A Phantom Herd

by Lorraine Ray

"Now this whole Rodeo parade is not my style. I don't like the glorification of the cowboy culture in America. Who voted them the most popular and important people in history? Why don't they have a miner's parade and festival or a festival of lumberjacks. Yes, they were just as big in Arizona and even bigger. I don't like the hucksterism of it. Selling stuffed donkeys on a stick. What is that about? And banners as though there was a team to root for. Nonsense. The animals don't have a chance at the rodeo. Don't get me started on what they do to the horses and the bulls. That's no way to treat an animal. I'm a farm girl, remember. We didn't treat our animals that way. Whooping around and poking them and spurring them to jump in the air. Laughing when the human conquers them. That's no way to act, by cracky. The whole thing is a phony put up if you ask me. Promotion by a lot of show-off men who don't know a thing about animals."

  "Now give me a circus any day. There's an honest display of animals. There's an honest American show, which has people doing things that are dangerous and the animals don't get abused. My dad liked his circus acts, and he tried to do what he saw in the circuses. That was a good challenge. When they came to Indiana, the people were the ones doing hard things in their barns to try to be like the trapeze artists, not using the animals, mostly. They tried to fly through the air and jump and land. Maybe upside down. Dad set up the barn to be like a circus. Made a rope and a haystack. That was good, honest fun."

  "Sure, a show is fine. Who doesn't like a show? I think the rodeo mentality is all wrong, though. I'll take you to the parade, because you ought to see it and a few of the carriages and hitches are original, but I don't approve of the hucksterism, and don't you forget it. They ought to be ashamed of turning it into some kind of goofy occasion. Why, the people who come in to town are purely the carnival type of low people. They are no good lowlifes without a care for history of the west. The bands are okay and the historic vehicles, but that's about it. Those ladies in their tight spangled suits, well, that's not the Old West. That's just flash and the old West wasn't flashy. Some people can cheapen anything they put their mind to and turn it into a shoddy joke."

  "Look at the way they treat Tombstone. Now there's a case in point when the story was blown out of proportion. There have to a hundred or a thousand better stories you could tell all the live-long day, even about the city of Tombstone itself, not to mention the entire state. But what do people remember? They remember that damn gunfight that was so trivial. The most ridiculous meaningless, corrupt story is all they focus on. Where are the ladies baking pies in the homes in Arizona, I might ask? Why when I worked at the Historical Society you know if people came in and asked for anything on the Tombstone story that old lady Miss Foxx would get so angry. And the other lady, well, she was losing her mind and when someone came in one day and asked for the box of information about the Gunfight at the O K Corral that lady went mad. She had a little gun in her purse and she pulled that gun on the patron! They had to cart her away to the state asylum. That's what Tombstone did to a good librarian. Drove her mad because she couldn't stand the trashing of history. She really knew her Arizona history. But I will say she had to have her hair cut in Phoenix. I thought that was mighty peculiar."

  A writer has to listen carefully to the details of any and all stories about crazy librarians. A writer has to collect those stories, herd them together, and not lose a single stray story.

  Until a few years ago, a rodeo parade wound through the streets of downtown. Traditionally, the parade morning was a Thursday in late February, the same day when the rodeo events, which we called La Fiesta de Los Vaqueros or the Cowboy's Party, began at the fairgrounds on Irvington. My mother preferred a quiet morning at home watching the parade on TV to hours spent crowding under the store awnings or standing at a curb in the scant shade of our modest high-rises watching the wild spectacle clatter past the banks and department stores. To her, the endless files of mules, ponies, carriages and mountain men which kicked off the rodeo brought with them a large amount of western hokum and bunk. She objected to the street vendors with their armloads of junky stuffed toys and flimsy felt banners, arguing that their morals were as cheap as their trinkets, and she despaired at the corny costumes of the crowd. I disagreed with her on this point; not that I thought the parade atmosphere was dignified, or the costumes of the crowd anything but their own private expression of solidarity with "cowboydom," but the nonsense surrounding the event delighted me, or at least the excitement captured my imagination. A grandma who once a year reached into the back of her closet and dragged out a tattered serape and a sombrero only to sit in a lawn chair at the curb, suck on pumpkin candy, and shout throughout the parade typified a part of the West. I liked her spirit or involvement with the West. To me, the "Real West" was whatever was really happening there.

