Wild shrieks. “My God,” said Gabriela, “the water’s two feet lower.”
“And just think if Oscar weren’t in the pool.”
Doris, laughing hard, said “Oscar, you have to stay in so we aren’t beached.”
“Glug,” Oscar said, spurting water from his mouth like an Italian fountain, an immense Cupid.
“What’s the flow rate of this spring?” Mike said. “Ten gallons a minute? We should be back to normal by morning.”
“We’ll have to pour some tequila in,” Hank said solemnly, carrying out a big tray filled with bottles and glasses. “A sacrifice. Here, start working on these.”
Jody passed around glasses, leaning out over the water.
“You look like a cocktail waitress, stop working so hard, we can get this stuff.”
“Hank’s bringing out the masks, then we’re done.”
Hank brought out a stack of papier-maché masks he had made, animals faces of all kinds. “Great, Hank.” “Yeah, I spent a couple months on these, every night.” He gave them out, very particular about who got which one. Kevin was a horse, Ramona an eagle, Gabriela a rooster, Mike a fish; Tom was a turtle, Nadezhda a cat; Oscar was a frog, Doris a crow, Jody a tiger, and Hank himself was a coyote. All the masks had eyeholes, and mouths convenient for drinking. They walked around the pool inspecting each other and giggling. Masked heads, naked bodies: it was weird, bizarre, dangerous looking.
“Ribbit!”
They all joined in with the appropriate cry.
Jody stepped into the pool and whistled at its heat, her long body feline under the tiger mask. Hank hopped around handing people glasses, or bottles for those who needed them to be able to drink through their masks.
“This is Hank’s own tequila,” Tom told Nadezhda. “He grows the cactus in his garden and does all the extraction and fermentation and distillation himself.” He took a gulp from his glass. “Horrible stuff. Here, Hank, give me some more of that.”
“It tastes fine to me,” Nadezhda said, then coughed hard.
Tom laughed. “Yeah, tequila is heavenly.”
Hank stood at one end of the pool, looking perfectly natural, as if he always went naked and sported a coyote head. “Listen to the wind.” He prowled around the pool’s edge. Over the trickle of water they could hear the wind soughing, and suddenly the shape of the canyon was perfectly clear to them: the narrowing upstream, the headwall, the side canyons up above—all that, just in sound. Hank began humming, and some of them picked it up, the great “aum” shifting as different people joined in or stopped to breathe. Over this ground bass Hank muttered what sounded like random sentences, some intelligible, some not. “We come from the earth. We’re part of the earth.” Then a low breath chant, “Hi-ya huh, hi-ya huh, au-oom,” and then more complex and various, a singsong poem in a language none of them knew, punctuated by exclamations. “We come from the earth like this water, pouring into the world. We are bubbles of earth. Bubbles of earth.” Then another language, Sanskrit, Shoshone, only the shaman knew. He prowled around them like Coyote checking out a henhouse, growling. They could feel his physical authority; they stood in the pool milling around to face him, chanting too, getting louder until Coyote howled, and suddenly they were all baying at the moon, as loud as voices could ever be.
Hank hopped in the pool, hooted. “Man when you’re wet that wind is cold!”
“Quick,” Tom said, “more awful tequila.”
“Good idea.”
Jody went to get more from the cabin, and while she was there she pulled the cabin’s TV onto the deck and turned it on, with the sound off. It seemed a kind of lamp, the faces and command centers mere colored forms. Jody dialed up music, Chinese harps and low flute tones, whistling over the sound of the wind. Overhead the stars blinked and shivered, brilliant in the so-black sky; the moon wouldn’t rise for a hour or two. Just over the treetops one of the big orbiting solar collectors shone like a jewel, like a chip of the moon or a planet ten times bigger than Jupiter.
Ramona stood in the shallow end, a broad-shouldered eagle, collarbones prominent under sleek wet skin. “The water gets too hot, but with the wind it feels really cold when you get out. You can’t get it right.”
