The Desert Rose Read Free Page A

in emergencies, which was a good thing because it was definitely an emergency, since Denny had taken off the day after he totaled the Pontiac. The insurance check hadn’t come yet either, though Harmony had been told several times it would come any day. Myrtle’s car was an old Buick station wagon which was sort of manageable on the highway but got cases of the jerks when you had to go slow. There was no way to keep from going slow on the dirt road, to go fast meant probably knocking the bottom out, which Myrtle no doubt would not appreciate, she didn’t consider Harmony a good driver anyway.
    The more she slowed down for the bumps the worse the Buick jerked. Also, it could not be said that it smelled so great, mainly because Myrtle was in the habit of stuffing Maude, her main goat, into the car, so she’d have company while she roamed around Las Vegas or went to Boulder City to check out garage sales. Myrtle had very little to do except go to garage sales or else hold them in their mutual garage. The car had so many goat hairs in it that Harmony had to spread towels on the front seat in order to keep from being covered with them when she got to work.
    Well, this car’s not going to make it home, I guess we’re down to no cars, she concluded, about five seconds before the Buick konked out.
    She tried the ignition but all that did was make about fifteen little red lights flash on the dashboard, plus some white smoke was pouring out from under the hood so Harmony grabbed the newspaper she had bought Myrtle and took off down the road, it was just maybe a quarter of a mile on home and she enjoyed a nice walk anyway.
    Before she had been walking two minutes she heard her peacocks calling, she only had three now, Joaquin her favorite, the most beautiful of them all, had somehow gotten out of the yard and fallen prey to coyotes, but the three that were left were beautiful too. She knew some people didn’t like to hear peacocks but she loved to hear them in the still morning, across the quiet desert, it could almost make her cry if she was feeling lonely.
    Particularly since Denny had left she was spending more and more time with the peacocks, though Pepper thought it was creepy and Mrytle argued that peacocks weren’t survivors, like goats. Myrtle was hipped on survival and anyway Maude was every bit as spoiled as a peacock, if not more so. Harmony loved to sit and have the peacocks come and eat kernels of corn out of her hand, they were quite delicate and hardly ever pecked her. Then they would getthrough and go spread their beautiful feathers and parade them around the yard, which would have been just an ugly little yard in the desert if the peacocks hadn’t been there.
    Harmony liked to think the peacocks called just at dawn because they knew it was time for her to be getting back, maybe that was romantic but she had never seen anything wrong with being romantic, it just meant you were a little more tender about things and liked to think about the good kinds of things that could happen rather than the bad kinds of things, which there were enough of, there was no point in dwelling on them. Anyway she loved the peacocks and sometimes did her exercises for them, they seemed to take an interest, at least feeling that the peacocks were on the same wavelength as she was made coming home sort of better now that Denny had taken off. She just liked to feel in her heart that the peacocks were glad.
    2.
    W HEN HARMONY walked up the driveway carrying her bag and the newspaper, Myrtle had already laid out her garage sale for the day and was sitting in the only lawn chair she hadn’t already sold at previous garage sales eating a bowl of Cheerios and waiting for customers. Sometimes customers came early, too—a lot of the keno runners and even a few dealers, older women mostly, were into the garage sale scene and would grab a morning paper and hit a few sales before going home to bed. It was Myrtle’s theory that any sane person