A Phantom Herd

by Lorraine Ray

During a windy parade, 1964, an old Navajo gentleman completed a sand painting in the window of a department store; the big stores in downtown Tucson hired the sand painters during rodeo week when crowds of snowbirds, many of them fresh from that dreadful place called Back East, milled their cold corpses around the streets of downtown soaking up our bright, ebullient February sunshine, that valuable solar benefit which poured itself in great liquid lumps onto our colorful but slightly disheveled streets. The particular store where I watched these gentlemen practice their art has long since fallen into ruins and been replaced, most likely, by a high-rise lawyers' complex; the fact that I ever saw them seems distinctly impossible now, a relic of bygone days or an illusion conjured up to support my art's needs.

  During this time the Pioneer Hotel, one of many bustling centers of rodeo activity, hadn't burned down-Mr. and Mrs. Greensteen, who would choose to perish together in that fire rather than escape, lived luxurious lives in the penthouse suite of the old hotel-and it was possible to see real cowboys and livestock owners near the hotel lobby flashing enormous wads of twenty-dollar bills and photogenic smiles; they began arriving the weekend before the rodeo in waves, a bit like long-legged locust, getting in and out of elevators and Cadillacs, the masses of these long exotic cars flocked together like migratory birds which had their tall tail fins banded by chrome and had been painted the most astonishing shades of yellow, turquoise or pink.

  I'm not sure to this day how the sand painters fit in, exactly who thought of bringing them to our town during rodeo week, or in what year they first arrived and were hired, by whom I'll never know, to dribble their exquisite sand art in our store windows. Navajos, whose cultural home is on the higher mesas of Arizona near the Utah border, didn't have much of a history in Southern Arizona, though many were boarded in town to attend high school and college and certainly found work here; it seems that the O'odham, who are intimately tied to the local history, never wove their baskets in any store windows, though they have an equally compelling art; I suppose the answer is that Navajos were a novelty and put on a good show. By the time I was ten, the banishment of sand painters from store window had occurred, and they had disappeared as thoroughly and as enigmatically as their sandy artwork used to-before they began gluing it to boards for tourists.

  Do any other people anywhere else in the world create art using material as impermanent as loose particles of colored sand? If so, I haven't heard of them. The Navajo's palate consists of colored sands in small bowls that are arranged along the edge of a plateau of tawny sand that forms the canvas. The sand painter takes the sand into their closed fist and dribbles it out. What appeared at first to be aimless and indistinct efforts, mere dribs and drabs, gradually evolved into extraordinary murals. In the end the sand painter would lift their work and scatter the sand in the wind. Destroying their creation was part of the creative act. The idea of gluing the sand onto a board and selling the art was alien then, purely a modern notion.

  The year I saw a sand painter, my father brought the three of us, Meredith, Jack, and me, downtown with him on the Thursday morning of rodeo week, the same morning of the rodeo parade, to pick up our new Magnavox stereophonic record player and radio receiver.

  Mother didn't approve of stereos.

  "I wish you would find something else to spend your money on. Something we could use a little bit more than a stereo. There are some many wholesome things that the house and the children need. I don't want the children sitting around listening to music, unless it happens to be folk music, maybe, but no, not even that. The recording industry is controlled by the gal-darn mob, oh, way back, as far back as Billy-be darned this recording industry goes and vaudeville types before that. Well, Shakespeare probably had to deal with some toughs that shook down the Old Globe, maybe, I don't know. I wouldn't trust the folk music industry even. Those guys got control of most of the entertainment business, even religious recordings and shows, by cracky, and dictated all the terms and who was going to be popular. Taking a cut of everything. Well, all you're doing by buying that stereo and Long Playing Recordings is propping up the Mafia as it controls America and I don't approve of that not matter what we get in return. Sure, we all enjoy a little music once and a while, however I don't think you should ignore the scandals in that music industry. They are as corrupt as can be, let me tell you, getting paid money for what goes on the radio and lying about contests and by buying their products you only perpetuate their hold on our country. Every time I turn on the radio and listen to the George and Square Show I think I ought not to be listening to it. It makes me madder than a wet hen. I want to hear the news."