“Reminds me of Muir’s night on Shasta,” the turtle said. “He was tough, his father was a Calvinist minister and a cruel man, he beat Muir and worked him at the bottom of wells. So nothing in the Sierras ever bothered him. But one time he and a friend climbed Shasta and got caught in a storm up there at the top, a real bad blizzard. It should have killed them, but luckily Shasta was more active in those days, and there was still a hot spring pool in the summit caldera. Muir and his friend found this pool and jumped in, but the water in it was like a hundred and fifty degrees, and full of sulphur gas. So they couldn’t stay in it, but when they got out they started to freeze instantly. It was scald or freeze, no middle ground. All they could do to survive was keep dipping in and out of the pool, lying in the shallows and rolling over all night long, one side in the water and the other in the wind, on and on until their senses were so blasted that they couldn’t tell the hot from the cold. Afterwards Muir said it was the most uncomfortable night he had ever spent, which is saying a lot, because he was a wild man.”
“Sounds like our Hank,” the tiger said. “One time we were up in the Sierras and a lightning storm struck, and I turned around and there was Hank climbing a tall tree—I said what the hell are you doing? and he said he wanted to get a better look.”
Said the rooster, “One time we went to Yosemite and climbed to the top of Yosemite Falls, and Hank, he walked right out knee deep to where he could look over the edge! Three thousand feet down!”
“Hey,” Hank said, “how else you gonna see it?”
They laughed at him.
“It was October, I tell you, the water was low!”
“How about that time we were on top of that water tower on the Colorado and these crazies hauled up in a motor boat and ran up the tower and dove off into the river—must have been fifty or sixty feet! And soon as they were finished Hank just leaned out over, and kept on leaning till he dove in too! Sixty feet!”
“I woulda done it before,” Coyote said, “but it didn’t occur to me till I saw those guys do it.”
The rooster crowed with laughter. “Once we were riding a ski lift at Big Bear and Hank says to me Don’t this look like a great take-off point, Gabby? It’d be just like dropping in on a big wave, wouldn’t it? And before I could say no it wouldn’t be anything like dropping in on a big wave he had hopped out of the fucking ski lift, dropped and turned thirty feet through the air and hit the slope flying!”
“Actually, I cut my forehead on the front of my skis on that one,” Hank said. “Don’t know how.”
“What about the time you took Damaso climbing in Joshua Tree—”
“Oh, that was a mistake,” Coyote said. “He got freaked and came off when we were crossing Hairball Ledge, and fell so fast I had to grab him by his hair as he slid by. A hundred feet up and we’re hanging there by two fingertips and Damaso’s hair.”
“I feel comfortable again,” the eagle announced, head bobbing on the water’s surface. “Or at least safer.”
She floated over to the horse. Instantly Kevin felt a dizzying stallion’s rush of blood coursing through his side as hers touched him. Knees, whole thighs; she stayed there, pressed against him. The blood poured through him, spurting out of his heart in great booms, flushing out every capillary in his skin, so that he had to take in a big shivery breath to contain all the tingling. The power of the touch. Their shoulders brushed, and her newly emergent wet flesh felt as warm as the water. Steam caught the rose light from the TV screen. They were showing a close-up of Mars. The horse considered the idea of an orgasm through his side.
Oscar and Doris, frog and crow, were discussing the most dangerous things they had ever done, in a facetious style so that they spoke only of accidents. Getting caught under a bronze mold, flying with Ramo
na, wrestling the Vancouver Virgins, trying to rescue a college paper from a burning apartment.… Their claims for their own stupidity were matched only by their claims for the other’s. Hearing this from across the pool, the cat nudged the turtle and made a tiny gesture in their direction. The turtle shook his head, nodded with his round head toward the horse and the eagle. The cat shrugged.
“I think it’s time,” Coyote declared. “Isn’t Mars getting closer?”
“Should I turn up the sound?”
“NO.”
