The Man’s Patterns Are Inside

Only three people fit in the cab, so the second man opens the gate at the back. I boost myself up. There is no roof, the walls wooden slats built like an animal pen so that the air can stream through. The truck is mid-sized and obviously used to transport livestock. The warped wooden floor is wet perhaps from being rinsed, though here and there I can still see dark clumps of their droppings. Despite the openness of the truck bed, everywhere the smell of animals; in a few spots what looks like blood maps the floor. Just as the man is about to close the gate, the girl appears, her eyes flashing. The man lifts her up and she walks to where I am squatting behind the cab. Her footsteps boom on the wood. The cab is missing its back window, a piece of dirty canvas taped in its place. Through it I can clearly hear one of the men singing. His song is an old tale about a beautiful horse that refuses to take a lover. The song’s bawdy lyrics cut through the darkness in sharp contrast to the beauty of its melody.

Hold on, says a voice through the window, and the truck starts to move. The girl takes my hand. There is something protective in the way she holds it.

We drive with the headlights off, just the glow of the moon to illuminate our way. Sometime in the next few weeks it should be full, a face shadowing us in the sky. We drive past the post office and the now-abandoned pool table like an empty garden plot, then on past the larch tree in the middle of town. Through the flimsy canvas I can see a shadow pass the driver a bottle. Tell me a story, the girl says. Something about this child reminds me of the adage: the man’s patterns are inside, the snake’s outside. All the same I honor her request. I think of my brother Mun walking the streets of Ulaanbaatar hundreds of kilometers away, his mind full of strange words and images, a library for me to draw on. Because she is not tall enough for the wind to find her in the leeward side of the cab, all the way across the grasslands the child remains standing.