Midnight Cactus

by Bella Pollen

  ‘Yes, hikes.’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘What’s wrong with hikes?’

  ‘From April on the sun will fry these people like pieces of raw liver in hot fat.’

  ‘That’s okay, they can wear hats.’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  I’m so sorry, I’m tempted to snap, but I don’t actually speak grunt.

  ‘What if they step on a snake?’

  ‘Well, you know, hopefully they won’t.’

  ‘There are seventeen different kinds of rattlesnake around here. Diamond backs, sidewinders, mohaves and they’re all lying around in the hopes that some fat city slicker will hike by close enough to get bit on the ankle.’

  ‘A rattlesnake bite’s not fatal, though, is it?’

  ‘Not unless you’re unfit or unhealthy or overweight.’ He grinds his cigarette into the ashtray. ‘A rattler will kill a child. Adults get about six hours. Snake serum costs around $5,000 a pop. Local hospitals don’t carry it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Hard to say. Maybe they figure there aren’t that many people round here worth saving for those kind of dollars.’

  ‘Well, I suppose guests will just have to sign disclaimers.’

  ‘And your kids,’ Duval says, ‘will you get them to sign a disclaimer?’

  I turn round. Emmy has fallen asleep. Jack, eyes wide, is listening intently.

  ‘You’re scaring Jack.’

  ‘Certainly is not,’ Jack says, riveted.

  ‘Look, other children have been brought up in Arizona and survived.’

  ‘Local kids have the ground rules beaten into them from the day they’re born. Have you taught Jack and Emmy to shake out their boots before they put ‘em on? Do you sweep the beams over their beds? Do they check under their pillows?’

  ‘You want me to check under their pillows for snakes?’

  ‘Spiders.’ He holds his thumb and forefinger and inch or so apart. ‘Brown recluse, small, harmless-looking.’

  ‘I’m really not worried about spiders.’

  ‘A brown recluse bites you, you won’t have any idea how much trouble you’re in till you start getting feverish and vomiting and your flesh turns black.’

  I look at him. ‘Duval, I assume you’re trying to make a point, I’m just not sure what it is.’

  ‘Do you have any idea of the dangers out here? For a woman like you?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean – a woman like me?’ Angrily, I screw the lid back on the water bottle. Under my feet Taco mutters in his sleep.

  ‘You broke down seven miles from town. What would you have done if I hadn’t come along?’

  ‘You know what, we would have managed.’

  ‘With a quarter litre of water? What if it had been daytime? Ground temperatures in summer reach well over one hundred degrees.’

  I nearly hit him. I don’t need Duval to make me feel guilty about this evening. ‘Do you really think it’s any more dangerous out here than in London, where they’re asphyxiated by pollution? Where paedophiles lurk behind every post box?’

  Duval doesn’t take his eyes from the road. ‘Take your children back home,’ he says evenly. ‘They don’t belong here and neither do you.’

  And in the dark cool of the truck I feel my cheeks begin to burn.

  Later, once Emmy is safely in bed and asleep, Jack becomes my shadow, refusing to leave my side, not even for a second, going so far as to crouch by the basin while I’m having a pee as though I might suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke.

  ‘I hate snakes,’ he says.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I don’t want to let you out of my sight,’ he says, as we climb into bed.

  ‘Okay, don’t then.’

  ‘Don’t go anywhere without telling me, especially don’t go anywhere after I’m asleep.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I won’t, I promise.’

  Under the covers, he wraps himself around me until every one of his limbs is intertwined through mine and I lie there, stroking his hair, wondering what Duval had intended with his warning. What had he been doing on the road so late in the evening and what is it that he’s hiding? I’m beginning to understand that the south-west of America is a place grand enough to swallow the dreams of all kinds of people. Nature lovers, loners, drifters, man haters, dream chasers. There are those running to a better life, those escaping a bad one. There are philosophers looking for the romance of another culture, or wanderers satisfying their thirst for adventure. There are some who come to escape the cold and others who come to die – and then, I guess, there are the real fugitives, the unruly and the lawless, who see in this vast empty land a place where they can disappear forever. Perhaps Duval is one of these, perhaps he’s simply an arsehole, or maybe he’s just being unwittingly woven into the complicated fantasy that I am starting to impose on this place – but whoever he turns out to be, I resolve to watch myself very carefully indeed around him.

