Darkness at the edge of town

The day is starting to fade. With everything beyond the dark shadows turning blood-red in the evening light, I take a slow walk back to the car. As I open the driver’s door the stored afternoon heat pours out into the cooler air like a blast from hell’s kitchen.

I head out of town across the railway tracks with no destination in mind. The road takes me past scattered dwellings, their yards littered with unwanted family possessions: fluorescent kid’s toys, broke-backed sofas, rusted vehicles with flat tyres sunken on busted springs, obsolete refrigerators with no doors. Three kids, in baggy raggedy clothes, shout out as they bounce a ball around a basketball court, brown weeds, running to seed, pushing up through cracks in the concrete. At the place where the buildings run out, a pale track leads to the town cemetery, neat and trimmed through the arch holding white wrought-iron gates. Then there’s just fenced-in fields of scrub and stunted trees. A windmill stands next to a water tank. With no wind to move them, the iron blades flash bars of reflected sunlight across the hood of the car and into my eyes as I drive.

A half a mile on I see a half-grown javelina - mistakenly called a wild pig by some –rooting around in the vegetation on the verge. It doesn’t look up as I coast past. I fear for its life out here within the range of humankind. The road runs out two miles ahead, leading me into a community park by a small lake of blue clear water. I park the car in the empty parking lot and walk past brown painted picnic tables and blackened barbecues to the water’s edge. Swallows swoop and dive, taking unseen insects on the wing. A white dog - some kind of crossbred miniature curly haired poodle, out of place in this harsh country setting - gives me a wide berth as it takes itself for a walk, sniffing out its territory.

The words on a stone monument mark this place as the site of a fort, built in the 1850’s to block the old Comanche War Trail into Mexico. Each spring, warriors would leave their hunting grounds on The Salt Plains in the Texas panhandle and travel south to reap a grim and bloody harvest, their trail a mile wide, beaten flat and shiny by the hooves of their painted ponies. The Comanche would return four months later, thirty miles to the west to avoid Mexican army blockades on the south bank of the Rio Grande. They came baring dripping trophies, driving hundreds of stolen horses before them and dragging their captives behind, destined for a life of human bondage as slaves.

Then the US Department of War erected a string of forts out here in the wilderness and the annual Comanche migration was ended forever. Thirty years later, in a canyon to the west of present day Amarillo, Quanah Parker, the last Comanche war chief, surrendered his people into the hands of the Federal authorities. To demonstrate their power, the army of the United States left the Comanche pony herd screaming and dying in the dust, their throats cut. Their fate sealed, warriors described as the best light cavalry the world led their families to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, on foot.

Returning to town, I draw close to the spot where I’d seen the javelina. A pickup is drawn up in the brown grass at the side of the road, parked askew, the driver’s door left open wide. The gun rack in the rear of the cab is empty. As I draw alongside, I hear the pig-like squeal of a wounded animal and the thrashing sounds of pursuit in the undergrowth over the wire fence. My earlier fears for the wild creature have been realised and the hunter is moving in for the kill. The peace of the day’s closing is haunted by thoughts of painful death as I drive towards the darkness falling at the edge of town.