A Phantom Herd

by Lorraine Ray

"Get out! What are you-? Get out of those gall darn sharp rocks! The three of you!" Mother called from the shade of the ramada when she noticed our silhouettes at the top of the rugged hill. She was making sandwiches and her shadowy figure in a long cotton dress with a big pleated skirt appeared to be shaking a knife, a paring knife for peeling our apples, at us. We jumped at the sound of her voice and began scrabbling down toward her as she continued yelling. "For heavens sake! Get down here where the car is and where I can see you! Didn't I explain myself adequately? Didn't I tell you where to stay? Didn't I tell you to stay put? Get down off the top of that hill, and I mean pronto."

  She stood with her hands on her hips watching us struggle down the hill. "By cracky, you kids. There have got to be scorpions galore in those gall darn sharp rocks! More scorpions than Billy-be darned. Scorpions waiting for you, silly kids! By cracky, you are asking for trouble!"

  Meredith and Jack scuttled down the hill quickly. I struggled far behind them, hesitant, mournful, worried.

  "Look at them! Just look at them!" she appealed to our father to join in with her hysterical reaction to our rock climbing expedition. Father sat impassively on a picnic table slowly smoking a cigarette while eating a mayonnaise and peanut butter sandwich, his huarache sandals pressed against a boulder. He might have managed a brief disinterested glance in our direction.

  "Help your baby sister!" she ordered, talking about me, though neither Jack nor Meredith came back up to aid me as I tentatively picked my way down the rocks. It took me a long time to go down hills and I often slid on my bottom if the ground became the least bit loose, though Jack and Meredith hated me for doing that. For my many weaknesses, they hated me with a passion.

  Mother went quiet for a minute and we could hear a new brisk breeze, and the strange call of a Gila Woodpecker, and that bird dove and swooped out of a saguaro toward the side of a rock. The bird perched there stupidly for a minute, picked at some lime green and gray lichen and dove off toward a saguaro growing at the shoulder of the road.

  Then Mother began again. "Meredith, didn't I warn you that those rocks are just full of scorpions and snakes with all the spring rains this year and the heat coming on early? What do you mean by leading your little brother and your baby sister up there into danger? I thought you were only going around the side of the hill a little bit. That was what you told your father and me. You said you were going around the bottom of the hill. Just a little bit of a walk on level ground. Didn't I tell you not to climb up there? Jack's asthma is at a dangerous stage. Do you want to kill him? Is that what you have in mind? Didn't I tell you about the danger of climbing around in rocks in the spring? You kids are forever asking for trouble! I thought you were down here on the lower slope. Why, there might be a thousand scorpions running around in those gall darn rocks. There's a scorpion up there for each of you with your name on it."

  That was a very absurd image, something Mother was adept at producing during her long tirades. She watched us come down further. "By cracky, I guess I've no choice but to have to give each of you a thorough lickin in the car."

  "I'm taking off my belt. Who needs a beltin?" asked Father, but he actually did nothing and kept on munching his sandwich. In those days his youth betrayed him; he resembled a beatnik himself: the hem of his loose jeans were rolled up as were the sleeves of his white T-shirt (a cigarette pack was encased in the fold like some strange rectangular chrysalis riding on his bicep) and he had planted his huaraches against a boulder; three silver buttons, small, medium and large, up the center of the creaky sandals were painted red, green and white, the colors of the Mexican flag. His grandmother on his father's side was from Mexico, but his parents had divorced and he was always trying futilely to regain the lost connection to his father's culture. The frame of his black browline glasses was clear at the bottom. High brown hair at the front suggested a modified version of an Elvis pompadour. "Which one of them is it that needs a belting?" he asked, not daring to choose one on his own, leaving it to her to decide. I doubt he was wearing a belt that day.

  "Well, right now, I think I'd say all three of them," said Mother debating our fate from behind her gray and black sunglasses. She was standing at a picnic table under the ramada spreading peanut butter on slices of bread and folding them in half. "All three of them deserve a thorough lickin. I'm gonna lick Jack for giving himself asthma. I thought he had more sense than the girls."

  "Take one of these dog gone sandwiches," she said wearily when we slid to a stop in the dirt near the ramada. "And I split a coke." The bubbly black brew had been divvied out into small black pools in various plastic thermos lids.

