The Last Temptation

by Gerrie Ferris Finger

  “I see.”

  “I make California for the little girl. For Madam Cameron, hake and abalone and eel. She bought caviar and champagne. I say, ‘Monsieur Cameron’s cellar is full of champagne,’ but she says, ‘I like the Moët & Chandon—you know, the cheap stuff.’ I laugh. Fifty-nine a bottle isn’t that cheap.”

  “Too bad the little girl had to go back to Atlanta. She seems so happy with her mama.” Philippe’s head tilted to one side like a sad mime.

  I went on, “And probably Eileen looked so let down at the thought of sending her home. Did she seem that way to you, Monsieur Philippe?”

  “Oui, mademoiselle. That Saturday, Madam Cameron is with her little girl. The little girl picked out some trifles she wished to take on her outing—to be the last of her vacation. They go to the skate park that afternoon.”

  “Arlo was in LA.”

  “Vraiment, mademoiselle. Madam Cameron asked that I deep-fry a turkey and prepare my special slaw for Monsieur Cameron when he returned from Los Angeles on Sunday. She paid me up front.”

  “Tell me how Eileen seemed.”

  “For your mission?”

  “In part.”

  He cast his eyes over my shoulder. “Madam looks around my shop.” I turned my head to follow Philippe’s eyes—to the flower section. He said, “Madam’s attention was las fleurs. I hear her gasp a little. Her mouth, it drops like this.” He mimicked the look of shock or surprise. He continued, “When I look over there, a man was buying le bouquet. I asked Madam if she knew him. She said, ‘No, oh no.’ But I wonder. Oui, I wonder. The man, he paid, and walked out. Madam lingered, looking out of the window until finally she called to the little girl and they left.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I never saw his visage. He wore le chapeau.” He reached up and patted his chef’s hat and laughed. “Not like this, more like golf players wear. I could not see much about him, but I asked Nicole, who sells las fleurs et les bonbons. She said he was average. Polite. Moyen.”

  “Think a bit, monsieur. Dark, tall, short, blond?”

  He shrugged and flipped up his hands in a familiar Gaelic gesture. “Average.”

  “Did he ever look directly at Eileen?”

  “Not that I saw.”

  “Or Kinley?”

  “It is probably the imagination of mine. I think to myself, Madam is just not herself. As you say, she had to send la jeune fille dans sa ville. I don’t think the little girl wanted to go home, either.” He shook his head. “Triste.”

  I returned my attention to the flower section. “Nobody’s tending to the flowers today?”

  “My girl is out this week. She goes to le festival up north.”

  “Is this festival far from here?”

  “Who knows?” he said. “Les festivals are everywhere. She is young. She goes where la jeune go.”

  “Monsieur Philippe,” I said, having fallen into the habit of addressing the imposter by a legitimate courtesy title, “I told you that I was on a mission. You perhaps have guessed it. But, please, let’s keep what we’ve been talking about to ourselves.”

  “Mon dieu!” Phillippe’s hands flashed up. “Non do I expose my clients.” He slapped both cheeks. “My business! I would be en ruine.”

  I picked up my lunch, and hurried away leaving Philippe the picture of offense.

  17

  From my hotel to the Swim and Skate Park, it took seven minutes and two wrong turns to reach Pavilion Road at Sunrise Plaza. The parking ticket-taker took my ten bucks and looked at my shopping bag as if he were about to tell me I couldn’t bring it in.

  “Lunch prepared by Too Busy to Cook?” I said.

  He said, “We have food and beverages inside.”

  I held up the bag. “Can I?”

  He tilted his head. “Go ahead.”

  It’s a California thing—big-time skateboarding. I stood at an iron fence and gnawed chicken—which was wonderful—and watched skateboarders do impossible things on concrete ramps. They named the various sections: the Combi Bowl, the Flow Bowl, and the Nude Bowl—like a kidney-shaped pool.

  “What do you think?” came a voice I recognized.

  “Noisy,” I said, turning to look at Dartagnan. He wore shorts, golf socks, and a hat that had the Mission Hills logo tree on it. “You played golf.”

