A Phantom Herd

by Lorraine Ray

"That poor, poor man," went the wicked whisper I heard next, a sound that wound itself around me for years, that whistled in my ears like a gale through an arctic pass, that blew so cold over me then that years later I can still feel its icy arms embrace me. The cultivated whisper, full of carefully pronounced consonants, came at us suddenly from a position behind us and, in unison, we turned to regard HER.

  I didn't know her name then, and it took serendipity involving an old man and a microfiche to help me uncover it years later, but somehow it was easy for us to tell that the words had emerged from the carefully colored cranberry lips of a large, pale woman, one of those dreadful grubs, like the pale lady and man who had kicked the barrel cactus, from the East Coast, surely. Frosty faint cumulous structures, cloud traces of the ghastly face powder that every old lady in those years dusted liberally over themselves, clung in a gossamer film to what looked like dewlaps, yes, dewlaps for certain, on a great white wattle of a neck, the convoluted crevasses into which no party of skiers would dare to playfully trail their poles, for those were polar inclines of unimaginable peril. She was chinless and had huge watery green eyes that popped out below thick black eyebrows and white hair. A faint scent of rancid lavender, perhaps from a handkerchief inside her purse, wafted toward us as though, during a delightful stroll down a country lane, a gate to a trampled and mucky sty had swung open. She jutted her pale face forward like an extraordinary talking ox, and when she spoke her upper lip hung over the lower and worked itself around every lying thing she said, or rather intoned, for she never simply 'said' anything. About her there hung a distinct aura of Eastern shops, money, and status; there was every possibility that she was eligible to join the DAR, that her great-great grandmother and every mother since had actually done so, and that people somewhere shuddered to visit her in her enormous, pitiless city mansion and country home overlooking a great shiny bay. Her busty bulk and wide hips stretched the seams of a strange, piney green suit, and short white gloves encased her hands; she had tucked the loose knot of a long, dotted Swiss scarf under one jacket lapel, and let the ends billow over the padded shoulders of the jacket. Her stiff beaded purse, a souvenir of Olde Mexico, grew an embroidered tree that had been hung with disks, fake coins, which jingled whenever she moved.

  "Doesn't he look dreadfully hot?" she asked, and all the while one of her strange gloved forefingers, the one with the purse dangling under it, began pointing at the man rudely, jabbing in the direction where he crouched on the other side of the big window pane. "Dreadfully hot just sitting in there, working so hard on his quaint little sandy picture, hmm." Her words were pregnant with meaning, of which we were ignorant, though the idea that she was trolling for a response from us seemed apparent. She fixed her eyes on the three of us as though she wanted to make very sure that we were grasping everything she said, and that we were also looking at the man in the window while she was talking. I then had the uncomfortable impression that during the time when we had been busily watching the sand painter dribble his flattened construction cranes, she had been working her way secretly around the crowd, choosing a route through the onlookers that would eventually insinuated her figure behind us. I wondered if I had actually seen this in the reflection on the plate glass or if I had only sensed some residue of movement, some residual clue to her prior impulses that had tipped me off. But what possible reason could she have to seek us out?

  Her finger continued to point at the man and she was still gabbing away about how hot she imagined him to be. "With a black velvet shirt on!" she exclaimed in hushed awe. "And in the full sun."

  She waited, but none of us replied.

  "Heavens!" she added in a stagy whisper. She finished by dropping her pointer finger and clutching the cloth purse to her belly and the shrub, or tree, embroidered on it, covered with its fake coins, jingled an assenting chorus of 'yes, yes, certainly yes.'

  "He isn't hot at all," said Jack shooting his comment at her, impudently, and I would say now, imprudently.

  The lady looked relieved to have finally drawn one of us out and she also gave me the impression that she was pleased by the strength of my brother's contrariness. He was famous for this and when he was younger he used to like sternly to say, "nobody, no how, never" when he didn't want to do something.

