The Wood Wife

by Terri Windling

  She swallowed and found her voice again. “This is extraordinary, Juan.”

  But the sculptor frowned and shook his head. “It’s still not right. I just can’t get it right. I’ll have to keep working on it.”

  “No,” she said quickly, surprising herself by the vehemence in her voice. “Don’t. Sometimes you just have to stop. This is finished, don’t you see that?”

  She wondered if he would take offense; but Juan frowned and considered this. “Who was it,” he asked, “who said a work of art is never finished, merely abandoned? Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s time for me to abandon it.”

  Relief flowed through her; she did not know why. Yet she knew that this work should not be changed. “Is it for sale?” she asked carefully.

  Juan looked startled. “Why? Do you want it? Take it then. If it’s here, I know that I’ll keep messing with it. It would be good of you to take it away. Consider it a housewarming present.”

  “Are you certain? I don’t—”

  He cut off her protest. “I’m certain. But it’s still drying, so you’ll have to handle it carefully. And don’t think you’re getting it scott free, mind you. Dora is going to make you sign every one of your books that she’s got in the house—and probably ten for Christmas presents as well.”

  The young man smiled, his mood changing, as though a great weight had been lifted. The tension left his smooth, brown face; the smile he gave her was sweet, and teasing.

  “It’s a deal,” she said. “And thank you. I promise to give your deer man a good home.” At least for as long as she stayed here, she thought as she walked back to the kitchen with Juan. And then what on earth would she do with it? She was in the habit of traveling light. Well, she wasn’t going to worry about that now; she was too pleased with the gift.

  Fox’s truck was parked in the yard, and the man himself was in the kitchen. He joined them for breakfast as Dora had predicted, downing more pancakes than Maggie would have thought possible considering his lanky physique. When they finished, Juan carefully packed the sculpture up and Fox put it in the back of his truck. Maggie signed copies of her books, surprised to find Dora even owned her old poetry editions. She borrowed a copy of Dora’s Spine Witch, then she set off for the Alders’ with Fox.

  Maggie looked back at the stag man’s box anxiously as they bumped along the heavily rutted road. She hoped it would survive the trip. It was a haunting creature, with those thin, scarred cheeks, those slanted eyes full of secrets. It reminded her of the man on the hill, whose beautiful face had carried similar lines. That man had turned up in her dreams last night, she remembered suddenly.

  In the dream his chest had been painted with spirals that dipped to the curve of his belly, his hips, and the soft, paler skin above his groin. She felt her cheeks flush, remembering the heat of the dream, its stark eroticism. She could still taste his kisses, as though they had actually happened in waking life. Good lord. How would she meet him again without stammering with her embarrassment? She wondered who the stranger was and she put the question to Fox.

  “Native American? Long black hair?”

  “Well—part Native American anyway.”

  “Then you mean Tomás. Your other tenant.”

  “He’s my tenant? The auto mechanic?”

  “That’s right. Your description sounds like him. Tomás is Tohono O’odham on one side of the family; Navajo and Anglo on the other. You met him on that upper ridge on the trail that runs above his house?”

  “Yes. Does he live all alone up there?”

  Fox nodded. “He’s got a married daughter in Flagstaff, and an ex-wife on the San Xavier Reservation. And other family all over the place. But he lives here on his own.”

  “He has a grown daughter?” He didn’t seem that old.

  “Well, he was pretty young when he had her, I reckon. But I don’t really know how old Tomás is. It’s not the sort of thing you ask people. I wonder why? How old are you, then?”

  “Me?” she said, startled. “I just turned forty.”

  “An excellent age,” said Fox.

  “So how old are you?” she asked, amused.

  “Seventy-three going on six,” he told her. “Or thirty-five. Take your pick.”

  “Thirty-five? I thought you were younger than that,” she said, hanging onto the door of the truck as they flew up the rutted dirt road. In cowboy boots, an old flannel shirt, and jeans so ripped that his knees showed through, he could either pass for a college student or else a rock musician. He wore a silver Hopi bracelet on his arm, and a gold earring glinted in one ear.

  “Hmmm,” Fox said, “I don’t think that’s a compliment.” He wheeled around a drainage ditch and then a fallen paloverde limb.