  “Me and Arlo,” he said, watching the kids on their boards. “He said he needed to get his mind off Eileen. He wasn’t very good at it—getting his mind off of Eileen, or golf.”

  “You took his money?”

  “Fifteen dollars. Five a bet. Max three.”

  “You should be ashamed,” I said as I chewed.

  “I see you got lunch from Philippe.”

  “It wasn’t his treat.” I dug into the heavy plastic cup of okra salad with an equally heavy plastic fork.

  “It never is.”

  “You order from him?” I asked, savoring the crispy greens and okra.

  “Never. I go by at closing. He gives me what he would throw out if I didn’t take it.”

  “Poor thing.” I took another bite.

  “You finding out anything?”

  “Zip. Nada.”

  “Zing said you came in.”

  “You following me?”

  “Somebody’s got to watch out for you.”

  “Why?” I’d finished the salad and dug further into the bag. I brought out a square flat container, opened it, and saw the cheesecake. I held it out to Dartagnan. He shook his head, and I threw it into the bag. “Why?” I said again.

  He’d looked up, his back to the sun. His stare didn’t go a thousand yards, but a hundred, maybe. He said, “Palm Springs is a place where everyone has secrets. A bunch of money brings a bunch of secrets. You don’t, if you’re in your right mind, go asking questions about those secrets. See what I mean?”

  “If anybody I talked to let a cat out of the bag, I didn’t pick up on it.”

  “See?”

  “Did Eileen have a stockbroker?”

  He laughed. “Even Arlo didn’t buy that one. She was using the money she took out to go shopping. Bet it was gone by Friday. She bought clothes for her kid.”

  “Rich people use credit cards.”

  He wagged his head. “Who knows. When you going with Tess?”

  “You want me out of Palm Springs?”

  “What you’re after isn’t in The Springs, but no, I like you here.”

  “What I’m after is two whos,” I said, wadding up the shopping bag. “Those whos are somewhere, and I aim to find them.” I headed for the trash bin.

  He skipped up next to me. “Didn’t mean to put your nose out of joint. I mean for you to believe me. Eileen and Kinley aren’t anywhere near here.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “It’s ’cause I know it.” His cell phone rang. “‘Lo,” he said. “Yep. Nope. Leavin’ now.”

  He studied me for a moment. “You doing anything interesting tonight when you get back from the desert?”

  “Sleeping. I’m still hung over from last night.”

  “Say the word when you want to go at it.”

  “To go at what?”

  He waved. “Say the word; you’ll see.”

  18

  Tess waited under the hotel’s canopy in a sun-faded Jeep. Somebody had smacked into the passenger door. It creaked when I opened it. On the back of my seat, an eagle had been etched into the leather. A patch of leather with a skinny cactus painted on it dangled from her key chain. Tess wore a million-dollar smile and a long-sleeved blue-jeans outfit. A jungle hat perched impertinently on her head.

  I stretched my naked legs under the dash. “Am I going to freeze?” I asked, rubbing my sleeveless arms.

  Her foot eased down on the gas pedal. “It gets cold in the desert in the evening, but I have a box of things in the back. You’ll be warm enough.”

  I leaned back and raked my mass of hair back with both hands. Call it premonition, but I had a feeling that Tess
’s shaman aunt would provide a clue to Eileen’s disappearance. The sun was at our backs as we headed east. Tess said, “It is good to get out of the city.”

  “You ever been to Atlanta?”

  “I have not. I talked to Russell Wolf. He said the streets there were poisonous.”

  “He’s right. Have you traveled much outside Palm Springs?”

  “I lived in Texas when I was a girl.”

  “Where?”

  “El Paso. On a rez.”

  “How’d you get to California?”

  “I was born here. My mother took me away from here when . . .” Her mouth turned down. “I don’t remember my father. Then my mother died when I was thirteen. I came back here.”

  Many people I’ve gotten to know have lost someone close. The grim reaper hangs over me much too much. “How well did you know Eileen?” I asked.

  “Okay,” she answered.

  “You two ever do girls things together, like lunch, or have fun?”

