Maggie backed away from the door. What if he caught her here looking? And yet, apparently she owned this cabin; perhaps she’d every right to look. The lawyer for the estate hadn’t mentioned cabins or tenants—or maybe she had and Maggie hadn’t paid attention. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to change Davis’s arrangements or try to kick anyone out. This mountainside was their world, not hers. She felt like a guest on Davis’s land, waiting for her host to return.
There was a path at the back of the cabin running up the slope into the hills. Another path went down the slope. She chose the upper one and climbed. The path snaked up the mountainside, looping back and forth across it. She climbed steadily on a well-worn trail that led her up and over a ridge. When she reached the crest she paused. The trail dipped slightly down again into a long half-moon of land tucked into a fold of the cliffs. A population of saguaro grew there, from knee-height up to ten feet tall. Behind them was a small cabin with its back up against the rock.
The cabin was much like the one Fox lived in: made of flourcolored adobe with rounded edges and a stone chimney built into the shortest end. This one had outbuildings as well, and a small ramada made of untrimmed mesquite branches holding up the woody growth of a tombstone rose. Beneath the ramada was a battered formica table and a couple of kitchen chairs. A dish of apples on the outdoor table and a half-dozen chickens in a fenced-in yard were the only signs of life up here. A narrow road led up to the cabin but no vehicle was parked out front.
The trail led through the saguaros and past the cabin, then began to climb upward again. Above her a bird rode the wind in circles, too far away for her to make out what it was. It was dark, like a crow, but large—perhaps a buzzard or local species of hawk. The bird was hunting its supper, no doubt. It would circle lazily until it spied movement below and then it would attack. She stood and watched its elegant flight, and then she turned back to the climb. The path was hard to negotiate, full of loose stones that shifted underfoot and went skittering down the dry hill.
The bird had gone and she was breathing hard by the time she reached the top of the trail. She sat on a boulder to catch her breath. The peak was a rounded outcrop of stone, adorned with prickly pear cactus and yellow flowers clustered on brittle grey leaves. Sun-bleached boulders made her a seat surrounded by mountains and sky. In the distance she could see the lights of Tucson spreading out from the Rincons’ feet. Beyond it, the Tucson Mountains’ silhouette had the sinking sun balanced on its jagged edge. The sky was a blue she’d seen before only in the Mediterranean, streaked with an improbable shade of scarlet fading into mauves and pinks. Even after years of Pacific sunsets, Maggie admitted that she was impressed. The sky was as vast as an ocean and the mountain was an island in its midst.
“Sky islands, that’s what we call them.”
Her heart leapt, startled by the voice and the man who had read her mind. He was not breathing hard from his climb up the trail. His feet were bare on the sharp stones. He greeted her with an intimate smile, although she’d never seen him before.
“You’ve found the best place for the sunset already,” he said with distinct approval. “This is where I often come to see it too, so you’ll have to share.”
She found she had lost the power of speech. She stared at him, but he didn’t seem to mind this evident rudeness. He stood engrossed in the setting sun’s gaudy technicolor display, standing braced against an evening wind that pushed long, dark hair from his shoulders.
He was not a tall man, not so tall as Maggie, but fit and lean, and beautiful. He was dressed oddly in a plain buckskin shirt held closed at the throat with what looked like long thorns. His jeans were tied with long buckskin strips around the shins and ankles. He looked part Native American, with that rich black hair, a white feather tied in it; but his face had a European cast as well, and his eyes were a deep moss green. He wore several thongs around his neck hung with hag-stones, turquoise, a little leather bag and a silver disk with a Celtic design. Copper bands encircled one wrist, etched with an intricate spiral pattern. The same spirals were drawn around his other wrist, or else it was a tattoo.
