Sunset for a Rooster

We drove out of the desert, through the dust, to escape a 110degree nightmare. My brother and I silently stared ahead at the rutted and heat stricken road with a dead rooster hastily thrown on top of the cab of the little red pickup truck, both of us knowing they wouldn’t be returning to the fevered dream of the sprawled encampment sitting inland from the southeast shore of the desolate Salton Sea. We had not slept and still felt the small tingling bursts in our guts of a night that trembled, full of tumult and cheap whiskey and LSD. We’d told our bleary-eyed host we were going to town to fetch a tub of tobacco and cases of beer but knew full well that we were making up an excuse to escape and avoid the accusations of a rooster murder. We were too tired to feel any remorse and felt earnest in our explanations for not having any regrets about the death of the rooster. Frankly, we didn’t actually kill the rooster and why should it weigh on our rat-brains. I pulled the truck over on a patch of level gravel and leapt from the truck to grab the carcass. I plucked two tail-feathers off the bird for my hat and unceremoniously chucked it into a patch of sagebrush before running back to the driver-side and jumping in to head west to town and to the clean breeze of the ocean. The inside of the cab was hot and we took a rare reprieve utilizing the air-conditioning as we exited Slab City and watched the expressive concrete molded faces, formed on the side of a Jesus-ccentric knoll evaporate into the quicksilver. Once.