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Instead, they stayed true to the path. When hunger controlled, they dined on desert flora and the oversized dirt-rats whose colonies popped up randomly along the red brick road. Santiago fetched their food by sitting stock-still in the middle of a colony with a handful of pinyon nuts and waiting for the plump, lazy rodents to approach and sniff him. He would wait for the critters to crawl into his lap and eat from his hand. When they did, he swiftly scruffed them with his empty hand and slammed them to the ground. Catching the rodents by hand and dispatching them gave Santiago a sense of satisfaction. At the end of the slaughter, Santiago, uncharacteristically calm with a beatific gaze, sat with the dead animals piled off to his side and still drawing others in to check him out. Once the killing was done, the remaining dirt-rats settled on his lap and safely ate from his hand. The nights found the large stripped rats turning slowly on a spit above a fire, dripping grease that flared up on the embers. The meat, gamey and tough, killed the hunger but left the men unsatisfied.
    Along the road, the twisted juniper skeletons stretched their dead limbs, welcoming turkey vultures to roost in them. John marveled at the birds’ hideous beauty as they sat, necks hunched over and feathers ruffled, and stared at him with hollow, piercing eyes. The red wrinkled heads tipped with curved ivory beaks seemed ill-fitted to the oversized brown bodies. The birds’ glare always seemed to mimic the hunger in Santiago’s eyes. The omnivorous creatures waited for Santiago to do his work with the dirt-rats. He always killed more than he and John needed for sustenance and threw the extra carcasses out for the buzzards to dine on.

     
    One morning, as the men walked, John noticed movement far off on a ridge. A lone figure stood, hand held above his brown eyes to block the sun, and gazed in John’s direction. Although John could not tell from the distance, the man on the ridge was tall and strong. His name was Three Tooth.
    The lines ran deep and dark on Three Tooth’s face. His long black hair, held out of his face by a leather band with feathers tucked into it, flowed most of the way down his back. His thick arms and legs were intentionally branded with hieroglyphics, the raised burn scars telling the tale of his ancestors and their role as guardians of the red brick road. Three Tooth watched the men in the distance plod along the road. He saw the strange little bearded man jumping around and circling the taller man dressed in white. Santiago tossed bits of refuse along the roadside as he jumped about and his littering saddened Three Tooth, drawing one briny tear from the Indian’s eye.

     
    Three Tooth gathered his rag-tag band of desert scurves and led them in a vector that aimed to intersect with the course of John and Santiago. Leading the pack was Three Tooth, bareback on his pale white horse named Morticia. Three Tooth, sitting as if there were a board strapped to his back and staring forward, his face tense, his mouth a slit and white lines where his lips should be. Following Morticia was Heap-o-Buffaloes, a stringy Chinese-looking man decked out in buckskins and fringed moccasin boots. Heap-o-Buffaloes, skipping dangerously close to the horse’s hind legs but never provoking her to kick backward at him. Trailing Heap-o-Buffaloes were two pale-skinned, toe-headed, glazed-eyed mamelukes – Crazy Talk and Throws-Like-Girl – walking side by side and passing a fuming clay pipe between them. Bringing up the rear, grinning like a village idiot, was the shovel-toothed, squat and swarthy Melungeon sluggard, Two-Dogs-Fucking. A scraggly, sparse beard failed in its efforts to camouflage the lack of a jaw line on Two-Dogs-Fucking and only served to draw attention to the flabby turkey neck beneath it that jiggled excitedly whenever he shook his head. Two-Dogs-Fucking, with his bare, floppy man-tits and his bottom-half wrapped only in a too-small