  Our eyes were huge, filled to overflowing with sadness and guilt and mostly useless and wracking self-pity. We were afraid to come too near her while she was in the mood she was in. We looked at the hot dusty road, too. Although we had told each other that we were rid of the angry man, all three of us thought he could decide to drive after us or climb over the hill and maybe bring the crazy lady along, too, although she might have a hard time walking that far.

  "And eat them where we can see you," said Father.

  Within minutes my brother and sister and I were ripping big bread crumbs smeared with peanut butter from our sandwiches and dropping them atop a line of black ants that were swarming a nearby garbage can.

  "Take that!" said Meredith maliciously to the ants under siege.

  "Look out below!" said Jack. "Bombs away!" He'd seen too many World War II bomber movies.

  "Don't feed the ants our hard-earned peanut butter!" Mother cried out in horror when she realized what we'd been doing. Meredith, who was about to drop a large slab of her crust on the ants, froze the crust in midair, diverted it, and popped it into her mouth instead. She walked away with the peculiar hitching hop she'd developed, imitating the scruffy crippled character named Chester Goode on Gunsmoke. We followed her, a small herd of willful children, holding bubbly black nectar in our thermos cups like chalices of sacred wine. We were Meredith's devotees, her novices, her acolytes, and we rarely left her side.

  Meredith walking away didn't stop Mother's tirade, her great volcanic fulmination at our disregard, our profligacy. "What in the world would make the three of you think you ought to destroy your wholesome peanut butter sandwiches and feed them to an animal? To ants?" And then a strange tongue-lashing, an epic, off-the-cuff saga, transpired: Mother being one of the few people in the world who often could not just scold her fellow humans but had to create in the process a fascinating, convoluted and guilt-ridden story cycle from a mundane act like wasting a few scraps of peanut butter on ants.

  "Your father worked hard as a draftsman, risking his eyesight, slaving away at the draftsman's table with those difficult architectural plans, night and day, to earn the money to be able to give it to me so that I could drive to Food Giant and buy, for you three ungrateful children, that jar of peanut butter," she began, initiating the chain of misery and eternal obligation surrounding the wastage of peanut butter, and a librarian's short geographical, agricultural survey of our country's productivity. "And that peanut butter had to be grown in a field way down in the south in some of the darkest, richest soil in this great country of America with an old tractor that had probably seen some better days and that tractor had to plow that dark rich soil on a cold dawn and I'll bet it broke down six times before that field was ever plowed correctly for peanut planting and you better believe that every line that tractor lay down was straight or that farmer would have plowed the field over, right smack dab from the start, and that was where the peanuts were planted by the wrinkled hands of an old Southern gentleman-who knows his name, because I'm the only one who's listening to this gall darned story and really interested in the way real things are made in this world!-and those peanuts had to be dug out of the ground when they were ready to be harvested and those peanuts had to be washed in a great big tub and those peanuts had to be trucked across the continent and those peanuts had to be run on assembly lines until they hardly
knew who they were any more and they had to be roasted in a great, hot oven, and this is also what your Swiss relatives did in Indiana to make a living, roasting peanuts, so hot that people had to be checking its gauges and valves night and day in case it got too hot and exploded those peanuts and the whole factory with it, hotter than Billy-be darned, and then those peanuts that you are dropping on ants so carelessly had to be dumped into hoppers to be mixed up in a great big vat and poured into a glass and a label had to be stuck onto it and it had to be boxed and it had to be trucked all the way out here to Arizona from a factory in Chicago at great expense and trouble and now you're about to feed it to an ant. Well, that isn't what those hard-working Americans who made that jar of peanut butter expected and it isn't what I had in mind when I bought it at Food Giant with a coupon and your father's hard-earned money! That wasn't what I had in mind when I drove it home and carried it in and put it on the shelf at home. I don't think I thought I would be feeding an ant when I spread that on a piece of bread! We're not rich enough to waste our food on ants, you kids."

