The Wood Wife

by Terri Windling

  She turned that wary look on Fox, appraised him, then stuck out her hand. “I’m Marguerita Black,” she said. Her grip on his hand was firm.

  “Johnny Foxxe. Or just Fox. You’re Cooper’s friend.”

  “That’s right. I’m looking for his house. If you’re Johnny Foxxe, you’re the son of Davis’s housekeeper—and the man who has my key.”

  He acknowledged that he was the keeper of the keys, and turned back to his cabin to fetch them. He was conscious of her eyes on his back until he stepped through the cabin door. He found the woman disconcerting; there was something too direct for comfort about her manner and her level gaze. He reckoned she was older than him, five years at least, maybe even ten; she had streaks of silver in her dark hair, and a sexy air of worldliness. He glanced out the window as he reached for Cooper’s keys on the hook by the kitchen sink. She stood looking up at the Catalina crags, watching them turn the color of old violet glass in the setting sun.

  She clearly hadn’t expected to find the place so isolated and rough—a reasonable enough assumption on her part, Fox had to admit. Cooper’s address merely said Tucson, and Tucson was a modern enough city with a population of over half a million; you had to know the town to realize it had these wild pockets as well. He grinned, imagining what she must have thought as the roads took her farther and farther from civilization. She didn’t seem entirely pleased by the place. But she also wasn’t scared off. Yet.

  He went back outside and handed over Cooper’s keys: the heavy iron key to the house and the smaller one to the generator shed. “I’ll take you over and turn on the water. We ought to check the flue as well before you light a fire there—I think something is nesting in the chimney.”

  “Thank you. That’s very kind of you.”

  He waved away her thanks. “It’s my job. Didn’t anyone tell you that? You own my cabin. And all this land from here, up the wash, to the third bend in the road. I take care of all the house repairs instead of paying rent. Don’t look alarmed. I’m not a nuisance, and old adobes need a lot of work. I’m patching Cooper’s roof at the moment. You’d best be glad you have me around or it would flood come the winter rains.” The woman looked at Fox warily. Too bad. He came along with the house. He’d claimed that cabin long before and wasn’t going to let go of it now. “There’s another cabin on your land, up there, just beyond that ridge. Tomás lives there. He’s an auto mechanic. He doesn’t pay rent either, but he’ll keep your car running, and he’ll bring you good game during the hunting season.”

  “I’m a vegetarian,” the woman said flatly.

  Fox grinned. “Take Tomás’s vegetables then. And his eggs. You eat eggs? He’s got a big garden. And chickens. And a bunch of goats.”

  “What can possibly grow up here, in this soil?” she asked him curiously, looking around at the rocky expanse of mica-flecked granite and quartz.

  “You’d be surprised,” Fox told her as he climbed, uninvited, into her car. He waited expectantly until she joined him. “Follow the road on this side of the wash,” he directed as she shifted into gear. The sun was passing behind the outer ridge, casting the valley into shadow.

  “How many houses are there in the canyon?” she asked him, pulling back onto the road.

  “Six.”

  “Just six?” She sounded surprised. He was right. She hadn’t expected the isolation.

  “Just six. Cooper used to own five—our local land baron,” he told her. “There’s your house, and its two cabins. There’s my mother’s house—but it’s so run down that no one really lives there now. I’ve turned the most functional part of it into a carpentry workshop. Then there’s the old stable, which Cooper sold to Juan and Dora del Rio a couple of years ago. And there’s the Alders in the Big House, down where the road dead-ends.”

  “The Big House?”

  “It was the main guest hall when this was still a dude ranch. You’ll like John and Lillian Alder. They’re retired now; all their kids are grown so it’s just the two of them rattling around the place. The house was in Lillian’s family; she’s been on the mountain even longer than Cooper.”

  “And I’d venture a guess that John Alder is the reason you go by Fox and not Johnny, am I right?”

  “You got it. John Alder and John Alder Junior. We got divided into John, J.J., and Fox fairly early on.”

  “Well, it suits,” she said, leaving him to ponder just what she meant by that.

