Bella by Shannon Salter

At an exit called Harvard, Elijah gets off Highway 15. He takes the road straight across the Union Pacific railroad tracks.

Everybody’s going someplace.

In the center of my back, I feel a piece of punctuation. A semicolon.

The wind is howling so loud you think the mountain might come down. The houses for certain.

*

Elijah and Henry are saddled up at a bar in Newberry Springs called The Barn. It is inside an old barn. Henry looks like a teenager but he doesn’t have any trouble getting served a beer in these old desert places. The inside of the barn is decorated with all kinds of antique things, metal things, heavy wooden tables and chairs. At the end of the bar, there’s a lamp. It looks to be made of bronze. When you look at the desert in a certain light, and in a particular way, in just such an instant—it looks like an animal. Could be a tiger, could be a bear or a lion, or it could be all of them, all at once. Remember there is water underground. A lot of water. So much that California wants to pump it out and lap it all up. Can you imagine? California.

The lamp at the end of the bar has stained glass in shades of blue and green. The green fades into yellow and the blue into purple. It’s got an old-fashioned kind of design, a tree in the foreground with big leaves and behind it a grass field, a ladder, a cottage with a chimney and smoke rising into the opaque sky. The lamp is on and glowing something wonderful. It gives the whole room a kind of ambiance.

The bartender is a woman in her fifties who moved here from Ramona. She bought this old barn and made it what it is now. The lamp she found on the property, in a back room. She’s not the kind of woman that has an eye for making things look a certain way. You wouldn’t say that exactly. But she has strong feelings. She is drawn to something or she isn’t. She likes heavy objects. Things from the old country. From before everything.

It’s two in the afternoon on a Sunday. The bar is full. She has a kitchen and a cook who makes burgers and pot roast sandwiches. A man sitting to the right of Elijah is wearing a black cowboy hat, jeans, and a blue flannel. He looks familiar. Both Elijah and Henry think so. Because of the strangeness of space and time, Henry seems to think almost everyone looks familiar, but Elijah is grounded and sure of things. The man looks to be past middle age, but he hasn’t gotten old yet. His shoulders are wide. His eyes are like stars.

This fellow will strike up a conversation with Elijah and Henry. In an hour’s time they will leave this barn and go with the man to his home, which is just across the street. The man lives alone in a house that’s a hundred years old. His house is at the edge of the rock mountain from which flowed the original spring. Behind where he lives there are the stone ruins of what once was a pool fed by rock water.

The house is made of white brick, and it’s been given a fresh coat of paint.

Inside, the floors are an orange southwest tile, large squares, and there are two artificial trees too large for the living room. The trees absorb both darkness and light.

Next to the front door, the man keeps a small lizard in a terrarium. Inside the terrarium is a stone pond because the lizard is a water monitor, and there are some artificial trees not unlike the ones in the living room but in miniature. There is a classic toy car that the man bought at a 7-Eleven in an old part of Vegas off of Boulder Highway. There is a Buddha’s head made of gray stone. Half of the terrarium is plastic green grass and half is sand. The lizard doesn’t care much for either.

There’s a fire smoldering in the fireplace and the man, whose name is Steven, picks up a log from the pile stacked neatly along the wall and sets it on the fire. The flame picks it up and the wood crackles into the chimney.

“How about something to drink? You like whiskey?”

“Sure, that’d be nice,” Elijah says, and Steven understands that Elijah is answering for both himself and for Henry.

The whiskey he brings out on a tray in glasses that look to be real crystal, the way they catch the light of the fire and the light coming in the window. The front of the house faces west and it’s all windows, beautiful thick beveled glass. “These glasses are real crystal.”

“Incredible.”

“The whiskey is from my brother.” In fact the whiskey had been aged in oak barrels that date back to the eighteenth century, to the Revolutionary War era. It has just the slightest hint of oranges.

*

Morning light of snow

    clouds so bright

From a telephone wire

you’ve known for lifetimes

an old cherry, black walnut, ornamental pear

the joy of small flowers by the roadside

this winter

    sky

*

Henry and Elijah and Steven are sipping whiskey. They are seated on a brown suede sofa that faces the window and Steven is in a recliner set in the middle of the room. The wood in the fireplace is beautiful. The glasses feel cool and smooth in the boys’ hands although there isn’t any ice.

