Hunters and Gatherers

by Francine Prose

  Rita smiled proudly. “This is how my people discovered what strong medicine I have.”

  “They should record that song of yours,” said Titania. “The uses for it would be legion.”

  Rita looked insulted. “My medicine song wouldn’t work unless I was there to sing it.”

  “Ignore Titania,” said Starling. “Always the businesswoman.”

  For a moment Martha wondered if Rita’s story was true. It was troubling that this woman had begun life in terror and grief and impossible responsibility. But it was just as unpleasant to think she’d invented the perfect story, the legend that these women most longed and needed to hear, a story about female magic pacifying male violence. Martha’s anger at them subsided, leaving her hollow and drained.

  Isis took Rita’s hands between hers.

  “That’s beautiful,” she said thickly.

  HOW LONG HAD MARTHA been sleeping? The back of her neck was soaked. She’d awakened in that weightless free-fall she sometimes slipped into falling asleep. She’d been dreaming that she was about to trip down the steps of her childhood house. Young and smiling and healthy, her father was running to catch her. Waking, she realized that he was dead and she had to stop from crying out.

  In the other bed Titania tossed and moaned in her sleep.

  Martha turned on the lamp and checked her watch. Ten after four in the morning. Her temples throbbed, her sinuses ached. Valley fever, no doubt.

  Someone was knocking on the door.

  “Titania!” said Martha. “Wake up!” Titania groaned and rolled over.

  “Who is it?” Martha called out evenly, as if it were perfectly normal, a visit at 4:00 a.m.

  No one answered. There was a louder knock.

  Martha thought of Scotty—and now she got really scared. Had she said anything he could have misread as flirtation or encouragement? Had a faint smile crossed her lips when he told his fat joke about Rita? Maybe Scotty had fixed her up with a biker-rapist blind date or the entire membership of the Tucson Hell’s Angels.

  “Who is it?” she repeated.

  A voice said, “It’s me, Freya!”

  Freya stood in the doorway. She said, “Have you seen Sonoma?”

  “Since when?” Martha said. “Is she missing?”

  Freya just stared at her.

  “Obviously,” said Martha. “Sorry.”

  She was stalling for time to remember their conversation outside the sweat lodge. Had Martha said something stupid? Driven Sonoma away? Should she have been more discouraging about her plans to visit her father?

  “What the fuck?” Titania mumbled from her bed.

  “Sonoma didn’t come back tonight,” Freya said. “She wasn’t in the cabin when I got back from the feast. I must have dozed off. When I woke up, she still wasn’t there.”

  “I talked to her last night after she left the sweat lodge,” Martha said tentatively. “She was saying something about wanting to go find her dad.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Freya said.

  “Freya,” said Titania. “Get a grip on yourself. When did you see her last?”

  “I don’t know!” Freya cried. “That’s the awful part—I don’t know when I last saw my daughter.”

  “She was there when we did Talking Stick,” said Titania.

  “I know that, I saw her,” said Freya. “But not after that.”

  “Where is her father, exactly?” said Martha.

  “Oh, who knows?” said Freya. “I thought it was Delphi, that town we passed through. Maybe it’s Delphi, Colorado. Is there a Delphi, Colorado? Could she have gone into town? Looking for her father? How could she have done this after what we said tonight with the Talking Stick? I thought some kind of healing was starting to happen between us. For her to run away after that…But why should I be surprised? I was the one who dozed off without knowing where my daughter was. What kind of mother am I? My first thought was that she’d sneaked off to flirt with Rita’s boyfriend. What was I thinking? Sonoma hardly knows boys exist. I went to Rita’s trailer and stood outside. I heard these rhythmic thumps, like someone being beaten or having S-M sex. Rita answered the door in her bathrobe. Sonoma wasn’t there.”

  “We haven’t seen her,” Martha said. “Titania, have you seen Sonoma?”

  “No,” replied Titania.

  “Jesus,” Freya said. “All right, I’m going to look for her. See you. Goodbye. Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

  “Is she nuts?” Titania said. “Telling us to go back to sleep when Sonoma’s missing?”