  Mother insisted everything be kept properly sober and dignified; it was a librarian's bowdlerized version of the West that she wanted: chronicles of cattle drives with maps and keys, cheerful statistics about the Navajo, endless charts of mining data. She looked askance at the displays of gaudy and horrific wanted posters; she hated hints of the state's early impropriety. I suppose she felt insecure about the wisdom of her move to Arizona and any taint of the tacky and cheap made her doubt herself.

  "The Arizona I knew was a place of quality people. The really wealthy barons you could say who owned vast tracts of land covered with elk. You know I mean the Cowboy Princes, as I said, who you went to school with, kid, if you could only remember them. When I first came to Arizona, there were a lot of quality ranch families who were an exclusive group, yet would rub elbows in the town anonymously in jeans. Many's the time I realized I was talking to someone of real interest and of large land holdings, oh, say, on the San Pedro or the Gila. Well, they were simply the owners of ranches the size of the state of Connecticut, but now you are being sold this vision of the West which glorifies the drug addicts, prostitutes and gun slingers who were nothing but trashy people. I am certainly willing to say all aspects of the West need to be depicted, but there is an unhealthy emphasis on the sensational and the gory. People would do well to know the really interesting details of mining enterprises, say, or the founding of towns. Plenty of upstanding citizens came here, but you wouldn't think it from those who revel in the unwholesome activities of the down and out. Sure, there were disreputable people here, but why dwell upon their dark deeds. I like a good story as well as anyone, kid, but I don't want this place to seem to be nothing but cowboys."

  Notwithstanding Mother's disapproval, our parents took us to several rodeo parades over the years where we roistered on the streets, displaying our cocky faith in the uniqueness of our Arizona upbringing and gazing open-mouthed upon the eccentric vehicles and characters of what undoubtedly was a cartoonish version of Old Arizona. For hours gap-toothed prospectors, flaming prostitutes, and a twenty-mule team pulling the payload from El Dorado jolted by in what local boosters claimed was The World's Longest-Running Non-mechanized Parade.

  I loved the parade. I'd like to believe others loved it too. Once I glimpsed a lean young man, most likely a lawyer, who was hurrying grimly through the parade crowd in the direction of the county courthouse. He ignored the parade and the crowd; no doubt he thought the rodeo ridiculous, yet one brief, unintentional, sideways glance at the wheel of mad Empress Carlota's coach, which was squeaking awfully, left him with a wide, wry smile. Afterwards, when he walked up Congress toward the courthouse, I could detect a spring in his step that hadn't been there before. That image of him grinning and perking up contains for me a thousand potential results, a thousand and one subsequent tales. I could imagine him, for example, impulsively joking with a judge that afternoon and striking up a friendship that lasted a lifetime, or perhaps the passing coach and horses reminded him of a long-forgotten interest in horseback riding and a certain young lady in a small Arizona town? The creative spark I received when I imagined the effect of all the rodeo trappings on the ambushed urban mind delighted me. When the parade left downtown an
d moved nearer the rodeo grounds a lot of this creative magic vanished.

  Blustery winds scoured these early rodeo parades. In late February sand scrubs and sweeps southern Arizona, as though we are our country's neglected back porch enduring a spruce-up for company-our population of snow birds reaches its highest point in that month. These dusty, windy old February parades layer my mind. One grimy cavalcade piles upon another until a stratum of these wind-swept spectacles clogs my brain. The exact years of the different parades confuse me, though each must have been before the mid-sixties, and all of them have the same stock actors and props: dappled ponies, their glossy black tails and manes flapping behind them in the wind, their features washed-out by curtains of drifting dirt, but with their alien hammer-heads bowed toward their chests, nostrils pinched shut, and long eyelashes fluttering; wincing parade marshals who grip the brims of their ten gallon hats and wave and occasionally manage tight smiles as the airborne grit pelts them and sends the fringe of their suede vests streaming in the air as though the wind is slicing through them and carrying their bodies away in shreds; gaily striped popcorn boxes that scud along the pavement scattering their few remaining oily kernels; wrinkled newspapers spread eagle and crackling against chain link fences; shaggy palms, their skirts of dried fronds rustling nervously; and big billowing plastic bags which zip into the parade route as last-minute entries and soar skyward where they float like the bodies of bloated jellyfish, spooking the horses and puffing and flitting at the edges of my consciousness even today whenever the wind ransacks our desert valley.