  She shrugged. “But doesn’t everyone want to look younger these days?”

  “I guess. Damned if I know why. So you’ve got me figured for a callow youth, do you?”

  She smiled. “I haven’t got you figured at all.”

  “Good,” he said. “A man of mystery. That’s better than a callow youth.”

  The dirt road came to a sudden dead end where a forestry sign marked the beginning of the trail that ran along Redwater Creek. On the left of the road was a narrow drive that wound back deep into the hills. The drive crossed over Coyote Creek on a crumbling humpbacked bridge of stone. At the end of the drive was a white adobe wall with a single low wooden door. A brass bell hung by the door. Fox rang it, and they went inside.

  Within the wall was a sprawling Hispanic ranch house of whitewashed adobe. It had a red tiled roof and a peaceful courtyard shaded by a desert willow tree, with a crude wooden bench beneath. A delicate deer, barely bigger than a good-sized dog, sat in the shade of the tree. It regarded them calmly with wide, dark eyes as they crossed the yard, the wooden porch, and knocked on a rustic door.

  The man who came in answer to their knock was tall and burly—a leathery old cowboy in dusty denims and a worn Stetson hat. “Come on through,” John Alder said to them. “Lilli is in the back garden. We’ve got a sick raccoon back there she’s trying to give medicine to.”

  As they crossed through the ranch house, Maggie got an impression of many large rooms with tiled floors, thick adobe walls, and high corbel ceilings—a tranquil place, shadowed and cool, old, and somewhat run-down. And then they were through the house and out the back door into another walled garden.

  Here it seemed almost tropical. There were flowers growing in lush profusion and an oval pool of water reflecting the cottony morning clouds. A couple of dogs were dozing in the shade of a swaybacked mesquite tree. The whinny of horses sounded from somewhere behind the adobe garden wall. “Hi girls,” Fox called, and Maggie heard the horses whinny again.

  Lillian Alder was a wirey old woman, her grey hair pulled back into a braid, dressed in well-worn denims like her husband and fancy hand-tooled cowboy boots. She was not a small woman like Dora, but beside her huge husband she seemed as if she was. She held a tiny raccoon in her lap, and an eyedropper in her hand.

  “He’s falling asleep now,” she said, nodding at the raccoon. “I don’t want to rise and disturb him. John, can you fetch some iced tea for these kids?”

  “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Maggie asked her.

  “With John? Shoot, he’s always been that way. Loco.” The older woman tapped her head. “Naw, I know, you mean Mr. Raccoon here. He lost a foot in a trap, is what. And now it’s gone gotten infected. So you must be Maggie. Welcome to Tucson. How do you like the desert?”

  “Well,” Maggie said carefully as she sat down, “I’m not really sure yet. It’s interesting. Very different from anything I’m used to.”

  “I was born and raised here, so this is the norm I compare everything else to. I feel closed in everywhere but the desert. So where is it you’re from then, gal?”

  “West Virginia, originally. But I haven’t lived there for years. California is where I was last, and London is where I’v
e spent the most time.”

  “London.” The old woman’s expression grew wistful. “I’ve always wanted to go to London to visit Kew Gardens, but shoot, the farthest east I ever got was Texas. Did you ever go to Kew Gardens?”

  Maggie admitted she hadn’t.

  “Lillian used to be a botanist,” said Fox.

  “I’m retired, Fox, I’m not dead yet. Once a botanist, always a botanist. It’s part of the hardwiring, like breathing.”

  “Do you work with desert plants? It must be an unusual environment to study,” said Maggie.

  “It’s fascinating, really. The Sonoran desert is utterly unique. Take these big saguaro cactus. They don’t grow anywhere else in the world but here. It takes them almost three hundred years to grow that tall.”

  “And it takes housing developers three minutes and a single bulldozer to bring them down,” muttered Fox.

  “Now, now,” said Lillian, scowling at Fox, “I don’t like what’s happening in the valley any more than you do. But even developers don’t knock down mature saguaro. It’s highly illegal, and you know it.”