  Martha pulled on her jeans and shirt. Only after she’d tied her shoes did she remember Rita’s warning about always checking to make sure that Little Sister Scorpion wasn’t sleeping in their boots. Well, let the scorpion bite her, she wasn’t going to take off her shoes and check. Martha grabbed a sweatshirt and hurried outside.

  Sonoma wasn’t anywhere. That much had been determined by the time Martha reached the ramada, where the others were gathered, warming their hands over the fire.

  Bernie told Martha, “She left a note. It said: ‘I’m out of here. Love, Sonoma.’”

  “She’s run away,” pronounced Isis, a conclusion so self-evident that only Sonoma could have appreciated its full, glorious banality. Martha shivered as a chill of pure fear raised the hairs on the back of her neck, amazing her with the intensity of her concern for Sonoma.

  “That’s the best-case scenario,” explained Bernie. “As a therapist, I feel I have to say…Well, given the teenage suicide rate, we can’t not consider that.”

  Freya groaned.

  “Don’t worry,” Bernie said. “Factoring in Sonoma’s personality and the tone of the note, suicide seems unlikely. It’s more like Sonoma to run away than do anything drastic. Plus, teenage suicides tend to talk about it first, and as far as we know—”

  Martha said, “Last night she was telling me about wanting to find her father.”

  With a sickening lurch of dread, she remembered: Sonoma had talked about killing herself. But before Martha could decide how to mention this without making everyone hysterical, Scotty said, “Let’s get this straight. When was the girl seen last?”

  Excuse me? thought Martha. What was happening here? Scotty was playing detective, not the none-too-bright cop that one might expect but the efficient sergeant—cool, competent, and thorough. What was far more unexpected was that the women were allowing this, turning phototropically to the only man present at the scene of a crisis. Joy, Starling, Diana, Isis—with their contempt for male intelligence, their belief that men were only good for making war and donor sperm—were reverting back to some learned response, some primitive form of wiring that, when lightning hit, conveyed the charge to the nearest male. As soon as her daughter disappeared, Freya had stopped praying to the Goddess and instead kept muttering, “Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus.”

  “Did she have a flashlight?” Scotty asked Freya. “Could she have gotten a flashlight?”

  Freya said, “I don’t know what she has! I have no idea where she’d go. This isn’t like her. I don’t get it.” As she grew more frantic and distraught, Freya aged before their eyes; the furrow between her eyebrows deepened, a wattle flapped under her chin.

  Scotty said, “Come on, you’re her mom—and you don’t know where she is in the middle of the night, or where she might go?”

  Who was Scotty to lecture Freya on the duties of motherhood? Why weren’t the others defending her against this stranger, this…male wielding his privileged male authority to destroy a woman’s self-worth? Martha sensed a faint stir of satisfaction rippling through the group as Scotty confirmed their opinion of Freya’s maternal capabilities.

  Tears left dusty trails down Freya’s face, but her voice was clipped and controlled. “This is no time to evaluate my competence as a mother.”

  “Well, excuse me,” said Scotty. “It’s not my kid who split.”

  Isis said, “Isn’t it odd that even feminists fall into this trap—when something goes wrong with a child, ev
en feminists blame the mother?”

  “Thank you,” Freya said.

  Isis went over and put her arm around Freya. “Sonoma’s not an easy kid,” she said. “Anyone could see that. She has lots of issues to work through. When she comes back, it’s going to be hard, and naturally it will take time and a great deal of help from the Goddess.”

  Freya said, “It makes me feel better to hear you assuming she is coming back.”

  Then Freya shrugged off Isis’s arm, blew her nose, and turned on Diana. “You’re the one always telling her to go get lost in the desert, as if it weren’t suicide for a thirteen-year-old New York kid to go be rattlesnake bait. The stupidity, the wickedness of putting that kind of pressure—”

  “Leave Diana alone,” Joy muttered.

  “You think Sonoma would listen to me anyway?” Diana was almost shrieking. “You’ve done such a job on that kid that her whole life is overeating and fucking with your head!”

  “Oh, I can’t stand it,” Isis said. “Something always happens! Something always sabotages whatever we try to do—”

  “Oh, Isis,” said Starling. “That’s not true!”

