A Phantom Herd

by Lorraine Ray

It was less of a fight to get out of that crowd than it had been to get in and see the Navajo. But the crowd at the sidewalk was four persons deep and there were more barricades and policemen between Rosefield's and Don Juan's. The last thing I wanted to do during our struggle to get out was to turn back and see what that lady was doing, but I couldn't help myself.

  It wasn't hard to find her because when I turned around I discovered her face was fixed on mine. Something about the way she looked reminded me of Blaine Newton. She had gotten something from us and I knew I was going to regret it.

  When we finally returned to our station wagon, the new stereo was about to be put in the back. This act of heroism was to be performed by an enormous man in a silly green uniform, a uniform which was so formal it almost needed a pair of golden epaulettes. The warehouse worker's tiny head was mounted between giant beefy shoulders, and his arms came shooting out from either side. He spoke with an asthmatic rasp. Waving Father back, he slopped an aqua chenille rug which we had brought with us over the open tailgate. He lifted the console himself and eased the utterly grand stereophonic radio and record player onto our rug. He then wrapped it, expertly, with the rug as though it were a big burrito: side over, bottom tuck; top tuck, side over, his movements sent dust motes and loose strings flying.

  After he slid the radio and record player into the station wagon bed he made careful adjustments to his person, fiddling attempts to stand erect and comb his hair, using a small black plastic comb which advertised Nogales Stagelines. He even adjusted his skinny brown belt and clicked his polish-daubed white wingtip broughams together.

  "Don Juan's TV and Radio, and Don Juan himself, personally and genuinely, wish you the experience of the happiest of hours with your family," he said, then pausing and faltering. His eyes rolled back in his head and he summoned forth the last words. "Listening to symphonic music," he added. With a slight aristocratic bow he slipped our receipt inside a large mania envelope and presented it to Father.

  Absentmindedly, Father handed the envelope to me while Meredith and Jack and I climbed in and he closed the tailgate.

  All the way home I studied the crest on the front of that envelope. It was a Spanish coat of arms similar to the one of Christopher Columbus which I had seen in an old history textbook. When our station wagon crunched across the gravel drive and I entered our home, I took the envelope to my brother's closet and compared it to the page in that old book. The pages of that book were so well read the foxy surfaces were soft, fuzzy and warm to the touch, and the Columbus coat of arms had been printed there whole and then sectioned apart like a cut-away diagram of an ancient fossilized trilobite, or the four chambered heart of an obsolete beast. Oak leaves sprawled around the arms and an eyeless helmet with only a mouth and teeth guarded the top of the four chambers. Columbus's crest, showed in those four rooms: a castle, a lion, tropical islands and anchors.

  In place of the oak leaves, Don Juan's crest was emblazoned with lightning bolts to represent sinister radio waves, and a microphone substituted for the eyeless helmet. In the four chambers of the coat of arms, Don Juan displayed: a radio tower, a pile of platter-shaped records hovering above a turn-table, a boy and girl dancing, and two tied quarter notes.

  Almost immediately that grand stereo my father had bought from Don Juan's joint developed the most interesting and peculiar quirks. It was as though we had brought something otherworldly into our home, an entity designed to connect us to European politics and water fowl.

  Father turned first to the radio.

  You shuffled two doors, thin particle board panels, to reveal the lovely glowing radio dial sunken into the mahogany veneer. The red bar that marked the station numbers floated under glass in its own sea of golden station numbers.

  "I could learn Spanish from this," said Father. "I could pick up the signal from Spanish language stations all over northern Mexico." The sudden, wild inspiration gripped him, inspiring him. It was as though he had been electrified. Floating about in the air were the keys to another world, words were passing unseen through the air. They were Spanish words and he would learn them simply by tuning in this fabulous radio set.

  He got one of the black wrought iron ice cream store chairs that my mother had brought from Indiana, and sat solicitously beside the dial his fingers twiddling idly as he sought Spanish stations. The lighted rectangle of the dial glowed like a yellow sea. But hour after hour the radio stations he sought proved elusive.

  He grew very excited after sundown though because he finally was receiving some noises that seemed to be coming from Sonora and seemed to have tuned in some far away signal from the distant hills of Mexico. What he was hearing was baffling, though because he was sure he was listening to them talking all about Trotsky and communist assassins. The buzzing static sounded like the murderous artillery of the death squads. In between the talk of assassins Spanish words came out in odd blurbs and hideous hisses: my father's knowledge of Spanish was minimal, illusionary, although his father spoke Spanish before he spoke English, his fragmentary knowledge combined with the intermittent transmissions of long distance radio combined to make the whole thing frightening.

  "Evidence of the assassination," said Father, supremely surprised. "Fenklestone or Fusselman did it. They said something about evidence of an assassination. I'm sure I heard that. Wait." He listened intently. While he listened he drank more of his rum and coke from a swirly turquoise glass. He was pretty drunk, as usual.

  "Someone get me a notepad," he ordered.

  Meredith dutifully complied and began searching my mother's desk, which was in the living room and had a single broad drawer. Giving up on the desk, she walked into the kitchen and opened another drawer.

  "What are you rooting around for?" said Mother dropping the top of her newspaper suspiciously, as she heard Meredith slide a kitchen drawer and shove boxes of rubber bands, crayons and twine around.

  "Dad needs a notebook," Meredith explained. "He's found a Spanish station and he's going to write down some of the words. Is this junky old red leather one okay?"

  "No. Put that back. That's got some important mortgage numbers in it that I need to keep. Tell him he needs to borrow a good language book. I'll get him one tomorrow."

  "And gun oil," Father said from the other room, hearing the whole conversation between Meredith and our mother.

  "What? What in the world do you need that for?" said Mother.

  "There's stuff going on in Sonora you wouldn't believe. It's a whole camp of them, planning to come up here to America, to Arizona, maybe even through Tucson. We better get prepared. It's Trotsky and his bunch. They aren't dead after all! If Stalin's police in Russia gets a word of this, they'll be over here to deal with him and we could get caught in the crossfire."

  "Trotsky!" mother exclaimed in astounded outrage, "He was murdered while he was sleeping in Mexico City. Years ago," she added, though we could see by the expression on her face that the exact date troubled her. "Let me get the almanac; I can tell you the year." Mother was a librarian and knew, when her memory failed her, where to get any pertinent dates in a flash.

  "Lies, it's all lies. I tell you it was staged. If those Soviets can put a dead man in a tomb, under glass, pumped full of wax and parade people by the corpse day after day so they can see that his body doesn't rot, they certainly can stage a murder in Mexico. Everyone knows the police there will cooperate with just about anything."

  Mother looked at him long and hard. "I'm putting the radio off limits for you," she said.

  After this, Father slid the cabinet door over the radio side and revealed the stereo. He brought his stack of favorite recordings from the closet, an especially favorite one being the Sons of the Pioneer's singing "So Died Jenny," a song about an army mule that dies in service to her master. He liked to listen to it while frying tacos, but fairly soon after he brought it home the turntable developed an annoying squawk. It wasn't as loud as it was persistent and at a range only barely audible, but you could have sworn a
duck waddled by when Jenny's skin came off with her blanket and she laid down by the fire with her legs in the air. Jenny, you see, was an army mule. The maudlin pioneer mourned him; this squawky duck ridiculed him. And each time Father turned off the fire, and went to the turntable to listen, the sound invariably disappeared. The golden arm that held the needle floated serenely over the black grooves of the big 78, and Meredith and Jack swore they did not even know how to quack like a duck.