The man had traveled alone for a very long time, and it was understandable that he was not a big talker. It wasn’t that he felt uncomfortable in the presence of others or that he didn’t enjoy their company, it was simply that he wasn’t used to talking while he was moving. The boys had begun their journey tittering and laughing and whining and running ahead and behind, just as boys should, but they soon adopted the slow but steady and quiet pace of the man they now followed. The three would stop to rest a few times a day and exchange a few observations, and at night around their small campfire they would share stories--the boys wide-eyed and silent while the dark man, made darker somehow by the light of the fire, told tales of places his steady pace had taken him--but during the day, moving straight ahead was all that was on their minds.
It occurred to him, of course, that the boys might have wanted to talk, to banter, simply to pass the long hot hours under the sun. Because while the desert was beautiful to him, full of life and sound, the truth was that it was just a landscape, and a relatively featureless one at that. Perhaps the boys were only silent to impress him, or perhaps it was a juvenile attempt to imitate him, who had, simply for lack of anything better, adopted him as a father. When his thoughts led him down this path, he would admit to himself that he was in fact impressed with their relatively quick maturation. It followed then that perhaps he had adopted them as well.
They were eleven days out of the last town, a small but surprisingly clean tangle of buildings, a stop not big enough for a name but big enough to feel like something. The people were friendly and asked few questions, allowing the man and his boys to stay the night and leave in the morning without the kind of trouble that he had gotten used to of late. It had been the third--no, the fourth--settlement that he had passed through with the boys, the only real measurement of time and space out here in the beautiful emptiness of the desert. Neither boy had made mention of his mother since sometime after the second town; he hadn’t quite decided how to feel about that yet. There were times for words and times for silence, times for walking away and times for holding your ground, but every once in a while a road would loom heavy on the horizon that would offer no hint as to what was at the other end, and the only way to find out was to just keep walking. It was a familiar feeling to him, uncertainty, and a not altogether unwelcome one for someone who had seen so much of the world. a familiar feeling, but one that had come less and less frequent as the years and the traveling continued. he had given up wondering how long the roads would stretch out in front of him a long time ago.
but no, the boys were definitely something new. he had had companions before--after all, he had been traveling for a very long time--but the two brothers were something fundamentally differently. at first he had thought it might simply be their youth: he had spent quite a while away from the kind of refreshing sincerity and naivety that blows children around like leaves in a strong breeze. after even just a few days with them, however, he picked up on an odd, almost ageless quality about the pair; their innocence still shrouded them like a fog, but occasionally he caught a flash of something deeper, an intelligence that, to wince through a cliche, was far beyond their years. he had first noticed at night, around their storytelling campfire, two or three days--probably three--after leaving their mother. he had been deep in a tale that he had started the night before, one of his almost endless stock of stories about those uncertain roads he had walked down.
[tired now bedtime; it's good to be alone guitar solo]
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