  She steered the car through a mesquite grove of small, crooked trees, roots fed by a stream that ran through Red Springs Canyon and then disappeared underground. On the other side of the grove was a clearing where a simple, rustic adobe house stood, shaded by an old cottonwood tree, and guarded by three tall saguaro cactus with many heavy arms. A wide wooden porch ran entirely around the low, square building the color of wet sand. On the front porch, two weathered Mission rockers and a Mexican bench stood to either side of a heavy wood door painted indigo blue. A wisteria vine as old as the house arched over the porch with twisted, woody growth. Beside it a tall bougainvillea was weighted down with bright scarlet blooms. The flowers glowed like flames in the dusk, brightening the gloom of the approaching night. The woman cut the car’s engine, and the wind in the mesquite grew still.

  They sat for a moment, in silence, for no reason he could fathom. Then he swung his long legs from the cramped little car, waited while she did the same, and followed her to Copper’s door. The porch light was busted. Another thing to fix. She fumbled with the heavy key, and finally it clicked open. He reached past her to turn on the light, and a blur of darkness came at him. Fox heard a sharp intake of breath, felt feathers brush against his skin. Something hit his shoulder hard, pushing him away from the door. A huge white owl swooped from the house, through the porch, and out into the trees. It must have measured a full five feet from outstretched wingtip to wingtip.

  “My god,” she said in that low whiskey voice that sent a shiver through the core of him. Her eyes were wide, alarmed. “I’ve never seen a bird that big. How long has it been in the house? Has the place been empty since …”

  Since Cooper was murdered, Fox finished the sentence silently. The old man had died some miles away, but he doubted that distance was comforting to her. Six months had passed since Cooper’s death, and the police had no clue who had killed him.

  “I’ve been in and out of the house, doing repairs,” Fox assured her, “and I’ve never seen that owl before. It must have just gotten in somehow. There’s probably a broken window. I’ll take a look. Right now, I’m going to go turn on the water. If you go through the door there, into the kitchen, you’ll find a light switch to the left.”

  He left her in the kitchen, looking curiously around her new home. It was strange to think of Cooper’s house that way … but the old man must have had his reasons for leaving his house to a lady friend he’d never even mentioned.

  He stepped back out onto the porch and looked down the road toward the mesquite wood. The white horned owl had disappeared. He knew what Tomás would say about that. An owl was bad luck, a sudden death, or the ghost of someone who had died. Fox had lied to the woman. He had seen it before. Six months ago, over Deer Head Springs, on the night Davis Cooper was killed.

  He stood on the porch for a few moments more, but the huge white owl did not reappear. He stood and listened to the song of the lone coyote somewhere farther up the canyon. He’d often seen its skinny figure skulking near the house since Cooper had died, smaller than the others in the hills, one eye white and blind. Fox yipped back to his four-legged friend, whose answer came an octave above. Then he headed back to the water pipes at the rear of his father’s house.

  • • •

  Dora put a tape on the tape deck as she maneuvered through the evening traffic on Speedway. R. Carlos Nakai’s Navajo flute filled the truck with haunting music soft as water on stone, a whisper of feathers, the wind in a high mountain pass. Nakai was a Tucson man, and his music perfectly suited the underlying rhythms of the
desert land.

  Outside the Bronco’s windows, however, the desert was decidedly less tranquil. The city’s traffic was beginning to swell with the autumn migration of college students and snowbirds—as the locals called winter residents—escaping cold northern climes. She was glad that the fierce summer heat had passed and the city was coming back to life, but she already missed the quiet of the season when only hard-core desert dwellers remained.

  The day had been far from quiet at the Book Arts Gallery where she worked downtown. Two important collectors had come down from Santa Fe, purchasing several pricey handmade books between them. Then there were the chatty tourists from Des Moines, book lovers who spent an hour among the shelves, asking a million questions. Then twenty students from the Book Arts class at the university—all dressed, despite the Tucson heat, in the black uniform of art students everywhere—crowded into the gallery’s small storefront for a lecture on hand-binding methods. After the slow, sweet summer months, Dora had to learn to deal with people again, to put her thoughts and her troubles aside and smile when the gallery door opened.

