Dispatch #18: Gullywashers

Short fiction on family, art, and psychosis

Happy Holidays, all—

This is the last story I finished in 2024, so it’s fitting it’s my final Dispatch of the year.

Thanks for following along, and special ups to all the folks who’ve shared, liked, and subscribed to this work in the past. I don’t do it for the numbers, but the connection with fellow writers and readers means a lot.

Hope 2025 is everything you need it to be.

XO,

CD

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"Long stretch of highway in West Texas" by joncutrer is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

GULLYWASHERS

Doc said he couldn’t stand another night in the guest room and Effie wouldn’t let him drive himself back to Saltwater, so it fell to me to drive the ailing man and his ancient truck across the state.

“Pretty boys like him don’t drive stick,” he growled when Effie suggested it. The first time I met Doc he said I had soft hands and talked like a child. He rarely addressed me directly.

“I drive stick, Doc,” I said. “No worries.”

“It’ll be good for y’all,” Effie said. “Bonding time. Go to a Bucc-ee’s or something.”

“Fun fact,” I said, clearing the dishes. “No Bucc-ee’s west of Austin, they’re just this side of 35.”

Doc grunted. He pulled a toothpick from a plastic case in his right breast pocket, the one opposite the Marlboro Reds, and picked the meat and potatoes from his molars. A week under our roof, shuttling him back and forth to appointments and tests, a week of meals together, ready to serve at 5:30 on the nose, and we still hadn’t found a common point of interest. Baseball was for sissies, “education consultant” was not an occupation, podcasts and music were of the devil, writers were drunks and queers, running was only to be done in desperation, not recreation, and our long-ago gentrified neighborhood in Houston, surrounded by coffee shops with stroller parking, was a cesspool. My knowledge of animal husbandry and well water pumps was limited to what I'd read on Wikipedia prior to his visit. He had not been impressed.

The night before we left, Effie gave me a pep talk. She said he’s an old crusty bastard, but she loved him, and she loved that I still tried. A lesser man would grow tired, sullen, hard-hearted, she said. “Just keep it light and it’ll be done before you know it,” she said. “I owe you.”

In another world she’d drive her dad back to her hometown seven hours across the state, but in this world, she had a flight to Lisbon in the morning, where she’d complete the sale of her start-up and send our finances into the stratosphere.

“I’m happy to do it, really,” I said, not lying. The idea of getting on the road was always exciting, but I had a project. I’d written 30,000 words of a novel that summer and I relished anytime working on it, even in my mind. Windshield time was a gift.

“And Doc’s great,” I said. “We’ll have a great time.”

Effie smiled, kissed my forehead, and went back to her office upstairs. I watched the news in bed and fell asleep.

///////////////////

“Limit’s 80, quit bein’ be gentle with her,” he said from beneath his sweat-stained cowboy hat.

“Truck sounds like it’s about to take off, Doc.”

“She’ll handle what you throw at her,” he said, then restarted the wheezing snores I’d heard since we left San Antonio. He awoke only to criticize my driving.

“Pull over,” he said after a while, still under his hat. “Gotta take a leak.”

My hands and feet fumbled around on the floor. After hours in the same gear, I tried to quickly relearn the precise maneuvers that would keep the old truck from stalling. Finally the engine reengaged and the RPMs slowed until, to my relief, we were idling on the shoulder of the interstate. He got out of the truck and hobbled a few paces offroad.

“Beautiful country,” I said, stretching my legs on the gravel shoulder. “God’s country. As they say. Sky is huge, Jesus. Big sky country. Well, that’s Montana. Just as big here, I guess they just get all the credit, ha. Probably some good hiking through here, huh? Some… what’re those? Plateaus? Buttes? Maybe some caves or something through this canyon. Think there are any petroglyphs out this way? Or is that just a southern Utah—"

“You ever shut up?” he said, zipping his fly and walking back, all rusted joints.

“Yep,” I said. I started the engine and tried to ease back onto the interstate when a metal-on-metal grinding shook everything to a halt.

“You let up the goddam clutch too quick,” he said.

An 18-wheeler entered my rearview, just this side of the shimmery horizon, liquid in the heat. I cranked the engine again and pushed the pedals in the way I remembered. The truck stalled again, straddling the shoulder and the right lane. The 18-wheeler was now clear in my rearview, a pillar of dust and exhaust smoke billowing behind it.

“I can do it,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

The truck lurched forward again and died. I glanced behind us. The truck was still in our lane.

