When Joey Met Saulie.

I was parched. I tossed my jacket over my shoulder and continued plodding towards the inexplicable pasture land in the distance. It’s not that I was ever afraid of dying, you understand, I just expected it to be quick and painless, like an unanticipated bullet to the back of the head. Baking to death in the desert? That wasn’t something I’d ever figured on.

We were on our way to Vegas and we’d already covered lots of territory that day, unfortunately, much of it was on foot. After two hours of trudging towards a slight rise in the deserted wastelands of the southwest, we finally reached the windswept outcrop of parched and crunching sand and could see what lay beyond. I sighed, then cursed under my breath. It made no sense.

“Look,” Joey said. “A cow pasture. I think we’re home free.”

I looked at my big, stupid partner and said. “You’re an imbecile. Did you know that?”

“No, I’m serious,” he said. “Look at that. That’s farm land. That’s a cow pasture. There’s probably a town just on the other side of those…” We both squinted at a wavy shimmering mirage in the distance. “What are those—mountains?”

“How the fuck should I know, Joey?”

“Well how far could it be?”

“A million miles?”

It was a waste of sarcasm, because he said, “Naw, the horizon is only twenty miles away. I read that somewhere. That’s like…”

“The horizon,” I said. “That’s the fucking horizon, you imbecilic moron.”

He was all patient innocence. “Why are you so pissed off? What did I do?”

“What did you do?” I wanted to shoot him. “What did you do?” It was hard to imagine any wheels turning behind that big, stupid, face of his. I resumed walking toward the green field. A part of me was relieved, if puzzled, at the sight of all that grass in a desert, but I was still ticked off at Joey’s stupidity.

“I gave you 40 bucks and told you to fill up the tank, Joey. So what do you do?”

“Come on Saulie, don’t be like that. I said I was sorry.”

“You get 10 dollars-worth, a lousy quarter of a tank.”.

He looked away.

“We left the last gas station with 10 dollars-worth of gas, Joey. Then you tell me you know a shortcut. Christ! You might as well have put a gun to our heads and pulled the trigger.”

“I don’t have a gun, Saulie.” He shielded his eyes from the sun.

“That’s because you’re too stupid to have a gun.”

“I don’t need a gun, Saulie. I got these.” He smiled as he balled up his massive fists.

I snorted in disgust.

“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” he said, jogging to catch up with me. He pulled a pen-knife out of his pocket. “I could signal a passing plane. You know, reflect the sun off the blade into the eyes of one of the pilots.”

First I looked at Joey, to see if he was serious, then I looked up at the clear blue New Mexico sky. There were two contrails, a tiny little jet-sized dot at the front of each one, heading in different directions: Tiny specks in the sky. I looked at Joey again. “You do realize that they’re flying at about thirty-thousand feet, right?”

“Yeah? So? What’s footage got to do with it?”

“What’s footage got to…?” I started to say. “Do you really think you’ll catch the attention of a pilot flying 6 miles up with a two-inch pen knife?”

“You’re awfully negative, Saulie. That’s why you don’t get anywhere in life.”

He said this with a straight face. Like he was a fucking psychology major at Dartmouth College. “Oh really?” I said. “How can you say I don’t get anywhere in life? Look around.” I spun slowly in place with my arms outstretched. “How can you say I don’t get anywhere, Joey? You don’t think this is somewhere?” I was more determined than ever to reach that field of tall grass before I broke his skull with a rock, if I could find one in all this sand.

“You know where we are?” He asked.

“Yeah, I know where I am. I’m in the middle of nowhere, sweating my cojones off with you—my partner, the genius.”

We were walking side by side. The grass was no more than 50 yards distant. There was something funny about it. My partner looked thoughtful. “Yeah, I guess nowhere is somewhere.”

The ‘big green field of prairie grass turned out to be an endless expanse of small black rocks: Lumpy, razor-sharp remnants of an ancient lava flow. It looked green from a distance because thin, two-foot-long shoots of grass had pushed their way through the rocks at regular intervals. Despite their struggle to survive in such an environmentally challenging landscape, there were so many that it created the illusion, not a mirage, just the appearance of a thick carpet of grass seen from a distance. But for the grass, we might as well have been on the moon. It was almost impossible to walk on such terrain.

After a minute of picking our way over the impassable landscape, I said, “Hey stupid.”

“Yeah?”

“Since you only got ten dollars worth of gas, what did you do with the other 30 bucks?”

“I spent it,” he said.

“On what?” I didn’t care. I was just making idle conversation with an idiot.

“I bought some minutes for my phone,” Joey said.

I stopped. He stopped. We stared at each other.

“You have a cell phone with you?” I couldn’t believe I was asking. I never carried a cell phone. It never occurred to me that he would. Who would he call, and who would call him? What a stupid question. The sun was baking my brain and the lack of moisture had reduced it to the size of my partner’s gonads.

Much to my surprise, he said, “Yeah, sure. Why?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “We’re walking through the fucking desert, and you’ve got a cell phone in your pocket? What are you—a fucking moron?”

He just looked at me.

I couldn’t believe it. “Let me see it, Joey.”

He stood there, dumbfounded, like he could not believe I would doubt his word.

“Let me see it Joey. Now.” I held my hand out, wiggling my fingers impatiently.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gun, pointed it at my forehead and said, “Sorry Saulie, bosses orders,” and pulled the trigger.

When nothing happened, he looked surprised. “Oops,” he said, “Goddamned safety's...”

Before his tiny brain could activate another muscle in his gigantic body, I whipped my piece out of my holster and shot him in the chest, twice. He still looked surprised. Then he fell backwards like a fucking redwood tree.

I shot him again for good measure.

“So—the boss wants me dead,” I said to his inert corpse. “Interesting.” I reached into his pocket and retrieved the phone. I already had a plan. Step one: Get the fuck out of this desert. Step two: Arrange a little meeting with the boss.