The Godot Method

by Tymber Wolf

Edoardo Frezet

We open in a town somewhere in the high desert. We tell you that the sky is painted blue as far as you can see, scattered clouds as big as houses make the size of the sky understandably large. The wind would be roaring if anything in the high desert could roar. Here, instead, the wind cuts through the nothing until it makes metals screech. The tall grass and yucca move as one. We tell you they are permanently slanted from growing up in the wind. We tell you of the sun-worn houses, bleached colors encasing those within. In the middle of town is not a park for kids and families to gather; is not a courthouse for the citizens to respect the law; is a water tower.

On this day, all 4,000 townspeople have gathered in a shape not unlike the large clouds to look at the water tower. The dust from the wind leaves scratches on uncovered faces and arms, but no one seems to care. They are all looking up and covering their eyes from the sun to see it.

One man, with the tallest ten-gallon in the crowd, has one hand holding his hat so it will not fall off of his head and one hand on his belt buckle, asking the question, “who wants to bring their truck around?” He continues with the fact that he has a truck, but they will obviously need more than one, and he has eight ratchet straps but will need more.

You ask, “what is happening?”

“This old thing's swaying too much,” one woman in a plaid shirt and a young tow-headed boy under her arm says from a few people away. Another woman stepped toward you from the other side, “Todd says we ought to take it down.” Her tattooed arm points to someone, must be Todd. He sits in a wooden kitchen chair that's been weathered enough to be growing into the ground, next to the leaning front left leg of the water tower. If you assumed Todd’s job was to watch the water tower, you would have been right.

The town begins to talk amongst each other. You know the undertones of what they're saying has to do with your arrival and the water tower's demise not being coincidental. This town doesn't seem like it knows what a coincidence is.

A deep metal groan comes from the tower, and everyone looks up again as if they forgot why they all gathered there to begin with.

They're obviously all waiting for it to fall. They seem to want it to speak first before they give it an end. One of the men in the crowd has sat down cross-legged like in pre-k and his face is turning red through the sun while he stares up with one hand on his forehead to give his eyes some shade. “You want me to go home and get your hat, honey?” a young woman with a large toddler on her hip asks him. “I can bring back a case of beers too.”

No one here drinks water. They only bathe in it on Sundays. They aren’t a dirty bunch, just don’t want to pay the price of water in the desert. They have an unspoken culture to use what they are willing to have.

Another white truck parks across the street and two people step out. One a man with a T-shirt that reads “Cantina” in neon pink with a shark at a tiki hut drinking something neon green out of a margarita glass in its fin. The other, a woman with winged eyeliner that could last through a hot night. “This is where y’all are,” she is the first person to make a sound like a laugh here. “We thought y’all died in some freak accident.” She continues to explain that if there was an accident and the whole town did go missing, at least one person would have had the time to post it on the Facebook page for everyone. She said people ought to know these things, that people ought to be neighborly.

“Look Shiela,” the water tower swayed in a way that made everyone move their head like the wind was pushing them as another man spoke, “I’m gonna need a drink after this is over.” Voices chimed in about saying goodbye to the tower with a drink or two when it was all said and done.

It’s been a sign of life here since its construction two or three generations ago. A note to the world, and those driving past on the highway that they were here, and they had something to live for. John Hamn’s great grandaddy was on the construction crew. The one whose great great grandaddy didn’t exactly lose a fistfight with Billy the Kid and didn’t win it neither because he didn’t get killed and he didn’t kill Billy. And Marsha’s daddy painted the town’s name on it when he opened the first painting business in town long before he was Marsha's daddy. The name of their town was on the thing for Christ's sake, painted in bold, black, sans serif, boxed up letters, reminding everyone where they came from. They didn’t know what they would be without it.

You don’t know how you feel about it. The town. The people. The tower coming down. You have the image in your mind that a stronger gust of wind will rip through the legs of the monument, and they will go one way and the large ball on top will splat straight down, and a great flood will happen. A great flood seems to be what everyone is waiting for. What about Todd? He would need to move for a flood to happen. For a great flood to happen, more than one person inside the crowd would have to believe that the tower itself is not just the bones of a ghost of a long forgotten resource; is not just the vessel of memory for a town with no need for what it used to be.

Another white pickup comes through the town square. This one doesn’t honk, but it moves through the crowd because somehow everyone in town knew it was coming and had cleared a path for it. A family, a man, a woman, a young daughter, a tween boy, and a husky whose panting could be heard above the wind climb out. “Ya’ll say your goodbyes?” The man stares up at the tower with his left hand on his forehead and his right around his wife. He continues with a story of his own about high school and his sweetheart and the kiss they shared up on the tower when he knew he was gonna marry her. He didn’t clarify if that was the moment she knew she was going to marry him. He didn’t say the other things he was probably thinking about that time in his life and the decisions he has made since in the same town with the same woman and the same water tower, but those memories didn’t mean as much to him at the moment. And she didn’t say a thing, just leaned into him like she was cloudless.

How romantic. How nostalgic. How historic. How recognizable.

Seemed like anybody could say anything about the water tower.

Then, it creaked what you thought would be its last words indecipherably. No children cried at the noise, and no one seemed to flinch as the tower swayed too far to the right, popping the roots of watchman Todd’s chair with Todd still in it, acting as a tether connecting the tower to the ground, to him, to town. The wind slowed for a second, stealing the echo that a sound like that should definitely have, but the tower did not fall back into its rightful place. It began to wobble.

The back legs shook, like the knees of a baby trying to take its first steps, sliding from side to side and bending in ways a knee, and a water tower support system, should not bend. It sort of looked like it would spiral around itself and spin softly to the ground, but the townspeople intuited that nothing about this demolition would be soft. No one panicked, only shifted their steps and stared. Hands still on their foreheads to see. Todd stood up, relinquishing post, leaving his chair, never losing eye contact with the tower. The guy with the tallest ten-gallon and the plan to bring the tower down with ratchet straps and trucks watched without a word. He was not thinking about the ways he could have helped and didn’t, and he was not thinking about what this moment meant to him. The woman who introduced you to Todd was staring with both hands on her hips, squinting real good to see, and she did not say anything as the last gust of wind made the front legs wobble too. The tower took one step in that shaky baby way to the right and as the first tier of the legs crumbled, the top of the tower dropped from a 90-degree angle to a 45-degree angle to the ground. A clear straight line. And blew open the giant tower ball, a last rusty breath.

No one was hurt.

No one was shocked.

A baby boy on a woman's hip clapped. He liked the noise and recognized his own confident steps in the wobble of it all.

The town stared, hands down on their hips and in their pockets now. The dust from the tower was carried away and the melancholy that came from sharing memory and identity went with it.

We close in a town somewhere in the high desert. We tell you that the sky is painted blue as far as you can see, scattered clouds as big as houses make the size of the sky understandably large. The wind would be roaring if anything in the high desert could roar. Here, instead, the wind cuts through, paving roads to nowhere. The tall grass and yucca move as one. We tell you they are permanently slanted from growing up in the wind. We tell you of the sun-worn houses, bleached colors encasing those within. In the middle of town is not a park for kids and families to gather; is not a courthouse for the citizens to respect the law; is not a water tower; is nothing.

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Tymber Wolf received an MFA from the University of Idaho. She grew up in the swamps of the Southeast, lived in the Pacific Northwest, and now, resides in the deserts of the Southwest with their partner, reptilian squad, and foster dogs. Other works of Tymber's have found a home in Mangrove Review.