  "Well, well," she said, pulling her head back on her shoulders, "aren't you a self-assured young gentleman." She stopped and, drawing her whole body back slightly, made as though she were doing a double take, assessing his cowboy boots and jeans for the very first time. "I mean to say, young gentleman cowboy," she said, correcting herself with emphasis on the word cowboy. "I can see you are a real cowboy. Now, tell me," she asked, coming in close to us with a greedy, crazy look on her face, "why don't you agree with me, why don't you think he's hot?"

  "Let me explain what my brother is trying telling you," said Meredith blandly, elbowing Jack's jutting ribs lightly which was her cue to Jack that she was taking over. "Indians don't feel the heat like ordinary people would because they have some special blood from living around here for so long, ah, blood that's better for this place than any of us have." As usual, Meredith delivered this shocking, inaccurate fact about Native Americans in a deadpan drone with a blank expression on her face. She did not wish to betray the tiniest smidgen of wonder with the world by showing any enthusiasm on her face or in her voice. She strove to produce the effect that everything in the world was to her a non-event, nothing too terribly special, just an everyday occurrence, that the sophisticated beings that we imagined we were had already experienced just about the whole of the entire universe. What we hadn't experienced was, well, hardly worth much of an effort anyway.

  "Oh, how very interesting," said the woman. She still whispered under the misapprehension, I suppose, that the man making the sand painting could hear what we were saying through the glass. "They don't feel any heat? Now tell me the truth, surely some?" she argued, leaning forward and studying each of us in turn.

  Meredith waved off the question as too absolute. "Not to speak of, lady. They don't let it hurt em in any way."

  At moments such as these, while Meredith was making free use of her vast store of questionable scientific wisdom and authentic gimcracks, suddenly, a surge of sisterly pride, and a real western conceit coursed through me, and the physical reaction in my body was like a team of horses' jerking on the tongue of a wagon following the pistol shot that began the Oklahoma land grab, this pride stretched, then stiffened, my spine and made my flesh tingle. It was an honor to be present when my sister's knowledgeable use of words made us, by proxy perhaps, appear knowledgeable, too. This self-satisfied, so-called superior Eastern lady, if indeed she was ever capable of being anything more than a pale sickly grub-and I was now fairly certain the answer to that was no-had probably just about met her match in us.

  "How fascinating," said the awful woman focusing on us intently again. Those green eyes of hers fixed themselves to Meredith's pixie face, her short brown hair, then her glance swept down over the faded and puckered Mickey Mantle T-shirt Meredith rarely removed.

  "Sure, it is," my sister said, shrugging, "Arizona, on the whole, is pretty interestin. I know about a hundred real neat-o facts about Arizona that I can think of, but I can't think of them right now." Meredith's eyes rolled up in the air as though some of those neat-o facts might be soaring around the air above the sidewalks.

  Someone further back in the crowd snickered.

  "Oh," said Meredith, thinking of something suddenly, "but one of them is, if they could crack the secret to Indian blood you could forget about Freon. Freon is what modern people who are not Indians just about have to use in their air conditioning systems in order to stand living in Arizona in the summertime. But Indians don't. It's a fact. Scientists would be wise to do a lot of studies about that stuff." Several more adults behind us had the nerve to join in laughing with the early onlooker who had snickered. Until then, I had been wholly unaware of our audience beyond of the lady. I perked up thinking that
there were bound to be some other Easterners there in the crowd that we could impress with our authentic gimcracks and inaccurate scientific bunk. If you got a chance to make a rugged appearance in front of a bunch of Easterners, you'd better take it; they didn't come around every day, in fact they only came around in the winter for a few months being too wise to show up in the summer when it was one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Impressing Easterners whenever you saw them was a vital part of the everyday code that we operated under.