  “It is true,” insisted Isis. “Someone’s always trying to set me on fire or drown me. Those women who burned the corn witches at the beach on Labor Day weekend—”

  Bernie said, “I always wished I knew Sonoma better. But she wasn’t the kind of girl who would ever let you in. Still, from what little I do know, Freya, I think she just ran away, and we can’t blame Diana.”

  Why was Bernie referring to Sonoma in the past tense? Hot tears welled up in Martha’s eyes, and she felt nearly faint with anxiety. Probably Sonoma was safe, and they would find her before too long. But why did Martha think that they wouldn’t—that Sonoma was dead or about to be dead, fallen prey to exposure, the victim of a four-legged or a two-legged creature, or of a snake with no legs at all? Perhaps only Martha thought that, the lone doubter among these women with their unwavering faith in a Goddess who was, as they spoke, watching over Sonoma.

  Hegwitha spoke up. “Who cares why she left? We’d better get off our tails and find her. It’s cold and dangerous out there—”

  “Hegwitha’s right,” said Martha.

  “Ladies,” said Rita, “the desert critters know when you mean no harm, and they will never hurt you. Sonoma will be okay. The Earth, our Mother, will protect her. Native people have legends about folks who get lost in the desert, and the Grandmothers find them and escort them back.”

  Joy said, “And we’re supposed to sit here until the Grandmothers find her? What if they don’t find her?”

  Starling said, “I thought Native people never got lost. I thought you said that yesterday, Rita!”

  “Not at all,” said Diana. “Rita was very clear about lots of Native people getting lost and surviving because of their memories of ancient hunter-gatherer ways. Gosh, I hope Sonoma was listening.”

  Hegwitha said, “Is there a telephone? Can we drive into town and call? Where does this father of hers live? Shouldn’t we call over there? Should we notify the state troopers?”

  Scotty said, “Hey, no, man. No way. Not the troopers—not those oinkers. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?” Martha said.

  Scotty said, “Get serious. There’s two hundred years of bad blood between our Native people and those sonofabitches. The minute you invite the law onto our land you get a situation like Wounded Knee.”

  “We’re not exactly activists out here,” said Joy. “Not by a long shot, I’d say. They have no reason to want to get us. A child is missing. We need help.”

  “Sure,” said Scotty. “Next, it’s in all the papers how we’re a bunch of godless satanic Indian savages practicing ritual child sacrifice. We can handle this ourselves. I’ll call my friends, we’re desert rats, we’ll find her faster than a bunch of crackers jerking off in helicopters. I was in Vietnam with those choppers, man. I know what bad magic they are.”

  Martha would have liked the entire 82nd Airborne out searching for Sonoma. Why wouldn’t Scotty and Rita call in all the help they could get? Could Scotty have hurt Sonoma? That was too frightening to consider.

  Scotty said, “Okay, I’ll level with you. I’ve got an acre of weed growing out here. Top-grade sinsemilla. The law would not appreciate that.”

  “Scotty!” said Rita.

  “Thank you for informing us,” said Starling curtly.

  Scotty said, “They’d probably lock us all up until they sorted things out, by which point you can write off the kid. If you ever find her, she’ll be put straight into foster care.”

  “Please,” said Titania. “Don’t threaten us. We have access to excellent lawyers.”

  It no longer seemed such a wise idea to call the police right away. Maybe Scotty was right, maybe he and his friends knew the desert better than a posse of overweight cowpokes in four-wheel-drive patrol cars.

  Scotty said, “I got a CB in my truck. Let me call my buddies. We’ll go looking for her as soon as the light comes up.”

  “We can’t wait till the light comes up!” Freya shrieked. “We have to go out now.”

  “It’ll be dawn in an hour,” Scotty said. “Let’s get our priorities straight. We’ll do better thinking it through and coming up with a plan than rushing out into the darkness with our heads up our butts.”

  The image Martha saw was out of Hieronymus Bosch: Scotty’s buddies scurrying through the night in that odd anatomical position. She didn’t like picturing Scotty’s friends in any position at all. But now the same women who’d thrown a fit about having Scotty around weren’t hesitating to call in the Hell’s Angels. In fact, they seemed quite grateful for any help at all.