“You know,” Steven begins slowly, “I lived here a long time.”

“Seems like you been here forever.”

Steven nods. He is holding his glass in front of him, peering as if into a crystal ball. The flame of the fire blends into the amber liquid and makes a kind of dance that puts him at ease. Outside, the sky is bright blue like you almost wouldn’t believe. And not a fleck of wind.

“My daddy used to take me fishing, to a lake called Cuyamaca up in the San Diego hill country. You ever heard of that place?”

“Of course. Last I heard, they got a new restaurant, more fancy like and all windows. Or it was all windows before, wasn’t it? And they have that patio to sit outside. I used to order a chicken pot pie.”

“That restaurant used to be a little shack that had burgers and fish sandwiches. And I remember when they built it up the first time. You know I caught a whopper of a fish one summer, a rainbow trout—twelve pounds!”

“Twelve pounds?! I never heard of anyone catching a fish like that in a lake.”

“I was famous that summer. I was the little boy that caught the big fish. And I was fishing with a kiddie pole so the fish was just as big as that and, would you believe, I had a piece of hot dog on the line!”

“Hot dog!”

Steven leaned forward, laughing, and set his glass down on a wooden coffee table. He had carved the table himself from a piece of black walnut he bought from the woman who owns the old barn. The tree had been more than 300 years old.

“And you know, I wanted to throw the fish back, but my daddy said no, we’re gonna eat him and share him with all our neighbors at this campground. So that’s what we did. He cooked the fish on the barbeque and everyone had some, I mean probably twenty people had a piece of fish, that’s how big he was.”

“Amazing.”

Outside, there are ravens. Three of them are perched on pieces of wood that were once fence posts, and there are two others on the ground that Elijah and Henry can’t see. The three perched on the wooden logs are looking in the window.

The house is surrounded by tamarisk trees on all sides; these are also known as salt cedars. They aren’t native but they grow like crazy with almost no water. There are the remnants of a few palm trees, which grow up around oasis places like this.

The salt cedars have a wispy kind of complexion and looking at them makes you feel soft, airy. The light from one window in the living room is filtered through some of the feather-branches, making a greeny shadow. The other window is straight on into the sun. The light in the kitchen also meanders through branches; the canopy is like a dream. One of the crows makes a clucking sound. And one of the others caws out to the mountain. With his feet he thrusts himself from the wooden pole, opens his wings.

“You boys wanna see something?”

Elijah and Henry are feeling warm from the whiskey. Steven stands up out of his recliner and puts another small piece of wood on the fire. The water monitor is in the pool, his thick-skinned head above the surface at one end, his tail at the other. Jasper is eight inches long and two inches wide. His head is like a beautiful sand puppet, the kind that reptile rocks and creeks are made for. Steven walks to the kitchen and comes back with a small cage and a few crickets inside. The crickets are standing around on pieces of lettuce. Steven opens the cage and ushers two crickets into the terrarium. Jasper’s eyes follow the crickets and all at once he lunges for one in the plastic grass, eats it in three bites. And then the other.

Steven goes back into the kitchen and returns with another cage. Inside is a giant moth, the kind of moth that is as big as a small bird. It’s white and it comes to the Datura, the desert moon flower—white trumpet blossoms like the belladonna that open at night. The flower blossoms eat the moon’s light. The white moth eats their pollen.

There’s no way that lizard will manage to eat that moth.

Steven gets the moth into the terrarium and slides the top screen shut. The moth flies as far as she can up to the enclosure’s ceiling. Elijah and Henry are watching wide eyed from the sofa.

*

There are things in the world that matter. Sun on the mountains. The moon on a dark night over the valley. Sink holes. Sometimes the earth opens up because so much water has gone in or because so much water has gone out. The hole can swallow anything—an SUV, a person, a folding chair. It can swallow whole neighborhoods. The asphalt cracking and sliding into its center. Christmas decorations. The river between us.

If you don’t know where you’ve been and you don’t know where you’re going, well then you’re in the right place. The way birds line up on telephone wires all right next to each other. There could be miles of phone wires and a hundred birds cram onto one.

*

Jasper is gazing at the large, white moth with her feet fastened to the screen at the top of the terrarium. She is in the corner so that her feet are up on the screen and her body is protruding outward. She’s the size of a tennis ball. She’s like an angel.

“They still grow pistachios out here?” Henry asks from the sofa.