She wanted to introduce herself, and ask his name and if he lived below. Instead Maggie said nothing at all, feeling herself grow younger, shyer, struck dumb by his physical beauty; turning, in an instant, back into the tongue-tied teenager she’d been many years before: too tall, too bookish, too altogether odd for those small-town West Virginia boys. She didn’t like feeling that way again. She reminded herself she was forty years old and that was all far in the past now…
Yet she watched the sun sinking lower in silence. Her companion never sat; he stood quite still, close behind her on the narrow perch. So close she could smell the musky scent of sweat and wood smoke on his skin—and something more which she couldn’t name, teasingly half-familiar. The moon was rising, round and pale and melancholy in the darkening sky. The coyotes began their evensong. For some reason this made the stranger laugh.
She found her voice at last and asked him, “This is your particular sunset place then?”
He looked at her and cocked his head. She saw that he had lines lightly drawn across the high bones of his cheeks—odd, but not unattractive. He did not answer the question she’d asked but the one that lay underneath it.
“We’ll meet again,” he answered her, with the gravity of a promise. She was chilled by the echo of Davis’s words, and yet unaccountably pleased by this. She nodded in acknowledgment, masking the confusion she felt.
He gave her a smile she couldn’t read—there was amusement in it, flirtatiousness, and a glimpse of something lost and sad. Then he left, abruptly, stepping easily down the steepest side of the mountain slope. He did not follow the trail she’d used; he struck off on an unmarked route. The coyotes’ song grew louder as he went, sounding to her like laughter. It reminded her of his.
She sat still while the sun disappeared, her heart beating loudly in her chest. Her heart seemed to beat to a rhythm that was pulsing in the stones, in the ground beneath her feet. The night was filled with scents and sounds that were strange to her, and heady. There was something primal about this land, a language spoken by the stones and the wind. What had Davis’s letter said? The stars, the stones, the very trees reveal the language of the earth.
Maggie stood finally to begin her descent, knowing she should have done so long since, while there was light left in the sky. The canyon below was a black river. She could just make out the tops of the trees. A truck was traveling toward Redwater Road, its headlights piercing the dark.
She was wary, almost frightened, as she picked her way down the treacherous slope. The night was very black up here. The stars hung so low and close it seemed she could brush her head on them. Below, the lights of Tucson spread an impossible distance away. She was closer to the stars than she was to the world, but it was to the world that she must return. She could barely see the path she walked, edged by sharp cactus on either side. The saguaro loomed tall and ghostly as she passed through their ranks by the upper cabin. There were no lights on inside the cabin. Below, Fox’s place was dark as well.
She reached the bottom of the trail at last and skirted Fox’s house on the way to her own. The chimes rattled loudly in the mesquite wood, and something small skittered close by her feet. The truck was coming up the road now. It turned and she was caught in its lights. She stared at it, blinded, as it came up her drive. The engine stopped and the headlights went out.
A young woman climbed down from the truck and extended a bandaged hand to Maggie. “I’m Dora del Rio. My husband and I live in that old stable up the road. I don’t mean to disturb you. Just wanted to stop by and say welcome.”
“Thanks for stopping,” Maggie said a bit breathlessly, glad after her trip down the dark mountainside for this simple human interaction. “It’s nice to meet you. My name’s Maggie Black.”
“I know.” Dora flushed. “I mean, I know your work. I loved The Maid on the Shore.”
; “That’s kind of you.” Maggie smiled at Dora. The younger woman was small and pretty in a delicate, almost childlike way, the kind of woman that always made Maggie feel like a leggy giraffe. She had thick red-gold curls pulled back with a velvet band, clear brown eyes and a heart-shaped face. Maggie instantly liked the look of her; her eccentric dress sense reminded her of Tat: a vintage fifties’ flowered skirt over purple leggings and green cowboy boots. Her suede jacket was beaded and fringed, and underneath it was an edge of lace. “Come in for a cup of tea?” Maggie offered.
The other woman looked nervously up the road in the direction of her own house. “I should let my husband know I’m home first.”
“Why don’t you bring him over too? I’ve got a bottle of wine if you’d rather. Or I could make margueritas.”
“I vote for margueritas,” said Dora, climbing back into her battered truck. “I’ll fetch Juan and be back in a sec. It’s not very far to our place—down the wash on the left, past the bend.” She shifted gear, gave a jaunty wave, and backed the truck from Davis’s drive; then she gunned the engine and headed up the dirt track, dust flying behind her.
