South of Elfrida

by Holley Rubinsky

  The vastness of the plain below—stippled with dwarf trees and dusty green brush and the occasional ocotillo cactus—is so astonishing, I am speechless.

  Myrna says, “You are safe here. You can see everything.” She moves to one side and places her arms around a standing rock. The rock is odd because it’s about four feet tall, and looks as though it’s grey and white, a piece of granite—wrong time, wrong place.

  She gestures for my attention. “Notice the hollow at the top. This would be a grain-grinding rock. Years of grinding corn into meal. Makes me wonder if a woman lived here.” Now her mouth twitches. A glow seems to rise around her.

  For a minute I stare hard at my friend, her features shyly veiled between the curtains of dark hair, before I get it, but I want her to be the one to say it. “And?”

  She throws her head back with what I take to be some pride, as she displays her lovely throat and neck. She says, “Your dream suggests I was that woman, the woman who was not a wife. The woman who stayed for the warriors.”

  “Aha.” I exhale the word as though I’ve triumphed. The lopsided grin on her face, a face that’s seen a lot of years and a lot of sun, brings words to my lips. I hear myself say, “The Victorian dreamer, the collector of, well, she says they’re priceless, the birds for her hats, thinks you’re in love. She told me to tell you that you’re in love.” I have no idea what I mean, but as soon as the words are out, they seem plausible.

  Myrna bows, pressing her hands palm to palm, and then she giggles—it’s uncommon and unsettling to hear Myrna giggle—and says coyly, “Am I?” Then she falls into what I can only think is a ceremonial rendering of what she feels based on what I’ve said. I watch like someone at a private performance, the performer herself self-conscious, aware that I’m watching. Myrna lowers her arms to her sides, drops her head, and stands perfectly still. The silence streams through my mind like stars pulsing in a desert night. The words don’t belong to me; what do I know about desert stars? She says, “Yes, I am in love. Don’t laugh. I’m in love with a person who lived in another life. When you love, you’re not alone. I am not alone.” I notice the tiny spot at her crown where she was hit by a rock when she was a child.

  I love the idea and want to follow her words all the way home. I, however, have no such feeling of being not alone; I feel like poorly made fabric about to unravel. My hands ache, miss sorting through textiles, intricately woven rugs, and cloth made almost entirely of beads, shells, and little pearls. I miss the markets, the bazaars, the noise and purposeful merriment of Malaysia.

  “I want to live in these mountains,” Myrna says. “I do not want to leave here.” When she has held a few seconds of silence, she crosses her ankles and folds her body down to sit on the ledge. She rubs her hands along her upper arms as though to stop the shivers.

  I sink into my own truth. What I want is not to sit on any ledge but stay as I am, hugging the wall. But if she’s out there, I will be too. I take courage and lower myself on all fours, creep to the ledge, sit carefully, not letting my legs hang over as Myrna’s are, and lean back on my arms. A hawk soars below us. “Redtail,” whispers Myrna.

  “How do you know?” The hawk sinks and rises as it plays with a current. Leaves on trees shielding the cave from below rustle. I say, hesitantly, “I feel disoriented. It’s like we’re invisible.”

  “We always have been. Welcome to earth.” Myrna sounds far away.

  A tremble of fear ripples in my belly. Images come fast and discouraging as I face what I did the day Baby was killed: “I yelled at him for throwing up. I cared about a fucking carpet.”

  Myrna’s warmth is like a hand around my shoulders, though she herself seems held in place only by an aura. I hear her say, “Thank you for your dream. It is such a gift. As for you, your issue is pride. ‘Through sorrow, pride is driven out.’ And, hey, here’s a message.” She chortles. “Change your name to Harmony if it helps.”

  I give a moment to trashing everything Myrna values, search through rough, snarling-sounding words to flout everything she believes in—the drumming, the Moon goddess, revelation, messages bundled in messy dreams. Cynical remarks come to mind and then, in the time it takes to snap your fingers, I let them pass through, let them go, think, “Harmony.” Peace descends. Under my hands I feel the silky tight curls of a wiggly little dog, and though I know Myrna has been leading me to an epiphany ever since I arrived in the Dragoon Mountains distraught and denying it, I miss Baby with all my heart. I love him, and knowing I love him, I soften, am laid bare, and cry. Flakes tumble, swirl in the wind, evaporate at the touch of rock.

