The skinny old man’s eyes were a watery hazel, and his wrinkled green T-shirt advertised, MUSTANG RANCH. The wife had those retro sunglasses. I can recall these details but can’t focus on what Baby looked like in general, whether the white tuft of fur was on his left paw or his right paw. The man said, “I’m an ordained born-again preacher, so your little fella is in good hands.” I heard the sound of a shovel scraping, the sound of digging. It was scrubland country, high and dry, with low-growing thorny things gripping the dirt. Then he called me to the service.
“The service?”
At the woman’s voice interrupting my story about Baby, I look around the patio at the group of five women gathered for the Blue Moon Ceremony, their faces ruddy from the wind that whips up in the Dragoon Mountains nearly every day, so Myrna says. They wear jeans and gobs of turquoise jewellery and cowboy boots. They’ve driven Dodge pickups or SUVs to Myrna’s and give one another looks as they listen to me, the old friend, the stranger with the weird purplish hair, tell the story about the death of her little dog. I’d told Myrna essential bits when I’d arrived, and then ignored her touchy-feely questions, pleaded exhaustion. Now I can’t seem to shut up. In the background Myrna moves nimbly between the house and the patio. I’ve kept an eye on the changing light on the mountains behind the women in the semicircle of chairs while recounting Baby’s story. The woman asking the question about the service is a hefty gal in her forties with a tattoo of roses around her right ankle. Myrna places chips in a blue bowl on the table. She says, “Baby was a yogi.”
“Yogi?”
“A being that teaches you about yourself.”
Myrna is annoying just now. Baby was a dog. “The service,” I say, getting back to the story. “Remember I told you the man said he was an ordained preacher. So, yeah, the graveside service.”
Someone’s radio was singing country blues, a forlorn love song. Two kids from a nearby campsite scattered pebbles on the grave. The little girl, her feet wiggling in pink flip-flops, sniffled. The brother whispered, “Shut up, snot face.” The preacher and his wife lowered their heads and pressed their palms, fingers to the sky. “God bless this little fella. May this little fella rest forever in the arms of his Maker.” His hands shook. Then he made the sign of the cross. That gesture—the sign of the cross—did it for me. No real born-again would touch that symbol.
I lean forward, palms on thighs, elbows akimbo, and run my eyes past each woman. Their expressions become wary, as though I am unpredictable, which maybe I am. I lower my voice. “Let me tell you what I felt. I felt a cold, stabbing hatred toward that man. And I still do.” A bat flits by. I flick a hand before resuming. “I told him he owed me two thousand bucks.”
“You actually said that to him?”
Eyes narrowed, I look steadily in the direction of the woman asking. After the so-called burial, I left the campground, drove into town, and parked under a streetlight in front of a drugstore to wait for daylight, then drove like a maniac to get to Myrna’s. Now all I’m getting is flack.
Myrna emerges from the house carrying a basket of sound-makers on her hip, and states, “Bats are good luck, by the way. They mean a departed spirit is listening. And, yes, she did say that. Those very words. ‘You owe me two thousand bucks.’ Teacup poodles are expensive.” Myrna has long, Pocahontas-black hair, shiny and straight, with an illegal eagle feather tucked into a leather sweatband. She hands a shaker with fur decoration to the woman who spoke. “We used to call these rattles. They are not rattles—kids use rattles. These are shakers. You don’t rattle them, you swish them back and forth, like a tide. This one is made from turtle shell.” She gives out two gourd shakers. “The relationship between Suzanne and her little dog was in the formative stage. She’d only had him for less than a month.”
I pull my knees up, rest the heels of my clogs on the edge of the chair cushion. “The old shit gave me fifty dollars.”
Pink wisps of clouds move through the deepening blue.
Someone murmurs.
“What?”
“To put a price on love.”
Thank God the bottle of tequila is coming my way. At least these strangers and I have one thing in common—the hope of getting smashed. I reach for my shot glass. “It was a matter of principle.” I’m determined to make my point between pouring and gulping, throat burning. “Besides, I didn’t love Baby. Not yet.”
“Love takes time.” Myrna hands out a rain-stick and some leather bells. “Being sexually impulsive, I’ve learned that lesson the hard way.” She flutters into the house.