  “That’s a wonderful idea,” Isis said. “Especially waiting for dawn. There’s no overestimating the power of light, of seeing things in a new light. Wait. I have a thought. Let’s do a healing circle before we go look for Sonoma. Ask the Goddess and the Great Spirit for help in finding their child, and ours.”

  Would they really waste precious time on mumbo jumbo when they could be stumbling around, calling Sonoma’s name? Martha thought of how she’d met these women, how she’d jumped in and saved Isis from drowning. What was wrong with them, what had happened to leave them so paralyzed and passive that they could stand and witness horrific crises without being able to act? Wasn’t anyone objecting? What was there to object to? Perhaps they should wait till dawn rather than go out now and get lost themselves.

  Martha still thought they should call the troopers, but Scotty might be right. Finding Scotty’s pot plantation might interfere with the search for Sonoma. Sonoma would have had something to say about a healing circle now. She would have crooked her finger into her mouth and pretended to gag.

  “All right, Isis, babe! A healing circle!” Scotty stuck up his thumb.

  Freya accepted the group decision and didn’t insist they start searching at once—though that was surely what Martha would have done, had Sonoma been her child. But she’d never had a child, so how could she possibly know? Was it all right to wait the hour, to let Sonoma get farther away? Would the benefits of daylight outweigh the likelihood of Sonoma wandering that much farther from the camp?

  The women shambled about in the vague way that preceded forming a circle. And even Joy, who’d been most vehement about doing something at once, gave in to the always seductive chance to put something off for a while.

  Martha knew she couldn’t join in—she would not be able to do it.

  Hegwitha came over to Martha and said, “This is total bullshit. We can’t just wait for an hour. We should blow this place right now and go out and find her.”

  “Let’s go,” Martha told her. That was how long it took to decide. Then they stood and stared at each other. What would they do now?

  Hegwitha said, “Should we take the van? Shouldn’t we ask someone? If this is really a nonhierarchical situation, it’s our van as much as anyone else’s. I think we shoul
d just take it.”

  “Can you drive it?” Martha was leery of standard shift, and cars with special needs and quirks.

  “No worse than Joy,” Hegwitha said. “And I know where Joy keeps the keys.”

  Martha didn’t want to ask how Hegwitha knew. It might have led to Hegwitha saying more about Diana than Martha wanted to hear right then. “How are you feeling?” she said.

  “Not great,” said Hegwitha. “But not so bad I can’t drive.”

  Hegwitha went to her cabin and came out waving the car keys. She climbed into the driver’s seat. Martha got in beside her. Would the women come after them when they heard the van start up?

  The women bowed their heads and joined hands. From the van, Martha could hear their tremulous mewing. What a sad minor tune it was, how frail and tender they seemed, with their yearning to believe that their pain and loss were part of some higher design.

  Hegwitha turned the key in the ignition. The engine started up. Miraculous! The second miracle was that no one turned to watch them go.

  “It’s a sign,” said Martha.

  “Bingo,” said Hegwitha.

  Hegwitha switched on the headlights. A cactus jumped into the light. She swung the van around and found the driveway.

  “All right!” Martha said.

  “Yess! Yess!” hissed Hegwitha. She sounded like Sonoma. “We’ll find her, I know she’s out there. We’ve just got to tune into her vibes.”

  Beyond the range of the van’s high beams, the desert was silent and unforthcoming.

  They bounced along, the needle wavering between five and ten miles per hour. Martha scanned the dark landscape. Oh, where was Sonoma? She concentrated as if Sonoma were a noise she could listen for and hear. She wished she were one of those psychics whom desperate police departments employ to find missing persons, though—she reflected with horror—clairvoyants often had better luck locating the dead.

  “She could walk faster than this,” said Hegwitha. “If she came this way she might have reached the main road and maybe, Goddess help us, hitchhiked out.”

  At the end of the driveway, the sky above them opened. The first rays of dawn gave the desert the silvery gleam of mica. An empty two-lane road rolled out toward the distant mountains. Sonoma was nowhere in sight.