“Oh yeah,” Steven says. “And this year with all the rain, the Mojave River ran through—it hasn’t done that in fifty years—and it went and flooded a lot of the orchards. They think it’s gonna be okay though. They think the nuts will still come out all right.”

“A woman used to come through town selling pistachios in September, October, and us kids would be so happy to get them nuts.”

In fact there is a glorious pistachio farm just down the road, where the red-brown rock juts out near the street and the road turns. The children on that farm had made a raft out of tires and boards and when the water came they played all day and night. On the red rock there are petroglyphs made by the Pipa Aha Macav, the people beside the river. There is the sun and the woman with wings.

All three ravens are now up on the wooden logs, all three looking in the window. Elijah looks at them and smiles. He loves ravens. One of them clucks and the other two put out their wings like they’re going to fly away, but they are just steadying themselves. The clucking is so friendly, you can’t help but think well of the birds. The one clucking has turned his head in such a way like he’s peering around the bend. It seems that he’s looking at the terrarium and at Steven standing between there and the entrance to the kitchen. Steven looks from the moth to the bird, moth to bird, moth to raven. The raven’s language is seven or eight short clicks and then a longer vibration, followed by more short clicks and then a little yelp like a question mark. Its language is also its eye.

Steven turns and goes back into the kitchen. Several minutes pass, and the boys can hear him open the refrigerator and slice something on the counter. They hear him take a bowl from the cabinet. Elijah and Henry both sip their whiskey and by now they are feeling very warm and light. They’re both looking at the white moth and the lizard, who is staring up at the winged creature from the fake green grass.

*

At my house in Pahrump, Mount Charleston is covered in snow. It is nearly April. The snow on the peak is a glorious white powder, and it streams away as wisps in the wind.

The birds emerge from their winter dens. Just yesterday, I was reading inside with the door wide open, so that I could see the white mountain. And would you believe, a bird flew right through my door, into the center of the living room. It was a mockingbird, not at all small, and to see it so close and in such an alien context jolted me from my repose.

They say an unmarried woman who has a mockingbird fly over her head will be married in one year.

They say mockingbirds that sing at night are males who have lost their mate.

Around here there is only one mockingbird, the one who flew into my house. The bird is brown and, from beak to tail, as long as a football. Its tail protrudes like a rain stick. By its motion it was sustained in the air above me. I could feel the pulse of its body, its wild heat. Then it flew out the same way it had come in.

The sky today is half covered in a gray cloud and, would you believe, light is pouring through one chute, so that the sun’s light is a beam over the valley. The eye of heaven. We’ve had so much rain that green grass has shot up everywhere, and weeds that are two and three feet tall with pretty yellow flowers. The burros have a lot to eat.

*

Elijah and Henry are standing now beside the terrarium and the ravens outside are all three looking in the window. Steven comes back into the living room carrying a wide ceramic bowl filled with lettuce. Jasper is sitting still, and so is the moth.

“You boys wanna see something incredible?”

Elijah and Henry both look at Steven with the bowl full of lettuce. A train blares its horn from across Route 66. It’s a fast-moving train. Elijah can tell by the way the driver presses the horn in two short bursts and then a long drawn out fire, full of urgency. It’s not the Union Pacific. Over here it’s the BNSF, the Burlington North Santa Fe, wholly owned by Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett, just like the Yellow Pine Solar Facility being built off Tecopa Road, and Nextera Energy, the company that’s building it. The BNSF runs through Newberry Springs along Route 66 and the Union Pacific runs through Yermo just a few miles down the way. Elijah and Henry crossed its tracks on their way in.

The cottonwood tree in my front yard is putting out new leaves. Yesterday they were buds, and today—brand new green.

“Sure we do,” Henry says, and Elijah nods. He’s thinking about the dogs back at his family’s compound.

The family has five dogs, and they are all well-behaved. But when someone pulls up on the property they bark like crazy and it would scare anyone, especially the biggest dog, Otis, whose head is the size of a car tire and whose guttural sound is like someone’s coming for you. Scares me just thinking about it. They have one new dog, a Belgian Malinois, looks like a German Shepherd, that’s young and just learning the ropes.