Flute and Chinese harp, and the wind in the trees, served them as soundtrack for humanity’s first touch of another planet. So often delayed, so often screwed up, the journey was finally coming to its end—which was also a beginning, of something none of them could see, exactly, though they all knew it was important. A whole world, a whole history, implied in a single image.…
From orbit the expedition had dropped several robot landers, in Hellas Basin where they planned to touch down, and all of these robots were equipped with heat-seeking cameras, which were now trained on the manned lander as it descended. The directors of the TV program had any number of fine images to choose from, and often they split the screen to provide more than one. The view from the lander as Hellas, the biggest of all craters, got closer and more distinct, its floor a rock-strewn plain of reddish sand. Or the view from the ground, looking up into a dark pink sky, where there was an odd thing, a black dot in the middle of a white circle, growing larger. It resolved to the lander and its parachute, then bloomed with white light as retro-rockets fired. The view shifted to a shot from orbit, in super telephoto, the lander a white spot of thistledown, drifting onto a desert floor. Ah yes—images that would become part of history forever and ever, created in this very moment, in the knife-edge present that is all we ever inhabit. The TV seemed huge.
Coyote shaman started chanting again, and some of the other animals provided the purring background hum. Everything—the stars shivering overhead, the black leaves clicking in the black sky, the deep whoosh of the wind, the wet chuckle of water, the weird Chinese music, their voices, the taste of cactus, the extraordinary square of rich red color, over against the dark mass of the pavilion—all fused to a single whole, a unit of experience in which nothing could be removed. The turtle, pulling out of it for a moment, had to admire the shaman’s strange sense of ritual, of place. How better to be part of this moment, one of humanity’s greatest? Then the lander fell closer to the ground and their voices rose, they saw the sand on the desert floor kick up, as if in a wind like the one swirling their wet skin, and the turtle felt a surge of something he had almost forgotten. Grinning inside his mask, he howled and howled. They all were howling. The lander dropped lower, throwing out clouds and clouds of dust and red sand. They screamed at the stars as it touched down, jumping and cheering wildly. “Yaay! Yaay!”
There were people on Mars.
After that the action on screen returned to the business of astronauts and commentators. Hank ran to the cabin and came back with a couple of light beachballs that he threw in the pool. They batted the balls around in volleyball style, talked, drank, watched the continuing drama of the astronauts suiting up. “What will they say, you know, their first words?”
“If they say something stupid like on the moon, I’ll throw up.”
“How about, ‘Well, here we are.’”
“Home at last.”
“The Martians have landed.”
“Take me to your leader.”
“If we don’t turn the sound up we’ll never know.”
“That would be an odd thing to say.”
“We’ll find out tomorrow, leave it down. We’re doing better than they will anyway, you know astronauts.”
A ball in the middle of the pool rolled over slowly on the water, pushed seemingly by the steam that curled off the surface in lazy arabesques. Foggy yellow light. Images of raised arms, flexing shoulders, breasts and pecs, animal faces. They glowed in the dark, their bodies looked like translucent pink skins containing some sort of flame.
They sat in a circle, silent, resting, feeling the water flow over them, the wind course through them. Muscles relaxed to mush in the warmth, and minds followed. The eagle crossed the pool to sit by the horse again, moving slowly, in a sort of dream dance that threw up a wake of steam streamers. A sudden flurry of sycamore leaves spiraled down onto the pond, alighting it seemed just a fraction of an inch over the water on each side of the eagle as she turned and sat. Powerful torso twisting, revealing wide rangy shoulders, lats bulging out from ribs, flat chest. Glowing pinkly in the dark. One leaf perched on the eagle head.
The conversation broke into pieces. Fish and rooster wandered off on their own, towels in hand. Tom and Nadezhda talked about the Mars landing, about people they had known who had been involved in the effort, many years before—part of conversation strategy, after all. Coyote and tiger got out of the pool, sat facing each other, hands twined, chanting in time to the music: Hank small and compact, a bundle of thick wire muscles—Jody tall and curvey, big muscles, lush breasts and bottom. Kevin and Ramona watched them, knees touching.
The frog and the crow sat across from each other at the narrow end of the pool, occasionally batting the ball back and forth across the water, to keep it from floating down the exit stream and away. They didn’t have much to say. The crow, in fact, was covertly watching horse and eagle. And from across the pool, in the midst of her relaxed talk with Tom, Nadezhda watched them all.
“Look at my fingertips,” the horse said. “They’re really pruning up.”