  "What recording would you like?" asked Father bravely, knowing better than we did that this was just letting off steam and she actually was about to tell him to buy a certain musical act.

  We held our breath thinking that she was going to become angry, but her response astonished us.

  "Well, the only recording I want is Nat King Cole. His singing pleases me. You may buy a Nat King Cole recording if you must. I'm not saying you should. I would sit down on a Sunday afternoon and listen to that recording, if you brought that home. I don't know the name of any of his recordings. I suppose any of them would do. But I'd listen all the way through, at least once. He is a great singer. I don't know if the Mafia controls him, but I hope not."

  Rodeo week typically sent us into frenzies of happiness, or madness, depending on your prospective. The later view was my mother's, who faulted the Tucson schools for our hysterical condition. We decked ourselves out in outlandish rodeo costumes, western regalia, at school during that week. To her way of thinking our appearance at school in rodeo costumes drained our thinking power. Certainly we were preoccupied by the stiff holsters at our sides and the cap guns with chrome paint peeling off the metal and pebbles stuffed in the barrels. Instead of doing arithmetic on our papers, our fingers counted the lengthy series of empty cells in the leather bandoleers slung across our serapes; the slides of our father's bolo ties (with the preserved resin encased remains of a slight blonde scorpion or the pewter cow skulls with gleaming red jeweled eyes) kept travelling up and down the bola strings. How could we stop them? And we kept a steady eye on the hunk of turquoise around our necks that in the veins of black depicted a scene from a renaissance master or a Ming Cottage Contemplating Immortality. A beaten and bedraggled hat of our grandfather's when he visited the Old Pueblo possessed us with the wild desire to slap it against our schoolmates' faces. The straw sombrero we purchased in Nogales or the straw cowboy hat that the man who built a wall left behind kept urging us to cry "Yippee!" And especially distracting were those goofy Argentinean hats with green and red pom-poms bobbling playfully on the lower edge of the flat broad brims. They made us slap our soles down and dance.

  "Run past Texas John Slaughter!" cried one boy. This was a playground monitor who was particularly fierce. She always planted one heel on the raised sprinkler head and wore a hat. I'm not sure who thought up the Texas John Slaughter name, but she might have been from Texas.

  They all ran past her quickly screaming "Arriba, Arriba!"

  "Hey, you kids! Come back here, all of yous. Get back here now!" screamed Texas John Slaughter. "I'm telling all of your teachers. Just because it's Rodeo doesn't mean you can go crazy."

  But we did.

  During classes we rapped and rubbing the metal tips of our bolo ties together and obsessively tapped and fiddled with the pocket snaps on our cowboy shirts. The leather belts with a space for your name branded in the back creaked relentlessly. Short vests in charming colors needed to be compulsively tugged down. And the chaps that heated in the sun and stunk like a dead cow needed to be stabbed by our pens. Pink or red boots on the girls allowed us to clomp noisily up the aisles between the desks when we were called up to the board to fail at two-digit multiplication.

  Our mother objected especially to the appearance of slacks and especially jeans on the girls at school during rodeo. In her opinion, giving girls permissi
on to don slacks for the three days prior to the holiday exceeded foolishness. Based on an intense and irrational Midwestern prudishness which could only be in response to an early childhood spent viewing too much barnyard sex, she reasoned that the continuous friction of any close, but loose, material, denim especially, with the sensitive skin on the inner thigh of a young female could produce unnatural levels of a carnal enthusiasm. One could guess where that would lead to; the Road to Perdition loomed in the offing. Elastic girdles because they held this area still and protected it from buffing or rubbing, which simulated sex, were correct garments to wear under slacks; skirts by not touching the inner thigh were less sexual, although you would think the access easier. This business about us wearing jeans was all rather mysterious to our prepubescent minds which hadn't yet worked out sex positions anyway and of course the true cause of our lunacy was much simpler; we got out of school on the Thursday and Friday of Rodeo week and as a result there was an air of celebratory stupidity which was as intense in Jack as it was in Meredith and me.

