by Pat Murphy
The old woman nods. “These devils will bring you bad luck,” she says. “When you make them, you give the devil power. You call the devils from the malpais to your house.”
“What can I do?” Dolores asks.
“Stop making devils.”
“The American wants devils,” Dolores says.
“Then you will have bad luck.”
That afternoon, Dolores makes whistles shaped like doves and owls and coyotes and frogs, simple toys that will make children happy and will bring no devils to her house. As she works, Esperanza plays beside her in the mud, making round balls of clay and patting them flat to make mud tortillas.
When Tomas comes home that evening, he examines Dolores’s new pottery. There is not a single devil. “The American told you to make devils,” he says to her. “Why do you make these toys?”
“I do not like the devils,” Dolores tells him softly. “They will bring bad luck.”
Tomas scowls. “These devils will bring us money. And money will bring us luck.”
She shakes her head. “The curandera told me that these clay devils will bring real devils from the malpais to our house.”
Tomas laughs. It is wicked, hurting laughter with no joy in it. “Why do I have such a stupid wife?” he asks. “There are no devils in the malpais. Those are stories to scare children.”
Dolores shakes her head again, suddenly stubborn. “I can’t make devils,” she says. “I—”
Tomas strikes without warning, an open-handed slap that nearly knocks her down. “Why do I have such a stupid wife?” he shouts. “The American wants devils and you will make devils.” When he strikes her again, Dolores falls to her knees and clutches her head, weeping. He stands over her for a moment, his hand raised as if to strike again. When she looks up at him, he scowls at her, the expression of a young boy who has been denied something he wants. “You must make devils,” he says.
“Then we will have money, and we can buy you a new dress.” Reluctantly, she nods her head. Then he tells her to dry her tears and helps her to her feet.
That night, Tomas drinks with his friends, finishing the tequila that he bought with the American’s money. Dolores dreams of a bat-winged devil who dances on a platform of human skulls, a feathered devil who clutches two weeping children in its talons; a snake devil who has caught a naked woman in his coils.
The next morning, Dolores makes devils: the snake with the captive woman; the bat-winged dancer; the bird devil and the children. Her head aches and she is weary before the day is half over.
When Tomas comes home, he sees her work and smiles.
“These will bring money,” he says, but she does not answer. He puts them on the shelf with the others and, because there is no more tequila, his friends do not come to visit. He sits alone on the rusting car and drowses in the setting sun. Dolores watches from the kitchen door; she does not like seeing him sitting so near the malpais when the night is coming. She goes to him. “Come in the house,” she says. “It is not good to be out here.”
He smiles, and his face looks unfamiliar in the red light of sunset. “You shouldn’t fear the devils,” he says. “The devils will make us rich. The devils will buy you new dresses and build us a new house.”
She takes his hand and he follows her into the house, obedient as a sleepwalker. They go to bed and he sleeps; Esperanza sleeps. And Dolores hears whispering.
“Dolores,” they say. “We will make you strong. We will give you money. We will give you power.” Tiny voices, dry as the wind from the desert. “Listen to us.”
Tomas turns in his sleep, and Dolores hears him moan softly, as if crying out in a dream. He is a weak man, susceptible to the devils’ promises. They have promised him riches, then tempted him with drink. He is weak, but she is strong. She hears the whispering voices, but she does not listen.
In the faint light of early dawn Dolores leaves her bed and carries the devils out to the edge of the malpais. She lines them up side by side on the hood of the old car. They stare at her with bulging eyes, threaten her with their claws.
She takes a large stick from the ground and clubs the snake devil who holds the woman captive, smashing the unfired clay into pieces. The light of the sun warms her as she lifts her club to strike again.
A Falling Star Is a Rock from Outer Space
A FALLING STAR dropped precipitously from the sky over San Francisco, slicing through the hazy air with a trail of blue-white fire. Mrs. Laura Jenkins stared out her kitchen window, transfixed in the act of scrubbing a pot. The kitchen window looked out toward the pair of soft gray-green hills known as Twin Peaks. The falling star appeared over the Twin Peaks radio tower and slashed across the sky, heading toward her house.