  “No,” he conceded, “they dig them up and sell them to garden centers in L.A. And then they strip the rest of the land down to bare soil, and plant a goddamn lawn.”

  “I did see an awful lot of building going on when I was driving here from the airport,” Maggie said. “Those horrible cookie-cutter housing developments, like the worst of southern California.”

  “That’s no coincidence,” said Fox. “A lot of these developers are from California. They come in from out-of-state because Tucson has been targeted as a ‘good market.’ They ruin our desert, pocket the money, and hightail it out again. Wiping out in a few months what took thousands of years to create.”

  Lillian said, “That’s true, I’m afraid. I’ve spent over sixty years in Tucson, and I’ll tell you Maggie, it’s changed more in the last ten years than in the whole fifty before that. It makes me mad looking at those butt-ugly houses every time I drive into town. It only makes it worse remembering there used to be groves of mesquite and ironwood there.”

  “And yet somebody’s buying those houses,” Fox said, leaning back in his lawn chair with his long legs crossed before him. One of the Alder dogs roused itself to come sit at Fox’s knee. He scratched the dog behind the ears, and a grin spread across the canine face.

  “Some people just don’t know any better,” Lillian said. “There ought to be some kind of test you have to take before you can live in the desert—to make sure you really want to live here, and not to turn it into New Jersey.”

  “Then I would have been stopped at the border,” Maggie admitted. “I’ve always been an ocean lover, myself. This land is completely alien to me.”

  Lillian looked at her through narrow eyes. “Give it time. This mountain wanted you here,” the older woman said cryptically.

  Maggie, amused, just smiled.

  “So,” Lillian said, changing the subject and shifting the raccoon to her other knee, “Fox tells us you’re a writer?”

  “That’s right. And did he tell you I’m planning to write a biography of Davis Cooper? Davis knew I wanted to, and now he’s left all his papers to me. I’m assuming this means I have his blessing. You and your husband must have known him for many years. Would you be willing to talk to me about him?”

  “I don’t see why not. Leastwise, as it seems it’s what Cooper would have wanted. But let me speak to John about it first. Today I gather you’ve come over here to talk about the man’s favorite subject? Be careful. You get him started on coyotes and you may have to stay the night.”

  “I heard that,” said John as he came out of the house with a tray of four glasses and a sweating glass pitcher. He set it on the table, pulled up a chair, and sat down beside his wife.

  Fox reached over and handed him the plastic container of scat that he carried. “This is what we wanted to show you. Something got into Cooper’s house last night. The tracks on the floor looked canine to me, but none of them were clear enough to identify precisely. Juan reckons something may have come in after some smaller animal—there was a bit of furniture knocked over, some scratching, a lot of leaves and debris. Then in Cooper’s office there was urine, as if the territory had been marked. And a lot of this stuff. I mean a lot. Not just one or two animals in there.”

  John looked at the container, and sniffed it. “What did it smell like in the room?”

  “Unpleasant.” Fox shrugged.

  “Just unpleasant?”

  “Pungent. The way dog shit smells when it’s fresh.”

  John looked at the container, puzzled. “Can I keep this? I hate to admit it since I’m an old hand at tracking, but I can’t tell you what this is. I’d like to take it down to the university lab, see what they think. I can tell you what this isn’t, though. It’s not coyote scat.”

  “No?” Maggie said.

  John shook his head. “You say there was a lot of urine? If it had been coyotes, the smell would have knocked you right out of your socks. It’s like ammonia—completely overpowering. Besides which, coyotes don’t behave like that. They’re not going to go into a strange human habitat. We’re their primary predator; they’re much too smart, and too wary. At a guess I’d say you had someone’s dogs in there. It wasn’t our two; they’re too old for that kind of mischief. I don’t imagine it was Bandido either. Maybe someone came up the mountain with some dogs.”

  “That’s an unsettling thought,” said Fox. “Why would a stranger send dogs in there?”

  John shrugged. “Maybe just some hunter’s hounds, running game into the house and trying to flush it back out again.”

  “A hunter?” Fox said, his expression alert. “What about our young friend, that cretin I had the run-in with?”

  “Well now, I have spotted him around—down there by Redwater Springs. But he doesn’t run any dogs, does he? Still, you never can tell,” said John.