  Besides allowing costumes, rodeo week had another consequence, one that children in the Old Pueblo dreaded. We arrived on the schoolyard our Adam's Apples assaulted by the enormous knot in our red and black bandannas, dreading that which was coming, like some monster in the hall which the celebrants would not discuss and were afraid even to name. During Rodeo week we were forced to dance square dances. A thoroughly depressing prospect, this mandatory enactment of the ritualized rip-roaring roundup, the square dance, had to be performed in squares of four couples and we had to hold hands, boys with girls, girls with boys. Lucky were the children left as extras in the last incomplete square. They got to perform their do-si-dos and Grande Allemande with an invisible partner.

  I remember one year seeing a blue phonographic record with its paper label showing a giddy square-dance-loving couple, a swinging pair of goons turning over and over; her hair poking out from under her cowboy hat was a mass of perfect blonde curls and his hair cut in a butch stabbed the air with raw Americanism. This disk was divided by the slick and shiny concentric circles of silence which we so craved instead of the noisy scratching of the fiddles, the repetitious strumming guitars, and the insane yodels and calls of some noisome nobody who pretended to be a cowboy. My teacher that year read the caller's name solemnly of the back of the LP as though she actually knew him. She held up a notebook of collected programs, of the square dances all of the state that she had attended with someone named Grant. And then she took across her body the arms of some suffering boy and walked a promenade. Then they do-si-doed, back to back, until she crashed her sizable bottom into her desk and wallowed painfully back to the record player, the old gray school phonograph with its large black and gold knobs. The next tune would be "Hoe-down Downtown," she informed us. But before we started she described her after-hours spent, not in bars, not tending children, which she had never wanted, but in the wholesome musical diversion of dancing these square dances all over the state. And even the amusing spectacle of her in layers of frill and a plunging neckline, could not inspire us to wish for the three days of square dancing before we were released on good behavior.

  But square dancing, thankfully, was over for the year. All the way down to the stereo store from our home which was then on the eastern outskirts of town my brother and sister and I scooted around the back of our station wagon like a pack of lean hounds. We were ravenous for our prey and our prey were Easterners. Let us at them, wherever they were hiding! We were sure we would eat them alive when we found them, and their pale bodies, sprinkled with a dusting of chili powder, would taste delicious! Easterners, I decided, would like square dances.

  "Hey, look that! That's just the craziest! Whoopee!"

  "Lady!"

  "What lady? Where?"

  "That lady! Look at her. Coming out of the hotel. Right there! She's wearing a dead fox and she looks like a dead rotting fox herself."

  "Ha, ha, you think she's weird? Take a look at her husband's face!"

  "He looks like this."

  "Oh, gee! They look about as stiff as a couple of deadies!"

  "He, he."

  "Gee whizz, this is great!"

  "That guy is funny. He's going to the rodeo in a business suit."

  "What!"

  "Look over there. There's a guy in a big furry coat."

  "Hey, Goofy!"

  "You outta be in Nude York!"

  "Get outta here!"

  "Go back to the grave. Paley boy!"

  "Don't get scared by some horsey!"

  It was wonderful to slide around, banging against the wheel wells, hollering out the open tailgate, shouting impertinent phrases, ridicule, and rude noises at anyone that we thought looked remotely like idiotic Easterners; pale austere ladies wearing black net veils over the upper half of their faces and whose throats sparkled with short crystal necklaces; overweight men wearing graveyard expressions and gray suits; boys in dressy shorts and matching hats, especially ones with propellers perched jauntily on the top and spinning slowly as though indicating the syrupy flow of their self-satisfied thoughts-they would be captains of industry in smoke-clogged, over-populated, and freezing cities. Pah on them!