  It was a relief when her boss closed the door for the night and there was only the gauntlet of rush-hour traffic between her and the silence of the mountains. The traffic thinned out on Tanque Verde at the easternmost edge of the city, and then disappeared altogether when she crossed to the Reddington Road. The road snaked into sage-green hills backed by the blue of the Rincon slopes. The pavement ended. Dora shifted into four-wheel drive and began to climb.

  The dirt road wound upward into the mountains, past Lower Tanque Verde Falls, past the Upper Falls as well and over the top of a cactus-spiked ridge surrounded by acres of sky. A narrow, pitted, unmarked road led back to Red Springs Canyon—at least when the summer monsoons or winter rains didn’t wash it out. Then Dora stayed downtown with her in-laws until the floods had passed.

  Thank the Lord it wasn’t flood season. She needed her own house around her. She wanted a fire, some Mexican beer, the patchwork quilt draped over her feet, and the four cats over her lap. The days were still hot at the end of September, but the nights were brisk, especially up here. She hoped that Juan had made something warm like soup or chili for dinner. She hoped he’d remembered to make anything at all—all too often these days he hadn’t.

  Dora sighed. She’d never really minded being the breadwinner for the two of them before. She believed in her husband’s artwork and his need for the time to paint. Up until the last six months he’d also worked restoring the house; he’d sold a bit of his art, and taken on the odd commission. But lately … Dora turned firmly away from that depressing line of thought. Juan needed her now. And so she needed these two jobs. There was no point in dwelling on the inequity of it—for what was she going to do, up and leave? There was nothing in Dora’s blood and bones that would permit her to let a loved one down.

  As she approached the wash she saw water in it, turned to silver by her headlights. She ignored the flood signs, gunned her engine, went through the standing water at a steady speed and made it safely up the other bank. She followed the road deep into the canyon, noting that there were lights on in Cooper’s place. A line of smoke came from Cooper’s chimney, and another one from farther up the road in the direction of her own house. Juan, dear heart, had already lit a fire. She smiled as she pulled in beside his jeep and climbed down from the truck.

  The house had been a stable that she and Juan had converted themselves—or more accurately, were in the process of converting. The big main room was cozy and complete, with a kitchen at one end of it, but the bedrooms were little more than sheetrock shells awaiting their plaster walls. An old stone barn stood next to the stable, built for barn dances in the dude-ranch days. It made a good-sized studio for Juan. Her own workspace would be in its upper loft when Juan got around to reinforcing the floor; meanwhile her desk was in a corner of the kitchen surrounded by stacks of papers, books, and the inevitable clutter of a building site.

  She entered the wide stable door into the house, which smelled of apples baking. She and Tomás had picked them in Wilcox last week, and Juan had apparently made one of his famous pies. Dora let out a small breath of relief as she hung up her beaded Indian jacket, kicked off her cowboy boots. She clung to these signs of normalcy, added them all together each day to convince herself Juan was all right.

  “Juan?” she called. He wasn’t in the kitchen, he wasn’t in the bedroom. She crossed the courtyard to the barn, but that was empty too. A single light was lit over his work table; the rest of the studio was dark and cold. The doors had been left wide open. Outside, a movement caught her eye. Four shapes—coyotes?—dashed across the yard, headed toward Cooper’s house.

  She stepped farther into her husband’s studio. The floor was cold beneath her feet. On Juan’s table was a sculpted figure that he had been working on all week, the image of a local cowboy hero. It was the kind of schmaltzy commission he loathed but used to accept anyway just for the work. Now he turned these jobs away; he would have turned this one down as well only this time she’d clipped the overdue electric bill to the client’s request.

  Dora stood in front of the table and looked at the work before her in alarm. The cowboy’s blandly handsome features had changed: his eyes were thinned to narrow slits, his nose was hooked, his cheekbones high, and stag horns were growing from his forehead. Beside it, a bucket of plaster was overturned, its contents puddled on the table and the floor. Juan’s favorite cup was smashed and coffee was stained across the wall.