“Gimme those,” he said, grabbing the keys out of the ignition and hopping with surprising ease out of the passenger seat and around the front of the truck.

“Doc, what the hell are you thinking, there’s a truck coming— I can do it!”

“Get out,” he said.

“Doc! There’s a truck!”

“Move the hell over, little dog,” he said, stepping into the cab. The 18-wheeler blared its horn. I scrambled over the center console and Doc hoisted himself into the driver’s seat. He started the truck just as the 18-wheeler roared past us in the left lane. And then we were alone on the desolate highway once again.

I reminded him that Effie directed him not to drive and asked to take back the wheel a few times, but he didn’t respond. He just fell into his natural driving position—toothpick in mouth, right hand at 12, left arm out the window, cowboy hat cocked to the back of his head. I gave up trying to get him to switch back and settled into the passenger side.

“Hike down there in monsoon season, better be ready to swim.”

Moving from my imagined world to whatever Doc was saying next to me felt like pulling a boot out of sticky mud.

“What’s that, Doc?”

“Those arroyos’ll fill up and wash you out to the Pecos faster’n you can blink.”

“Hm.”

///////////////////

Two hours later Doc pulled into the dirt parking lot of an old wooden building with a faded sign.

“Mangroves,” I said, reading the sign. “Looks authentic.”

My eyes had to adjust to the dim light inside. A jukebox and a cigarette machine lit up one corner and the rest of the light was provided by neon beer signs and Christmas lights hanging from the rafters. There were a few low tables and a long wooden bar. Dollar bills were stapled to the ceiling. Framed posters and signed photographs lined the walls.

Doc ordered us each a beer with a shot and a brisket dinner. I checked my phone and jotted down some ideas for my novel while Doc held court next to me. The bartender, the few other patrons, everyone came over and welcomed Doc back, asked how he was feeling, and reported on their own health issues, family drama, and water-related challenges.

“Not enough or too much,” one man said.

“Put all those weathermen in a toe sack and hit it with a hammer,” the bartender said, pouring another round for us and herself. “Never hit the wrong one.”

“You must be the son-in-law.” A round man in bib overalls and a patchy white beard had his hand on Doc’s shoulder. They laughed.

“Guilty as charged,” I said, shaking the man’s hand. His name was Gus.

“You know my boys are coming back from Dallas,” he said, turning back to Doc. “If Effie decides this ain’t working out.” Doc laughed and then coughed so hard he couldn’t breathe.

Our food came out on a massive metal tray lined with pink paper. Thick slices of brisket, paper boats with sliced onions and pickled jalapenos, neat mounds of potato salad, and Styrofoam cups filled with syrupy baked beans. Doc cleaned his side of the tray, and I hid the fatty bits I cut away under a stack of napkins.

I offered my card, but Doc brushed it aside and set a neatly folded stack of bills under the tray. He thanked the bartender, who came around to give Doc a big hug and a kiss. I smiled and waved.

On the way out, Gus was on the front porch. He shook Doc’s hand with both of his.

“You take care of this man,” he said, giving me a hard look. Then back at Doc, with affection, “This man’s something between the Mayor and the King around these parts.”

“They sure love you here, Doc,” I said, back in the passenger seat.

The sun was low on the horizon now, right in our eyes, until Doc pulled off the two-lane highway onto a long, rutted driveway. I recognized the house from Effie’s childhood photos. The scrubby Mesquite trees, the rugged, rocky landscape rising just beyond the house, the St. Francis and Virgin of Guadalupe statues among the cactus and aloe plants in the front yard.

Doc switched the truck off, and I grabbed his bags from the back. He had the kettle on the stove and a lit cigarette in the ashtray by the time I got everything in. He lived in a time capsule. Wood paneling, thick carpet, seafoam green sectional surrounding an entertainment center thick with knickknacks and dust. Effie’s mom passed 15 years ago.

The kettle whistled and he steeped a bag of Lipton in a thick blue mug.

“I’m hitting the sack,” he said. “Effie’s room’s down there, venison’s in the deep freeze out back if you get hungry, nothing’s in the fridge but a couple Cokes. TV’s on the fritz but you can entertain yourself.”

“No worries, I’m just going to write for a bit anyway,” I said, but he’d closed his bedroom door.