  Children crave someone to persecute; in this we were no different. Those dread Easterners, we held in several discussions among ourselves, were very likely to be the same people who, jealous of our liberating warmth in winter, our many bright and sunny afternoons when we ran without coats in our parks and didn't have to shovel snow, conspired to set the nation's school curriculums and composed our textbooks. Safely ensconced in New York City high rise offices, they spent long cold afternoon filling our textbooks with what we considered worthless drivel about sledding, snowmen, and subways, maple trees and ocean-side clam bakes; clam bakes! Of all the irrelevant things to someone surrounded by cacti in the desert; and it was they who made us to pretend to learn the history of the thirteen original colonies (and nothing about Arizona). Why, though it seemed impossible to imagine anyone more ignorant of Mexico than we were, Easterners when they came to Tucson, openly flaunted their stupidity toward things Mexican; we were much more subtly stupid. Trust an Easterner to wonder what a taco was and be unable to pronounce it. We asked ourselves what kind of person it could be that had never enjoyed a raisin in a tamale and didn't know the smell of fresh masa. Clearly, these were incomplete people. When would they learn to pronounce the words chimichanga or tortilla?

  We were cultural zealots immersed completely in the reality of our own peculiar outskirts of the world and who were enraged by the cultural hegemony of the East. Their ability, because of population density, to dictate to us what the national culture would be, left us feeling powerless. In short, Easterners were our enemies; we were on a general campaign to commit depredations against them; to be tanner than them; to laugh much louder and longer; to jump off high wobbly structures shouting "Geronimo!" in their presence. Devil-may-care, dressed in T-shirts and jeans before they were the national costume, we hissed the word "Easterner" as though they were a specie of drab grubs which had infested the United States.

  My father nosed the long hood of our green and white station wagon into the crisp winter shade outside of the awning that hung over the front door and windows of Don Juan's Television and Stereophonic Emporium. Nervous of denting the hubcaps, yet afraid of the encroaching parade traffic, he inched the station wagon in close to the high curb. The back of the wagon, where we were, stuck out past the end of the stereo store where there was a small dirt parking lot, the only open lot in what was a solid block of businesses; my eyes immediately focused on a thick brocade which appeared on a brick wall at the back of this vacant lot; I thought what I was seeing was an extraordinary tapestry, large and impressive enough to rival anything hung on a European cathedral wall, but gradually, after pricking it apart visually, I realized that what I had taken for a large picture was instead a series of small pictures, a collage consisting of season upon season of bullfighting posters plastered
one atop the other and announcing in detail the schedule of fighting in Nogales, Sonora. The matadors and the dates appeared beneath the enormous black bulk of the bulls themselves and beneath the banners which promised in screaming letters the spectacular nature of the upcoming battles. The impression that these posters were a tapestry or a needlepoint was increased by the picadors' lances, which stuck out of the bulls at random angles like abandoned needles.

  I used to color on a low mosaic table, which had the verdant scene of a mission across a lake on the tiles and which was purchased by my father in Guaymas, Mexico, and at this table I sat cross-legged in front of the large glassy eye of our black and white television; for hours every Saturday night while the snowy images of the prior Sunday's bullfights from various arenas across Mexico appeared in that strange aquarium glass of the TV, I impassively stroked coloring pages with thick crayons; the sublime woody aroma of a fresh coloring page reminds me of Hemingway's passionate sport, though it translated to me as a stagy soap opera as overly theatric as Mexican telenovelas but due to the language barrier these bullfights were a sufficiently dull backdrop for the much more exciting work of coloring. What cities these bullfights took place in I'll never know; I understood not a whit of what was happening, the sequence or significance of the stages of death of this great spectacle, or the elaborate move of the matadors, nor did I care to learn. The blood oozing down the injured bull's sides and dripping onto the sand of the arena appeared in black and white as a wet chocolate spill, a rather messy ice cream sundae. What tradition there was in bullfighting I did not care to know. The names of any of the weapons or the moves of the matador disinterested me. Only the padded horses occasionally drew my attention when they were slammed against the wooden corral; I liked their wild eyes when the bull moved them.

  But on that wall on that rodeo day the collage of bullfighting posters, some faded some fresh, appeared in ragged rectangles of peeling paper, blistering up from summers spent in hundred degree heat. It was as though someone had plucked at threads in order to take a tapestry apart or as if over time the threads had worn and the tapestry had grown ragged.

