For the first eleven days in Mesa I didn’t get a damn thing except heartburn. On the twelfth day I was hanging out under the Super 8 sign with the other losers—most of them drinking Night Train, me doing shots of Milanta—when a posse of Mad Max-looking blind guys with welding masks, canes and target pistols all piled into a rust-colored ’66 Dodge A100 van driven by a kid who was maybe—maybe—fourteen. My Pinto had died on me on day four and I had traded it for an ’81 Littlejohn BMX bike (the other dude got the ass-end of that deal), so there I was, clown-bikin’ after the A100 with my knees around my ears. Luckily the kid couldn’t drive stick worth a damn, so I was able to catch up pretty good every time he had to shift.

I followed them along the bone-dry Salt River into Avondale someplace. Looked like a vacant lot. Good place to dump some trash. The blind guys came creaking out of the van, lined up on the riverbank with their masks and goggles on and started to bang away at the dirt. They looked like they were aiming, but basically they were just some blind dudes shooting the shit out of an empty ditch. After a while they all stopped to reload and the kid ran down with a stringer and started picking up and stringing a whole lot of nothing. When he got done with that he tied one end of the stringer to a rusty wheel rim and threw the other end into the dirt.

At this point I stopped leaning on my bike and walked over to them.

“How’s the fishin’,” I asked.

The guy I was talking to was fat like Evil Santa, with a huge burned beard and two empty eyes.

“See for yourself,” he said.

I stuck my hands in my pockets and shut up.

The shooting started again. One skinny little guy with a sweat-colored wife-beater and a full-face mask was swearing every time he pulled the trigger: “Shit! Shit! Shit!” The mustache next to him smacked him in the back of the head, which made his visor flop. “Shit!”

“That’s Stevie,” said Bad Santa. “Can’t hit a thing.”

I nodded.

“Bet you can take him,” said Santa. “Give it a shot.” He held his pistol by the barrel and swung the butt in my general direction. I took it.

It was a Smith and Wesson Model 41, early nineties maybe. I let it hang by my side. “What’m I shootin’?” I asked.

“Smallmouth,” he said, and pointed.

“Can’t see ‘em,” I said, and handed the gun back.

He showed me his silver teeth. “Gotta be blind,” he said.

There was another cease-fire and the kid was down collecting nothing again.

“What about the kid?” I asked. “How come he can see ‘em?”

“He’s blind too,” Santa said.

“And he can’t shift for shit,” I said.

“Long as he gets us there,” Santa said, and squirted something down his throat out of a plastic flask.

“Been fishin’ all your life?” I asked.

“Just since we been blind,” he said, and started pointing out shooters down the firing line. “Birth defect, hit by a brick, embolism, stroke, macular degeneration, roman candle, gunshot.”

“How about you?” I asked.

He showed me his teeth again. “Staring at the sun.”

“But you can see each other, right?”

“Each other, fish, birds, javelina, our old ladies.”

“Your old ladies are blind too?”

The teeth. “Naw, but they’re stacked. And they grill a hell of a smallmouth.” He pointed at empty space. “Once the coals get hot.”

“They come in the van?”

He snorted. “They live down here, so they can walk.” The flask again. “Jesus can they walk.”

“I join you?” I asked, forgetting about the heartburn.

“Coals get hot. Suit yourself.”

I went back to admiring ricochets and counting puffs of dust. Eventually the kid pulled a Ka-Bar out of his pants and started gutting the air on the end of his stringer. The pistoleros began to gather around the invisible campfire and slap imaginary asses.

“Coals are hot,” I announced to nobody. I joined the group and held up both hands to grab breasts that weren’t there.

Santa punched me in the shoulder blade and made me stumble. “No titty for you, two-eyes,” he said.

I shut my eyes. “How about this?” I asked. “Blindfold me?”

He reached inside his vest and pulled out a sweat-damp baggie. “Gotta use this.”

I took the bag and dumped the gray dust inside from one end to the other. “What is this, your grandma’s ashes?”

He teethed and said nothing.

“What do I do, smoke it?” I asked. “I didn’t bring my papers.”

“Throw it in the fire,” he said, through the teeth. “Better be sure.”

“Fuck I got to lose?” I said. I fumbled open the slippery bag and took out a handful of powder. Smelled like sulphur. “Flash powder? What am I, your beautiful assistant?”

Nothing but silver teeth.

I gave him the finger left-handed and tossed the powder onto the ground.

The report made my ears ring. Turns out the world looks white when you’re blind. I always figured black.

I reached for Santa to steady myself but I was grabbing at air. “How long till the flash wears off?” I asked, but nobody answered. “Fish smells great,” I said, but I couldn’t smell any fish.

After a few hours it started to get cold.

_{Image CC-BY-NC-SA by slworking2}