  She took a break and began slicing apples. "And don't you go into those rocks again," Mother said, shaking the knife at us again as she returned to the prior complaint. "I saw you climbing down from those rocks and I knew there was going to be trouble. I've seen enough of Arizona to know a place where there's going to be scorpions in the rocks. Why, doggone it, children have crawled into rocks never to be seen again. And their parents have mourned, but what good did it do them? They should have stayed out of the rocks. Foolish children have fallen headfirst into mines, mines with no bottoms, never to be seen again, and never to make any bother either, not to mention the fact that that hill is the perfect place for baby scorpions to be crawling around waiting for some foolish child to come along and stick their hand down a crack accidentally. If you put your hand down in the wrong crack, well, by golly, I don't even want to think about what could happen to you. Swelling up would be the best part of what would happen. I've seen plenty of scorpions and scorpion stings. Don't think I haven't. Why, wasn't I just telling you about one of those small golden ones out under the clothesline a few years ago? Those are the most poisonous ones that nearly struck you, kid," she said, pointed the knife at me, "under the clothesline. There it was racing around underneath you. Here, there, right under the bare feet of my youngest child. By rights you should have died that same day. There I was hanging out clothes and I slid my sunglasses down my nose and I saw it right at your feet. A baby scorpion, kid. You've got to watch for baby scorpions. And centipedes. You got to watch for them...."

  My mother's voice always rose when she told me the story of the scorpion. I suppose she was horrified when she asked me to see how death had scampered at my feet, and the intricate details of the outside our house, the colors and shapes of pebbles and shadows on the floor of the desert as they must have been in 1957. I imagined the black iron poles of our clothesline, which were beautifully embellished with bluing and rust, branded the ground beneath my mother and I that morning with two dark elongated crosses, and the shadows of the five clothesline wires connected these crosses along the lower bricks of our neighbor's patio wall and formed an undivided length of musical bars over which the shadows of the clothespins were scattered like the notes of a jittery jig, this being the late fifties when the ritualized chore of Monday morning laundry and hanging out clothes on the clothesline ranked as both a religion and an art in our American home. Cold war contrails from the exhaust of an unseen jet crisscrossed the sky above us and crumpled down toward the brown desert very much like one of the sugary cereal toppings on the great golden flakes in our vital cereal bowls. My mother squeezed the spring of a wooden clothespin, jabbing the open beak of the pin over the cuff of an upside-down pair of my father's jeans. When those pants were pinned, she dragged the plastic wheels of our yellow and white striped laundry cart across the sand and caliche; the wobbly wheels scrunched and gritted the ground noisily, attracting me from where I stood on the concrete landing outside the little brick washhouse at the back of the garage, and suddenly, I suppose, I craved the comfort of burying my face in the pleats of her big paisley skirt.

  Walking, I imagine, involved the lifting of thick thighs, the bending of stubborn knees, and the clenching and unclenching of my toes, which were bare on the cool gray concrete. But as difficult as all these actions were, the lure of my mother and her skirt was so strong for me that the muscles in my lower back began firing in robot-like impulses, and I found myself tottering out from the washhouse in her direction. My fingers groped the air above me, and I have my mother's word that, after leaving the support of the door, I waddled out a few steps toward her. Then, when I was making real progress in her direction, my antagonist appeared.

  The scorpion slipped out of a foundation crack in the western side of the washhouse and scurried around the corner of that little structure to a spot between us, between my mother and me.

  From that spot that it first chose, the scorpion skittered forward tentatively, and then scampered a little sideways, turned, writhed, and retreated over the rough mortar mixed with mud that two years earlier my father had shoveled over the slope as a transition between the single back step and the slightly lower patch where he raised the clothesline. But here in the telling of this significant tale of my early life, namely how my life itself was threatened when I was barely more than a year old (a story which I ought to be thankful for because it's so dramatic, and it isn't a lie), I become as unsure about what direction to take with my story as the scorpion I'm describing. I find myself more apt to travel backwards or skip sideways than I am to forge boldly ahead and simply tell you, create for you again, everything that happened. While I remind myself to step out bravely, while I have my mother's word that I, the baby on the step, didn't falter, didn't dither, over what to do next, and probably never noticed the scorpion, I find myself focusing on the details of what my ugly nemesis looked like.

  In this effort I am frustrated by the removal, with time, of any way to know the variety of scorpion which was scrabbling underneath me. Nevertheless, I go on thinking about it. Was the body of the thing entirely pale greenish yellow, and did it measure a quarter-inch in length, and was it therefore a Sculptured Centruroide with a sting that is often fatal? Or could it have been a baby Hadrurus arizonensis with a darker thorax, perhaps shedding its first skin that day, and, curiously, leaving forever the charge of its own dear scorpion mother that it loved and knew so well-as well as any scorpion ever can be said to know its mother?

  "Stay right there!" Mother yelled.