Make a wish, Mrs. Jenkins thought, but no wish came to mind. Only an ill-defined feeling of loss and longing. She did not know what, exactly, to wish for.
Looking out at the deep blue evening sky, Mrs. Jenkins remembered another falling star, long ago. Andrea had been ten, and Mrs. Jenkins had accompanied her daughter’s Girl Scout troop on a weekend camping trip. On a crisp cold evening, Mrs. Jenkins and Andrea were out gathering firewood. In the west, the sky was a deep royal blue, darkening to black overhead. When a falling star streaked across the darkness with a burst of fire, Mrs. Jenkins called out, “Make a wish! Quick, before it fades.”
Andrea, wise beyond her years, shook her head contemptuously. “That’s silly,” she said. “It’s a piece of rock falling to earth from outer space. How could it grant a wish?”
Then Andrea scampered back to the campfire with an armload of wood, leaving her mother to blink at the first stars in the evening sky.
Mrs. Jenkins was a timid woman, pale and frail boned, but beneath that weakness was a stubborn streak. Mrs. Jenkins didn’t know how, but it seemed likely to her that a falling star could grant a wish. At least, the magic of falling stars seemed no less unlikely than many other things that people accepted without question. Things like wristwatch calculators and astronauts on the moon and horoscopes and UFOs. If people could believe in those things, Mrs. Jenkins felt she had the right to believe in falling stars. No matter how much her daughter scoffed.
Mrs. Jenkins pulled her flannel bathrobe more tightly around her. She dropped a few ice cubes into a tumbler and poured herself some Old Bushmills Irish whiskey. The ice cubes crackled on a high brittle note, like shards of frozen laughter. With the first sip of whiskey, Mrs. Jenkins felt, as always, a touch of guilt. Ever since Andrea had moved away to New York, where the lights and career prospects were brighter, Mrs. Jenkins had relied on the relaxing influence of alcohol. Mr. Jenkins, a fast-talking used-car salesman, had departed long ago: one year after the birth of their daughter, he had walked down to the corner market for a six-pack, and he had never returned. Mrs. Jenkins lived alone in a two-bedroom flat, the top floor of a Victorian house that had been divided into apartments.
Whiskey soothed her restless thoughts of Andrea and helped her sleep. Whiskey kept her company, whiskey held her hand and gave her comfort, whiskey kept her warm in a cold world. She needed the whiskey when the flat seemed so large and empty and New York seemed impossibly far away.
On Monday, the morning after the falling star, Mrs. Jenkins found a strange hair in her bathroom sink. It was a long red-gold hair that coiled around the drainhole like a snake ready to strike. Mrs. Jenkins’s own hair was short, curly, and brown touched with gray. She picked up the strange hair on a tissue and frowned at it.
Mrs. Jenkins was the only person who used her bathroom and she cleaned it carefully once a week. There was no explanation for the red-gold hair. Yet there it was, glinting in the morning sun, a puzzle, an anomaly.
She had no time to consider the strange hair. She had to hurry to her job as school librarian at Putnam Avenue School, where she had worked for the past thirty years. She threw the hair into the trash and dismissed it from her mind.
She took the bus to work. The bus was crowded with kids on their way to school
, men and women on their way to work. Mrs. Jenkins sat in an aisle seat, her purse in her lap, her hands folded over it protectively. An old man wandered down the aisle, stopped beside Mrs. Jenkins’s seat, and reached up to grab the strap just over her head. He was raggedly dressed in an old sport coat and jeans, he desperately needed a shave, and he smelled strongly of Old Spice and faintly of urine. But he smiled at Mrs. Jenkins, and she, without thinking, smiled back. The look in his eyes was vague and unfocused. “Did you see the light in the sky last night?” he said conversationally to Mrs. Jenkins.
“The falling star,” she said. “Yes, I did.”
The old man swayed with the movement of the bus. “An alien spaceship,” he said softly. “Coming in for a landing.” His tone was gentle and matter-of-fact. “I saw it fall from the sky and go down the storm drain. Just like that. Right down into the sewers.” He nodded, still smiling at her in a dreamy way. “Most people don’t know that the aliens live in the sewers. The government denies it. But I saw them land.”
