Hunters and Gatherers

by Francine Prose

  “Eat up, ladies,” said Rita. “Soon we will have fasting.”

  “I take it back,” whispered Titania. “It looks like there isn’t food.”

  “How soon?” said Diana.

  Rita ignored the question. “Before we go on our vision quest, we will fast to purify our bodies and rid ourselves of toxic impurities to make our spirit helpers welcome.”

  “A vision quest?” Diana pushed her plate away. “Great!”

  “Shit,” said Joy. “I thought we’d settled this.”

  Isis said, “Maria didn’t mention a vision quest.”

  “Yes,” Rita insisted. “Maria does vision quest. She does sweat lodge. She does dream work and Talking Stick and drumming and spirit dance intensive.”

  “Sweat lodge,” said Titania. “Marvelous. I could go for a sauna right now.”

  “The planet’s a sauna right now,” said Joy. “Where we’re sitting is a sauna. I thought part of the sweat-lodge thing was an icy stream or cool air outside.”

  “At night,” said Rita, “we will have sweat lodge. Then the desert will be plenty chilly.”

  “Brr,” said Bernie.

  “Desert ways are tricky,” Rita said. “Like Coyote. Always giving with one hand and taking back with the other. But Mother Earth is different. Giving and giving and giving. Native lore is about the difference between Coyote and Mother Earth.”

  “Like the difference between Demeter and the male sky god,” suggested Hegwitha.

  “Okay,” Rita said. “Now we go to our rooms. Then we come back out when it’s cooler for Native storytelling and dancing.”

  Rita directed them toward the cabins and retreated to her trailer. Each woman dived for her luggage and scrambled for a cabin, although there were ten women and five identical cabins. The haste, the edge of panic reminded Martha of grade-school fire drills when screaming teachers and clanging bells whipped them into a frenzy in which they each had to pick a partner and walk, don’t run, to the nearest exit. How unlike the orderly grace with which the Goddess women once moved as a group, dividing into smaller units and separating from the larger crowd of women on the beach that first weekend on Fire Island.

  Martha tried to pretend that she didn’t see Joy hurrying toward her. Titania caught Martha’s eye and said, “Go for it,” and they headed for one of the cabins.

  MARTHA SURVEYED the room in dismay. Rorschach blots of furry black mildew blossomed on the cracked walls.

  “Oh, thank heaven,” Titania said. “Indoor plumbing. I can handle anything, even a dump like this, if I have my own bathroom and can take a shower and lock the door and read on the toilet. Do you care which bed you get?”

  Martha shook her head no.

  “Good,” said Titania. “Then, if you don’t mind, I’ll take the one by the bathroom. Among the negatives of cronehood is getting up to pee all night. God, why don’t I feel like someone who’s just had a life-changing vision on a 747 over the Midwest?”

  Martha put her suitcase on the bed by the window and went into the bathroom to wash her face. The hot water tap leaked a few brackish drops, then sputtered and ran dry. Martha spun the faucet, increasingly enraged. When she flushed the toilet, the water sucked from the bowl, and no fresh water replaced it.

  “Great,” she said.

  “Did you say something?” Titania called in.

  “Nothing, no,” Martha said.

  Martha didn’t want to be around for Titania’s first encounter with the plumbing. Leaving the bathroom, she made many patting motions that Titania might, if she wished, interpret as Martha drying her face.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she said.

  “Watch it,” said Titania. “It’s a hundred and ten out there. Major rattlesnake population.”

  Cautiously Martha opened the door and checked for the nest of vipers. The desert was peaceful and benign, pricklier but more open than a forest or a field. Its colors were harmonious, subtle, and mild—the silvery green of the cactus, the clear green of the paloverde. Which was the jumping cactus that shot you full of spines? Best to pretend they all were and be careful where you walked. There was a faint chirp of crickets, the smell of sage, something smoky. The wind felt hot and clean on her face: skin damage disguised as pleasure. No doubt the desert would scare her more if she knew what lethal surprises it concealed.

  Martha climbed the hill above Four Feathers and was soon covered with sweat. She flapped her arms to help the wind dry her underarms and chest. The world dropped away before her—she might have been flying over the desert, Roadrunner walking out on thin air until he notices and falls. The white sky unfurled before her like a roll of gauze.