  "Is that so?" said the weirdly horrible lady, reacting to Meredith's claims about Freon by sucking in her breath and placing a hand atop her mammoth right chest beneath which a heart was supposed to be beating. Her stance made it look as though she were about to recite the pledge of allegiance at a ballgame; her purse which hung from her right arm bounced off her big belly and the coins again jingled their agreement with everything she said. "My, my, how interesting. Scientific studies, you say? Maybe they'll take your advice. I wouldn't be surprised. You do learn some fascinating things when you travel to the far western regions of the country and especially when you visit this most wonderful state of Arizona. Why, this cactus land of yours with all its saguaros is almost like a fairyland for someone from...." She paused and during this momentary break in her gushing tribute to Arizona and the West, which was laid on so thickly that even I was unimpressed, I could clearly see the grimy gears turning inside that horrible head of hers, and it seemed as though she plunged her gloved hand mentally into a hat and drew out, ever so slowly, a small folded slip of paper with the name of a completely random Eastern state on it, "?Pennsylvania," she cried triumphantly. I knew immediately that she was no more from the state of Pennsylvania than I was from Transylvania; if asked, she would have been unable to name more than a few counties in that state, not that I could have caught her lie by asking; I doubt if I knew what a county was.

  However, why did she need to deceive us? We didn't give a hoot about any dumb old Eastern states or anybody who lived in them nor did we care anything about them; they were just dumb old places that tried to rule the whole country all the time and succeeded, much to our frustration and growing feelings of cultural impotence. Why was she trying to conceal her true home from three kids she had just met on a sidewalk in Arizona?

  "Sure," said Jack, drawing out the word to an amazing length; this, and the way his eyes were studying her, tipped me off to the fact that he was greeting this tidbit of information, her home state, with a degree of skepticism equal to mine.

  But our doubts about her didn't seem to have sunk in or else they had and still our opinion of her lying ways didn't faze her. "Do you three children happen to live on one of those Arizona ranches that I've read so much about in our nation's magazines?" asked the lady, and she intermixed her words with loud, rather ridiculous gasps that served to attract the attention of more of the crowd around us. "A ranch as big, perhaps, as the whole state of Connecticut?" She leaned in eagerly when she asked this, and I had an even greater impression that this woman was pumping us for information. Suddenly I felt afraid that her interest in great big ranches, coupled with the size of the crowd around us, would tempt us to tell some great big whoppers.

  "No-" I began, but as soon as this word left my lips I felt my chest being squeezed and Meredith was upon me; for a moment I disappeared entirely beneath her and she had four fingers pressed to my lips; I had been stopped before I could reveal that we were living in a small ranch-style tract home in a subdivision of unrelenting middle-class banality.

  "I just love my dear, dear little sister," said Meredith patting my shoulder. "I like to squeeze her."

  The woman had a startled look on her face as she watched me struggle to extricate myself from Meredith's relentless grasp.

  "Yeah," said Meredith, allowing my escape but sending a wary look my way, "that is, yes, ma'am, we do live on one of those ranches you've read about. The Circle....ah, Bar S...Circle Bar X J9 Supremo Rancherito. That's our brand and the name of our ranch. We've got millions of cows spread all over the county. All the way down to the Mexicano border and...um...way up in the Mogollon Rim and the Grand Canyon a pretty long way in the northerly direction and over to Gila Bent and El Frida Y Meida. But we have to get those out of there. The snow's getting em down."

  I remember being a little surprised, as I listened to this excellent lie, the number of our cattle in three years had grown to millions, because more of those people around us smiled and chuckled at Meredith's fantastic, overblown tale of cattle and the size of our family ranch. Then I remembered she had told this before to the crazy lady and man out at the cactus monument.

  When my sister finished, the lady spontaneously and suddenly smacked her gloved hands together, swatting them once loudly, and the retort in my ears was like an awful clap of thunder which might ripple across mountains, stunning the foothills, resounding on the very broad floor of a darkened desert and flattening the lacey creosote limbs and pale furry gray flower stalks of the desert marigold.