The women laugh and glance at one another and wait for Myrna to return. This time she’s lugging a tall cowhide drum. She places the drum next to me and gazes toward the mountains. “The Moon goddess is on her way. This is a night for dreams, insight, a night for truth. She has gone to a lot of trouble to bring us into her consciousness.”
Someone starts to make a joke—maybe a joke about the hard-working moon—and stops. Someone else giggles. Faces are less distinct; the light is disappearing as the moon brightens a cleft in the mountains. Myrna takes her seat, uses her knuckles to hit the stretched hide surface of her hand drum, then swishes an open hand over the top, the sound like sifting sand. Everyone seems still, watching and waiting. Breathing in, what I inhale is tension, so I say, “Do you want to hear more about my dead dog?” No one laughs. Myrna’s hand sweeps the drum’s surface. “‘I have arrived in heaven.’ This is a quotation from Cochise. Imagine him here. Imagine his suffering, his stalwart resistance, the truths he had to face. He said, ‘I am alone in the world . . . I have drunk of the waters of the Dragoon Mountains and they have cooled me. I do not want to leave here.’”
Feet shuffle. Someone kicks a stone.
Myrna whispers, “Let she who needs to speak do so.”
My thought is, She must make up these lines on the fly.
The woman with the rose tattoo says, “Okay, I’ll start. I steal money from my husband’s wallet. He doesn’t have a clue. I feel like a kid, the cookie jar thing.”
“Revenge,” someone offers.
“Revenge?”
I recognize a defensiveness similar to my own and pipe up, “Yeah, well. Revenge for making her live out here in this hellhole.”
Now they laugh. It’s getting dark enough so that their faces meld into the warming orange colours the mountains throw into the violet sky. Myrna’s drum stops and we’re quiet. I reach for another shot of tequila.
A small voice says, “Me, I had an affair. It was early on so don’t bother mentioning it to him now.” A ripple of laugher runs around the circle. In between each story there is silence. Bells jingle, gourds comment.
Myrna motions that I should stay seated and hold the cowhide drum between my thighs. She demonstrates how to use the beater, a wooden stick wrapped in deer leather, then stands, holding her hand drum ready. Everyone rises and forms a semicircle facing the mountains.
Myrna calls out, “Mountain spirits, Moon goddess, hear us.” She hits her drum. One, two, three, thirteen times. As the moon rises, Myrna begins to chant. Her voice, warbling deep in her chest, sounds eerie and so strong that the vibration thumps through the bones in my own chest. I bang the powwow drum, listen to Myrna, and soon get the rhythm and even give the singing a try. As the moon becomes a yellow globe, we’re chanting, “Way ha, way ya, ya hey ya hey, wah hey ya hey wah hey yo.”
In the no-man’s land between sleep and wakefulness, voices speak languages I don’t understand. Images of people I don’t know flash by. It isn’t the fault of the bed, I conclude toward morning; it was the damn moon. At home, I always hide from a full moon because if it spots me, it influences my sleep or dreams; I’ve always known it. Last night the full moon saw me all right—she was in full view and, daring fate, I stood before her.
Myrna makes Bloody Marys for breakfast, adds a spoonful of canned green chiles to the eggs as she scrambles them. “If Cochise hadn’t run out of Mexican horses to steal or lived in another ce
ntury, he would have laughed at us last night. God. The energy here is so confusing. You saw the local gals.”
I catch the toast and butter it. “Mmm. I thought they were down with it.”
Myrna says, “Down with it? They’re posers. Doesn’t matter how much turquoise you wear. They’re just skimming the surface. They want something they’ve never had before, and this is what we do.”
“Who are they? Knitters?”
“Weight watchers. Collectors of photos of grandchildren. I couldn’t get my Yay ha way ha’s straight.” Myrna takes the plate of bacon from the microwave. “When I lived in the east, I took lessons from a Cree singer. The singing’s syllabic, but you can tell the real from the fake. We were just wailing, making fools of ourselves.”
“It had a certain synergy.”
Myrna laughs.
Nibbling toast, parts of the dream come to mind. “I had a crazy stupid night. There was woman wearing a really strange hat. She had a message for you.”
