The Bone Yard: A Civil Wars Tale

Even then, so many years after, you could find things out in the middle of nowhere. Over all the years of war, the fighting had extended all over, reaching even out there, out into the vast empty spaces. Rusting trucks, downed helicopters, broken down tanks, the remnants of a crashed drone or plane or two! I’d drive down roads, park off off to the side, grab my walking stick (rattlesnakes) and stretch my legs on the fringes of somebody’s ranch or farm, slipping through a hole in fencing that was never tended to. A lot of the ranches and farms never came back though there was always talk on how the government was going to come out and retake the idle ones to help with food shortages. Still, some new crisis or other always seemed to pop-up sending everyone off on to some new danger.

On my walks, snakes were my main worry but they weren’t the only danger. Rabies had popped back up then in a big way. There were lots of feral dogs out and about making a good reservoir for disease. You never knew when you were out when you might run into some snarling, mangy, foaming-at-the-mouth hound from hell. My walking stick would’ve been no good for that so I always carried a gun, a snub-nose .38, just in case even though the government had outlawed most all private guns. I didn’t figure my little revolver was going to cause too much of a stir, though. Plus, the further out in the country you were, the easier it was to be forgotten and when you’re forgotten, it was just easier to live.

Nature had returned out there, in the country. Coyotes weren’t a problem usually and, even though the Mexican wolf had really made a come back, they didn’t tend to bother. There were lots of feral hogs and wild boars, though and they could be unpredictable. Add them on top of the rabid stray dogs and you had to for sure pay attention. You’d hear folks talk about jaguars having come back too, as if it were a thing but I never saw one, so for me, they were just a case of out-of-sight-out-of-mind.

It was when you started to see lots of debris and detritus from the wars that you had to pay attention, though. Landmines were always around and nothing ended a nice peaceful walk worse than stepping on one. I’d have rather stepped on a rattler, to be honest. There was also lots of unexploded ordinance, too. Every now and then you’d hear of something going off and blowing some kids up, kids who were too curious or too dumb to know not to mess with it in the first damn place.

The town I lived in wasn’t really a town, it was more a collection of trailers and old buildings in various states of disrepair off the main county road which was ostensibly paved but for long stretches, you sure wouldn’t have known it. I had a house. It was a small two bedroom affair that dated back to the 1950s when there had been an attempt to take what had once been a town and make it new again. A couple of paved streets were laid down back then and some houses built and mine was one of those. It was a robin egg blue once but I’m not even sure if the color it faded into qualified as a form of blue or not. I just called the color ‘weather’ because that’s what it felt like to me.

One place I’d go to on my exploring was northwest of Cuchillo. It was just as empty and desolate as it could be, with lots of grasses and small rolling hills. I’d see thin, malnourished cattle sometimes but not often as I went, bouncing along this little trail which splits off from State Highway 52. If you followed it back aways, it’d lead you out towards a rusting metal building, more shed than shack. All the dark red and orange colors struck me the first time I saw it. When it was together, it was pretty good-sized but it was all falling apart now, with one whole side gone and the rest of it such that it shook violently in the wind like it was going to just all blow away right then and there.

‘Violently’, was a good word for that place. What was left inside the shack, piled here, scattered there, were implements of pain and tools of torture designed for suffering and death. Walking for miles around the shed in any direction you’d find evidence of it, evidence that no one had come to gather up. The way I figured it, it was the government’s dark secret, either government forces or government allies or groups allied with government allies had been out there because, if it had been the other side, it’d have been jumped on, cordoned off, put under the spotlight, with every death meticulously counted and registered, extra funds going towards facial recognition whenever enough of a face was collected to be reconstructed. But the fact that no one had touched the place, and why would they with it being out in the middle of nowhere, meant that it was something that no one wanted anything to do with if they didn’t have to. Me? I just kept my mouth shut. I took to parking off the main road and walking the last few miles down to the place to avoid leaving tire tracks.

Bones were all over. Most gleamed white in the sun, long picked clean of any identifying flesh they’d once had. In bones, there’s no politics of identity. In bones, no one cares what you identified as or who you fucked, no one gives a shit about your personal pronouns or what color your ball cap was or which Independence Day you celebrated. Nope. None of that matters were the bones are concerned. The wind just whistles over them all equally. I always thought of that when I walked along the edges of the area, the area I called the bone yard.

Sometimes, I’d find little bones and, near them, toys or dolls or stuffed animals. I didn’t have to be good at math in school to solve those equations. I got that the government was serious about stopping the other folks. They wanted justice. They wanted fairness. They wanted to put an end to all the madness. I mean, you heard it all the time in the shows you saw while streaming online and it popped up on the radio all over the place as a regular thing. You read it online, article after article. No matter what though, I couldn’t figure out what it all had to do with little kids, not for the life of me. How’d they get swept up into all that? Why did I find as many of their bones and belongings as I did?

