PARTNERS IN CRIME

                

He pilfered the tan angular rock shaped like a miniature Alamo

from the nearby mountain where it languished, a hard patriarch with arms that spread above the surprising lake where retired men steal away from their wives to float and fish for a few hours in small boats in this parched micro-climate a few miles from the Mexican border. Transports it to his suburban home in the aging Subaru Forester, plunks it outside in the dirt of the narrow back yard where it now shares morning’s gold glint of sunlight with the blue, red and seafoam seahorse painting, a true fish out of water fading from the same sun, five feet tall on a beige concrete wall, his signature work purloined straight out of a dream of a shared picnic table, cerulean skies, greenest grass and tiny flying ocean creatures whose male members have snatched the gestational function from their female partners, dream images looted from more than twenty years’ ago, when he awoke splashing in a fountain of laughter, the kind of hilarity and barefooted freedom only summertime children know, the dream and he thick as drunken blundering thieves, perhaps proving plunder does have its own rewards.