  Suddenly Martha’s knees sagged, unhinged by fear of getting lost or dying of thirst or snakebite. She grabbed onto a reddish rock, lowered herself, and sat down. She clung to the stone beneath her as she gazed at Rita’s trailer and the dogs writhing and thumping the dust with their chewed, stumpy tails.

  The wind was saying something, or at least translating the rumbling, hostile mutter of a deep male voice. She’d thought there were no men for miles around except for the serial killers streaming over the desert to shoot fish in this barrel of females, whose posthumous Indian names would all be Sitting Duck. Martha was just scaring herself. The voice was coming from Rita’s RV.

  Then she heard a woman’s voice—Rita’s—higher but as angry. Falsely, no doubt, this reassured her; the man was someone Rita knew. She wondered how the others would respond to a man in their midst: probably the way chickens react to a fox in the henhouse. Could they hear him through their cabin walls, or had a trick of wind and geology carried the sound to Martha alone, to be her unwanted secret, like the truth about Hegwitha’s health?

  Where were the Goddess women? The cabins looked abandoned. Most likely Rita and the man had butchered all the others while Martha was out walking and were waiting to finish her off when she returned. A racist fantasy, of course: the Indian massacre. But couldn’t you be on the Native Americans’ side and still not like or trust Rita?

  Curiosity and unease drew Martha down the mountain. Crossing in front of the cabins, she found Hegwitha standing outside, smoking. She ground her cigarette in the sand, a gesture that telescoped Martha back through the past few months and planted her like a cigarette butt on the beach at Fire Island.

  Hegwitha said, “I always think that before we consider starting an affair we should get notarized affidavits from the person’s previous lovers. Everything Joy used to complain about—all of it was true. Diana saw my cigarettes and gave me a two-hour lecture on smoking. We’ve only been together two days—this was not a long marriage. Now I can’t tell her about my recurrence because she’ll make me feel it’s my fault.”

  “Is that…thing on your neck still there?” There was no point even imagining that Hegwitha might say no.

  “In my neck,” said Hegwitha.

  “Have you decided if you’re going to tell the group?”

  Hegwitha shrugged. “I’m leaning toward it. I keep wondering if it would be healing and who exactly would heal me. I’m not so sure about Rita. So I wonder what we’d be missing if we focused more on my illness and less on learning from Rita. Or maybe we could heal ourselves by getting into this magical landscape.”

  “Maybe you should tell them. Let them help you with it.” Martha hoped she had Hegwitha’s best interests at heart and wasn’t merely seeking a clever way to sidetrack the vision quest and the sweat lodge.

  “Great Goddess, it’s hot,” said Hegwitha. “Almost sunset and it’s brutal.”

  “Sunset,” Martha said absently. “Sunset would be nice.”

  They watched the trailer door open. Dressed in a beaded headband, a modified feather bonnet, layers of butter-colored chamois fringe and squash-blossom turquoise jewelry, Rita stepped outside.

  “My God,” Martha said. “She looks like a Ralph Lauren armchair.”

  Hegwitha said, “That’s very unfair of you, Martha, very prejudicial to people of
size, a group that absolutely everybody feels perfectly free to dump on and that I happen to belong to. Rita must be expiring from heat.”

  But Rita seemed quite comfortable as she went around gathering firewood for the fire pit by the ramada. Then she walked out into the desert and picked up a large stone that she lugged back and arranged with more rocks in a ring.

  “Look at her,” whispered Hegwitha. “She’s making a sacred circle. And positioning the holy fire along the sacred path.”

  Once more Hegwitha was Martha’s guide, a storehouse of ritual knowledge; her awed tone made Martha feel dejected and annoyed. Hadn’t Hegwitha just said she wasn’t so sure about Rita? How could she be so easily swayed by a circle of rocks?

  Rita adjusted a stone or two, then surveyed her work and seemed satisfied with the circle and the wood. She sat down by the picnic table and lit a cigarette.

  Hegwitha said, “If only I could learn to use tobacco like Rita does, as a ceremonial helper. I’d be able to give up smoking!”