  Under the confusion of bullfighting on these posters two teeny characters reclined against the sunny brick wall, bedrolls tucked under the small of their backs while they passed a liquor bottle back and forth between them. Now, characters were what my mother called people you didn't want to look at too closely, the exception being interesting characters in a book whom you were certain you would want to sit beside with TV trays banging knees at dinner, even if they were as unsavory as Bill Sykes, but I studied these characters, scrutinized their filthy visages and their ragged clothes. I remember one of them had a snowy white beard that stretched to such a length that he tucked an unknown measure of it into his pant waistband and the end came back up as though (horribly!) it was his white pubic hair sprouting up to meet his beard. The band of his pants was wider than any I had seen; his funny old pants needed suspenders and could have been, I thought years later, the bottoms of a Confederate uniform, with the filth on them of a thousand disappointing roads and foreign fields. He wore a striped cap-was it a railroader's cap which helped him to hop on trains but had been reduced to a bad state by all the travelling?-and his eyes were teeny and looked as though they had been pressed too close together into a withered slice of white apple. He was terribly thin with small square-toed black boots caked with clay poking out oddly at the ends of his legs. His companion was as brown and as young and as smooth of face as the other man was pale and old and hairy. But they had struck up a friendship. That was another way, I realized, that I felt superior to Easterners who might have frowned on a Mexican and an old American hobo sharing swigs from the same bottle, even in the relative privacy of an early morning vacant lot, whereas that was ordinary stuff to us; there was only one nationality among hobos, and many of them, though not all, weren't reluctant to mix in with Mexicans if they passed through town; in the winter the fringes of downtown cities across the Southwest, especially the railroad easements, were practically nothing but masses of hobos and their sparkling, litter strewn camps could be glimpsed through a veil of creosote bushes, twinkling across the light pink dirt. I felt a certain pride in that, my town's open-mindedness, but this was because I cherished a great deal of misunderstandings.

  Father had just put the car in park when Meredith leaped out of the open station wagon window. Father got out and slammed his door; before he entered the store he squinted dramatically in our direction and shook a single threatening finger. "Be back here in forty minutes and I mean it. I'll have the stereo and a dozen or so records picked out by then. I'm gonna get some Nat King Cole records for your mother and some jazz for me. Don't get hurt! Don't get lost! The crowds are bad down here today, so watch yourself. Watch out for the cars and look both ways if you cross the street. Keep ahold of your sister's hand the whole time."

  He yanked the brass door of the stereo store with a glance back at us. "Ojos," was what he said as he strode inside. That was his favorite parting tag, and as teenagers it never failed to send us into peals of laughter, though it was years before we got the nerve to laugh and Jack would reply with "huevos" in his best Senor Wenchlas voice.

  A streak of pale yellow sped by.

  "Hey!" yelled Meredith at the speeding sedan. "There goes some big shot rancher. Dang, I bet he's rich, rich, rich. Look at that car of his. What a big shot. Probably cost him a few pennies." Smoky black windows and weird antennas on a Cadillac-this one was canary yellow-announced the passing presence of A Mysterious Arizona Big Shot. As I said, these rich old geezers could be seen in town at rodeo time; they liked the parade and the pancake breakfast at the Pioneer Hotel and, I suppose, driving around town buying concha belts that hung low on the sassy hips of their skinny teenaged granddaughters.

  "If we catch up to him, he might like us if we tell him some stuff about how we play in the arroyos and stuff and he might think we are really great kids with a lot of potential and spunk and he might just decide to give us his fortune in the future, secretly, kinda," said Meredith, revealing by this comment her own treasured fantasy about riches, a wish-fulfillment daydream we had picked up from my mother who acting as a librarian in a small town on the Salamonie River and had read and reread, and suggested to the unwary reader, rather foxy and smudged copies of Great Expectations and Daddy Long Legs. Possibly goofy Horatio Alger tales as well. We were always on the lookout for a free handout from random adults, who were no more apt to bestow their wealth on a trio of such unattractive children than our own parents were (for in their stinginess they did not even grant us a weekly allowance). Howard Hughes, we knew, owned certain tracts of desert land and we imagined, as someone later really claimed, that we might meet him casually and convince him to bestow the deed to several valuable properties on us.

