Free Doubtful Canon by Johnny D. Boggs

the left side of my face, and the shape of my nose told me it had been broken. The pinky finger on my left hand seemed crooked, and I couldn’t bend it, the palm badly skinned, while my right shirt sleeve was torn into strips, arm and hand criss-crossed with scratches. My ankles still hurt, but if I had walked five or more miles, nothing had been busted.
    Cool, alkaline water burned my hands as I dipped them into the water, shattering my reflection, and began to wash my face and slake my thirst.
    “Fall rains, summer monsoons been good,” Whitey Grey said. “Water ain’t always so plentiful, but don’t drink too much of it.”
    He didn’t have to warn me. The salty water burned more than relieved, but at least it reduced my swollen tongue’s size.
    “Tolerable.” Ian Spencer Henry, acting like some savvy frontiersman in a Beadle and Adams half-dime tale, spit out a mouthful. “I’ve had worse.”
    With a grunt, Whitey Grey opened a pewter flask, which contained something even stronger than the playas offering of water.
    “We have to cross… that?” Jasmine’s face paled.
    She hadn’t been banged up as much as I had. Oh, her sleeves were ripped, and bruises were beginning to form on her forehead and hands, and she walked gingerly, favoring her left leg. I followed her gaze, staring across the flat, hard land beyond the small pool of water. We stared off into Valle de las Playas, an infinity of nothing, the sand already reflecting the rising sun’s heat. Even in early October, crossing the old lake bed could be like stepping into a furnace. The water I had just drank no longer tasted so bad, but I remembered Whitey Grey’s warning, and knew he was right. Too much would make me sick.
    When my father still dreamed and acted like a father, when we had first arrived in Shakespeare, he had told my mother, sisters, and me all about the great dead lakes between Shakespeare and Arizona Territory. Once, he had said, more than 12,000 years ago, these lakes had been as vast and full and magnificent as the Great Lakes of the north, filling much of the basin. Yet the climate had changed, warming and warming until southern New Mexico became an arid wasteland. Streams and lakes dried, leaving nothing but flat beds hard as nails, uncompromising, unforgiving. Water returned only during spring snow melt or from the violent thunderstorms, usually in late summer, and even then the liquid only lasted a brief while before disappearing into the desert.
    Whitey Grey had been right. We were lucky to find water here.
    He had led us—no, that’s not right. He had taken off, to save himself, and we had followed, to save ourselves. I thought back to that night. For some reason, the dog, or dogs, had kept their distance, as did our human pursuers. Whitey turned north from the rails, and Jasmine, Ian Spencer Henry, and I stumbled along after him, darting through cactus and brush, in and out of arroyos, eventually turning back south and west. We had stopped only once, and now our pursuers had given up their search and retired back to the comforts of Lordsburg. With the skies turning gray in the east, we had slaked our thirst slightly from Ian Spencer Henry’s canteen.
    Jasmine had left her canteen in the freight car. Mine lay somewhere along the tracks of the Southern Pacific, along with my war bag of clean clothes, jerky, and sardines.
    “Bet you’re glad I come along,” my friend had said. “Else, you’d be a mite parched.”
    He reminded us of our luck now, sitting on the edge of the playa, holding up his canteen for Jasmine to see. “Don’t worry, girlie,” he said, imitating the white-skinned treasure hunter, “I got a canteen, and I’ll share.”
    This led to a snort from Whitey Grey. “Hey, what happened to your gear? Your water? Y’all had it back in town. I knowed ’cause I heard it sloshin’ all night when we was walkin’ up from Shakespeare.”
    When we informed him of our losses, he cursed and let the flask