“Of course,” said Mrs. Jenkins nervously. She always tried to be agreeable to crazy people. She turned hex head and pretended to be looking out the window for her stop.
“Watch out for them,” said the man behind her back.
When her stop came, she fled the bus and did not look back until she was safely at the door to the school.
Something about the man and his interpretation of the falling star had disturbed her, but she put it out of her mind.
That evening, when she returned from work, she opened the cupboard to get a can of soup and discovered that all the graham crackers were gone. The empty box lay on its side, brown wax paper wrappers crumpled within. She had purchased the graham crackers to make a pie crust, and she remembered using only half the box. She picked up the empty box and shook it uneasily. Even if she had finished off the box of crackers, surely she would have thrown the package away. She would not have left it empty on the shelf. It was as odd and as inexplicable as the hair in the sink. Finally, she threw the empty box away and closed the cupboard tightly, as if closing something in.
Over the next few days, she kept losing things. A package of gum vanished from her bedside table. Potato chips and peanuts disappeared from the kitchen cupboard. The packages remained, but the food was gone. And not just food, but other things as well: a wave-rounded fragment of green glass that she had found on the beach; a cheap kerchief made of silky material printed with a, bold floral pattern; a gaudy rhinestone brooch that she had bought on a whim. On Wednesday, when she came home from work, it seemed to her that the things on her dressing table—her hairbrush, her perfume, her jewelry box and knickknacks had been rearranged subtly, nudged this way and that.
On Wednesday night, she watched the late-night news on television and drank a nightcap. Lately, she had been bothered by small sounds at night: the floors creaked as if someone were walking softly in the hallway; she heard rustling, as if cloth were shifting in the wind. Once she thought she heard someone tapping at the window, but it was only a tree branch tapping against the glass. She was constantly on edge, plagued with the same sort of anxiety she had felt when Andrea was very small. As she lay in bed at night, she listened, though she did not know what she was expecting to hear.
But she did nothing except turn on the television to drown out the silence. She could think of nothing to do. Mentioning her anxiety to Andrea would only worry her daughter and make her think that her mother was getting old and foolish. There was no use doing that.
Mrs. Jenkins became seriously alarmed on Thursday morning, when she found evidence that someone had made a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich during the night. On the kitchen counter she found an open jar of peanut butter, an open jar of strawberry preserves, a knife liberally coated with peanut butter and jelly, and a scattering of bread crumbs. She blinked at the mess in the morning light. Could she have fixed herself a midnight snack and forgotten? But even at midnight she wouldn’t have been so sloppy.
She put away the peanut butter and jelly and wiped the counter clean, but she glanced uneasily over her shoulder as she left the kitchen.
At work that day she was distracted. She read aloud to the kindergarteners, as she did each Thursday morning—a weekly treat for the children and a welcome break for the teachers. Her selection was a fairy tale about a princess who was kind to a frog who later turned out to be a prince. But she was distracted and her words lacked their usual conviction.
Later that morning, she spilled a cup of coffee on her desk, and while she was mopping it up with paper towels from the bathroom, she snagged her nylons on an open desk drawer. By noon, her head was aching and she snapped at two fourth grade girls who were loudly arguing about whether a stegosaurus could beat a brontosaurus in a fight. She told the kids that both dinosaurs were vegetarians and would not fight in the first place.
“Something wrong?” asked Annie Clark, the college student who helped in the library on a part-time basis.
“Just a headache,” Mrs. Jenkins murmured. “I haven’t been feeling well lately.”
Annie insisted that Mrs. Jenkins take two aspirins. For the rest of the afternoon, Annie hushed the children whenever they started to get noisy.