The thing about bones is, once they’re just bones, they don’t have nothing to bind them all together. Ligaments, tendons, muscle, it’s all gone along with the skin and hair that topped it all. With nothing holding them together, they’re just loose upon the world scattered about in the dirt and the dust. You could handcuff you some hands when they had all that extra stuff on them but once they were just a bunch of bones, there was nothing to keep them together for the handcuffs to do their job. I’d find rusting handcuffs and perfectly preserved zip ties frequently with bones nearby. They might’ve done a bang-up job keeping someone under control once but they weren’t doing shit when I found them. All that need for control was gone with the wind like so many tumbleweeds.

Wedding rings. Charms. Watches. Old cell phones. Bracelets. Piercings. I mean, I took my metal detector out a few times and you could find you all sorts of stuff out there. I didn’t take anything home with me. Couldn’t be caught having a collection of memorabilia, no sir! If the government found that I’d have been in deep shit! Besides, I wasn’t a religious man but it felt wrong taking stuff from the dead. I don’t know what the hell happens to us after but maybe pieces of us remain and are tied to concrete things, things we owned or touched in life. I don’t know. I wasn’t about to chance it though. No sir! I found stuff, I’d look at it, I’d examine it but I’d always go and put it right back where I found it.

There was a field near the shed, a stretch of ground that I never brought myself to walk through. I’d walk around it always, staying on its edges. I thought it weird how it was roughly cubicle in shape, as if maybe it’d been fenced off at some point but, if it had, I never found any evidence of it. It was a big field, roughly half the size of a football field, I thought.

The field had cacti and yucca and sage and bones, lots and lots of bones, bones that gleamed a stripped sparkly white in the sun from a distance. I’d walk around it and I felt like I couldn’t go into it no matter what. I saw the skulls with their empty eye sockets looking back at me. Maybe that was it. Those empty eyes always seemed to look right through me. Then there were their smiles. They were always smiling, those skulls, well, the ones that were still together at least. Some weren’t. Some were bashed to pieces. Others had gaping holes in them, small holes in the front leading to blown out huge holes in the back. You could see bones from a distance and not know if they’d been a person or not. You could play games in your mind about that. Skulls? Not so much. You saw a skull and you knew right away that had been a somebody once upon a time.

Ribs. Femurs. Pelvises. Shoulder blades. Ulnas. Humeri. I remembered, back when I was a kid, we had these building blocks that you could put together to make new things with and standing in the glaring sunlight alone for as far as I could see, I’d look at all these bones and find myself wondering if I collected them all and built something new with them, what would it be? Would it feel? Would it remember? Or would it just be some crazy strung together pile of leftovers that wouldn’t amount to much.

Shell casings gleamed different from the bones and there were sure a lot of them out there, brass, brass, everywhere. Sometimes you could see piano wire and you knew that there wasn’t nobody playing “The Entertainer” out here in wilds. Knives and other sorts of blades didn’t show up often and were rare. I guess, once used, they just got wiped off and put back wherever they’d come from. When the wind got to really blowing and howling I tried to imagine the sounds that came from the shed and the field beyond, the cries, the sobs, the shouts, the screams, the wails and the panicked laughs. I imagined the shots that followed, how sharp they were when they happened and then, how quiet everything was right after. Coyote yelps would come to mind, too. I imagine back in those days the coyotes did pretty good for themselves with what was left behind when the men, they all had to be men right, left the shed and went back to wherever they’d come from.

I’d always go home from my explorations wondering about what it all meant. I lied earlier, when I said I never took anything that I found out there, in the area around that bone yard. There was one thing I found one time I couldn’t just leave behind: a black leather bound journalling book with a sliver snap to it so you could keep it securely shut.

March 3rd,

They’re outside. We just heard them pulling up. Lots of doors opening and closing and voices talking to one another. There it is! A voice on a bullhorn. They’re shouting at us to come out with our hands up, to not resist. It’s over now Diary.

I don’t know what all Daddy’s gone and done or what he’s said but it’s all over now. They’ve all come for us. I’m only 13. We know what this group does. Everyone in the county has heard. They’re not the gov’t but they act for it.

This may be my last entry. I may never write anything ever again. If anyone ever finds this, tell David Mitchell that I loved him, I just never had the guts to tell him. The drawing he made of me in Mrs. Cisneros’ English class, I’ll treasure as long as I live, even if that doesn’t prove to be very long.

I only read the last entry. Never have had the heart to read more of it.

I’m not sure how it wound up out there, how it wasn’t burned or shredded or something but there it was on one my walks, half-buried by a tumbleweed wrapped up in a towel that was coated in grease, almost like someone was trying to hide it and smuggle it out of that bone yard. Well, if that had been the goal, it’s been accomplished. I tucked it away, as well hidden beneath a loose floorboard as I could. Not that I knew what good would ever come of it. Still, I couldn’t bear to part with it.

I stopped going out that shed and that place after a while. It wasn’t anything that happened, not really, though I was always worried that some high-flying drone would see me and register me and that there’d be hell to pay. Nothing like that ever happened, mind you, it’s just that I got old and the walks got harder and, as they got harder, I found they got sadder.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do in life is to just let the past be the past.