  A film, a screen, like the gauze dropped between Elizabethan audiences and the players in a mysterious mummery, obscures these old windy parades. Behind this veil, the flag bearers, stiffened by patriotism and the bandannas that bind their necks, suffer trials to maintain the dignity of the flag of our country. Angry hot gusts wrest control of their poles, and the flag bearers stiffen their resolve and wrench the nation's colors-the red and dark blue stripes that are bleached orange and a pale baby blue in our blinding sun and blowing dirt-off the asphalt and away from the steaming piles of green mule droppings. The teenage members of the marching bands suck in sand with the air at the side of their mouthpieces only to have the meager toots they manage to produce whisk away in the wind. The ranks of the Old Bastard's Band lurch along the street, their faces, which seem to be cryogenically preserved, are even less supplied with air than usual as they struggle to play the songs they haven't practiced. Their pursy faces are temporarily smoothed by the headwinds, which blast their frail bodies backwards and send the tips of their thick white moustaches stabbing the air on either side of their cheeks. Puffing out these cheeks and rolling their eyes, they march past with an old man's loose, ungainly shuffle.

  Snatched-off hats roll away and the carefully lettered paper signs on the carts and wagons rip to shreds. Stiff breezes strip braves of their feathers; Becky Thatcher look-a-likes riding in wagons find their bonnet ties stretching, the bonnets themselves lifting off their curls. If the breeze is a headwind, the carriages drag, the carts crawl. A tailwind sends the parade careening forward crazily like some clockwork toy parade gone berserk. And though it's entirely possible that I witnessed the windy parades on separate occasions over several years, they are now permanently folded together in my mind like a packet of letters bound with a thick ribbon.

  The ribbon image is crucial; photos from the air reveal the unflattering truth-the Old Pueblo consists of a sixty mile expanse of bare dirt dotted at the edges with spidery creosote bushes and interrupted by what appear to be thousands of scattered, insubstantial shacks. Gone are the quaint green saguaros transplanted into yards and standing sentinel like pleasant oversized pickles, gone are the charming adobes and courtyards with their gurgling, spirited fountains. In such a terrain any breeze snatches the loose dirt, flings it in the air, and deposits it as a hazy wash that sometimes gobbles up the foot of the mountains or at other times leaves a bathtub ring, a ribbon, halfway up the sky.

  This smudge of desert soil around the city comes in varying hues; in the misty light of certain winter mornings it shows a uniform pale tan, at other times the color reveals golden tints, or is banded by old ivory or pale bluish gray, but more often than not, its pink, a salmon-colored ribbon slicing neatly across the confederate gray of the Catalina forerange and curving south across the bluer Rincons, leaping across the pass to Benson where the Apaches launched in their attacks upon the old presidio, smearing the Santa Ritas, and obscuring the sharp black volcanic peaks of the Tucson Mountains which crouch underneath the layer of dust like black cats that have rolled in the dirt to shed their fleas.