  "How fascinating!" she cried, and her pale green eyes widened, her bristly gray eyebrows rose into the white powder on her forehead. "So you're all real ranch buckaroos? Every last one of you?"

  Then, as though she needed to emphasis the importance of her terrible question, to drive home the permanence of our deceit should we hold tight to our fib, one of her pristine white gloves shot off of her hip, where it had been resting after the awful clap, and spread itself flat. Tiny stitches puckered up the fingers of the white glove which was floating there; the fingers were like probes at our souls; then that spooky glove with its hidden horrible hand which I knew if I could ever see it would be whiter than any human's hand ought to be, shot out and swept its keen knife edge at us, coming out level and slicing through our envy of all the real ranch families, the real wealthy people of Arizona, slicing straight through the wicked, vain lies we had told, our tales about our fabulous, mythic ranch, which we were about to plant forever in the minds of innumerable strangers to make ourselves feel more important, more influential, than we were ever destined to be. All three of us took a giant, telling step backwards, away from her.

  I began to sense that she was pulling our legs, that this was not a very nice lady, and that she might even be menacing. There was no doubt she knew Meredith was lying about the ranch, but it was too late to turn back, the die was cast, and though she might be the most evil woman in the world, we were already talking to her, endangering our souls by telling her a lot of bragging fibs.

  "Uh, yeah," Jack replied, hooking his skinny thumbs around the belt loops on the front of his frayed jeans the same way he had when he had jumped out of our car, but now adding a self-conscious wrench of the belt loop that pulled them outward, and all the while his voice was adopting his own peculiar version of a westerner's laconic and lackadaisical drawl, "ranches are easy stuff for us. Shucks, real easy stuff. Give us a ranch to manage any old day. We'll manage it, why, what's the big problem. We got the cattle under hand and all the money figured out. We know how to rope and whoop and skedaddle the cattle this way and that all over the state. Don't hardly lose any of them when we're on the job." He pulled one of his thumbs out of the belt loop when he finished saying this and shoved the frame of his glasses up his nose; the toe of his boot (it was one of a fancy pair that was destined later to be mine and had the most lovely brown shiny slope inside where your foot slid in, as shiny as the surface of an English flint, though I only saw those years later) scuffed the sidewalk in a shy, shuffling imitation of a humble hometown cowboy, though our own, real, 64 acre ranch in the Avra Valley, homesteaded by our great-grandfather, had long before been deeded from my grandfather, the older, urbanized brother, to his younger brother, Jim after he had been gassed in World War I; and we had only visited it twice on Sunday afternoons, enduring in shy, embarrassed humility a tour of the ridiculously small measure of wealth and prestige we had lost. "We know cows and cows know us," he proclaimed, and most of the crowd chuckled, gentle, non-confrontatio
nal adult laughs, but a sound nevertheless which was capable of severely wounding me and made me ball up my fists and wish I was the one telling the lies so that I could make up a humdinger, some massive impressive mistruth about our lives, which would convince all those doubters of the wealth and might of what I truthfully knew to be my failed, feeble little family.

  Jack continued: "We brand em and sort em and get em out of the messy old creosote and the arroyos and the prickly pears; they've got an awful bad habit of landing in those old prickly pears or brushing up against a jumping cacti. And as for stomping on Devil's Claw which is as good as a hobble for a young cow-excuse me, I mean a calf-they do that all the time when they aren't busy snapping off their horns accidentally. We shoot rattlesnakes that are biting at em and lions and stuff, too. Mountain lions, that is. African lions don't live in Arizona."