  It’s around four a.m. when a coyote cuts loose with a long howling session from somewhere nearby. We both wake and in the utter blackness of the room, the final vestiges of Jack’s bravado evaporate.

  ‘Skinwalkers,’ he moans and buries his sweaty head in the crook of my arm. ‘You know,’ he whispers, ‘I told Winfred I was afraid of nothing, but the truth is I’m afraid of everything.’

  ‘Snap,’ I tell him.

  12

  Tucson is a strange and soulless city. It appears to be modelled on a grid system of sorts so it’s easy enough getting in, but getting out is another matter entirely. The streets are so devoid of individuality or even discernible street names that there’s no way of telling one from the other. I’m lost. And I’ve been lost for some time now. If this map is to be believed I’m supposed to be in the centre of town but I’m driving alongside nothing except seedy commercial buildings, tyre-shredding businesses, warehouses all battened up and deserted. It’s mid-afternoon on a Friday, yet the place is as quiet as a mausoleum.

  I don’t know if it’s just me, but there’s an unfriendly feel to Tucson. With the exception of a lugubrious drunk who gives me directions to Wal-Mart and sends me on my way with the reassuring ‘God is with you’, and, in fact, the employees of Wal-Mart itself – the Daria Beths, and the Cindys who willingly propel their fourteen-stone bulk through the aisles in order to extract from the shelves the single can of pinto beans amidst 420 other varieties of beans on offer – people in this city take your money furtively as though it would make their day if they could only short-change you in some small way or break your eggs for no good reason.

  My low-grade headache is now being joined by gum-ache as the novocaine in my mouth slowly wears off. A nagging toothpain I’ve ignored too long finally prompted an emergency flight to the dentist this morning. True, I could have gone to see Dr Adams in Ague, but then I’ve seen the state of people’s dentures in my local town and they’re not a pretty sight.

  I finally leave the city centre behind me, but within minutes become embroiled in the mass of converging secondary roads which loop over and under but never actually directly onto the freeway heading south. Hoping for salvation before I hit Canada, I battle on through Tucson’s suburbia, a nightmare sprawl of real-estate offices and Motel 8s offering cheap room rates and frothy Jacuzzis, before the system spits me out into an industrial zone and, shortly after that, a small town preceded by two signs, the first echoing Winfred’s warning with the enigmatic ‘Danger. Do not pick up hitchhikers!’ and the second, a mile on, the more explanatory ‘Prison’. I stop the car and, utterly confused, turn the map first one way, then the other. I am either north-west of Tucson or south-east but which? There are precious few humanoids around to ask and the only sign of life is the coughing engine of a tri-coloured GMC with very bald tyres parked about a hundred yards away by the entrance to an industrial-looking zone signed ‘Pima Corporation, Exploratory Mining Co.’ The Indians inside the car are big and scary and wearing
cheap cowboy hats. All four of them are chewing something which has left a greenish layer of scum on their lips and when they direct me straight through the dirt track behind the sign, with a series of thumb jerks and grunts, I suppress the instinct to drive off at high speed in the opposite direction and instead, due to some innate English embarrassment about not wishing to appear rude, follow their advice to the letter. The first few miles are spent glancing twitchily in my rear-view mirror but after a while I relax. It’s a beautiful afternoon, the sky blue and empty save for the odd white twizzle of an aeroplane that appears like some alien vessel coming from one world, on its way to another. I have a map, bags of supplies and a full tank of petrol. The truck is mended and working fine, the children are being fed and watered by Benjamín and I don’t have to deal with any residual feelings of unease about Duval until Monday.