  During one of these gusty parades in 1962, when a terrific wind had scoured the valley since dawn and painted a vast hoop of pink around our city, I found myself huddled on the sunny dirt bank of a shallow tree well with six or seven other children of various ages. None of them were my brother or sister (being older I suppose they must have stayed at the curb to watch the carriages and bands) and their faces were unremarkable and were, perhaps, unobserved; attention to anyone's features strained your senses because of the searing bright light of the desert in winter and because of the punishing wind that day which left us scrunching our eyelids to slits. At times the wind tugged our hair straight out from our heads in all directions, at other times our Medusa-like locks wiggled frantically before our eyes. Dappled dots of sunlight thrashed merrily all around the cup of this tree well like a flock of confused birds and from the spread of these dots of light, I can estimate that the sun was nearly vertical and that more than half of the parade had already passed. Another clue to the time is the fact that the bank of earth that formed the tree well warmed our calves. Perhaps ten o'clock had come already.

  We children sat so that the toes of our shoes pointed down the slope of the embankment; we had long since lost interest in the spectacle of the parade itself and were more fascinated by each other. How we had gathered there, I can't say, for my memory begins only at the point where our shoes were pointing down in the dirt. A teeny girl, I remember, wore anklets and brown Mary Jane shoes with one buckle completely undone and the other half fastened-the flat strap of leather humped up in the buckle as though it were a brown worm. I suppose that in her mothers' rush to get ready for the parade that morning fastening the little girl's shoes properly had been neglected. Someone else sported red cowboy boots with white stitching and leather cutouts in the shape of prickly pear cacti and jack rabbits. There were several other pairs of duller cowboy boots with thoroughly scuffed toes, boots that must have been passed down from child to child, special rodeo boots. One small girl scuffed about in a too-large pair of brown buckskin Indian moccasins with tiny red and blue and orange beads sewn to the moccasin tongue in the shape of a stylized thunderbird. All these various shoes extended down into the bowl-like amphitheater of the tree well with the dapples of sunlight dancing over them.

  The tree that this impromptu group congregated around was a small sour orange, one of hundreds of these blighted fruit trees planted in intervals along the parkways of the central streets by misguided city fathers-trees planted, and then neglected, never fed or pruned, and left without a source of water other than the Old Pueblo's spotty rainfall. Whether due to lack of water, natural inclination, or disease, stunted and contorted limbs resulted. Birds and most bugs refused to eat the ghastly fruit produced by the tree, and the sight in the spring and summer of the oranges lying scattered about the streets and the sidewalks would cause snowbirds to criticize the locals. The Citizen published letters to the editor noting this "Western wastefulness." So much free fruit lying around tempted newcomers to sneak out at night with sacks and pillowcases which they hurriedly stuffed with the awful oranges, never realizing that no one would object if they came in daylight and took every sour oranges in the entire city, only a fool would bother defending them; at their next breakfast the thieves would discover (to their considerable horror) that the oranges yielded a pale juice which bit into y
our mouth like lemon juice.

  Thrifty wives, with free time on their hands and too many sour oranges, took a few into their kitchen and experimented on them cannily for days only to give up in frustration or else eventually devised ridiculous recipes which called for fractions of a fractional teaspoons of the juice as flavor for a sickly sweet frosting. If they gave up the idea of eating them, they proposed skewering the skin of the sour oranges with cloves, punishing the innocent oranges for the sin of being unwholesome. Then, after the sour oranges' martyrdom, their dried corpses hung in closets.

  The desert sun broiled the Old Pueblo, and there were so few overcast days to stop this broiling effect that sour oranges left on the ground seldom rotted, instead a summer of sun sucked the vital juices out of them as thoroughly as any vampire sucked blood; they shrunk into small, brittle husks, hollow shells. Even odder, the orange skin stayed smooth and didn't pucker. When it dried, the whole fruit reduced in size exactly like a shrunken head on a headhunter's belt. In the process of drying, the peel of the sour orange acquired huge open pores like those on the noses of old men; in their hues these dried oranges resembled Lascaux cave paintings; in parts, oranges and deep brown hues blew across the peel, in other sections inky stains dripped in lines and blobs across the dried surface of the orange. A subtle palette of browns and warm mustards might blend with sallow parts of the orange hemispheres, while on other oranges whole sides of the fruit would be slashed with red. Often circular black patches on the dried orange peels resembled the scorch rings found on the bottom of Hohokam pots, and when the dried oranges broke, the cracked pieces likened broken potsherds which poked from the banks of our arroyos. Some dried oranges were colored a uniform charcoal black, as though the sun had thoroughly scorched them, but at times these black oranges had ghostly whitish patches; other oranges had tinges of beautiful auburn and russet or subtle tawny shades which blended in spots or arcs across their hard bodies. No two oranges dried with the same colors or patterns and it was a fascinating hobby simply to examine them one by one.