Maggie laughed as she watched Dora go. The woman drove like Tat as well, as though the internal combustion engine ran on raw enthusiasm instead of gas. She watched the truck bounce over the rutted road. No wonder it was so banged up.
She turned and walked back toward the house, her fear of the darkened mountain dispelled. She’d remember to take a flashlight with her the next time she went walking at dusk. No doubt she’d feel less jumpy here if she had some friends just up the road—someone beside ol’ Johnny Foxxe, and that disturbing man on the hill.
Maggie wondered then if Dora’s husband was the beautiful man she’d met up there. It would probably be just as well, she decided, if he was attached to someone else. The very last thing that she needed in her life was a schoolgirl crush on a total stranger. Or worse, another half-baked romance—like the last one, in Mendocino. Romance, unlike friendship, was not a skill she seemed to practice with any great success. She’d written Tat just a few days ago that she planned to swear off men for a while. She’d be an “art nun,” as Tat laughingly described those solitary stretches. That is, if her life could be called solitary with Nigel always on the phone. And with Davis Cooper’s ornery presence, even now that the man was dead.
Maggie reached the porch, and stared at it. The French doors to Davis’s study were open. The blue front door was standing ajar even though she was certain she’d locked it. She stepped into the hall and turned on the light. There were muddy prints leading into the kitchen, and the trace of an acrid, unpleasant smell.
She looked into the kitchen, appalled. The heavy wood table had been knocked over, glasses smashed on the hardwood floor. Mud and leaves were everywhere, and animal prints were tracked in the dirt. Before the hearth was a pile of vomit containing the bones and half-digested organs of some rodent or bird. Something had spattered the front of the woodstove, a rusty color like blood.
The living room was in better shape, although the couch had been overturned and one tall bookcase lay facedown, its volumes scattered across the floor. Davis’s bedroom had been spared. The door to the back room remained safely locked. The door itself had been clawed and battered; deep gouges marred the length of it. The worst of the stench came from Davis’s office. She flicked on the overhead light with dread. The poet’s desktop had been swept clear, its papers strewn across the rug. The floor was thick with mud and puddled urine and piles of shit.
Maggie took a deep and steadying breath. Then she turned the light back off again. She went outside, shut the front door and sat down, shivering, on the porch steps. Soon Dora and her husband would come. Maybe they could make sense of this. Maybe they could explain what the hell had just been inside Davis Cooper’s house.
• • •
Juan took a rag to the canvas, wiping away an hour’s worth of paint and work. It wasn’t right. The rhythm wasn’t there. The paint didn’t sing, it sat there, so much lifeless pigment in linseed oil, blended into shades of mud.
He threw down the cloth, disgusted. He could feel the rhythm pulsing in his hands, see the colors dancing behind his eyes. Why couldn’t he translate that insistent pulse into paint or plaster or clay? It wasn’t right, it just wasn’t right. Nothing had been right for months. He knew what he saw when he closed his eyes, he just couldn’t put it onto canvas.
He left his easel and sat down at the drawing board instead, picking up a charcoal stick, opening a hardbound sketchbook. He sharpened the stub of charcoal and began to draw random shapes and patterns. Spirals, linked together in intricate designs like a Celtic knot. Patterns that seemed to pour from his hands, bypassing conscious thought. It was the only work that pleased him now. The only thing that satisfied. The rest was skill, empty of art—the paintings he’d made for all these years. He had painted surface shadows only, the skin of the earth without the bones, flayed from the organism beneath. The shape of the mountains without their voice—oh, Cooper had been right about that.
And look where being right got him, said a calmer, steadier voice in Juan’s head. The practical voice. The Dora voice. All right, so he wouldn’t go out tonight. His feet were raw and painful anyway; his muscles ached. He’d stay indoors. He’d already shut the windows tight, locked the big doors of the barn. Tonight he would watch television with Dora and ignore the singing of the stars.