I let out a deep sigh, finally out from under the goddam microscope. I looked around, leafed through a TV Guide on the coffee table. It wasn’t even 8pm. I grabbed my bag and stopped at the door to Effie’s room. It seemed untouched. Standing there felt eerily intimate, like that time when I was 8 or 9 and my neighbor friend wanted to spy on his big sister. We hid under her bed for hours while she came home, talked on the phone, changed clothes, went downstairs for dinner.

I put my backpack on her desk chair and creeped around the room. Fingered the spines of the books on her shelf, alphabetized by author’s last name, a perfect mix of the buzziest literary names of the early aughts and AP lit classics. I read the handwritten notes on her cork board collage, touched the track medals hanging on the wall, read each cast and crew member’s name on her one-act play poster, studied her polaroids with friends, her postcards of exotic locations. All these artifacts of quiet ambition and endless potential. I fell in love with her all over again.

I grabbed a Coke from the fridge and set up my computer on Effie’s desk. My mouth burned from the bubbles. Something howled outside. I left the lights off and when the screen fired up, I entered a portal from which I didn’t emerge until deep into the night.

//////////////

The sun hit my face and all I could manage was to flail an arm across my eyes to buy another few minutes. I assessed. Still in my jeans and T-shirt. At least my shoes were off. Above the covers. Eventually I shook off the sleep and got my bearings. Posters of the Strokes and the National and the Washington Monument surrounded by cherry blossoms. My wife’s childhood bedroom. Doc. Bumblefuck, Texas. I was ravenous.

Not a creak in the house. Doc was probably still asleep. I checked the fridge, forgetting the only food was frozen venison in the deep freeze. I put a pack of sausage in a bowl of water to thaw and found a granola bar in my backpack. I ate it as I rummaged through the pantry and found some recently expired instant oatmeal. I put on a kettle and read through what I’d written the night before.

It was unreal. I couldn’t actually remember writing anything, not a specific word, but everything was pitch perfect. The tone, the characterization, the stakes, the sense of place. It was all a keeper.

The kettle screamed but I couldn’t pull myself away. I kept reading, not fully believing what I saw. Finally, I got to the end of last night’s work and ran to the stove, half expecting Doc to be there ready with a wordless scold. I took the kettle off the burner and poured some water in the bowl with a packet of oatmeal. I went back to the laptop and took a few bites before picking up where I left off, in a feverish flow state almost instantaneously.

It was like the words were already fully formed. A good day was 1000 words and now I had more than double that before lunch. At this pace I could have the manuscript, the raw material, done by the end of the month, and a full first draft done before my next gig started in September. Then I could spend all fall editing in the evenings and weekends and have something to shop around to editors and agents by the spring. Maybe Doc would let me stay another few days to let this ride out.

Where the hell is Doc?

I pressed my ear against his door. The rattle of the fan. The muffled clatch of talk radio from an alarm clock.

“Doc? Want some breakfast?”

I listened.

“Thawed a pack of venison, and I found some oatmeal, want me to make you something?”

Sounds unchanged.

“You alright, Doc?”

A deep burning inside my chest.

“OK Doc I’m coming in, OK?”

The door swung open. Doc was on the floor in his skivvies and V-neck undershirt. He had soiled himself. My fingers touched his neck. He was cold. He must have had some sort of episode, a crisis, in the night. He must have tried to get out of bed, escape, go for help, but death caught him.

Did he call out? Could I have heard him if he did? Did I hear him?

I backed out of the room and gently closed the door. I checked my phone. No service. I would have to drive to town, to Mangrove’s, let someone know, arrange for someone to come get him, call Effie. My flight from Odessa was in five hours and the airport was two hours away.

I touched my forehead to the door. When I was in college, I made my parents give me Troop, the family dog I’d picked out in middle school. He was my dog, I insisted, and, too easily, they let me pick her up and take her back to my duplex in Columbus. This was in October and the morning we were supposed to make the trek back home for Christmas I woke up and she was dead on her memory foam bed. I wrapped her in a blanket and buried her just behind a row of boxwoods in the backyard before the sun came up. I didn’t tell anyone until I was home and my little sister ran out expectantly as I pulled up the driveway.

I opened the door and sat on Doc’s bed. The mattress sagged under my weight, the springs groaned. I stared out the window. The sun was high, casting short, sharp shadows on the rugged ground. A lizard stirred on a rock.