Myrna cuts the crust off a piece of toast, tears the crust into pieces, and places them one at a time into her mouth.
“I think you’d call my dream a real honest-to-God New Age dream.”
Chewing slowly, Myrna raises her eyebrows.
“You don’t think I’m capable of having a message dream?” No, actually, she doesn’t, but I plow on. “You don’t want to know about the hat?” Myrna loves hats; she’d had a good business designing hats.
“If you insist.”
“The hat was wide-brimmed, decorated with feathers.”
“You mean a hat from the Victorian era, with stuffed larks and warblers?”
“In my experience, in Arizona the birds would be grackles.”
Myrna gives me a look and tosses her hair over her shoulders.
“The woman was stately, tall, proud. She said you really want to make love to an Indian and maybe you loved an Indian in another life, she isn’t sure.” I know I sound like a simplistic idiot. I tear up the last of my toast and imitate her and delicately place it piece by piece in my mouth.
Myrna suddenly becomes busy, brushing crumbs into her hand, spinning around the kitchen. I recognize that these are evasive moves on her part and wait, licking my fingers. She turns on the tap, adds detergent, looks over her shoulder at me. “Those women last night were packing. It’s strange living out here. Usually they put their guns on the kitchen counter. Last night . . .”
Okay, so she wants to change the subject. I’m willing to humour her. “Guns? Come on.”
“Their husbands are mostly ex-military. Look around. It’s lonely. What do we have, realistically? Some free-ranging cattle, houses acres apart, illegals walking through. The war on drugs has escalated the violence, brought in organized gangs. Eyes are everywhere.”
I think about eyes. A creamy mound of scrambled eggs calls out. I stab it with my fork. “Baby watched everything I did.”
Myrna collects her plate and the cooking pans and slides them into the sink. “Think of it this way. Baby was like the weather balloon near the border. It only looks like a weather balloon; it’s really a spy camera, and now, in your case, it’s gone.”
“Damn, I hate you.” Snatching the last piece of bacon, I open my mouth, snap my jaws.
Myrna plans to drive us into the Coronado National Forest, adjacent to the ranch, to the hideout used by Cochise. After the breakfast feast, we dress accordingly: long sleeves and lightweight pants that tuck into hiking boots. This hideout isn’t the famous one, the stronghold on the east side, where the Chiricahua Apaches and their families eluded the US Cavalry for so long, she tells me as we pack a cooler with sandwiches, pasta salad, bottles of water, and wine into her SUV. “I’m taking you to the real hideout, the place the men lived, the warrior braves, when their freedom was lost and they knew it.” She heaves the trunk shut. “And I haven’t forgotten your dream. I’m thinking about it.”
At the gate she punches in four numbers on the security box; we pass over a cattle grate, and she hops out to shut the gate. “One time I found hunters in here. In a nature sanctuary! They were wearing camouflage gear. Beer and rifles. They were not Border Patrol taking a break.”
I admire the way Myrna rants, as she always did, this time expressing incredulity that anyone would even think of trespassing into a nature sanctuary, much less do it.
Soon we enter the opening of a canyon where oaks, junipers, and manzanitas are watered by a creek. The mountains’ flat breaks, like stacks of crispy bread, and the lichen on the granite that make the reddish rock appear pistachio green or like rinds of lemons are stunning. As we grind along a gravel road about as wide as a walking trail, I hold the Thermos of coffee away from my lap. My hair brushes my face, retreats, brushes, retreats; I like the wiry, overprocessed feel.
“Cochise was a Chiricahua Apache. The Chiricahua were different from the Apaches to the east. In the long run, retaliatory raids against the army were futile, but Cochise knew Doomsday was coming.” Myrna is in her anthropology professor mode, her first career. “The man was mythic in his capacity to vanish. You won’t see the place until we practically fall into it.”
The morning blue of the sky shifts to greys that look heavy, weighed down; in Colorado I’d be thinking snow. The road is disintegrating into washboard; we bounce, and things rattle around in the back. I remove my sunglasses, place them on the seat. Myrna is still talking about Cochise, but I don’t mind. My friend is obsessed, and there’s that past life to consider.