  The Compact

  Sally and Al are in their blue canvas chairs, side by side, under the red-striped awning. An American flag flies on the permanent pole in front. Al—once a lieutenant in the paratroopers—won’t have it any other way. Back when they travelled, wherever they went, he set up the flag, let it fly night and day, just to remind those left-wingers that they were desecrating the US of A with their fuzzy-headed ideas, welfare for every Tom, Dick, and Harry—God did not give a man hands if He didn’t want a man to use them. Al’s wife, Sally, has been by his side, gauging her remarks by the expression on his face—he can’t abide a chatty woman—for twenty-five years. She’s a second wife, hard as that is to believe considering all their years together, and she knows where she stands. The children he had by the first wife have turned out well—real estate, marketing—but their son together is the maintenance man of this very RV campground that calls itself a “resort.” They stay here most of the year, in their gleaming thirty-four-foot Monaco La Palma, to keep an eye on him, to keep him sober and drug-free. They have the spot as close as they can get to his double-wide, sometimes go over with bread for the caged parrot on his porch and steak bones for his Doberman.

  The bumper sticker on their Dodge Ram advertises Al’s feelings: America, love it or leave it. Sally thinks he’s stuck in the 1970s. But to each his own; she, too, has her flaws. She flosses her teeth in front of the TV. She rinses coffee cups without soap, just runs her fingers around the rims, dries them, and puts them away.

  She likes it at this campground/resort—really nice folks from all over, and she’s made friends with some of the wives. They knit or crochet together, sip rum and Cokes (what do the boys know) while they hang out at the pool. At the end of March the girls and their husbands leave, back to Wisconsin or Michigan, and the last of the bus-like diesel pushers pulls out, a little car hitched to the back, along for the ride. By then, the weather is really hot and if she didn’t have prescription sunglasses, the sun would burn out her eyeballs. Thank goodness for air conditioning and her body’s tolerance for heat.

  In her opinion, not that anyone would ask, she and Al do a lot of sitting around. Al putters, polishes the rig, and tinkers with his truck while she crochets little nothings she donates to the Salvation Army. She can’t bring herself to make something useful, like a sweater for a baby, so she makes doilies for old ladies who might need new ones. Her friends at the pool snickered when she made that comment.

  Sometimes she thinks she’d like to volunteer somewhere, but the problem, from Al’s point of view, is that Mexicans are everywhere, people who can’t keep their fingernails or a toilet bowl clean unless they’re paid to do it. She’s been to the barrio, looked around. In Tucson these days it’s hard to get out of the barrio; it’s like the downtown has been taken over by aliens, that’s Al’s word for them, and white people—the people who founded the country—are pushed farther out, left sitting inside gates and fences in the middle of nowhere, just waiting for sunset. And something cold to drink, she can face that fact; you need something to drink out here with nothing to see but sky and the wind blowing dirt so hard she thinks the mountains will be smaller in the morning. Whatever’s in the wind makes her nose tickle, her throat hurt. Allergies. Everybody in Pima County has allergies.

  “Go get that box of tissues,” he says. “I can feel you revving up.” Him speaking that way makes her
feel fond.

  “About to have a sneezing fit,” she says.

  “Can count on that with this wind. You take that pill the doctor gave you?”

  “Oh, it just makes me . . . oh, I don’t want to say.”

  “Pee, woman, that’s the word you’re searching for.”

  “Oh, you,” she says, batting his arm, stepping inside for that new box of extra soft, extra strong.

  Through the screen door, Al says, “How about that meatloaf tonight.”

  Sally opens the fridge. “I thought pork chops.”

  “Got my heart set on meatloaf. Betcha there’s a store up the road.”

  “Betcha you’re right.” She’s used to his little demands. She has nothing else to do, not really. She plucks the car keys from their hook.

