by Jo Ann Beard
Now, as then, the saguaro stands beneath the sun as the desert clock sweeps over the ground in circles, and begins the slow, tedious task of sealing its wound.
This is the campground: acres and acres of barren plots, bent and scraggy trees, stand-up grills, picnic tables, no people. One big vehicle is parked about a hundred yards away, on the other side of the bathrooms, tethered to an electrical hookup. The people won’t come outside until the sun leaves, but a small apricot poodle ventures out a few times and barks at itself wildly. The door opens to let it back in, sending out a big waft of refrigerated air for the bugs and birds to enjoy.
Our tent is all set up, with a minimum of arguing. We stretch out inside it to see how long we can stand to lie there. First it gets very stuffy, then the air leaves completely. We climb out and sit in the front seat of the car, listening to the radio and eating potato chips, waiting for the sun to back off. I’m reading a book about vampires that is so graphic in various parts that I have to breathe through my mouth and stop eating chips. Eric is thumbing through an astronomy magazine. Every once in a while I’ll tell him a detail from the vampire book and he’ll show me his magazine, explain something about one of the pictures, a black background with white dots. We read and thumb until the landscape is a hazy 3-D postcard and the sky is a turquoise tent. Our legs decide to walk.
The Official Map and Guide stresses not once but twice that rattlesnakes are protected here. It has a curt, no-nonsense tone that indicates we’d better act right. Small quail run across the path, back and forth, stopping and starting, murmuring and pecking. In the distance one cactus stands apart, reaching at least two feet taller than any of the others, a surly foreman, the dad of the landscape. I want to go see it, see how tall it is compared to me.
Eric has a forked stick that he’s using for a divining rod. “It’ll come in handy for snakes,” he tells me, “and show us where there’s water.” The stick suddenly lifts in the air and starts shaking, he manages to hold on and push it back down. “I accidentally pointed it towards the bathrooms,” he says.
The camper people are out with their little dog. The guy has a garden hose that he’s spraying the path with because he doesn’t want dust from cars to get on his Astroturf rug. I feel like talking to him but he just nods without smiling and we have to keep walking. He points the hose politely in another direction until we’re past, and the poodle barks and barks.
I tell Eric I wish I had a little dog like that one.
“Of course you do,” he answers, “that’s the one thing you’re short on.” Three dogs mingle and mill somewhere in the vast universe, in Iowa, wondering why we’re not there petting them. I muse on this for a while. A big dog, a medium-size dog, and a charming lapdog with a mean streak.
“They don’t even know we’re gone,” I tell Eric, “they think we went in the other room and just haven’t come back yet.” The minds of dogs interest me, the way they never bother to anticipate problems.
By the time we get to the tall cactus the light has softened to a benign burn, a warm pat on the head. We both look great all of a sudden, stained brown with pink auras. Eric sets down his stick and moves back to get the whole cactus in the frame, with me standing at the base for comparison. At the very top of the saguaro a crista has formed over some kind of damage. The scar blooms out, hard and dark green, like the tiny head on a giant. I step over the debris at the base and arrange myself with arms out, bent at the elbow. The cactus is very old and very tall; up close it is hard and weathered and looks important; a cactus emeritus.
I stand in the soft, end-of-day shadow and have my picture taken. It feels like being on Mars here, the light is strange, these green men stand all over the terrain.
Ninety-three million miles due west, the sun continues to shoot off its bottle rockets. The desert has edged away now, out of range. At the foot of the saguaro, a snake, without moving anything but the thread of tongue, gently touches shoe leather, considers it, and decides no.
The nervous birds are gone from the ground now, it is night. The coyote runs in a mile-wide circle, at a lope, thirty miles an hour. There is nothing else moving. The moon bounces in the sky, over his right shoulder, now behind. A rock rises, a cholla extends soft elbows in his path, a dry husk stares up from the ground. There is nothing. The moon is a wide, mottled face, the countenance of an enraged idiot. The coyote runs and runs, not gasping, until there is something.