Bandido stirred and lumbered to his feet. Juan put down the drawing charcoal. The old mutt always knew when Dora was approaching, long before he could possibly hear her truck coming down the road. Juan switched off his work light, wiped his hands and headed for the kitchen. He had a pot of chili cooking and brown bread rising, ready for the oven. He was resolved to be a more satisfactory husband to Dora tonight.
As he stepped into the house he tried to avoid looking closely at the pictures on the wall, his old ones, which Dora insisted on hanging. He wanted to burn them, or paint them all over, but she would be furious with him if he did. He focused instead on the pictures by other artists (conscious of the failure of his own, hanging there, nagging him like an itch he could not scratch): the obligatory Georgia O’Keefe poster; the Froud reproductions that Dora had arranged in a row over her worktable; and the smaller canvas hanging in the place of honor above the fireplace.
The canvas was an original Mexican Surrealist painting, by Anna Naverra. It showed a pale and white-haired girl holding water cupped in her small hands against a desert night filled with Escher-like towers, white moths, an antique clock. It was titled The Mage and the Midnight Hour, although the clock read 1:15 in the morning. Cooper had given it to them last year, on Dora’s twenty-fifth birthday. It had been a generous, astonishing gift. As if he’d known he’d soon be gone and it would be his last.
Juan stood before the painting now; he never got tired of looking at it. Rendered in the vivid and painstaking style of the Surrealists, its rich colors were luminous; the figure glowed as if with an inner fire against the dark background. He sighed. If he could paint like this … Portray that light, that heart of flame… He’d tried. He’d studied Naverra’s art, and that of the other painters who worked in Mexico after the Second World War. Frida Kahlo. Remedios Varo. Leonora Carrington. He’d never paid much attention to them before he moved next door to Cooper; the art history he’d learned at school was largely French, English, and Italian, despite his own hispanic roots. Now he couldn’t get enough of Mexican painting, Anna Naverra especially. What secrets had Naverra known? What witchery had she conjured here? And had those secrets destroyed her, as they’d destroyed old Cooper in the end? Juan’s eyes traced spiral patterns woven into the canvas, into the paint, into the smoke of the pale girl’s breath, losing himself in a draught of dark desert night brewed from wind and stars.
Bandido barked and the cats looked up as the Bronco pulled into the driveway. Juan roused himself from Naverra’s painting and went back into the kitchen. The chili was fine. He tur
ned off the flame; it was too early to eat dinner now. Dora would want to relax, have a beer. He’d make a salad, and for dessert there was the apple pie that sat on the counter. Why hadn’t they eaten it last night, he wondered, while it was still warm from the oven? He shook his head. He couldn’t remember. He’d probably been locked away working again. And Dora was probably still angry about it. She always seemed angry lately. Well, tonight he’d make it up to her. “Mr. Househusband rises again,” he said, picking up the chopping knife.
Through the window he saw her jump from the truck—a tiny woman, doll-like in her stature but with a will the size of the Rincons. Watching her now as she walked to the door, her face tired, her eyes shadowed, her copper-colored curls escaping from a velvet band, he felt a sudden rush of love for her. The first he’d felt in quite a long while. Not that he loved her any the less, he silently defended himself; but love, like the other habits of daily life, was pushed to the corners of his consciousness. The urgency of the colors, the rhythms, the visions he sought on the mountain’s trails left little room for anything else but the raw desire to paint. Wasn’t this what true artists felt? He’d never felt such compulsion before; it thrilled him, it frightened him, it made him hope that at last he’d do good work.
If only he could explain that to Dora. That it wasn’t the marriage that had changed, but him. His work. And something he couldn’t name, as necessary now as the air he breathed, out there somewhere in the hills. Dora would never understand. His wife was not Anna Naverra, not a witch woman with a heart of flame, she was a woman of earth: granite and quartz. Her love was reserved for human things: her family, her husband, Bandido and the cats, for the simple daily magic of food on the table, friends close by, a warm body in the dark. These were the things that mattered to Dora. They used to matter to him.
The Wood Wife Page 6