  My brother, wide-eyed at the mention of an available fortune which might be rapidly retreating, though all he would have desired from the money was the opportunity to purchase innumerable plastic model airplane kits, clambered over the station wagon tailgate and jumped down beside Meredith, his thumbs crooked around the belt loops at the front of his jeans in some unconscious homage to a cowboy Hercules, though Jack was frail, resembling Mahatma Gandhi with his chest imprisoned in shrunken white T-shirts. "Hey, Mister. Hey, come back here, Mister!" Jack yelled in the loudest voice that an asthmatic nine-year-old could produce. He was risking one of his frequent wheezing attacks.

  "Callensen el osico!" screeched the young drunken derelict right back at us, and his shout echoed off the canyon of bricks that surrounded him. His Spanish came out horribly slurred and, I suppose, thinking to add further insult, but unsure if any of his words would sound any clearer, he threw back his head, so that his long bluish black hair hung down on his back like an ink spill, and he crowed: urph-a-urph-urph, urph-a-urph-urph; his tongue arched and flopped in his mouth in a way English-speakers could never hope to imitate; his arms, tucked under his armpits, began flapping at his
sides and one leg lifted to paw the air as though he had metamorphosed into a new mythical beast, the upper half a rooster, the lower half a peeing male dog. It really was an extraordinary performance, eye-catching, but also disturbing in the way he expressed his real disgust for us.

  A young couple, who had been strolling toward us on the sidewalk and had been all smiles for each other, loudly discussing horseback riding and their mutual excitement with our towering variety of cacti, scooted ahead nervously at the explosion of raucous crowing from the derelict; the young woman turned her face away from the vacant lot and sought the protection of her youthful man's chest; I could see the muscle in her forearm clench as she worked the strap of her purse under the lapel of her blue blazer and clutched the strap and the lapel together as though Faust and the Devil had begun to wrestle for her. Both their heels, which had been clicking in happy unison, now pounded the pavement urgently with ugly, opposing beats. The man who was walking with her leaned backward and his angry blue eyes shot here and there about the vacant lot, the very back of which finally yielded the pair of lounging hobos, and that man seemed to be thinking, I imagined, that the Spanish which had preceded the crowing had insinuated something obscene about his pert young companion. That was certainly one way in which I felt worldly-wise, superior, braver than that stiff man and woman, who I took to be a couple of dippy Easterners, for sure. There are some ridiculous people in this world, I thought, and most of them are Easterners. Hadn't they realized that the hobo, though he was certainly unsavory, had simply told Jack to shut up? If hobos could be said to have a job while they visited town, it most likely consisted of drifting around telling kids what to do, to mind their parents, to read and obey rules, and to shut up, things they never did themselves, of course, and it was as though they had been stationed around our Old Pueblo, in empty lots, arroyos and alleyways, purely as surrogate, stopgap parents. I often wondered if those tramps had left very many children elsewhere in America or Mexico, and being oppressed, as I imagined I was, by overbearing parents, I envied these liberated, fatherless children who would be climbing trees and bouncing down on saggy, buggy couches behind airy shacks, and swimming in mud holes, and what more apt demonstration could there be of a middleclass child's shallow understanding of actual poverty? Well, the hobos felt guilty enough about leaving their kids in those lovely airy shacks and mud holes that they harassed every kid they laid eyes on.

  I straddled the tailgate on my stomach and began cautiously lowering one knee over the side when, to my surprise, Meredith and Jack dashed off in pursuit of the Cadillac. The fear of being left behind caused me to perform a kind of impromptu and imperfect back flip, something I never could have managed on my own as anything remotely resembling gymnastics terrified me. As I went over, the base of my skull conked the bumper; in silver that bumper showed a panorama of the sapphire sky and crazy clotted clouds, strangely barred and bending off at the edges as though the beautiful clouds had decided to retreat shyly around a convenient corner.