  The deepening light turned the sky a paisley orange-and-black. Rita rose from the bench and doused the wood with lighter fluid. Flames shot up in the air. She struck the crusty greenish bell hanging from the ramada, and the cabin doors swung open, like doors on a cuckoo clock.

  The women converged on the ramada. None looked rested or washed, but they had all changed clothes. Most were in jeans or running suits. Sonoma had put on her cowboy outfit and Isis her red robe.

  Martha and Hegwitha reached the ramada at the same time as the others, some of whom were glancing covertly at Rita’s outfit, like dinner guests discovering that they’ve undepressed. Rita greeted them individually, clasping their hands between her palms. Several of the women closed their eyes and inhaled as if trying to suck Rita’s Native wisdom up through their arms.

  Martha joined a group of women conferring in a corner.

  Bernie said, “I still think it’s hostile, serving roadkill to your guests.”

  “I don’t know,” said Isis. “Best to treat everything as a lesson until there’s evidence to the contrary.”

  “Oh, Isis,” said Starling affectionately. “You’re so tolerant and open.”

  Hegwitha said, “Anyway, it’s not uncommon. I’ve read a lot of books about women who go to study with medicine people and wind up eating roadkill. It takes some getting used to, but they all test you in some way—”

  Rita motioned for them to sit at the picnic table. Then she went and stood where the fire cast spooky shadows on her face. She flipped a switch that activated a spotlight, which shone down on her—then punched a button on a large boom box. They heard men’s voices chanting.

  Rita swiveled her head from side to side, widening her eyes and listening, as if she were a hunter or, alternately, prey. Lifting her knees like a huge squat elk, she paced to the edge of the ramada and put the side of her hand to her forehead.

  It looked, Martha thought, like a grade school version of an Indian dance or like the stagy gestures of Victorian poetry recitation. How depressing this New Age snake-oil show was: an act that should have been retired along with Buffalo Bill. But you couldn’t blame Rita for trashing her own culture. After all, the white man had done such a job on the Indians that one of the few options left was Native American show biz.

  “Welcome, Earth sisters,” Rita chanted. “Welcome Ancestors, welcome Mother Earth. Say welcome with me, sisters.”

  The women said, “Welcome.”

  Rita picked up a black feather and a bundle of sage that she held in the fire till it smoked.

  “Great smudge,” whispered Hegwitha.

  Rita closed her eyes and said, “I am Rita Ochoa of the Two Deer Clan. I have been a healer and a woman of vision among my people since I was small. No one chooses to be a healer. Something chooses you.

  “I was seeing visions before I was three. Luckily, Native people have a vision tradition. Still, I knew how hard it was for girl children the spirits choose, and I did everything possible to keep my visions from coming.”

  “Isn’t that wacky?” said Bernie. “Most of us would give our eyeteeth to have visions and Rita was trying not to have them.”

  “You will have visions,” Rita said.

  “Promise?” said Diana coyly.

  Rita frowned and continued. “When I was six, I died and left my body three times. Once I ate rat poison; once I was burned in a fire; once a flash flood carried me down the arroyo, and the men in my village found me twenty miles away.”

  “Flash floods,” said Titania. “Crikey.”

  Bernie laughed. “Your mom must have had her hands full.”

  “See, Mother,” said Sonoma. “Rita’s mom had it worse than you.”

  “I suppose,” said Freya.

  “Child neglect,” Titania whispered to Martha. “I wonder what a team of competent social workers would do to the world child-visionary population.”

  “I heard that,” said Joy. “That’s racist.”

  “My visions continued,” said Rita. “I tried to escape my calling. I asked a great medicine woman, Grandmother Talking Raven, to help me silence the voices in my head.”

  “Grandmother Talking Raven!” said Isis. “I spent two weeks with her at Mount Shasta.”

  Rita said, “Grandmother Talking Raven warned me there was nothing I could do. The sacred path had chosen me and I had to follow. And at last I had a teaching vision that resigned me to my calling.”

  Rita seemed about to describe her vision but, perhaps in the interests of brevity, thought better of it. “On behalf of Native people everywhere, I welcome you to the Storytelling Path. For our people, stories have always been pathways to knowledge that the white man is only now beginning to walk—”

  “And the white woman,” corrected Bernie.