Myrna says, “I do love it here, and I would like to stay. Sometimes, though, this solitude scares me. Then I decide that fear is necessary for an interesting life. Then I go so far as to think I wouldn’t be apprehensive if I had a man around.”
“With your luck, you’d have to take care of him.” I speak reflexively, forgetting Myrna’s second husband, who was great-looking but a gambler. It cost her a fortune to get out of that one.
The SUV veers as the right front tire hits a rock. “Shit,” she says.
“I didn’t mean it that way. Oh, hell.”
“Mean what?”
When my skull knocks against the passenger window, she takes her foot off the pedal. “Sorry.”
I touch my temple, check for a lump, mull over an angry response, then consider one that’s prim or even pitiful—I can go there—but laugh instead. “You are such a brat.”
We pass a standing pool of water where sycamore and sagebrush exchange black-throated sparrows, the birds made flighty by the car. I remember Baby’s little brown eyes, his butt-wiggling when he snuggled in my arms. “Baby licked my chin but not my face.” I mention it as though the behaviour was a virtue. “He was cute.”
“You loved him. Case closed.”
Being the good friend that I am, I press my lips tightly together—Myrna can be such a pain—turn my mind back to wondering about precipitation and the sky and whether it snows in Arizona at five thousand feet altitude this far south and why, despite all Myrna’s explanations, I don’t know much about where I am, though I sense running all around me—rabbits, or quail, or something else in the deep canyons, chased by coyotes with narrow faces and piercing eyes.
“Damn.” Her voice makes me jump. “I missed the turn. We’re too far south. I tell you, if I didn’t know this place existed, I’d never find it.” The bottles clink in the cooler as she whips around.
I snort. “Well, it is a hideout.”
“I wish you’d take this seriously. I am leading you to a spiritual moment.”
In university we studied art history and fought the good fight in radical politics. We travelled in Eastern Europe before it was easy. Despite what I think about Myrna’s attitude, one that borders on good-old-fashioned churchy rectitude trimmed with fur and feathers, the fact that we’ve know each other so long makes our friendship feel charmed.
“Here.” She brings the SUV to a skidding stop, flings open the door, and bats her hat at the cloud of dust. “Wear your hat and put those sunglasses back on. The li
ght will ruin your eyes.”
I obey—“Whatever you say, oh leader”—and scramble out. She leads me along a crevice, so tight we turn sideways to slip through. I follow her as the crevice opens along a flank of rock, touching warm slabs as I pick my way upward through a winding, narrow canyon, low mesquite and grasses growing out of gravelly soil, until, as we climb to the right, a trail gradually appears and I find my feet stepping on flat rocks. I’m panting from exertion and take a moment to scan the width of the steps. “Cochise must have been tall.”
“Fast,” Myrna says. “Like wind.” Her silhouette is dramatic against the sky; her black hair catches the sun and for a moment looks ablaze. I’m about to applaud but she turns and bounds upward and I have to pick up my pace, keep my eyes on the toes of my heavy boots, footwear unlike anything Cochise would have worn. Then she extends her hand and tugs me around some brushwood. I can’t see an entrance until she tells me to duck and pulls me inside.
“Wow.”
We stand listening to each other’s breathing as we recover from the hike. The cave is bigger than I’d imagined it would be and smells cool and clean.
Myrna has been before, obviously, and, just as obviously, she has analyzed the three rooms. The one we’re in must have been for sleeping, she says, because it’s the most concealed and has no view. “The walls are polished, notice? As though men had nothing to do for long periods of time but chip rock, smooth it, and dream of the women left behind.”
Discreetly I roll my eyes.
In the second room, I lose my footing and Myrna catches me, murmuring, “You can float away if you’re not grounded.” When I’m upright, she switches to tour-guide mode and swings her arms in a slow arc. “Don’t you think this room would be perfect for supplies?” Again she reaches for my hand, this time to lead me to the entrance of a low passageway. “Keep your head down, eyes forward. I’ll go first.” We trundle, one at a time, through the darkness and emerge into a space, a horizontal fissure in the rock, like a clamshell open to the sky.
South of Elfrida Page 4