  “No. I’d see her when she was with Dartagnan. They were friends. And Dartagnan and I are friends.”

  Interesting trois. “And Arlo? Where was he?”

  “Making movies. Doing deals.”

  “Too busy for his wife?”

  “He is a busy man,” she said, keeping the car at an even speed. “You know, he is like an unofficial mayor now that our beloved Mr. Hope is gone.”

  The road had gone from smooth to uneven. “Were Eileen and Arlo a happy couple?”

  “Very happy, very good together.”

  “Where would Eileen run with Kinley?”

  Her elbows tightened into her sides. “I know of no place.”

  “Dartagnan said there are many shelters in the desert.”

  Her forehead winkled. “I have heard that.”

  “You think she could have gone to one?”

  “It is possible, yes.”

  “Would your people know of some of these places?”

  “Maybe.”

  We turned south on a newly paved asphalt road. It ribboned up the valley and my ears began to fill—and soon to pop. An awesome sight lay before me—the desert, powerful and romantic. To my right, vertical black obelisks reminded me of Stonehenge. On my left, black rocks topped hillocks. Pebbly, wide gulches made me think we’d landed on the moon. Tess began to talk of the land and called the ditches “arroyos.”

  “It’s magnificent,” I said. “But it would be easy to get lost. Everything looks alien, one arroyo like another.”

  “Living here, you find markers.”

  “But no Gas-n-Go to mark your way.”

  We rode past what she identified as Joshua trees and yuccas and rock cairns.“ All of this land you see, it is our land.” She spoke like an oracle of the ancient gods. I felt like an interloper, insignificant. She turned onto a dusty road, and said, “My uncle is head of our tribal council. As the elder, he was given his own reservation—where we are going. We have twenty-eight families living there. My aunt is the medicine woman for our rez, and the larger rez next to us.”

  We bounced through cholla cacti, and when I thought my words wouldn’t shake in my throat, I asked, “Do your people still speak the old language?”

  “Mine do. A lot of our people, those who have remained in the desert, have kept our traditions—like the Bird Songs.”

  “Bird Songs?”

  “They are for ceremonies. My uncle is a Bird Singer, and I dance like the birds of our ancestors, who, like us, went south for the winter.” I noticed that her silver earrings were birds in flight.

  “What kind of ceremonies?”

  “Burials. In the old days, my people were cremated. Three days for cremation, three days for the ashes cooling. We sang and danced for the spirit to soar. It is a happy thing, to die. We visit with our dead and let them see that we do not forget.”

  Three days to burn .”Do your people still cremate?”

  “If it is a personal choice, it is allowed, but we cannot use the old ritual. When the Spanish Catholics came, they made us bury our dead uncremated. After a couple of centuries, and given the laws of California, we are content with Christian rites.”

  “You lost a lot of your heritage to the white man’s idea of Manifest Destiny,” I remarked.

  “Not only then,” she said. “You also lose your heritage when you go to Sacramento every month and line up for a handout check. But that was before we were allowed to build casinos. Now we can afford to retrain our young in our language and culture. We are looking forward to fall fiesta. I hope that you will attend.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be here then,” I said hopefully, “but, if I am, I’m sticking with you. I adore your passion for your land and your people.” I’m not usually that gushy.

  She said, “When I was in El Paso, as a little girl, I dreamed of one day coming home.”

  We were going due south and I figured we’d soon come to the Salton Sea.

  “Our big casino is in Mission Palms,” Tess said. “My aunt and uncle run it. The casino—it has given us the money to bring back our pride. We are buying banks and hotels. We own your hotel.”

  “It’s very fine.”

  The sun was suddenly gone, although it wasn’t near nightfall. Outside my window, a wall of black rock rose skyward. Tess said, “We are in Lost Coyote Canyon, my home. We are riding on a tuff bed. See ahead to our left? That cave leads into an abandoned gold mine.”

  A sign read: Forbidden. Not responsible for disasters!

  Tess said, “People come who are not welcomed. You can see, we have no fences or gates, but we do not take responsibility for people looking for gold. They are fools.”

  “I hope Eileen wasn’t foolish enough to come this way.”