  Scanning the three of us slowly with an emotion on her scary face that appeared to be nervous glee, she inquired if our boasted knowledge of the use of guns could be anything but real; fess-up, was what she was saying in other words; confess that you are lying now and I'll go easy on you later; but she concentrated her prying question especially, intently, on me, seeing the weakest link in that chain of children, and expressing her own trepidation even around the literary flintlocks which she said shot up the pages of any of Mister James Fennimore Cooper's novels, her favorite casual reading. Yes, those guns terrified her when in the hands of someone that she said was a real outdoorsman and awfully reliable around firearms called The Deerslayer. The thought of the slender frame of a captive deer being harnessed to some Easterner's heavy sleigh brought prickles of indignation to my hot cheeks; those sleigh-ers ought to have known better-I had no doubt now that Easterners were fiends-and I sincerely hoped, and enjoyed imagining them dashing through the snow and being promptly dashed into the side of a boulder when they plowed into a snow bank and broke their lily-white necks.

  "Sure, it's real," said Jack, coming back at her when she had finished telling us all about her nervous reaction to Fennimore Cooper books. "You're afraid of pistols and rifles? That musta been the work of that deer slayer guy. An Easterner exaggerates just about everything around them in the puny old East. They think their boulders are the Rocky Mountains. They think a stream is the Mississippi. Guns are a natural part of our lives. The fact is we would have shot out of the side of our cradles, but they ain't a stable shooting platform." He finished his critique of Eastern braggadocio with this crazy image, straight off the pages of a Paul Bunyan tale, and shoved his hat back on his head. The crowd, which had remained hushed during Jack's bragging criticism, which had grown louder and louder as he spoke, suddenly broke out in an enormous and continuous roar of laughter; people clapped each other's backs and grinned at the foolishness. An old white haired lady standing by herself took out her handkerchief and blew her small nose as though listening to Jack had reminded her of the bravado of a long since grown-up brother or son.

  Chief among the roarers gathered around us that day was an emaciated coot wearing a broad-rimmed tan felt cowboy hat, which was clearly his best hat, brushed up and brought straight out of a box. Hearing Jack's comical reproach of Easterners, he slapped his long flat thigh with a bronze hand-his whole arm was just brown shiny skin and bones and you could see his ribs through the thin cotton of his cowboy shirt-and he doubled over making a raspy, painful noise in his throat and shaking his head. The mother-of-pearl snaps on his loosened cuffs clacked together and sparkled in the morning sun as though bands of extraordinary lightning encircled his lean forearms. "That's good," he said, between incredulous shakes, "that's so good it's darn-right funny! I haven't heard anything so funny since I left work at the ice cream plant."

  I don't know what possessed me then. I don't know what made me chime in with the declaration which has troubled me for years. Perhaps it was the fact that Meredith and Jack were getting the better of the situation, amusing that crowd of adults, and perhaps I wanted to be the one getting the attention, or maybe I wanted the adults not to laugh, if, as I suspected, their laughter was at us, and not with us. That galled me. Or perhaps it was because that lady's great globular green eyes had focused on me during Jack's lie about guns, but whatever the reason I blurted out the fateful words which I was to regret for years.

  "And we have a ghost herd, too."

  And we have a ghost herd, too. I'd given it all away without a thought. The things I was really going to need later had been disposed of that easily.

  She swung back at me, there is no other way to explain the way she looked than to say she pounced on me, suddenly and profoundly, like a suspicious spider feeling a small fly who had the bad luck to twiddle a remote strand of a web, and she was very quick to drop her big, awful face down close to mine.

  Oh, how I wish I had never spoken.

  "What was that, my little one? What did you say? Something about a ghost herd? Will you kindly repeat what you said so that I can hear it properly?" The scent of foul old lavender overwhelmed me as though she had shoved my face in a hunk of mildewed weeds and I stared at the tiny cracks along the edges of her lips which were bleeding color out from her bright cranberry lips. Where her mouth should have been there was nothing but a bloody gash.

  "There's about-" I squinted up my face the way I often would in the full face of the sun (for we never wore sunglasses then) and tried to come up with a large enough number to knock those self-satisfied adults on their keisters and I wanted the same number that Meredith had used on the pale man and woman, "-near about, a hundred thousand million head of prime ghost cattle." I claimed this absurd thing quietly, rather awestricken by my own audacity, and wondering myself what made a cow 'prime cattle' not to mention 'prime ghost cattle.' I wonder now which mythical television cowhand, transmitted to me in a snowy image on our great black and white television and perhaps delivering a rambling ad-libbed soliloquy while sipping out of a tin cup imaginary coffee on the prop of the chuckwagon's open tailgate or a wagon wheel, had perhaps paired those words that spilled out of my mouth.