  She drives up Kolb Road to Fry’s. As soon as she’s inside the glossy store, under the fluorescent lights, she sighs. The store is like a sanctum, the church she doesn’t attend. She loves the privacy and peace. She pushes her cart to the meat aisle and meditates in front of the wrapped packages of ground beef.

  Al was away at military training when she had the abortion. She couldn’t have got it past him; the child would have been part black. She understands that, genetically, the child could have been very white or very black or something in between, but she couldn’t take the chance. She wonders, dawdling in front of the meats, what that child would have been like—smart, maybe, different.

  She had it done at a private clinic, away from the base. She’d asked that the tiny little thing be cremated; she keeps some of the ashes in a powder compact, the lid decorated with enamelled butterflies, jewels in their wings. A soft, pink powder puff covers the ashes. She keeps it in a drawer along with her many cosmetics, the lipsticks, foundations, eyeliners, and other women’s necessities. Al never looks in this drawer; he’d rather not think about the effort she puts in, to look groomed and pretty.

  Waiting at the checkout, she notices so many young people with all shades of skin colour. They’re pretty, the girls with olive skin, long faces, dark hair, a little slant to the eye. God may never forgive her that sin. The price you pay—she paid—for a moment of freedom.

  After fixing the meatloaf, Sally returns to her canvas chair with a second glass of wine, though Al doesn’t need to know it’s her second. Here comes a Class C Adventurer, passing carefully over the speed bumps. “A 2001,” Al says. She pats his hand. He’s always right on the money about the models. They look pretty much the same to her, but Al says that’s because she’s a woman.

  Now here’s something that causes them to share eye contact—two women together in the cab. Both of them have short brown hair, and Sally knows at first glance they ain’t sisters. She suspects the new gal on duty in the office will let them stay for a night or two because most of the regulars are gone for the season—it being April—and there isn’t an image to uphold. Al says, “Look at that. Should be against the law, letting people like that in here.”

  And she says, “Yes, it’s a shame.” She feels envy mixed with pity. Envy because not having a man to lord it over you would be a relief—every time she has this thought, she asks God’s forgiveness—and pity because some women just fail at being women. Something wrong with that; she’s certain. A woman needs a man, period. A good man is organized and keeps his world that way, even if she herself still chafes, acts out through dark, nasty little deeds. Just a few minutes ago, wrist deep in the muck of meat, eggs, and breadcrumbs, the little rebel in her rose up and she spit into the mixture.

  Here come those two women, out of the office, both wearing beige shorts and white sport socks, showing off their muscular legs. How does God make so many variations on a theme? Sometimes it just takes the lives of others to make you grateful for what you have.

  Mabel and Ed stop by in their golf cart decked out with American flags. The four of them look over at the Class C Adventurer, jockeying to park beyond the row of palm trees. “That is just a crime against human nature,” Mabel says, and Al says, “You wanna Bud?” and so they pull in under the canopy and unfold chairs Al keeps at the ready. Sally slips inside for glasses and Al reaches into the cooler for the beer. In a moment, they’re set.

  The sky turns pimento red, a line of blue lavender above it, and above that, a tender wash of pink, the colour of Sally’s white Zinfandel. They watch stealth bombers returning to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, the eastbound planes taking tourists home, and, to the south, the helicopters on border patrol. Sally nestles into her chair. Here she is, looking exactly like a person living quietly under the radar.

  Banished

  Stefan bites into his emu burger at a café in Tombstone. He looks across the table at Karen, her face lit from a window, the café curtains pulled back so customers can see the frontier townspeople passing by, garbed in long skirts and cowboy gear. The splotches where once Karen had acne are obvious. He knows she spends a fortune on facials and creams and puts herself through the expensive ordeal of laser treatments; he has heard all about her adolescent skin traumas.

  A full-time environmental activist, Karen has succeeded in saving, for now, the Arizona pygmy owl, but she focuses on her love life, or lack of it. She blames herself, thinks her inability to find love is her fault, for mysterious, possibly karmic reasons. A merchant in a bowler finishes his meal, pays his bill, and tips his hat as he leaves. “God, this Western town thing is so overdone,” Karen mutters.