  To my right two solitary pumps duck up and down with slow sinister inevitability, like giant storks feeding, or monster lobster claws digging in the sea bed. After a while the dirt track turns into a stretch of newly laid asphalt divided by a glowing yellow line which cuts through the eerie lunar landscape of the desert. The rock here is buttery gold and bulbous with not a jagged edge in sight. Now and again monoliths loom, some smooth and rounded by the elements, but others grotesque and deformed, like prehistoric beasts temporarily inert with sleep and so extraordinarily lifelike that I stop the truck to photograph them, imagining dinosaurs sweeping through this part of the world, nudging boulders aside with their tails before falling to the desert floor, exhausted by their efforts After an hour or so of this, landscape complacency sets in and I find myself zoning out and dreaming into the emptiness before me. How many bones are buried beneath this soil? How many ghosts haunt the ground above them? It strikes me that what makes this land so romantic is everything you cannot see, that which you can only imagine. The vastness out here is incomprehensible and absolute. It feels as though nothing you do could affect anyone or anybody. If a bolt of lightning were to smite the truck right now, I would turn to a speck of dust and nobody would be any the wiser. How different from existence in the city where everything you do impinges on someone else. You stall your car, the man behind bumps into you, five people turn to look, a passer-by becomes a witness and, before you know it, you’ve had an effect, a meaningless but nevertheless tangible effect on the lives of others. As a child, I was intrigued by this idea. I liked to think of people as snails, leaving a thin thread of life behind them, and every time one human being impacted on another I imagined these threads crossing, and the course of their lives becoming tangled forever.

  The Mars landscape finally gives way to a drier, more desolate backdrop. I’m still unsure of where I am exactly, but the sun is dipping to the right, so I guess I must be heading south. This area is marked on the map as the Tohomo O’Odham reservation, and seems to be desert right up to the horizon. I come across a couple of yellow school buses disgorging Indian kids with backpacks onto the side of the road and I watch as, heads down against the dusty wind, they begin making their way along narrow paths to scattered trailer homes.

  It’s getting darker. Cool air filters into the truck. Clouds change from orange to pink. The sunset spreads quickly, infusing the pale sky with a sudden stain of colour like an anaemic receiving an emergency blood transfusion. I flick on the headlamps and something catches my eye. It’s far off, no bigger than a dark thumbprint in the centre of the windscreen, and as I draw closer I see it’s a dead animal.

  Sue, Jack’s teacher, told me this part of Arizona had, once upon a time, been overrun with an extraordinary variety of wildlife: ‘I mean, before we hunted them to death there were jaguars, turkeys, armadillos, even little monkeys.’ But this particular road kill is nothing more exotic than a dog – still, as I pass it, then glance at it again in the mirror, there’s something about the way it’s lying there, silhouetted against the burning sky, that induces me to brake the truck to a stop.

  The dog is a big domestic animal with a smooth brown coat and the snub forehead of a boxer. Its lips have been pulled back as though it died with a snarl on its face and its top teeth have settled over the lower jaw in a clenched grimace. Its eyeballs have rolled back in its head and they stare up at the sky, opaque and pupil-less. I focus my camera, but as the shutter clicks there’s a faint noise. It’s no more than a rustle, a slight break in the current of air, but with a start I realize I am not alone.

  I hear them most nights, of course, but I’ve seen only two since we arrived; one high up in the hills to the back of the house, the other at dusk, far, far away and crossing my eye line so furtively it might have been the shadow of a ghost. This is the first time I’ve seen one close up. The coyote stands motionless in the scrub, a mere four feet away, but it’s not quite the ferocious beast of my imagination. It’s a leaner, longer-legged version of Taco with a pointed face and a black tip to its tail. It eyes me insolently, as though issuing a silent order to relinquish my claim to the dinner which by all the laws of nature is rightly his.

  ‘If you look into the eyes of a coyote, you go crazy,’ Winfred had warned. ‘You should never look into the eyes of a coyote. It’s a bad omen.’

