Bill's Bag

Things are very quiet here. The population of this valley is about half what it will be three months from now, after all the snowbirds come back from B.C. and Washington and Oregon to dry off in the sunshine.

There's very little traffic. The price of gas is keeping people off the roads. Business is slow, even at WalMart.

The sun comes up and warms the shoulders of the silent old mountain, Saint Jacinto. A few cars move drowsily about the valley floor until another sleepy, slow-moving day ends. The sun goes down and the coyotes come out from their holes and sing.

I spend my days taking clothes out of bags, hanging clothes, steaming clothes, racking clothes, taking clothes off the rack, untagging them and putting them in bags to go back out. I wait for customers who never come.

Bill the Cat sleeps on the porch all day. After dinner he begins to move, preparing for the hunt. I'm not sure what his bag total is this week, but it includes one dove, one sparrow, and one baby rabbit. Like our purported temporary semi-legal de facto leaders, he's a natural born killer.

Walking out in the desert in the cool early morning people listen to the silence. The bats find a place for repose; the hummingbirds come out to search for blossoms. Terror plots, Baghdad, and Beirut seem not to exist.

It would be pleasant to sit here all day watching the hummingbirds, and to avoid thinking about the world beyond. But think about it we must. The blood of the innocent cries out from the ground for vengeance.