  Stefan disagrees. “People need to play-act; they need fantasy.” (He imagines gunslingers naked except for their belts and, of course, their holsters and guns.) He pats his lips with a paper napkin. “The meeting was Danny’s idea?” He knows the answer: the old high school flame found her on Facebook and made the contact. They exchanged e-mails and photos. Danny is on the chunky side, a large man, is how Karen described him when she forwarded the photos to Stefan, but Stefan thinks he looks like a beer drinker wearing a corset. Of course he didn’t say so. This Danny from San Antonio—why a grown heterosexual man would call himself “Danny” is beyond Stefan—was supposed to fly in to spend the weekend, this weekend, with her at the grandly refurbished hotel in Bisbee called The Copper Queen.

  Karen shifts in the chair and gives Stefan a patient look. “He said he loves historic hotels. He is passionate about them. He said meeting me at The Copper Queen would be a turn-on.”

  Stefan knows about The Copper Queen; he once spent three delirious days with a stranger in a corner room.

  He snips a brown bit of lettuce from his burger with his fingernails. “Having expectations leads to disappointment, wouldn’t you say?” He personally doesn’t have expectations, doesn’t think about what should or should not be; as a poet, he’s long ago decided that his obligation is to observe what is. “You’re unrealistic,” he adds. She’s divorced and forty-five and her looks are on the plain side. Her romantic entanglements usually have shitty endings. She’s optimistic and then her hopes are dashed—he used that expression on the drive down from Tucson and she perked up. Told him the archaic expression—“hopes are dashed”—reminded her that the path of love was, indeed, tortuous and fraught. “Tortuous” and “fraught” in the same sentence made the poet in him cringe.

  Her countenance is a portrait of disappointment; the lines beside her mouth seem deeper, the circles under her eyes darker. Stefan says, “I didn’t mean unrealistic in a negative way.”

  “Danny was pleased about the idea of meeting in Bisbee. He went to the hotel website and thought it looked super. Then, bango, a message on my cell saying he wasn’t coming. One minute he’s coming, the next he’s not. There’s something wrong with me.”

  He nods sympathetically. What else to do? Karen sets herself up. Any woman who would sign on for ballroom dancing without a partner is asking for rejection. It hadn’t turned out badly for either of them. He was the gay man in the class, the sought-after partner—no clammy hands, no clumsy steps—and she, in turn, protected him from overeager widows. They made a good pair; they w
ere light on their feet, anticipated each other’s moves, and caught on to new steps quickly. He lives in Phoenix now, two hours north of Tucson. After Danny cancelled, left her high and dry, she phoned him in tears and begged him to come down. She would reimburse him for the twenty-five-minute flight, and because she knows he can’t bear sharing a bathroom, she booked him a room for two nights in a nicer motel near her condo. When she picked him up in her white Honda Fit at the airport, they drove east on the I-10 toward Benson. They passed miles and miles of identical housing developments. She said, “Not a solar panel in sight.” As soon as she said it, Stefan became conscious of the missing solar panels. Their absence was obvious. Talk about green energy; Tucson has sunshine for more than eighty percent of the year. That’s the sort of fact she grabs and runs with.

  In Tombstone they went first to the bookstore. Stefan has found his slender volume of poetry in unlikely places, but not here. Not that he actually expected it. The store specializes in the history of the west, with an eye to tourists. They have a few little books of cowboy poems, that’s it. He said he was starving, so they went to the café and ordered emu burgers because they sounded exotic.

  “What karmic sin did I commit that so many relationships are toast before they begin?” Karen presses her fingers to her eyelids.

  The words are so familiar that Stefan says, without thinking, “He has always disappointed you, whatever his name is, he has never given enough.” The lines are from a long poem he’s written about her but not let her read. He writes about a bitter, older woman too, a character based on her, and though she’s read some of the poems, she doesn’t realize she’s his subject. “Expectations,” he says, getting the conversation back on track.

  Karen pushes her plate toward him, crosses her arms on the table, and gives him a steady look. “I suppose I could join Second Life.”