  But as fruit, the oranges failed; they were best put to use by delinquents who exercised their growing limbs by kicking them or throwing them at passing cars and trains; after decades of neglect most of the sour orange trees had become gnarled and stunted; the tree themselves withered away to gray, ghostly stumps, then disappeared entirely, the empty wells remained for a decade after the trees were gone and then even the wells filled with dirt and disappeared.

  That day I sat in the basin of one of those doomed trees. Lurking with us under the crooked branches of this particular sour orange was a boy of eight or nine, a red-haired rooster of a kid, whose rowdy, rambunctious, and boisterously enthused behavior fed on the presence of such an audience in the pit or amphitheater formed by the tree well. At the sight of a sheriff with a big drooping moustache who rode by, one hand resting on his gun in its holster, our entertainer stood up and pointed his play pistol at the sky bawling: "I'm sheriff of this county" and at that he leaped onto a round rock and fired his cap pistol.

  "Everybody here, listen! I'm sheriff and all of you better listen! Well, we have some work to do and I want you to do it for me! Everybody listen. We have to get ourselves working together!"

  In his antics around the tree well he was weighed down by the considerable bulk of an oversized striped cotton vest, probably his father's, one of those serape vests without buttons which were popular in the Southwest as costumes for children who wanted to be Pancho Villa for Halloween and which his mother, like many others before her, had ruined by dunking in hot water; none of the dyes on those vests were color fast, in hot water the blue and black stripes blended onto the white and over each other, and though my adult mind now knows that it ran in the wash, it occurred to me then that the fingers of the wind, which clutched at all parts of us that day, had now managed to smear clothing dye.

  Anyway, due to his superior size, I suppose, and his flaming red hair, this boy with the ruined serape seized power over us. Included in his dominion was his little sister who stood about my size and was equally timid. At some point while we huddled together hearing the jingling harnesses and the snappy tap of a cavalry drumstick on a taut drum skin our leader stood up and strutted around the dirt and Bermuda grass nearby as though he were thinking. He then began walking on the stacked heels of his cowboy boots, whirling his arms to maintain his balance; though his arms were still scrawny, the wrist ridiculously thin and bony, the elbows pointed and the hands little and thin like a woman's, my eyes noticed and appreciated the slightest bulge in his upper arm where later a man-sized muscle would develop; it was only a hint of a brawn on him, the barest hint, but it was the first time I remembered noticing that strength and respecting it; there was something about the potentiality of manhood which attracted me, just the inkling of a future being, a future metamorphosis of this being into a teen, and then a man. He had the ways of a wily person already in his eyes. In the way he traipsed around the tree hole, amusing us, and giving the other boys room to be themselves, I knew he was not a bully, yet he was clever enough to take on all the vicissitudes of the earth, bold and crafty, bearing the best of human nature. His arm was a symbol of the way things were going to be for him and also for me; that muscle would make him different in a few years and in an animal way, I suppose, some part of my subconscious mind responded to the potential of an efficient protector; soon his funny way of traipsing around the hole had us laughing, which drove him into a frenzy. He paced around the tree well rubbing his palms together briskly. If only he could devise another antic which would increase our amusement!

  Nearing one of those dried oranges that were so plentiful on the ground around the tree, and finding that that particular one had landed on a partially buried adobe brick, he threw his arms above his head like a Spanish dancer.

  "Everybody watch this! You're gonna be surprised!"