  I looked into the chrome bumper for only a second more and yet in that second of time the herd of cattle that I had seen on my way home from the church potluck reappeared. The same billowing heads, jamming their way forward, the crowds of steers, bulls bellowing, heads raised and tongues lolling. It was the fabulous Phantom Herd that I had seen when in the car with Peg. I was certain of it. The mass of cows fled around the edge of the chrome bumper in a rapid boiling froth. Cows, bulls, and calves, heads held high, pushing and shoving, whipping themselves in a fury toward the mountains. As quickly as I had seen the Phantom Herd, they were gone.

  After recovering from the blow to my head by jiggling it well, I came up slowly and shakily, and the derelicts, who were watching me, collapsed in sniggers.

  "Hey, missy," called the white bearded one after swallowing another swig from the bottle and passing it to his companion, "come here. I got something to g-g-ive you." He sang the word 'give,' strung it out in a queer, suggestive way, a deliberate stutter that should have warned me that he wasn't serious. He held his fouled old arm out with the fingers of his outstretched hand cupped and the wrist cocked down as if he concealed a hard candy in his hand and he might drop that candy into my hand if I would just come near enough for him to manage it.

  I ventured forward hesitantly, responding almost robotically to his primitive offer of calories free-for-the-taking in the way that I suppose millions of ravenous cave children and famished women before me had when lured by their stomachs to their black dooms then enslaved, hacked apart, or thrown off the edge of a cliff by a devilish madman, and all the while I was imagining, rather foolishly, that the horrible hand suspended in midair might conceal some delicious creamy nougat or a bit of fine, crackling butterscotch, safely sanitized in a wax paper wrapper, I hoped, though why I wanted anything that had been housed even temporarily in a pocket which hung anywhere near the body of that grimy miscreant is beyond the ability of my mature brain to fathom. But we adults can hardly stand to look back at our naked vulnerabilities and see the monstrous might-have-beens that haunt us, especially when we have our own children, and we realize we are just as paralyzed to do anything about their bad judgment as we were to stop ourselves in our past. We look on in horror at what we are about to do. A few steps closer brought me to the very edge of the oozy shore of a sallow pond, a broad and gummy puddle. Wet caliche can carry a scent which permeated the air above the water and this stopped me for a moment; this lake mercifully blocked my progress toward the outstretched hand, and then the old man who lay on the far lakeshore suddenly sucked in both his cheeks and mashed together his loathsome lips making a kissing fish-face and a slurping, suckling sound. What an appalling sight for the eyes of a girl! The young hobo howled to see how shocked I was by the old man's disgusting face, and I didn't wait to see more; I took off out of there pronto. I felt like damning aloud those drunken foolish hobos that plagued our town each winter. Why weren't they packed in railroad cars and sent on their way to break their backs in the fields of California?

  My pursuit of Meredith and Jack, who trailed the elusive yellow Cadillac, resumed; I spotted my brother and sister entering a crowded wind-swept street where a line of fuming red, yellow and green buses with the ominous bulletin RODEO GROUNDS blaring in big white letters across the width of their black headliners waited patiently to swallow their allotted bellyful of overly-excited tourists.

  "I don't know why they aren't letting us on yet."

  "Yeah, we wanna go!" said a freckled face boy who was beating his mother's purse with a toy gun. "I wanna see some horses and junk."

  "That isn't the right way to talk. And you're scratching my purse. Stop it. Put the gun away."

  "Well, I wanna go!" he said hitting the purse again.

  "They're moving us on. Look, we took a step forward."

  "Excuse me. I'm sorry I jostled your arm. Someone in the crowd behind us is pushing."

  "Can you make the steps all right?" said a man to his pregnant wife.

  "I wish I had brought some food," remarked an older woman in front of them.

  "Do you suppose we'll all fit?" asked a man at the back.