Three mule deer spring and run in various directions, bounding, flinging their hooves in the air. He picks one and chases halfheartedly for a distance, hearing his own feet, feeling the moon. They reassemble farther out, staring at him through the dimness, long ears moving back and forth like wings, each face small and wary. The one he chased turns first and takes up its occupation again: finding forage and trying not to die. He holds the moment until he can stay still no longer and begins running again, away from the sky. The ground is silver, the rocks are gleaming. There is nothing.
We play euchre and hearts, drink beer, rearrange the lantern thirty times. Finally we put it under the picnic table and it i-luminates our legs and shorts, blows the whistle on a large furred spider.
“It’s got knees,” I marvel. Actually, it has sort of a face, too, attached to a slender neck. I decide to sit on top of the table for a while.
“Let me get my spider stick,” Eric says. He holds the tines of the divining rod and gently points the way for the spider. It scuttles a few feet and then pauses, goes back into a trance. “Get along, buddy,” he urges, giving it a prod. It does several push-ups, puts a leg in the air, and then moves of its own volition out from under the table and into the darkness.
We play a few more hands of hearts, until I realize that we both want me to win and I still can’t manage it. The whole desert is disappointed. We fold our hands and practice being bored for a while. Our dogs are sleeping at home, two of them nose to nose and snoring, one off by herself, flat on her side, dreaming of me. The stars are no match for the wash of the moon, the night air is navy blue and coolish against our skin.
The camper people are out of it. Their colored lanterns are dark now and the TV is on inside, the glow of Letterman and his guests reflected in the window. I can see a head framed in the light, surrounded by a frizz of hair. It’s the poodle, looking at stars.
We clear the table and spread out a sleeping bag on it, flannel side up. This is the best way to watch the sky. Eric has his red flashlight and charts, I have my sweatshirt zipped and a Walkman with two pairs of headphones. It’s his turn to choose a tape so I’m waiting for something discordant and spooky but when he pushes the button it’s one of my favorites. Thank you, I mouth to him. He smiles, closes his eyes, and takes my hand. Side by side. He moves into the solitude of headphones and constellations. I am perched on planet Earth, Milky Way galaxy, who knows what universe. Way up there, satellites are parked with their motors running, and vivid rings of plasma do laps around Saturn. Way down here, there is only the terrible arch of the sky, the sagging moon, and nothing else.
The earphones make my head feel like a hollow tube, full of horns and drums and a voice that echoes like green glass. I am alone inside my own skin and the edges of everything have begun to darken slightly, curling and browning, the beginnings of disintegration. Inside my chest a heart begins knocking to get out. I am alone down here, and up there, clinging to the spoke of a satellite, looking upward at the dark velvet, and downward at the dark velvet.
There is nothing.
Pockmarked and surly, the moon steps back and drops the curtain, darkens the theater for the stars. The clock is halted, the desert gives up its heat. A finger-size lizard with infrared spots and oval eyes finds itself, one second too late, in the damp cotton of a mouth. Power lines gleam and bounce their signals on the ground, startling the brain waves of small mammals, putting thoughts in their heads. Something swims through the medium of sand and surfaces, pinches hard and holds on.
In the endless black of deep space a small c
omet hurtles along, tossing iceballs and dirt behind it, on a perpetual path, around and around and around, pointless and energetic. Propelled by the force of its combustion, the comet passes within a light year of Sirius, burning out of control. Under the press of gravity and air, inside the earth’s atmosphere, the coyote reads the signals in the ground, whirls, stops, and sprays a bush. He begins loping again, without awareness, the desire widening, a dark basin, until he cries as he runs, low and controlled. They are somewhere.