  Then he raised one foot and drove the heavy heel of his cowboy boot down on the hollow orange, striking it so forcefully that the dried husk cracked with a BOOM as loud as a small bomb; an infant screamed itself awake at the sound of the explosion, and its mother shot an angry glance through the branches into the tree's interior though she was unable to see us; glossy chestnut horses pulling a wagon past the sour orange, pricked their ears and tossed their heads; a snare drummer paused at the unexpected thump in the middle of his roll; we were stunned by the sound for a moment and then we gasped, and what was better, we cheered to see a small yellow curl of pulverized orange smoke rise up from under the boy's boot like little tendrils of a fern. Where once an orange had been, there were now only smithereens, the littlest ones of which the wind quickly whipped away, and chips broken into sharp-edged triangles, like pieces of broken crockery or pottery shards.

  More, we clamored! More!

  "More! Get me some more of those! Everybody find them! Look everywhere. Look in the grass all around. And some are still on the tree! Some old dried up ones are on the tree! We gotta blow up a whole bunch more. Look, they're everywhere."

  The dried oranges, scattered widely in the tree well, fed our fever for explosions. I joined our hero's little sister in collecting these dried oranges, finding many of them where they had fallen in a stand of tall, dormant Bermuda grass; they resembled orange balls, lost in the tall grass, that a dog had found and ravaged; by providing these oranges and collecting them with his timid little sister I felt connected, indirectly, to this hale god-boy, her brother.

  "We must find all of them," I said earnestly, grabbing her by the hand.

  "Let's walk in those weeds," she suggested, pointing to another part of the tree well that was also grassy.

  "We'll find more there," I said, taking her somewhere else.

  "I see one!" she said.

  "Let's get it," I said.

  "Gee, there's a lot of them here," she said.

  "They're hiding," I said.

  "They don't want us to find them!"

  Once he had hammered nearly every dri
ed orange lying in obvious spots in the tree well, another boy bullied us into going on excursions out of the tree's protection to provide our hero with more ammunition; we retrieved the blackened oranges for him, even if we had to snatch them from the street or from under the feet of great men, and we brought them forward apprehensively as though they were burnt offerings to a god. Burnt because the oranges had that blackened appearance, just as though they had been singed by a fire, which indeed is what a summer in the desert will do to anything lying out in the sun, and offerings because it seemed the other children, including myself, were the hero-boy's retainers, eager to respond when his assistant bellowed "More! Get us more! Everybody work to find them!"

  But when on one occasion this unpleasant, bellowing assistant, in his quest to produce a lively, pleasing explosion for the hero-boy, received in good faith from one of us an orange which had not been thoroughly toasted and dried by the summer-long effect of scorching temperatures and intense sunshine, one in which the slightest smidgen of juice lingered leaving the orange with a pliant, elastic core, and when it failed to detonate properly under the hero-boy's feet, and several people giggled nervously, the assistant froze, glanced down with a glare, and bellowed "Daannnggg!" Our leader simply hobbled over to the curb with a shrug and hooked the leathery orange off the heel of his boot, leaving the orange as it came off, smeared pathetically over the edge of the curb like some mutilated accident victim. But as he came back his assistant cast a smoldering look of disgust at us as though no amount of his reprove could describe how repugnant the situation really was. We, he let us all know, ought to have known better than to have disappointed our leader. It seemed then that he transferred his hatred to us, to our uselessness and inferiority, and it was us, as well as the orange, that he despised. From then on, he examined our bombs thoroughly.

  My fascination with this stomping boy and his assistant with the ugly temper, inevitably lessened as the morning wore on; his sister left me, but still I searched for oranges for him like a robot, and the sight of a large blackened orange which no one had yet claimed lured me into an area near the street where several low, twisted boughs trailed in the dirt. After working my way toward the swarthy orange, and making several frustrating thrusts with my short arms toward it, a swarm of delicate green lace wings fluttered up in my face and I discovered, by tracing their take-off, an opening in the branches right above me. When I popped up into it, I found I had arrived in a bower, a leafy cavity, where there was shelter from the wind and a small peephole which gave an unobstructed view of the parade.

