If Cormac McCarthy Wrote a Movie Treatment for Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight at the Oasis”

FADE IN:

A bone-white desert stretches out beneath a black vault of stars. The dunes are still as sacrificial altars. Somewhere out there, beneath the coyote moon and the ruined tower of Orion, rides a woman of indeterminate age and infinite mischief. She wears a sun hat like a halo. Her sandals leave no prints.

The camel she rides is named Jeremiah. He does not speak but regards the world with the mournful gaze of a beast who has seen empires fall and lovers lie. His saddle is adorned with silver conches, turquoise fringe, and a little brass bell that tolls only for the damned.

She comes upon a man.

He is shirtless, jawline like a blade. Smokes roll-your-owns and speaks in aphorisms. Former bluesman turned snake-oil preacher turned fugitive for a crime he may or may not have committed in Santa Fe, where the sheriff’s daughter still dreams of him and leaves milk out for the scorpions.

She says

Midnight at the oasis

He says

There’s no such thing as time in this country. Only heat and forgetting.

They drink wine from a dented canteen and roast cactus blossoms on a fire made of mesquite and ancient regret. The camel chews cud. The stars wheel. A frog laughs somewhere.

The woman suggests they slip off to a sand dune real soon. Her voice, soft as velvet, carries across the salt-swept wind like prophecy or seduction or both. The man, being a fool or a poet (but never both at once), accepts.

The desert is watching. It has watched worse.

They make love like two fugitives hiding from God, beneath constellations older than grammar. Their bodies steam in the moonlight. A lizard judges them and scuttles away.

At dawn, they are pursued. By whom? Perhaps the woman’s husband. Perhaps bounty hunters. Perhaps just Time, wearing spurs and humming a Carter Family tune. The chase is unspoken but certain.

The camel refuses to run.

The woman kisses the man once more and vanishes into a dust devil. Gone. Or maybe never there to begin with.

The man will ride Jeremiah to the nearest roadhouse and order three fingers of mezcal. He will never again look at the moon without suspicion.

FADE TO BLACK.