  Two by two, like obliging animals entering an odd Ark, the ladies and gentlemen with an appetite for the reenactment of various acts of animal subjugation, stepped into their future, into their rodeo destiny, pulling children and the elderly up the steps behind them. Such an amazing assortment of goofy gaucho hats, fringe vests, and Mexican peasant blouses I'd never seen in my life, certainly not on grown men and women. The sight of all those duded-up people scrambling to get in the buses rivaled the antics seen in any monkey house at the zoo; the smaller children chattered, the women picked odds and ends out of their children's pockets, and the husbands looked stony and manly, like silver-backed gorillas, enduring the crush.

  It dumfounded me to see tourists filing so willingly, so naively, into those cryptic buses; after all, what was there to guarantee that the driver would take you to the rodeo grounds and
not to his uncle's tallow factory where you would be melted down for the quantity of fat in your body? It was several years later, of course, when a terrible thing-not quite as bad as being rendered down-did occur. One of those very same coaches with the words RODEO GROUNDS on the headliner parked at a curb in downtown Tucson, but this coach turned out to be anything but a bus to the rodeo. Every time a load of tourists filled a bus, this one particular bus advanced in the line until it reached the front and tourists randomly claimed their seats. The crammed bus drove off. Many people on it, being visitors to the state, never suspected when the bus took a slight detour. But when the driver kept driving, right past any turns that would lead to the rodeo grounds, those who were residents protested. The driver explained that traffic snarls meant a detour. Minutes later, the bus swung around the front of an old ruined warehouse and the driver unloaded the tourists into the waiting clutches of masked men with guns.

  These men, without explaining their intentions, herded the group into the warehouse using cattle prods, barred the door, and drove away. The resulting hysteria and mass panic of the group was vividly described in the book: Our Rodeo Ordeal. Their distress inside the warehouse while they managed an escape made interesting news, but the police never caught the culprits nor explained their motive. The owner of the warehouse was as bewildered by what happened as the kidnapped people and the driver who took them there had disappeared.

  We passed the buses and I remember seeing men, temporary hires, who had a look of desperation in their faces and they were standing on the sidewalks carrying huge bundles of sticks. At the top of the sticks either red straw donkeys or blue felt banners bunched together and the banners read "Join the Cowboy Party Today!" If I had had any money with me, I would have bought one of those stout, straw-stuffed donkeys. I was as susceptible to donkeys as just about anything in the world including butterscotch nougats.

  Besides wishing for money to buy one of those donkeys, my aspiration as we ran through the shadowy valleys of banks, dime stores, and Indian curio shops that made up our teeny, colorful downtown was that lots of those damn, goofy Easterners could be standing around being thrilled by our display of western bravado, by the way we galloped down the streets, by our clomping boots, by our whooping voices, which mimicked what we hoped were official-sounding sirens. We slowed down with the crowds and I looked at the walls of people who were waiting for the parade to see if any pale emaciated Eastern grub children, wearing hats with spinning blades on the top, admired us, but instead my eyes found a large, tanned young man in a cowboy shirt.

  This young cowboy embodied everything, everything worthwhile in the male of our species. A weedy pale blonde thatch, almost wild, sprouted out of his handsome head, a fabulous head, perfectly formed as any Adonis with sparkling eyes and a gorgeous mouth. His hair had been lightly shaved into a flat-topped butch, but that had grown out like a lawn. He had long, strong legs and perfect muscles, even in his neck. He was the Ultra Man, an Ubermensch, like a handsome cowboy in a cheesy ad, except real.

  I loved the way the young man looked, moved, and talked and the way he evaluated the women around him. Although he escorted two women, one on each arm, his beauty eclipsed theirs. But the thing about him that fascinated me most was that he had several scars on his arms that they seemed to be stitched together like some grandma's crazy quilt and yet it wasn't repulsive, but only showing that he was a real cowboy, someone who had worked hard on a ranch or as a rodeo star.

  O, what a majestic man! What a wondrous body I beheld in that cowhand, what a feat of god-like glory in the formation of his muscles. For a moment, I worshipped at the strange altar of the human form. Then we dashed away.