In quick unthinking movements I got to work, in the same way certain moments, the ones you dread, wash over you and before you know it, they’re at once far deep in the past and right under the surface. I didn’t think about covering him in the yellowed sheets until he was wrapped up tightly, like a pharaoh, and I didn’t think about where to take him until I was hoisting him over my shoulder and out to the deep freeze. The lid didn’t close so I laid Doc on the packed dirt and grabbed armloads of frozen venison to make enough room.

The frost-covered meat burnt my hands and clattered onto the tempered glass shelves of the fridge in Doc’s kitchen. My clothes were soiled in dirt, sweat, and Doc’s filth. I stripped and put them in a plastic grocery bag I found under the sink and rummaged through my backpack, knowing full well I hadn’t even brought a change of clothes for the quick trip. Then I was back in Doc’s room, pulling up dirt-faded Wranglers, threadbare on the thighs and knees and stretched at the waist. Hanging in his closet were half a dozen identical long sleeve button ups, all with a thin white outline in the shape of a pack of Marlboro Reds. I put one on and rolled up the sleeves.

The house was silent again. I returned to the cold bowl of oatmeal and ate it in heaping spoonfuls. I drank a few glasses of tap water and walked slowly back to Effie’s room and closed the door.

////////////

I wrote wholly outside of time and space. I wrote without filter, without judgement, without worry or concern. With hope. Freedom. I rode whitewater down a canyon, I broke through logjams, through brick walls. Through unpassable expanses, through tangled rats’ nests of plot and character and theme. Paragraphs, pages, chapters, I wrote without ceasing. The sun went down and came up again and again and again and I existed outside of time and then, somehow, I had something real, as real as this chair and desk, as real as the jagged mountain behind this house.

I hit save on the first complete manuscript of my life, leaned back, and screamed my guts out to the ceiling. Emptied, I fried a pack of thawed sausages and ate them over the sink. It was the golden hour. Deer were in the yard, picking through the charred landscape and munching on whatever nutrition they could find. I licked my fingers and grabbed a half-empty pack of Reds on the windowsill. I tapped them against my open palm like I’d seen smokers do and placed one between my lips.

Eventually the kitchen light turned the window into a mirror. I looked shrunken in the work shirt, my face stretched and hollow. Maybe it was the mirror, faults in the glass contorting reality into something grotesque. I clicked the light off and the reflection vanished. I lit a cigarette and smoked in the dark.

//////////////

The first time I saw Effie she was pulling espresso and refilling napkin dispensers at a coffee shop near the university. The second time I saw her she was a TA in my graduate political science seminar. The third time I saw her she was in my living room, a party hosted by my roommates in full swing. Small dark eyes, long straight nose, thin strong arms, spidery fingers wrapped around a red solo cup, dancing by herself, knees bent, twisting, corkscrewing herself in and out of the floor. The walls were wrapped in tin foil. She wore knee high boots lined with fake fur.

I thought of her as I stared into the open deep freeze, smoking another Red, the cigarette and freezer smoke mixing in the hot air. And then I heard the knock. I closed the freezer and took another drag, willing the visitor to disappear.

“Doc? I know you’re in there, where you at?” the voice called out, followed by another round of knocks.

I stubbed the cigarette out and walked slowly into the house. I closed the back door, holding the knob so it barely clicked. I packed my laptop in my backpack in the dark as the man pounded on the door. I slipped Doc’s boots on my feet and tightened my fists until my arms burned.

“Doc, buddy, I’m coming in there, alright? Just hold tight.”

I heard a jangle of keys move away from the door and then some metal-on-metal rustling coming from the driveway. When the keys returned, a sharp crack of a crowbar on the door, then splintering wood as the flimsy door swung open.

I flipped on the lights to the living room.

“Hey there, partner!” I said, moving to shake his hand. “Sorry, I was out back.”

“Who the—fuckin Soft Hands?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Gus, right?”

“Where’s Doc at?”

He wore the same coveralls and held the crowbar like a club. He searched the living room, the kitchen, Doc’s room. He sniffed the air.

“Not here,” I said, standing by the broken door. “He had another episode, I had to take him to Odessa earlier, just got back to pick up a few things. He’ll be there a few days at least.”

I wanted to ask what day it was, but I stopped myself. He flipped on the floodlights and looked out the back door. Cicadas roared.

“We expected him in town,” Gus said. “Thought he might’ve taken another spill so wanted to check.”

His eyes scanned me from top to bottom.

“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t pack a change of clothes.”

“I’ll fix that door,” he said, lumbering past me.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” I said.

“Weather’s turning,” he said over his shoulder.