  The parade! In my delight with the explosions, and my pursuit of oranges, I had almost forgotten about the files and files of ponies and cowboys passing by on the street right outside the tree! Secure inside this bower-work cell, I worked my eye close up to the peephole that I had just discovered; the edges of the hole were surrounded by interesting orange leaves, many of which were knotted and gnarled into various nautilus or snaillike forms; the morning light burnished the outer shells of these curled leaves and intensified the crisp shadows of the folded undersides; the wind, tossing the tree limbs about, set the whorled leaves bobbing and shaking; though the shapes of the leaves were pitifully deformed when seen up close, in the blurred sunlight and with the limbs heaving in the wind, the effect of all those blighted leaves was to mimic the scrolls and curlicues on an ornate edge of a golden frame; it certainly seemed that a clever gardener had clipped the leaves to make this shining window on the world. The closest branches to my eye formed a small frame, only a few inches across, but looking through it I discovered there were others, in fact a whole series which extended forward in increasing diameters, and together they acted as a golden telescope or spyglass, the type that snap sections of smaller diameter together, and this spyglass seemed by its perspective to magnify the cowboys, oxen and stagecoaches that were travelling toward me and to present each image in momentary isolation, the same way artists who need inspiration for a new painting will slide a square which is snipped out of the middle of a sheet of blank paper around a large painting searching for a smaller, suitable aspect to paint, a masterpiece within the masterpiece, so to speak.

  After several moments spent getting used to the view from my golden telescope, and allowing my eye to adjust to the odd light and the usual feeling of the air moving toward me, which made my eyelid snap shut compulsively until I got accustomed to it, I was delighted when an exquisite moving sculpture trotted into the shimmering frame. It was a creamy white pony, the color of a fine white marble, which had been harnessed to a black brougham in which an Arizona doctor of the 1880's rode the dusty roads to a house call. This pony pranced through the blowing dust in a manner that was perfectly fluid, its petite and sharp-edged hooves struck the pavement rhythmically as it trotted toward me, withers twitching, a long blonde forelock swept to one side and obscuring that eye like the hairstyle of the Surfer-Boy which had just becoming the teenage girl's obsession and had worked its way down to children. I watched as the pony pranced toward me angling slightly sideways as though it hoped to offer the most attractive three-quarters view of its milky breast, and somehow the angle it took kept it positioned inside the spyglass, though it became larger. The pony wore a winter coat; haunches which seemed to have been smooth normally were dappled with patches of thick white hair, and it had a very hairy muzzle. Its eyes on either side of its pretty head rolled about delightfully and the dock arched. The precision movements of its legs became more exaggerated as it came closer and it seemed as though each leg were drilled in the desired motion, trained to produce a fine moving miniature. The perfect dancing animal filled the frame exactly; the powerful arch of his neck just skimming under the top of the picture, the small mouth held pertly down, big lashes batting as he danced. The ears pricked upward perfectly, the mane curled on its strong neck, and the tail splayed in the wind.

  A sinuous branch cut out across the opening and the pony's hooves suddenly seemed to be striking the very bark; it could have been a teeny horse dancing on that branch, enchanting me with a lovely trot, and then breaking into a canter.

