked up with a scowl on my face. Now, focused on him, I asked him what he wanted.
“My friend,” he said. “There is a saying that one can tell a true gardener by sneaking up on him and surprising him. If he turns with a smile, he is a true gardener.”
Unmoved by his rebuff, I again asked what he wanted.
“I live up there, on the hill,” he motioned with his head toward the little mesa.
“And?” I asked, impatiently.
“You know, this is a desert where we live,” he said, moving his hand across the barrenness outside my garden. “There is a reason for this desert to be here. I do not know the reason, but I know there is a reason,” he said
“What’s your point, old man,” I asked.
“Your garden is very beautiful,” he said.
“Thank you. Now may I get back to work?”
The old man simply smiled.
“I see you use a lot of water to keep it beautiful,” he said.
“It’s my water, and my well, and you should mind your own business,” I said, moving a step closer to the fence, thinking that this mildly threatening movement would send him on his way. But the old man stayed in place, his arms comfortably folded across my fence.
“The water is on your land, my friend, but the water in the desert, it belongs to everyone. You have the right to use it…but not the right to use more than your share,” he said.
“And who determines what my share is? You? Leave me alone. You’re on my property.”
“As you wish, senor,” he said. Did I detect sarcasm in is voice+ He tipped his hat and moved away from the fence.
The next morning, I rose early and made a strong pot of coffee. I walked outside and sat in the small patio I had created with my own hands.
Sipping the coffee, I leaned back to admire the beauty of my garden. Every inch of planting space was taken up inside little courtyard. Now, I was making plans to enlarge it again. I would expand the coyote fence, doubling the garden space I had now. I would haul in tons of more topsoil and fertilizer.
I sat there with my eyes half closed and took in the smells of the flowers. I don’t know how long I sat there, but I suddenly became aware of the flute.
It was the same soft melody that I had heard before, but this time there was something different. There were odd pauses, as though the music was waiting for another instrument to join in, strange shifts in timing and minor scale intonations that were the same as I had heard before, but somehow different.
During the next few weeks, the music began to change. I don’t mean that a different tune was being played. It was the same melody, but a little more strident, and always the pauses that were oddly displeasing.
Suddenly one day I realized that the music had entirely changed. It was still the same tune, but it was quick and jerky, and even more strident.
That was the same day that four of my roses had died. They looked like they hadn’t been watered in a month, but I distinctly remembered watering them the day before.
Sorrowful over my roses, and disoriented by that damn flute, I decided it was time to pay a visit to the mesa.
It took me all morning to walk the mile or so to the mesa, and climb the switchback trail to the top. And the sound of that flute became cleared and clearer.
As I reached the top, the flute abruptly stopped in mid-song.
I looked around. There was an old shack built between several pinions and junipers. An old door entering the cabin was flapping open and shut in the wind. A small dust devil rose up before me and headed directly toward the door then dissipated before it.
I walked closer to the cabin, and an old man stepped out of the darkness of the shack.
It took me a minute, but I recognized him as the same old man who had leaned on my fence and confronted me that day months ago.
“You!” I said. “You’re playing that damned flute?”
The old man looked at me for a long time. Then he answered.
“No, my friend, I don’t play the flute. But you are here. Let me welcome you. Come inside.”
“Listen,” I yelled. “I traced that sound to here, right to the top of this mesa. If it’s not you, then who is it? Your wife?” I stepped toward him. I was angry. Angrier than I have ever been. My hands were shaking.
“I live here alone, my friend. And I do not play the flute,” he said calmly. “Come and sit with me in the cool shade of my house. I will make coffee and we will talk.”
“Talk? TALK?” I took another step toward him.
“Someone up here is playing that flute. You think I’m crazy?”
The old man looked steadily into my eyes. “There are many kinds of crazy, my friend. I don’t know if you are one of those or not.” He stopped the flapping door and held it open. “Come in out of the sun. If you con’t want coffee, I’ll dip you some water from my well. It is good water. Cool and has the taste of the mountains still in it.”
“I don’t want your damn coffee. Or your precious water. Just have whoever it is stop playing that flute or I’ll be back.”
“And what will you do then, my friend?” he asked calmly.
“Nothing you’ll be happy with,” I answered. “And I’m not your friend,” I spat out. “I don’t know you, and I don’t care to know you. Just leave me alone.” I felt rage welling up into my throat, not just anger that I knew he was lying to me about the flute, but rage at the world. Rage at my wife and children. Rage at that accountant who had the job I wanted. Rage for all the lost things in my life. Rage for my roses.