  “Is there hunting permitted here in the canyon?” Maggie asked.

  “No there isn’t, but that never stops a determined poacher,” Lillian said with disgust. “So you be careful, back in the mountains.”

  “You know,” Maggie told them, “I’m actually glad to hear it wasn’t coyotes. I like seeing them around.”

  “So do we,” said Lillian. “They’re beautiful creatures, aren’t they? God’s Dog, that’s what the Indians call them.”

  “And Trickster,” said John. “In our local legends, they’re sometimes the hero, sometimes the villain, and most often a kind of divine Fool.”

  Maggie said, “I saw one up close in the yard yesterday morning, right up beside the house.”

  “Skinny little fellow? With one bad eye?” John asked her. “I know the one. He’s been around here too. He visits Cody, our tame coyote.”

  “You have a tame coyote?”

  “Well, as tame as coyotes ever get, which isn’t very,” Lillian put in. “They’re wild creatures. They’re built to be alert and wary; too independent for domestication. But Cody’s different. She’s nervous of strangers but she’s come to trust John and me, in her fashion.”

  “Would you like to meet her?” John asked Maggie.

  “I sure would. If that’s all right?”

  “You go on, old man,” said Lillian. “I’ll stay here with the ’coon.”

  John led Fox and Maggie through a gate in the wall, past a stable and back to a series of outbuildings enclosed by fenced-in runs. The runs contained animals of various kinds, a pair of mule deer, a tiny kit fox, a pronghorn antelope with a splint on its leg, an eagle with only one wing.

  “We belong to a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation group,” John explained. “People call up with sick or injured critters on their land, our doc fixes them up, and then we supply four-star hotel service until they’re ready to be reintroduced into the wild.”

  “This is their idea of a quiet retirement,” Fox told Maggie, “hand-feeding wild animals, and fishing drunk teenagers out of the cree
k.”

  “Damn straight. What are we supposed to do? Put our feet up and watch the TV? Look here, this is our litter of bobcat kittens. Aren’t they the prettiest little gals you ever saw? Some big brave idiot shot their mama. Trophy hunter. Just took the head and left the rest, including the kits. They were still trying to suckle. We’ve had them for a couple of weeks now—we lost the little male at the beginning but his sisters look like they’re going to make it. They’re so dern cute Lilli wants to bring them in the house—but of course we can’t. I don’t want them to get too comfortable with humans, seeing as what humans did to their mama.”

  While Fox slipped off to say hello to the horses, John led Maggie to a low shed at the end of the row of cages. The run behind it was so large that an entire mesquite tree was fenced inside.

  “This is where Cody lives during the day,” John said. “At night she comes into the house. Sleeps at the foot of the bed like a pup, along with the two dogs. She’s crippled; she’ll never make it back in the wild, so she’s become part of the family.”

  At the sound of John’s voice, a slim and golden coyote came up to the edge of the fence, then backed away nervously when Maggie approached, her amber eyes alarmed.

  “It’s all right, Cody,” John told her, “Maggie’s just come to tell you how pretty you are.”

  Cody kept wary eyes on Maggie, but she edged around closer to John, presenting her hind quarters for him to scratch through the wire fence. When he’d hit the right spot, an unmistakable expression of bliss covered her face. She would indeed have been a handsome animal, with soft, tawny fur and a pure white muzzle. But she hobbled along, dragging one lame leg, and her long fluffy tail had been bobbed.

  “She’s an unusual creature,” John told Maggie. “You generally can’t keep coyotes like a dog or even certain wolf breeds. They’re too nervous. People take ’em in as pups, and then throw ’em out again when—surprise!—they grow up into wild animals.”

  “She is beautiful, isn’t she? Despite the leg.”

  “In the wild they’re gorgeous creatures. They run together in family groups, and generally have just one mate for life—they’re enormously loyal creatures that way. Not like dogs, who’ll mate with dern near anything that presents its backside. Sometimes at night what you’re hearing is a male and a female singing together, just for the sheer pleasure of it. It’s a different sound from their hunting cry. Makes me smile just to hear them.”