The moon is gone and Eric has fallen asleep beside me. Planets and stars. I know only the ones that everyone knows: the sun, the moon, the dippers, Gemini and Cancer. They move into formation, still and distant as dead relatives, outlining the shape of my mother’s mouth. Nothing moves. Inside my head images emerge and retreat, emerge and retreat. I have to open my eyes. In the vivid blackness overhead a diamond falls through the sky, trailing its image, a split-instant of activity. By the time I realize I’ve seen it, the sky has recovered. I can’t breathe in this emptiness. I turn on my side on the hard picnic table and look at Eric.
He is awake, watching me. He knows the desert is making me sad, that I have these moments; he smiles and moves up close. I can feel the sky on my face, the warm flannel of the desert floor below. I can feel the face of the man beside me. In the silence of the monument he begins whispering the names of the constellations while I listen: Cygnus the Swan, Pegasus the Horse, Canis Major the Great Dog, Cassiopeia, Arcturus.
I am on planet Earth.
They are near. He pulls in the scent with loud snorts, running from bush to rock to bush again. This is a clearing, a high naked spot. On the distant rise, just ahead, waiting, they are still invisible, but the scent rises in the air around him, palpable as mist. He opens his mouth wide and stands frozen, ears back, eyes pressed shut. The dirt beneath his pads is hard and dry, devoid, the moon is gone.
As the mist rises around him, the sound comes forth, pulled from tendon and muscle. It pushes itself through his lungs and into the night, a long trembling wail, dying slowly, drifting finally, without his help, dissipating. Still frozen, he listens for a moment to the roaring silence, waiting, and slowly the sound moves back toward him, fainter, broken into parts like music. Many voices.
They are ahead of him, in the high clearing where the deer sometimes sleep, pausing to listen, ready to bring him in with the radar of their voices. He begins running again and gravity relinquishes its hold. The terrain becomes buoyant and he soars low over the ground, like a night bird, a skipped stone.
The tent is completely dark. I am floating on the ocean in a canoe, each dip of the oar pours out a panful of light, beneath the surface small silver minnows hover like aircraft. My big collie roams along the shore, following the boat, whining low in her throat, stamping her white paws against the sand. I row toward the beach, casting light behind me, and she begins to bark.
I am awake suddenly in the darkness. Outside the tent is the padding of feet, around and around, a swift turning, a pause. There is something in our campsite, trying to get our food. Eric startles and wakes, I touch his hair, breathe into his ear. The paws turn again, there is loud panting, the low whine, and then a series of barks and yelps, a prolonged terrible howl. It is deafening and wild, I can feel him out there, conjuring hysteria out of the dark. A long, plaintive keening, and suddenly it ends, drifting off, carried away from us. We are breathing low and shallow, resting on our elbows.
When the reply comes he joins in, barking first and then crying, pitched high then low, the howl of loneliness and communion. It is lunar and eerie, the pleading of the cold, dead moon to the blue and green revolving earth, the call of sister stars across years of space, the cry of a child who has lost her mother. Now it is coming from every side, the beautiful wailing; they are swarming over us, gray and brown ghosts, distant relatives.
In our green cocoon, we move closer to each other, hands, faces, knees. The walls of the tent press down like skin, the ground presses up like bone. The coyote is gone, suddenly, the air thins out and becomes ours again. Inside the narrow landscape of the tent, hills and valleys realign, adjust themselves, realign again with whispers.
The coyote runs, straining to reach the others, a quarter mile away, over the crest of the ridge. They are waiting for him in the darkness, in the burning desert with its lifted arms of cactus. In the dark tent, on my smooth ocean, inside my mind, he is there already, gray and golden like the desert, like the moon, moving among them in the clearing, feeling the thrust of snouts, the padding of many paws, the push of love.