  Suspend my fat foot with its babyish toes forever if it takes my research that long, suspend it so that it hovers in the air and only threatens to fall and receive my karmic sting from the scorpion. Let the shadow of my baby toes coming down and the scorpion evading that shape, and me thinking of the story of me evading the shape that is evading me, explain the sudden lurch Mother said I took down the step, releasing my toehold on life, as every mortal one day must release their hold on this wonderful world. Let my foot fall where it may, toward whatever skittering beast; let the brute carry its blonde joints beneath me; let my mother's eyes take note of it, and yet I tell you before she can knock the laundry cart out of the way and dash over to scoop me up, I will always time the step right, the beast will run away and leave me to be held accountable for every breath afterward. That is the miracle of the real past, which shows the powerlessness of writing. The nervous scorpion, which only my mother's eyes noticed, wiggled out from its crack, turned, scuttled, and could even have flexed its tail under my foot, but then that wispy harbinger of death decided on a different course.

  Certainly the sting of the scorpion, had I received it then, could have been lethal and in that case the writing that you are now enjoying would have been impossible, destroyed along with me. The cycle of stories, frankly the all the lies, would have ended. I would never have had all the trouble I've had over the herd of phantom cattle. And Meredith and Jack and
I wouldn't have lived through that night when her boyfriend tried to give Mr. Wayne LSD. And the librarian, well, he wouldn't have seen me in the special collections room and threatened me with his knife and tantalized me with his tale of Belinda. That's a stray story I lost. The story of Belinda could have been the greatest story ever, a real treasure, or, perhaps, another hack tale of a hippie gone wrong. I'll never know which. That stray story is gone, unless I manage to make up my own lie about it, but you won't be able to tell the difference. That's what makes art plastic, in the sense of being malleable and changeable.

  The reality of life, or I really mean death, could have swept away the vain, unreality of writing. You see my life, my writing, from the very start was a phantom. What difference does it make if I tell it wrong now? I see that the idea that I, the writer, control things may be utter nonsense. Images appeared and disappeared before me under the power of some Unknown Trickster. If the material of my life was plastic, the material of my writing is too. I must build it and not worry. I have to stop trying to control the shape of the herd, but simply, simply move it forward. A story like Belinda's has to fall by the wayside, and the writer with her ego has to learn to disappear along with Belinda.

  In this vein, I realized it could so easily never have been-that morning in early spring, a year after the scorpion almost struck me-when a patch of sun in a great elongated golden trapezoid flowed from the southeast window in the bedroom I shared with Meredith (and a drawer full of her forbidden dolls arranged in open-lidded boxes like perfect coffins with colored tissue blankets of pink, aqua, and blue). That trapezoid of watery sunlight, which was almost like an odd-shaped aquarium tank, stretched out as far as the spot where I crouched on the rug in the living room. In that barren room, I had been spending the morning stacking blocks on the scratchy gray wool rug, and I could smell the shaggy stink of sheep and the sharp oiliness of a rubber pad underneath. The room was without much furniture; erecting the shell of our walls has cost my parents so much that the purchase of anything more than beds, a single sofa, a few chairs and a dining table was unimaginable for years. In this wide open space I was balancing colorful plastic blocks atop oil cloth blocks, the thick loops of yarn on the corners of the cloth blocks made my castle wall unstable. Before I stacked each plastic block I shook them first to hear the hissing slide of the teeny beads inside, and I scratched the green and yellow corner of one particular plastic block against my new top teeth and the oddest O and an irritatingly indistinct outline of oxen on another red and blue plastic block. I glanced up briefly at certain animated antics displayed by the dust motes in the golden light, their pirouettes in that bright trapezoid were especially elegant, though I had seen those before, and I listened while the mushy heartbeat of a coffee percolator on our kitchen counter gradually ebbed, like the ocean retreating on the shore at low tide. Happily, I then plunged my arms, nearly up to the elbow, in the golden light.

  "You're having a good time by yourself, I see," said Mother, looking in on me from the doorway, "Well, well, I don't suppose anyone else is reading this far into your book or paying much heed to what you're telling them, though. Why all the detailed description of a time past? Aren't you the fancy one? Who cares about that? Why don't you tell them something interesting like a detailed life history of a person from Indiana? Now there's something that people will take an interest in. You could tell about a man whose name was Lugar who used to beat up a lady that worked in my mother's restaurant. That was a real interesting case. He was terribly evil and his story would make a good subject. Mrs. Lugar was a teeny thing and scared to death of him when he was drunk or angry. Boy, he was the real thing, kid, real violent. You could sell people him. I think he went to the penitentiary, but don't quote me on that. Now that's a real human interest story. You'd have to make up a lot of it, though, because I don't know anything more about him, old Lugar. Or tell the story about the white button in the mashed potatoes. That's homey, like Little Women. Something wholesome will sell. Ah, well. Keep playing."