  A spasm of impatience tweaked one corner of Rita’s mouth. “And our white sisters,” she said. “For generations our stories have healed Native people. Now we must heal the white man with the power of our stories before he wipes out our animal teachers and Mother Earth herself.”

  “Amen,” said Titania.

  “A-women!” Joy called out.

  “Stories can do many things,” Rita said. “They help Native healers cure disease. They are strong tools to help us find the sacred way. Tonight I will tell stories about the emotions, which our ancients knew better than all the white men’s psychiatrists.”

  “That’s not saying much,” said Joy.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Bernie. “Quite a number of us here have therapy backgrounds.”

  “I’ll say,” said Hegwitha. “Sometimes I can’t believe it. Everybody here’s a famous therapist or writer or Goddess person or artist.”

  “Hardly everybody,” said Titania. “I’m just a businesswoman and you are a health worker and Martha works at a magazine and Diana’s an academic—”

  “An academic dropout,” said Joy.

  “Martha worked at a magazine,” said Martha, but no one seemed to hear.

  “Right,” said Starling. “Some of us are the CEO’s of ecologically correct megabuck cosmetics firms.”

  “Yes, well,” said Titania. “That’s not precisely my job description. And some of us are glorified handmaidens for high-profile celebrity priestesses.”

  “Ladies!” said Isis. “I’m horrified!” In fact, she seemed pleased, perhaps by the reference to her as a high-profile celebrity priestess: reassuring, after not being invited to wherever Maria was teaching.

  “Rita,” said Isis. “Did I hear you say something about Talking Stick?”

  “I do Talking Stick,” said Rita. “I do storytelling. I do sweat lodge. I do drumming.”

  “Maybe we should do Talking Stick now,” Isis suggested. “Maybe it would help us get where we’re trying to go.”

  “Tonight we do storytelling,” said Rita. “Later we do Talking Stick.”

  “Of course,” agreed Isis.

  “Okay,” Rita said. “The first story I want to tell you is a story about fear.
”

  “You’ve found the right crowd for that one,” Hegwitha said. Martha turned, but Hegwitha was in the dark, beyond the spotlight and the fire.

  Rita began pacing. “Once upon a time”—her voice was stentorian—“the Earth, our Mother, was taking a nap, and the world was more dangerous even than now.”

  “Hard to imagine,” Freya said, but no one paid any mind because they were all gaping at a young man approaching with a smoking smudge pot in his outstretched arms. He too was dressed in fringed leather, turquoise, and beads. He was slight, with a ferretlike triangular face, thin curly hair, a wispy beard, and ice-blue eyes jittering in their sockets.

  “El Diablo!” said Titania.

  “Who in the Sam Hill is that?” said Starling.

  “Ladies, meet Scotty Red Deer,” said Rita. “Like me, he is a healer, chosen against his will to walk the healer’s path. Scotty was in Vietnam and came home to another battle, this one against post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse—”

  “It was a bitch, man,” said Scotty.

  “Hold on, buddy,” Joy said. “I think we should counsel. Some of us may have negative feelings about a man being around.”

  “Scotty’s kind of cute,” whispered Titania. “He can beam me up any time.”

  Rita’s eyes narrowed. “Scotty is my partner on the sacred path. Scotty is my teacher, just as I am his. He has learned the teaching stories and the secret ways that the ancients used to shoot stories like arrows into our hearts.”

  “Oh, great,” said Starling. “The neo-Native-American Charlie Manson.”

  Earlier, when Martha heard Rita arguing with a man in her trailer, she’d assumed, from the sound of his voice, that he meant to harm them. Had her time with the Goddess women so estranged her from men that anything deeper than a countertenor made her anticipate damage? Dennis had a beautiful actor’s voice that Martha loved to hear, even his vocal exercises, embarrassing gurgles and growls.

  “For my story,” said Rita, “‘The Girl Who Was Not Afraid,’ Scotty will be Fire Man, tending the fire and smudge.”

  “‘The Girl Who Was Not Afraid?’” said Hegwitha.