Against the Grain
It’s okay to be married to a per-fectionist, at least for a while. Just don’t try to remodel a house with one, is all I can say. This is what he’ll do: set you up with practice boards and nails to make sure you have the technique completely down before you attend to the task at hand, which he has suggested would be the best task for you at this particular time in your training. You sigh and jokingly threaten him with the hammer but because you aren’t adept at pulling nails from ceiling trim you grudgingly work on the practice boards until you can almost remove a nail without splitting the wood all to hell. It makes your knees hurt to crouch that way so you take a doughnut break, staring out the dirty window at the neighbor’s house across the way. The perfectionist comes in on his way from a completed task to a waiting, un-begun one. He notices you standing there and grins.
“It doesn’t get done that way, does it?” he kids you.
You feel revitalized from the jelly filling and pour a tepid cup of coffee from the thermos, head back in, crouch some more. The pieces of trim are in pretty good shape, long stately things that will nestle up against the ceiling, hopefully hiding the uneven line between wallpaper and paint. The perfectionist is feeling very sensitive about that particular uneven line, since he tried and tried to make it straight. You assured him over lunch the previous day and again over dinner that the line would be covered up by the lovely trim. You, in fact, feel encouraged knowing that an uneven, almost jaggedy, edge will be hiding in the house. You tell the perfectionist this in a joking way and he stares at you for a long moment and then smiles uncertainly.
In the other room you can hear him giving explicit directions to his brother-in-law, who owes you guys a big favor for helping him put an oak floor in his den last summer. The perfectionist convinced him to go ahead and sand and refinish all the floors in the house while he was at it. After all, he explained, you might as well do it right. Then it’s done and you can feel good about it. You know? His own sister didn’t speak to the perfectionist for about three weeks after that, until the job was done and her furniture was back in place. He kept advising her to try another way whenever she got frustrated and started sanding wildly against the grain. Unfortunately, she knew that “try another way” is what they used to say to the retarded citizens at the sheltered workshop where he worked after college.
“I’m not retarded, pal,” she told him.
No matter how hard you try, the long, lovely pieces of trim start out fine and end up with these odd-looking splits and splinters. He’s whistling in the other room. You try a different technique than he showed you and suddenly the longest piece has become divorced from itself. Oh dear.
“Well,” says the perfectionist, standing in the doorway. “We’re having trouble, I see.” He sets down his chisel and shows you once again how to tease the nail from the wood. “You can’t just go nuts on it,” he explains. “You can’t wrestle it.”
Carefully and efficiently, he sets himself to the task. Within fifteen minutes the wood is free of the nails, which are stacked, mostly unbent and ready to be used again, on a windowsill. You open the can of spackle with a screwdriver and begin the tedious job of filling all the little holes left behind. He’s behind you before you know it.
His hair is tufted up in back from the hat he’s been wearing and his pants have plaster dust on the knees. He has the sweetest face of any man you’ve ever seen. He smiles. “Just be
sure not to glob it on,” he says gently, and then retreats again, into the rest of the house, which is structurally unsound but possibly fixable, just like you.
The Fourth State of Matter
The collie wakes me up about three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream. She’s on the shoreline, barking. Wake up. She’s staring at me with her head slightly tipped to the side, long nose, gazing eyes, toenails clenched to get a purchase on the wood floor. We used to call her the face of love.
She totters on her broomstick legs into the hallway and over the doorsill into the kitchen, makes a sharp left at the refrigerator — careful, almost went down — then a straightaway to the door. I sleep on my feet, in the cold of the doorway, waiting. Here she comes. Lift her down the two steps. She pees and then stands, Lassie in a ratty coat, gazing out at the yard.
In the porchlight the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a chalkboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us is aware of it yet.
The collie turns and looks, waits to be carried up the two steps. Inside the house, she drops like a shoe onto her blanket, a thud, an adjustment. I’ve climbed back under my covers already but her leg’s stuck underneath her, we can’t get comfortable. I fix the leg, she rolls over and sleeps. Two hours later I wake up again and she’s gazing at me in the darkness. The face of love. She wants to go out again. I give her a boost, balance her on her legs. Right on time: 3:40 A.M.
