We reach Nevada three hours predawn, and I pull over, five feet from the road, in the middle of this

duneless desert to watch the moon set the stars in their cradles, slowly from east to west. My brother

grabs the last of the Florida grapefruit (the kind our father eats over a garbage can with his shirt off,

combing the fallen seeds out of his chest hair) and we sit on the hood of the dilapidated “72 Comet

eating grapefruit without shirts and without words, like our father, and Jake points to a shooting star

and I nod. We suck on the rinds, knowing this is the last piece of fruit until we reach the West Coast

where we both want to live and raise families. We crossed the North Carolina-Tennessee border

four days and nights ago, and living on fruit, canned protein, and sugar snacks makes our sweat

pungent, our shirts invariably overripe with the greens of saltwater and dirty goatees.

Our backs chilled by the hood, we hear the buzzing for about two minutes before we bother to raise

our heads. I hand him a bandana and we tie the knots below our auburn pony tails and wait for the sand

breeze. He read to me in the car about flash sandstorms, but we had no idea that this

desert wind is like those in Israel; the khamsin, which comes from the North. The legend holds

that the sands cause hallucinations that can bring brothers to spill innocent blood in the land and after

six wars in forty years, my father left his native orange grove for Florida and will never return.

The sand swarms closer and when the car begins to rattle and the ground shakes we leap off the nose

and bolt inside, trying with all our biceps to roll the windows and failing, shielding our eyes too late

as the sand wraps her fingers around the car and toys it up and over the road and lays us down

facing the way we came, the tendinous fingers of the desert telling us to go back home. I turn to ask

what we should do and there growls one hundred fifty pounds of sand-specked, blackened iguana;

charcoal lizard with forked fangs and a slippery tongue. I punch, I kick, and I snatch the broken bat

from the back seat, and I run out of the car with the lizard on my heels, and I scream for my brother

to stop fucking with me!

I run at the lizard on its hind legs and it parries, the broken bottle waving

from its scaled hand, and I race the bat against its face and it shoots shards of brown glass

large enough to make my blood sting of root beer and it gets back inside the car and turns for

California, but not fast enough to escape the sandstone rock which shatters the back windshield,

dust spraying the front seat and carried out the window with the afterimage of the iguana etched

in the sparkling crumbs of the storm. The car”s open-mouthed back windshield reveals my brother

adjusting the rear view mirror and we stare, teary eyed for a few seconds before I climb in through

the shattered windshield and sleep, awaken to find a bandage made of overripe shirts on my shoulder

and my brother driving with gauze over one sandy eye and a poor cast of magazine and duct tape

on his left arm and we swear over our first California grapefruit that we will never return to Nevada

where the sand brings sane men to their knees, prostrated like lizards. Never.