  Very slowly, so slowly, I bring the camera up until’ level with the coyote’s head and softly depress the shutter. The flash flashes. Startled, the coyote blows on its front legs then pushes itself round and vanishes into the desert, sending up small puffs of dirt in its wake. I turn the camera back to the dead dog and fire off a dozen or so shots in rapid succession. The light show in the sky is reaching a climax. The sun has melted out of the constraints of its circle and is arbitrarily shooting streaks of orange through the riot of violet and crimson clouds above. Then, as it drops lower, an angle changes. The pale milky film of the dog’s eyes suddenly catches the light and the pupils begin glowing a deep molten red. I take a step backwards. The dog looks demonic. Super-natural. Like some terrifying pagan deity about to be resurrected by the power of the dying sun. Thoroughly spooked, I retreat a couple more steps, unwilling to present my back to the beast.

  I do not see the Mexican until I turn. No intuition, female or otherwise, warns me that the real danger lies not in front, cold and stiff in death on the road, but behind, alive and very much human. Except that the man standing by the truck doesn’t look dangerous. He looks scared. He stares directly at me, but how long he’s been standing there, watching, waiting, I have no way of knowing. Certainly long enough to have swiped the shopping from the back of the truck. He holds all eleven of my Wal-Mart bags. Five hooked through the fingers of one hand, six more cutting into the wrist of the other. He steps backwards, feeling with his trainer for the edge of the desert, but all the while staring, almost as if waiting for an order to drop the food, and I think later that had I had the presence of mind to call out, he might have put the bags down, possibly even murmured an apology; but it doesn’t occur to me and when it dawns on him that I am not about to make any attempt to stop him, he turns and scrambles down the scrub of the bank, melting away to nothing as the desert closes protectively around him. As I look after him the irony strikes me. That out here in the middle of this emptiness, not ten feet from the supernatural fantasy I was ready to lose myself in, exists somebody else’s harsh reality.

  His face comes back at me that night. Troubled bloodshot eyes, a broken front tooth. In retrospect, I realize I’d been lucky. He could have taken the truck. The keys had been in the ignition and he could have been long gone before I got anywhere near him. So why hadn’t he? Enough basic humanity not to abandon a woman alone in the desert? Or had there been others, hidden away in the darkness – too many to climb into the truck without being heard? Or did it all just come down to a question of priorities? How close to starvation do you have to be to choose food over transport? I close my eyes, but his image remains. I’ve never seen this man before yet he seems so familiar to me. Something in his face strikes a chord. Then I realize it’s not those hawkish features literally, but the expression in them
. It’s that look of fear and desperation I’ve seen before. I’ve seen it in the face of a Mexican boy holding an empty gallon water bottle by the side of the road, I’ve seen it in the eyes of people staring out of the windows of green immigration buses, and, God knows, in Temerosa, I get to see it every day.

  13

  A brand-new Chevy Silverado, unusually clean and polished for the area, draws up outside the cabin early Tuesday afternoon. My visitor is a lanky man of about fifty years old wearing denims with a pronounced crease down each leg and a pressed shirt cinched at the collar by a jewelled flag with two strands of black leather hanging from it.

  ‘Mrs Coleman?’ he queries as I open the door.

  ‘Yes, hello?’

  There’s an initial look of surprise at the bare feet and cracked black toenails courtesy of a recent Emmy makeover, but he swiftly recovers.

  ‘Jeff Hogan, ma’am.’ He removes his hat. ‘Your neighbour down the way.’

  I’d been in the middle of a kitchen blitz, a weekly attempt to quell the anarchy of the tinned-can cupboard and impose a more militarized discipline on open packets of spaghetti, which most of the time tend to slouch untidily against the walls of the cupboard like soldiers on the verge of desertion. Every surface is covered with packets of cranberries, bags of flour and rice all waiting to be re-stationed, so it’s with some reluctance that I shake his proffered hand and invite him in.

  ‘How nice. I didn’t know we had a neighbour.’

  ‘Fifteen miles north-east, just past the turning to Fishsprings. You’ve probably seen it. Beautiful place, view over the Patagonia Mountains. One of the finest properties around.’

  I murmur something appropriate. I have no idea what Jeff Hogan’s business is with me, but I have a sinking feeling it’s not going to be over nearly quickly enough.

  He stands awkwardly in the kitchen. ‘So, now, would Mr Coleman be in?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Do you expect him back any time soon?’