Cheekbone

We moved out west when I was six. Mom said she'd had it, no more broken heirlooms, projectile keepsakes, no more fires from neglected cigarettes. The living room always had that acrid smell, that yellow-brown film covering the glass coffee table, the burned patch on the carpet, the recliner, the record player, me. Johnny Cash and the tinkling of ice in her drink, 107 degrees during the summer. No air conditioning, just the hot, dry wind blowing up from the Mexican desert, past Juarez and the maquiladoras and the scorpions.
From a shack to an RV, and I'm still not sure if that was an improvement. The RV lets you run away, sure, but you're towing seven tons of trinkets, furniture, bad memories. Cigarette burns. Bruises.
We eventually just stopped driving, just short of California, the promised land we were supposed to dream about. We gave up and stopped in the most desolate stretch of land I had ever seen, and I was okay with that. If you never make your dream tangible, you can never dissect it and discover the intrinsic flaws. My dreams never involved gang shootings, heroin, the adult world. Better to remain in the desert, tainted only by the smell of tobacco. And us. I was always cognizant that we were a blight upon the hot, clean, deathly expanse, breathing where oxygen should not exist.
She tried to school me, made an effort, but she was no teacher. Eventually, I just sat in the shade of the candy-stripe RV canopy, listening to the wind chimes.
I was alone most of the time, in the sense that I didn't interact with people. The desert was an organism, a different kind of friend. Mom worked in town. I had never seen town, only heard it referred to as 'town', and never wanted to go there. If we were germs on the desert landscape, a permanent settlement must be like a tumor. I had no interest in interacting with my home's cancer on any social level.
I found the skull in May, when the sun was starting to really burn. The only evidence that some unfortunate cow had died on this spot, a memorial abandoned in the sand. Completely bleached white, I must have thought it was an eerie pearl, a smiling parody of a priceless jewel. I put the skull on a shelf at the back of the RV, my 'room', kitschy desert decor. I went back the next day and dug up the vertebrae, perfectly crafted like a marble puzzle. These too traveled with me to the RV. By the end of the month, I had a nearly complete cow skeleton, and some smaller acquisitions, predators, maybe coyotes or bobcats. I'd obtained some wire, begun to assemble the bones carefully, according to the anatomical standards I'd devised. What I could recall from my school books.
Every evening, mom's dilapidated Chevy would roll up to the RV, sometimes she'd make dinner and read a story, sometimes she would drink and put me to bed and drink some more. I began to see a correlation, an abstract connection between my mother, the bones, the desert, me. She eventually made me get rid of the skeletons, said they were creepy, so she probably saw the connection too.
I gave up on the skeletons for a few weeks, did more conventional things. Coloring books. Action figures. Retrieving bones was secret, my ceremony. The skulls and ribs and femurs and clavicles, white blemishes on the red-brown earth, just as out of place in the desert as we were, just as scattered, forgotten, and profoundly meaningless.