  “Eileen knows this land.”

  “Has she been here with you?”

  “Not so much, but Dartagnan liked to picnic by the mine and weave tall tales.”

  Dartagnan again.

  We bumped along the tuff road, passing sandstone rock outcrops and desert junipers that clung to the sparse soil. She pointed to a slick rippling sandstone fracture that would have been a waterfall had there been a river above it. On either side of the sheer slope, circlets of darkly varnished rock cascaded to the desert floor. “That is a dry waterfall,” she said. “We call it Ripple Rock.”

  “Looks treacherous.”

  “It is, when the monsoons come and water pours over it. When you see black clouds in the west, get to high ground. It is monsoon season, but this afternoon we don’t need to worry. The air is not right.”

  We climbed higher into the desert, passing stone cairns. “Those are works of art and religious shrines,” she said. “They are sacred. That is one of the reasons we forbid outsiders in Lost Coyote Canyon. Tourists strip the stones.”

  We came to a grove of palms. “The oasis surrounds a hot spring,” Tess said, penetrating the trees and stopping the Jeep. It felt good to stretch the muscles after the grinding drive up the canyon. I followed Tess through the gentle palms. We were silent, as though the land beckoned but forbade chatter. The faint smell of sulfur rose on the dry breeze that bathed my skin.

  Tess walked out of the grove and I followed her to a mound of pebbles in a cactus patch. It looked like children had constructed a stone castle. “The stones are geodes,” she said. “They have crystals inside them. People come from all over the world to hike the canyons to find geodes.”

  We stood at the work of art for several moments before Tess turned to lead us back the way we came. I took a step and my foot sunk into sand, halfway to my ankle. I freed it and looked at the sunken spot. Tess said, “Damned pocket gophers. Makes walking treacherous.”

  Back at the Jeep, Tess fetched a blanket. We stretched it out near the hot spring, which was a deep, dark pool of mineral water surrounded by large stones. Tess said such pools were abundant and were medicinal and sacred. She brought out a handsome oval picnic basket.

  I coveted it. “That’s a weird-looking cactus,” I said,
pointing to the design on the basket. It started on the front and flowed over the top.

  “It’s a boojum tree,” she said. “It looks like an upside-down carrot, doesn’t it? It was named for a character in a Lewis Carroll book.” She took several lidded clay pots from the basket and arranged them ritually. Obviously they were art from the desert. She said, “We shall have a bite to eat here. My people have eaten their late meal by now.”

  “Did you make those?” I asked, pointing to the pots.

  “I did, but they are not my designs. I borrowed them from the Navajo. Our people were weavers and woodworkers. I learned the old Navajo ways from my mother’s friend in Texas.”

  I thought about modern pottery wheels and kiln furnaces. “Aren’t the old ways laborious?”

  “That which is worth it is,” she said. “It takes hours to dig the clay, and grind it, and get it into shape. Then the wood must be gathered for the fire. Children gather pitch from the piñon tree. We coat the clay with hot sap and fire it in an open pit of juniper wood.”

  I took the lid off a squat pot. “Um-yum, guacamole.”

  Tess raised flat bread from the basket. The guacamole was divine, although I was still full of Philippe’s food. Tess told me it was Lost Coyote Canyon guacamole. “The usual ingredients,” she said, “plus some secret spices.” She and Philippe had an affinity for secret spices.

  She poured tea into small clay cups that were twenty subtle shades of blue and green. A stick bird had been etched on mine with symbols like hieroglyphics. Tess said, “Like the cairns, they are religious. I can’t explain them. Bad luck.”

  No bad luck, please.

  As beautiful as was the clay ware to the eyes, the tea tasted dreadful.

  “Creosote and honey tea,” Tess said, laughing at my puckered face. “It is made from the stems and leaves for a variety of ills. It works on horses. That’s a good indication it has medicinal properties. No psychological influences with horses.”

  I set my cup down.

  She said, “We must drink a full cup before we see my aunt, the medicine woman. She believes it rids the body of transmittable poisons.”

  Lifting the cup, I said, “I’ll do it.”

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and, soon, it was time to go.