“Mine too,” the eagle replied. “My whole skin is doing it, I think.” She sat on the concrete rim of the pool. She took off her mask, shook her head. Water sprayed out from her in a yellow corona. Hank had accomplished his reversal; it seemed to Kevin that this exposure of the face was infinitely more revealing and intimate than bare bodies could ever be.
She looked at him and he couldn’t breathe. “I’m overheating,” she said.
He nodded.
“Want to go for a walk?”
“Sure,” he replied, and the stallion inside reared for the sky. “Moon should be up soon. We could take the middle canyon up to the ridge, get a view.”
“Whatever.”
* * *
They got out of the pool, went to the cabin, dried and dressed. Returned to the pool. “We’re going for a walk,” Ramona said.
They took off up the poolside trail. Soon after they left, Doris sat up on the pool rim herself. Her rounded body looked small and plump after Ramona’s ranginess. “It is getting hot,” she said to no one in particular, in a strained voice. She stood with a neat motion. The frog watched her silently. She walked quickly to the cabin, started dressing.
The cat slid over to the frog. “Don’t you think you should join her?” she said quietly.
“Oh, no,” the frog said, looking down at the water. “I think if she wanted that she would have asked.”
“Not necessarily. If she asked you in front of us, and you said no…”
“But I don’t think so. She wants … well. I don’t know.” He turned to the rim, picked up a bottle, drained it empty. “Whew.” He surged out of the pool, causing a sudden little tsunami. He padded over to the picnic table, drank from another bottle. Turning, he saw that Doris was gone.
He took off his frog mask, dressed. The pool seemed to pulse with a light from its bottom that filtered up through a tapestry of reddish steam. The ripples on the surface were … something. But Doris was gone. Oscar felt his diaphragm contract a bit, and the corners of his mouth tighten. Perhaps she had wanted him to ask to join her. Never know, now. Unless—
The wind coursing over his wet head felt cool and dry. Despite the evaporative cooling he could tell it was a hot wind. It felt good to be out in it. All his body felt cool, warm, relaxed, melted. And perhaps. Well, if he could find her. Sooner the better, as far as that went. Brusquely he pulled on his shoes, walked to the pool, crouc
hed beside Nadezhda. “I think I’ll go take a look for her,” he said softly.
The cat nodded. “She went up that same trail, by the pools. I think she’ll appreciate it.”
Oscar nodded, straightened. The sycamore overhead had a fractal pattern of such complexity that it made him dizzy. So many branches, all of them waving against the stars, not in concert but each in a rhythm of its own, depending on how far from the trunk it was … another drink of tequila, sure. Looking down he saw the trail as clear as the yellow brick road. He lumbered off along it, into the forest.
* * *
Tom and Nadezhda sat beside each other, masks off. The wind felt good on Tom’s face. Hank and Jody were still chanting, voices ordering the night’s sound, and feeling it fill him Tom joined in, Aum. Under his feet the sandstone was both slick and gritty at once. Between the leaves the sky to the east had a faint white aureole—desert dust in the wind, and the moon about to rise. Hank and Jody stood, short man, tall woman, and walked across the pavilion hand in hand, stopping only to pick up a towel.
“Well,” Tom said. “Here we are.” He laughed. On the screen the lander stood on the red rocky plain of Hellas. “Such an alien little car.”
“Is that what they’ll say when they step out?”
He shook his head. “That’s what I say here. And now.”
Nadezhda nodded gravely. “But they should say that. Why don’t you get us another bottle of the tequila. I’m developing a taste for it.”
“Uh oh.” He went and got a full bottle from the table. “I’m kind of drunk, myself.”
“Me too. If that’s what it is. You’re right, it feels a little different. But I like it.”
“You do now.”
“That’s what counts. You know, I’m getting colder rather than warmer. It’s like a bath you’ve been in too long.”
“We could move upstream to the next pool. It’s hotter.”
“Let’s do that.”
She stood and stepped into the stream bed, walked upstream with small, hesitant steps. Even in the dark her silvery white hair shone like a cap. Slender as she was, in the dark she almost looked like a young girl. Tom blinked, grasped the neck of the bottle more firmly, followed her.
Pacific Edge Page 16