My mind raced as I watched him rummage through his truck, returning shortly with a headlamp and canvas bag of tools. The most natural thing I could think of was to fry up another pack of sausages, so I did that and tried to calm my nerves, relax my face and shoulders. I saw some meat in a bowl of water, smelling foul, the ones I thawed before I found Doc. I quickly dumped the water and tossed the bowl and its contents into the garbage can. Gus buzzed and knocked and pounded on the front door while the meat sizzled on the pan. When I brought him a plate with two links he was screwing a fresh brass plate onto the door jamb.

“Hungry?”

He stopped screwing and looked at me, then the plate.

“Doc thawed ‘em out when we got home.”

He motioned to the chair on the porch with his chin and I put down the plate. He finished turning the screws and checked the door. He closed and opened it and closed it again, the new mechanism clicking home every time.

“Incredible,” I said.

He put his tools back in the bag and turned off his headlamp. I drank a glass of tap water and stood dumbly on the porch as Gus ate the sausages.

“They say anything?” he said. “The doctors in Odessa.”

I took another drink and nodded, words rushing past me like water through a fist.

“Yep,” I said. “More of the same. Not looking good, between you and me.”

Gus chewed and nodded. After a while he set the plate down by his feet and held his head down there, between his knees, and then his whole massive body jolted and heaved, convulsing with sobs. He covered his face with both meaty hands. Moths danced around the porch light. I put a soft hand on his shoulder.

After a while he regained his composure and asked me where Doc was, and I told him I couldn’t remember.

“Probably Memorial,” he said.

“Yep, that sounds right.”

He looked at me hard through red eyes.

“Memorial’s in Midland,” he said. “But you said Odessa, so Regional, huh?”

“Yep, Regional, that sounds more like it.”

He nodded and tightened his thick lips. He asked if Effie was coming to see him, and I told him she’s out of the country.

“Kinda flying blind over here, Gus, tell you the truth.”

“Shoulda called us.” I nodded.

“Well, we’ll call Regional and see what we can do for him,” he said. “Man don’t belong up there. Belongs here, with family.”

“I’m headed back there now,” I said. “Just picked up a few things, so. I’ll try to bring him back, if that’s what the doctors say.”

“Weather’s coming in,” Gus said, walking back to his truck. “Wait till the morning. Old man can stand anything for a night.”

I thanked him for the door and waved as he pulled out of the driveway. I smoked two more Reds in the front yard and stayed long after the red lights disappeared. Then I felt a buzz in my pocket. I had a bar. Suddenly the phone lit up with an endless cascade of texts and voicemails. Effie, my parents, my sister.

With trembling fingers, I tapped out-- “I finished the book 😊—headed home, see you soon <3” -- and threw the phone into the darkness.

Doc’s truck roared to life as I gunned it into the back yard. I ran inside for my backpack and set it on the passenger seat as the first massive drop fell. I looked up. Half the sky was speckled with pinpricks of light, the other half roiling grays, purples, and greens. By the time I got Doc’s stiff body into the bed of the truck, thick drops were falling steadily, unlocking a smell of dirt, grass, and gin from the land.

I opened every closet and drawer until I found a box of shotgun shells. A handful clattered into the pan I used for the sausages and I flipped the burner to high. I ripped up a TV Guide and threw the crumbled pages in the pan. I locked the front door and ran through the back just as the skies opened up.

The wipers couldn’t work fast enough, the lights couldn’t shine brightly enough. The road appeared in front of me out of inky blackness, but I drove where I willed the road to be. Soon the only road was the one in my mind, unfolding out of the desert. I held the bucking wheel with one hand and the backpack with my manuscript on the passenger seat with the other. I couldn’t see Doc in the rearview, but I imagined him back there, soaked, face locked approvingly, even in death, his final act an acknowledgment of a job well done.

And then with a titanic squelching of metal the truck ground to a stop. I turned the key in the ignition, but nothing budged. I stepped outside into water up to my shins. I sloshed to the back of the truck and tripped on a rock, falling face first into the rushing water. I pulled myself up with the wheel well and saw Doc still lying in the bed.

Fighting against rising rapids and torrential rain I walked, hand over hand, around the truck bed to the passenger side. The door wouldn’t move against the water, now waist high. I pulled with both hands, losing the keys to the flood, until the water caught the door and flung it open. I grabbed my bag and stumbled into the inundated passenger seat, clinging to my works, until nothing remained but the lonely desert.