The old man said something I didn’t understand. Something in Tiwan, no doubt, for that’s what most of these Pueblo Indians spoke, I have been told.
Then, he turned, and went back into the cool blackness of the shack.
I walked to the edge of the mesa. For some reason, I picked up a stone at the rim and hurled it at the old man’s shanty. With uncanny aim, it flew right through the doorway into the house.
“And stay away from my goddamn place,” I yelled.
I stumbled and fell several times going back down the mesa, and across the patch of desert to my house. I was still angry and cursing when I arrived.
In the days that followed, my rage didn’t subside, nor did the flute music. I drove my old truck 10 miles to the nearest store. If that crazy old man wouldn’t stop playing that flute on his own, then maybe the sheriff could make him stop.
I bought some supplies, stashed them in my truck and then called the sheriff’s office.
The deputy on the other end of the line was less than helpful. In fact, he was laughing at me.
“You want us to send a unit out 25 miles into the desert to get an old man to stop playing a flute?” he asked.
“Mister, you need to get a life. We’ve got more important things to do.”
“Listen. Just listen. He’s doing this on purpose. All hours of the night. I can’t sleep. Just go out and talk to him.”
“What I’ll do is file a report and, if we get a unit going that way, I’ll have him stop and see you.”
“That’s not enough,” I yelled, but the deputy had already hung up.
I drove back home and tried to eat some dinner, which I couldn’t do. I shoved the plate away and looked out the window at the sun setting over the San Juan Mountains. Then I began to hear the flute again. It started slow at first, with the same melody I had first heard. The sound drifted in and out, carried by the desert winds.
Then it began to pick up tempo, and the music became faster and wilder.
It was dark and late when I finally tried to sleep. This time, I stuffed cotton in my ears, and that partially blocked out the sound.
It was that night that I first found myself walking, half-naked, in the desert, miles from home.




When I awoke from my fifth night wandering in the desert, it was almost dark. My hands and feet were throbbing. I switched on the lights, and filled a tub with hot water. I swallowed half a bottle of aspirin and sat down in the tub. At first, the hot water was agony on my hands and feet. But slowly, the pain began to subside, and, with tweezers, I began to pull out the broken ends of cactus spines still embedded in my legs.
Finally, I got out of the tub and stood there naked, letting the cool air of the desert night dry my body.
I stripped the bloody sheets from my bed and replaced them with clean ones.
Then I made a cup of tea, and poured a liberal shot of whisky into the cup. I drank it down in hot gulps and lay down on the bed, waiting for the whiskey and aspirin to take effect.
Then it occurred to me that I had not heard the flute tonight. I rose and went to the door. The desert was quiet. A bloated yellow moon was rising over the Sangres. I went to sleep and slept soundly for the first time in weeks.




The sheriff finished reading the journal, and was shaking his head. Deputy Bud Willis had found the journal beside the desiccated head protruding from the desert.
“I don’t know what to make of it, Sheriff,” the uniformed deputy was saying.
“The two kids that found the body are over there in my patrol car,” the deputy said.
The sheriff nodded. The kids were campers and were probably scared stiff. They couldn’t add anything to this.
“How do you think he got in there, Bud?” he asked the deputy.
“Hell if I know, Sheriff. But you can see he’s been here a while. Strange that the animals didn’t get at that head.
The coroner had driven up and was looking at the head.
“Yep, he’s definitely dead. Let’s see what the rest of him looks like,” the coroner said.
“Dig him out boys,” the sheriff told the deputies standing around with shovels.
Below several inches of sand, the deputies struck had caliche dirt, and they called for a pickaxe.
Two hours later, they lifted the body out of the earth.
“Don’t want to jump to conclusions, Sheriff,” the coroner said, “but it looks like the fella buried himself. See how his arms are all scrunched up. And the way the body was standing? He was alive when he went into that hole. And he wasn’t fighting. And no ropes or anything on his arms and legs. He wasn’t bound. He could’ve gotten out by himself, at least at first, until the ground hardened. Huh. Never heard of this before.
Suicide by burial. The fella just planted himself right here in the middle of the desert.”
“Hey, Sheriff,” one of the deputies called out. “What do you make of this?” he asked, pulling a large stone out of the hole.
“Looks like an Anasazi petroglyph,” the sheriff said, examining the stone. “Kokopelli,” he said, referring to the stick figure playing a flute. “Ancient Anasazi god of tricks and fertility. Looks like our corpse made a discovery,” he said.