  "Ghosts? Cattle ghosts? You mean you are the owner of a ranch of supernatural cows? How can that be?" the lady asked rhetorically, straightening up with an enchanted look on her face that bordered on lunacy. "What a charming concept! I've stumbled upon something really fascinating here! Aren't these children interesting? Don't they have glorious imaginations these charming children?" She appealed to the people around her to agree and they smiled patronizingly.

  It only took an instant for Meredith and Jack to realize that I had piqued her interest in the phantom cattle tale, and anything about the West that tantalized an Easterner, be it truth or tall tale, the rule was-carry on with it. So they boldly jumped in and slathered on their own details. Of course, Meredith recognized the tale as her own and simply took over, noticing that I had turned the cattle into ghosts.

  "It's no imaginary thing, lady," Meredith began, seizing control of the story, "Not at all, not in the least. The atmosphere in the upper ionony sphere of the desert is charged with more particles of a particularly weird nature due to the parched land and the watery air and these forces can make for the appearance in the sky of extraordinary things. Things that are usually herds of cattle. There are hundreds of those cattle on our ranch. Or I should say above our ranch. It's a piece of heritage that we're proud to take care of. A part of our big, old Arizony." She ended this with a very upbeat, Chamber of Commerce attitude and a goofy smile.

  Meredith was making this whole thing up, along the lines of what I had started. Or was she?

  "Hundreds of cattle!" The lady was simply delighted. "Heritage, you say?" Her purse jingled as she merrily clapped her gloved hands.

  "A piece of it," Meredith replied. She had a way of standing with her double jointed knees bent backwards and her arms crossed on her chest. She was doing that then.

  "And you can see them in the skies?" asked the woman wonderingly. "Right up above the city?"

  "They're mostly boiling up over t
he horizons," said Meredith, "and pounding their heels on the ridges. In our big sky. They don't call our state the big sky country, another state got that name, because our sky is big, maybe bigger than any other, but it's so damn packed with these cattle flying around you couldn't call such a crowded place big, could you?"

  "No, I suppose not," the lady agreed. "But they're flying around?"

  "Sure, they're flying," piped up Jack. "The Busy Sky Country is what they ought to call Arizona." Almost every adult within earshot was smiling; we beguiled them with our tale of ghost herds, ranches, guns and mysterious malarkey.

  "How do you know they're yours?" she demanded suddenly, as though she had just thought of it and needed to show her newly awakened distrust. She put her gloved hands on the pine colored sides of her skirt where her large hips spread to near bursting and she straightened up. "Did you round them up from somewhere?"

  "Well, now you're getting into the secrets of the ranch," said Meredith as she grimly crossed her arms on her chest. "You might just be trying to find out what you can from us, so you can rustle them!"

  The people around us laughed, long and hearty laughs. Several ladies chortled so loudly that they put their hands on their husbands' shoulders for support in their merriment. Their eyes watered.

  "A rustler," said the skinny old fellow who we had amused before, and he was bursting out with the fun he was having listening to us, "imagine her as a rustler! Don't that just beat everything? These kids are better than the radio programs!"

  "Never!" cried the woman from 'Pennsylvania' in mock horror.

  "I pick you out as a rustler type if ever there was one," said Jack dryly.

  "Now you're fooling me," she protested. "You're playing with me, aren't you?"

  "No, I'm not," said Jack plainly.

  I took a long careful look at that lady. I knew suddenly that a dangerous rustler was exactly what she was. And she looked satisfied, she had gotten precisely what she wanted. And I, unfortunately, had been the one to give it to her.