“Well,” said Steven, “you know I been out here a long time. How long has it been? It’s been a long time, years and years, decades. And I seen this place go through some changes but for the most part it stayed the same.” The boys nod. Steven has the bowl of lettuce in his arm like he’s cradling a baby. He puts one hand into the bowl and lightly picks up some of the lettuce, lets it fall back into the bowl. There’s a knock at the door. The two boys and Steven all three turn to look, and Steven sets down the bowl of lettuce on the coffee table, goes to the door. He grips the door handle like he’s caressing a woman, he has that way about him. He looks rough but his motion is gentle as can be. The calluses on his hands are just for show; the palms of his hands are soft and smooth.

When he opens the door, sunlight pours into the room and it goes through the branches of the artificial tree closest to the entryway. The leaves cast shadows all over the tile. Elijah is struck suddenly by how clean the place is. With the sun shining in, you don’t see a single fleck of dust in the air or on the floor. Even the lizard’s terrarium is impeccable. The house doesn’t have a lot in it, and everything that is there is exactly as it should be.

“Rita!” It’s the woman from the barn, the bartender that owns the place. “Is there a fight?”

“It’s Decker and a man I never seen before.”

And with that Steven runs. Elijah and Henry move into the doorway, where Rita remains standing. The barn door is wide open and they can hear the brawl going on inside. Several men have gone out to stand clear of the frenzy and make room for Steven to break it up.

In less than a minute the fight is finished and more people appear outside the barn. In the desert winter, stand in the sun with its rays on your forehead.

*

Steven comes back into the house and gets the bowl of lettuce from the kitchen, leads the boys to one of two bedrooms. The door to the bedroom has a brass doorknob and the door is made of thick, gray wood. That was the moment, see? Did you feel it? You think and it’s gone. Don’t think too much. Try not to think at all.

When Steven opens the door, darkness unfurls out of the room. Sometimes when you look at the dark you can see waves the way you do in summer with the heat rising off the asphalt, even off houses and cars. The darkness comes from the far wall; they could have been standing on the precipice of some old mineshaft, they could have been standing at the edge of a great lake. Steven entered the room and stood to the right of the door. The boys followed and moved to the left.

“Hey Bella, hi girl.” Steven says into the darkness.

When he turns on the light, it is a dim, soft light. In the room there is a king-sized bed on an antique wooden bedframe. Henry grabs hold of Elijah’s arm.

“Boys, say hello to my tortoise.”

The tortoise is as large as the bed, her shell almost up to the ceiling. The tortoise fills the entire room.

“I rescued her when she was a baby. That was forty years ago. She doesn’t hibernate because I keep her warm.” Bella’s head and neck perk up and her black eyes, the size of golf balls, look at Steven, Elijah and Henry. She bobs her head up and down. Steven sets the bowl of lettuce in front of her and holds out a piece. She eats it from his hand in two bites and the crunching sound makes everyone happy. “You want to pet her?” Go on, she won’t bite.

Elijah and Henry are wide eyed. Neither wants to pet Bella, but they don’t want to be rude. Both boys obediently approach the bed and touch Bella’s massive shell. The shell feels alive. It’s like its own organism, with its own nerve endings, its own brain. Both Elijah and Henry had touched tortoises before. The Ivanpah Valley is full of tortoises, and you see them in the washes after a big rain. Once Henry had found an empty tortoise shell and kept it forever in his room. When Stella got buried in the cemetery, he put it in with her. As far as I know that tortoise shell is still resting beside Stella’s grave.

The fire is crackling in the living room. A breeze takes up inside the house, a warm wind carrying the fire’s breath, and it meanders down the short hallway and through the back bedrooms. Elijah feels it on his skin like a moth’s wing. Henry feels it as a bird.

“There she goes, nice Bella, nice girl.” Her shell is a cornucopia of circular patterns, a spiral. The bowl of lettuce is empty, she’s eaten the whole thing in no time. Her head is resting at the base of her shell, and her eyes are fixed in front of her. Steven is petting Bella. “She can feel our touch, you know, through her shell, her shell is like a skin.”

Shannon Salter’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Adroit, Denver Quarterly, Interim, The Bitter Oleander, Las Vegas Writes, and Desert Report, and it has been anthologized by Black Lawrence Press. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she is currently a PhD candidate in English. Shannon lives in rural Nevada, not far from Death Valley National Park, and is an advocate for the Mojave Desert. You can read about her recent poetic action at MojaveGreen.org

Published October 15 2025