  She could feel the rapid beating of her heart as she crossed the room to the open doors. “Juan?” she called into the night. Silence and darkness answered her. He’s all right, Dora told herself firmly. He just got a little frustrated and now Ke’s gone for a walk, that’s all.

  She turned off the lights, shut the doors, and crossed the yard to the kitchen’s warmth. But even sitting beside the fire, a warm quilt wrapped around her, Dora found herself shivering as she waited for her husband to return.

  • • •

  Crow climbed the funnel of rock that led to the top of Rincon Peak. The rock was sharp beneath his bare feet. A strong wind whipped his long, black hair. When he reached the top, he sat under a star-filled sky and waited. At last he heard the boy approach, a rush of air, footsteps on stone.

  “The man is dead,” the boy told him, angry, daring him to deny this.

  “Yes,” Crow replied mildly. “It’s been six months since you’ve been gone.”

  The boy ignored this quiet reproof. Time, as yet, meant nothing to him. “Then who stands guard over the east?”

  “Not I. Not you. The stars still watch. The rocks still sleep. Nothing has changed, my deario.”

  “You lie. He’s dead. He’s gone. And you lie.”

  Crow shrugged. “And what if I do? You know who I am, and what I’m like. All things must be true to their nature. Even the dead. Especially the dead.”

  The boy laughed. And laughing, flung himself right over the mountain’s edge.

  Crow shuddered. And then he laughed himself.

  The boy had left a white feather behind. Crow picked it up, tied it into his hair, then began the long descent.

  ❋ Davis Cooper ❋

  Redwater Road

  Tucson, Arizona

  H. Miller

  Big Sur, California

  October 5, 1947

  Henry, you old bugger,

  You are entirely wrong about deMontillo’s latest. How you can get excited about that self-serving puffery disguised as poetry is completely beyond me—all that pathetic he-man verbiage about the terrible beauty of battle when we all know he spent the war safe in his mistress’s villa, waited on hand and foot by sloe-eyed Moroccan girls (or was it boys?). This sudden critical appetite for deMonty the Perpetual Dilettante is bewildering, and you, at least, ought to have better sense.

  By now you’ll have read about the floods. Our land remained dry, of course, being so far up in the mountains here, but we were
cut off from the valley for several weeks. Redwater and Tanque Verde creeks flooded over, entirely washing the roads away. I tell you, I was beginning to go stir-crazy, cut off from the mails and the news of the world—but Anna was in her element. I swear she wishes it would flood again. It’s gotten so she doesn’t want to see anyone with the single exception of yours truly, and on some days barely that. She is obsessed with these new paintings of hers, and they are, indeed, magnificent so how can I complain when the washing piles up and dinner is beans on toast again? I want to get a girl up here to do the work, but Anna won’t have it. She’s shy of her creations now—she won’t paint if anyone else is around.

  She has taken to roaming the mountain by night and it’s no good trying to stop her with tales of rattlesnakes or wolves or mountain lions, let me tell you. She’s meeting her muse out in those hills. When she returns there is a fire in her eyes and she works like a woman possessed by spirits until she drops in exhaustion. She is strong and brown, and so terribly thin. She has never looked more beautiful to me. I am frightened of this intensity, and yet I am stirred and fascinated. The process of creation seems to pour directly from the ground through her small body into the paint.

  My own work, it comes … in bits and pieces, dribs and drabs, it comes, it comes. I am nearly done with Exile Songs and count myself an exile indeed, from Europe, from Paris, from the cafe life which the war has stolen from us all. Perhaps when this collection of poems is done I’ll be able to lay those ghosts to rest and resign myself to this raw, brash land; but so long as I work, I am back there again, sitting in the Paris streets with you and Fred and Brassai and the rest. Then I leave the page and I leave the desk and I find myself here, on a mountainside, in the desert, the farside of Nowhere. In truth, Nowhere is as good a place to be as any other—it doesn’t matter where I am so long as I can do my work and live on the streets of Memory.