  Then the pony stepped out of the frame and the doctor's carriage flashed through and I returned to the vital business of finding and collecting seared oranges for the boy with the fascinating arms; I ducked down and sprinted here and there in the tree well snatching up the husks before any of the other children spied them; I stood with two grenades in line bouncing on the toes of my sneakers, ready to produce my hoard for the work of the boy bomber, and while I waited, I enjoyed the unparalleled sensation of excitement brewing inside me, bubbling happily, and it was a mad desire which was brimming over ever since I had seen the dwarf white horse prancing atop the tree limb. I now had a unceasing desire to own, not any real life-sized horse, but the animated, miniature horse; I coveted that sweet petite animal, and waves of ardent pleasure overtook me just to think of owning such a treasure; if only some mysterious magician poured these miniature horses out of a gorgeous green bottle; if only a genie would only conjure his from a brass lamp; if only he were tied up at a pint-sized hitching post behind some dusty boxes on a shelf at Toy Mart; as I finished stooping under a branch to gather another dried orange, I popped up inside my secret vantage point, my golden spyglass, again only to discover that someone had changed the channel so that the frame was occupied by other Lilliputian characters; this time it was human members of the world's parade, counterfeit conquistadors, who served out their ordinary days of drudgery as accountants and dentists. They trooped by, their plodding march and battered wooden breastplates and leaving the crowd with the impression that they were actually seeing a band of mournful desert tortoises; their numbers inevitably included that silliest of all conquistadors, Coronado, whose bewildered expression and pike probing the sky made him the butt of rude jokes. The morning light gleaming off his helmet. As Coronado bowed on, another conquistador, a plump, red-faced man, neatly filled the golden frame. I delighted in this small man's antics. Sporting a purple v
elvet doublet and tights, which made a marvelous contrast with the pale gray pavement and the moving curtains of dust, he marched blindly into the biting wind; his miniature thighs bulged, his calves pumped and his legs and arms were jointed so loosely it was as though a genius of a painter had managed to show movement and separation. Suddenly, just when his helmet threatened to whack the top of the golden frame, he placed his teeny hand over his heart, and his head raised momentarily while his eyes rolled upward like a dying warrior in an oil painting and then his fat series of chins dropped onto one another and the last chin dropped onto his chest. I was watching the breakdown of this sham conquistador, a double-chinned, and horribly overheated gentleman, whose thighs bulging out of his breeches, who could barely support his wooden shield in the wind and sun. He leaned out on his thick knee, tentatively, accepting the support of another conquistador, and he tried to slowly rotate the sore joint of his hip. He winced and clutched at his Samaritan. Two other conquistadors arrived to support him; he grimaced more and shook his head; most definitely the answer was no, any further travel on the faulty knee joint was a no-go. A nervous consultation among the men resulted in them waving down an approaching antique coach, I believe it was the one once owned by a mayor, to take him to the end of the parade. Hitching him slowly up the steps, the coach bowing to his weight, the people inside grabbing his arms as he allowed himself to be ignominiously handled, he stopped to wave goodbye the applauding crowd and then was unceremoniously wedged sideways through the narrow coach doorway; when his left knee began buckling.

  Wouldn't the pair of them, the white horse and the fat uncomfortable conquistador, be splendid to own, I wondered to myself? If they were my dolls, my possessions, if their miniature destinies lay in my hands, wouldn't that be exquisite? The smooth white back of the horse could rest right under my palm, I would feel its tiny heart pumping blood around the body, its muscles ripples, a nervous feeling that the horse would have with such a big hand controlling it; the feel of its warm coat which I could brush, with a tiny brush, of course, would relax me, why I could feel myself relaxing with the thought of tending it minutely. If it kicked, I could feel its muscles tense before the back legs flew up. The world would have a perfect nature to it. And wouldn't they be fun to arrange? The real-life little man could be set to the task of exploring my room. What glorious days I could spend taming the horse and teaching it to perform tricks, interesting antics with its hooves among the perfume bottles and combs on the top of our dresser. Then the tiny pony would make me feel as though she were my own creation. And in thinking that I reached the thing I needed to think. That was it, the heart of what I wanted, not the substance but the idea of my own creation.

  Intricate layers compounded to form this experience, a doll, a living doll, the thoughts of owning living dolls, and ultimately the creative act of imagining or creating living dolls. At first it was the possession of the creation that I sought, the doll itself, but I wanted someone else to manufacture them for me, to make me the dolls, but to give them life, to make them moving dolls. Then it became not the teeny pony or the teeny conquistador itself that fascinated me but only the idea of the excitement that came with creating them and moving them about. I could only penetrate the last idea at a shallow level. I thought about that for only an instance before the idea of the things themselves, my interest in their material substance, intruded itself again and I was unable to focus on the idea of the creative act because the look of their actual eyes, the touch of their actual bodies, overwhelmed the more interesting obsession with the idea of the process or act of creating them.

  Shortly after I saw the conquistador and stood in line with my last dried orange for the boy-bomber, that year's parade ended.