  I turned my chubby arms in the sunlight and watched the bright light which served to soften the edge of me, bending me, merging with me into a watery wiggle. I twiddled my fingers and took my arms out of the light and then plunged them in again, up past my elbows. My very skin felt molten. It was then when I was enjoying my molten arms when The Most Extraordinary Thing danced by outside the front window.

  I caught only the movement in my peripheral vision. My first thought was that I'd spotted a baby rabbit, perhaps even one of the long-eared jack rabbits, cavorting in some peculiar manner. Live rabbits were still something special, even when my home and its small triangle of tantalizing green lawn in a sea of gravel sliced into rabbit territory, the dry dirt and endless plain of creosote bushes that made up our desert valley. Live rabbits could be caught in a box with the lure of a fresh carrot, or so we believed. Meredith, Jack and I obsessed about them, and Father, with his draftsman's skills, helped us sketch elaborate plans on paper of traps to catch bunnies. We saved cardboard boxes, and, optimistically, read books about the do's and don'ts of raising rabbits, rabbits that never took our bait.

  The prospect of seeing a bunny brought me slowly to my feet, drew me to the low ledge of our northern windowsill. I took the block with the ox with me to the window where I saw our crescent of stunted bottle brush bushes evenly spaced along the inner span of our semicircular gravel drive offering a smooth rim in front of the pink porch trim and burnt adobe of the home on the other side of the unpaved street. The bright pink dawn burned across the yellow expanse of dormant Bermuda lawn over there and seared the branches of an olive tree and the sliced, enticing view of a weedy alleyway behind. Curbs glowed, bricks lit up, and a milk truck lumbered by loudly.

  My two stout forearms, tanned and tinted a rosy red by the unrelenting Arizona sun, lay stacked on top of each other on the narrow width of the cold masonry windowsill in our living room's single, northern window, and, as I fiddled with the window crank, turning the loose knob on top, I waited for something to happen outside. Eventually, my patience was rewarded.

  A sudden breeze teased the tip of something silvery, then lifted it, and lofted it, and brought it to view. A shining hoop sprang into action, tumbling over and over, bright and light. Like the center-ring star of a circus show, the gossamer wheel, flipped forward happily. It was a see-through circle, a lovely orbit, filtering light through the discarded skin of the old fellow who supposedly gave us a world of sin. Even from the window I could glimpse the overlapping diamonds on the hide, the faint scale pattern, which remained on the crisp wrapper, an imprint of the animal which had made its life inside. The skin split at the head and remained intact as a tube of white light, slightly worn on the edges, and in fact the head of the snake skin appeared to be swallowing the tail, forming a circle; a world without end.

  The scaly hoop, hopping and skipping in the gravel as though it has a life of its own, as though it was there to amuse me with an act which I alone got to view that wonderful, wintry desert day, somersaulted brightly, tumbling, whirling, spinning and revolving, it twirled itself into a perfect hoop guided by-the old Drover, the Unseen Hand, the Trickster's Magic?

  The desert is the Trickster's favorite place to appear, to inspire with grand illusions as he did again and again throughout my life. It was a mysterious world, to be forever containing these scenes, a thousand stages, under a thousand big tops, circus rings with each center-ring holding its own phantasmagoric circus show. The hoop I saw skipped across the gravel, hopping and rolling, moving forward happily, as though perfectly informed as to its ultimate purpose. Why wasn't I?

  Suddenly, the puffed-out skin fell and twiddled along the gravel in a corkscrew manner. When I had gotten used to watching it writhe that way, the snake skin sprang up into a hoop shape again. And on it rolled, that bright halo of holy happiness, that miracle of nature, hopping and skipping across our front yard gravel. The snake skin bumbled across in plain view of me and then it whisked away, stage rig
ht; it couldn't have traveled far along our rough roads and front yards before it caught in a cactus and the hot sun disintegrated it, melting away the crisp wrapper until it resembled nothingness.

  A writer always keeps her eyes on the phantoms, on the clear hide of the Devil, on snake skins blowing by the window of a desert town.