At three o’clock, half an hour before school let out, Mrs. Jenkins sat at her desk and checked in the magazines that had arrived that week, tucking each one into a plastic cover and stamping it PROPERTY OF PUTNAM AVENUE SCHOOL. It was a simple mindless task that kept her from thinking too much about the strange occurrences at her apartment. She hesitated with a science fiction magazine in hand and inspected the cover. The picture showed a spaceship descending in the night sky over a city. The spacecraft was fire-engine red, sleekly streamlined, and equipped with sweeping tail fins. It left a trail of blue-white light across the glossy black sky. Mrs. Jenkins stared at it for a moment, remembering the falling star and thinking about aliens who lived in the sewers and crept in through the plumbing. It would have to be a very small alien, she thought, to fit through a drainpipe.
“Are you feeling all right, Mrs. Jenkins?” asked Annie with concern.
Mrs. Jenkins jerked her eyes away from the picture guiltily, startled by Annie’s question. She had not heard the younger woman approach. “I’m fine,” Mrs. Jenkins said defensively. “Just fine.”
Annie shrugged, smiling at the older woman. “It’s just that there’s a nasty flu going around. You’d better take care of yourself.”
Mrs. Jenkins nodded testily. “I take care of myself,” she muttered, and continued her work, avoiding Annie’s eyes.
That evening, as she rode the bus home from work, she felt uneasy. She walked very slowly from the bus stop, delaying the moment that she had to enter her house. She checked the mail: a letter from Andrea and a junk mail advertisement addressed to someone named Beth Bettbett. She took both letters upstairs.
The dead bolt offered a reassuring resistance when she turned her key in the lock of the front door. The lock was secure—no one could get in and surely she had nothing to worry about. Quietly, she closed the front door behind her and prowled through the apartment, searching for signs of an intruder.
The apartment was laid out in a linear fashion, with room following room like the boxcars on a train. All the rooms—her bedroom, the bathroom, the living room, the kitchen, and Andrea’s old bedroom—led off a single badly lit hallway that ran the length of the flat. A door near the end of the hallway let onto the backstairs, which led down to the garbage cans and a tiny weed-choked back patio.
Just beyond the back door was Andrea’s old room—an afterthought, a tiny cozy room that was just large enough for a twin bed, a chest of drawers, and a small writing desk.
Mrs. Jenkins’s bedroom was just as she had left it: warm, cozy, reassuring. The kitchen was clean: no crumbs, no mess. Outside the kitchen window, a sparrow perched on the branch of an ancient pine that grew in the adjacent yard. The sky was the pale soft gray of goose down. It was February and the brief California winter
was giving way to spring. For a moment, in the midst of her nervousness, Mrs. Jenkins felt something different stirring: a sense of anticipation and welcome. She had always loved spring, and the monotony of rainy winter days had left her eager for the sun.
She dropped the letters on the kitchen counter and went to check the back door. The deadbolt was in place and the door was secure. But when she glanced toward the back room, Andrea’s bedroom, her nervousness returned.
It was silly, of course. Foolish to think that anyone might be hiding back there. She listened at the door. No sound came from within. She laid her hand on the knob, hesitated, then jerked the door open suddenly.
The room was filled with silence, dust, and Andrea’s cast-off possessions. On the shelves were high-school yearbooks, a collection of Nancy Drew mysteries, and a few old picture books. In the closet hung Andrea’s prom dress and an old ski jacket—out of style but too good to discard. On the desk was a transistor radio with a broken tuning knob. Andrea’s ancient security blanket, a worn piece of flannel with a faded print of red roses on blue, lay folded neatly at the foot of the bed. On top of the blanket, looking as if they belonged here, were the rhinestone brooch, the rounded green glass; and the lost kerchief.
Mrs. Jenkins snatched up her possessions. She felt like an intruder, but she had always felt a little out of place in Andrea’s room. She forced herself to look around, examining the faded rock groups that smiled from posters on the walls. The air held a faint scent that she could not identify: vanilla, perhaps, or cinnamon. The door to the closet was ajar. When she glanced into the darkness, she thought she saw movement behind the prom dress. She waited, listening for a sound. When she heard nothing, she backed out of the room and closed the door firmly behind her.
For dinner, she made herself a small salad and reheated part of a casserole she had made earlier in the week. Over the meal, she read Andrea’s letter, a cheerful note that talked about her work in a New York advertising agency and about the miserable weather in New York. As always, Andrea sounded quite cheerful, practical, and very, very distant.
