Phantom Strays

by Lorraine Ray

I provoke the further, deviant excitement of the lonely librarian when I ask him—thingking only of the scientific aspect of my question–to kindly research the ability of scorpions to pee. A happy gleam on his face, as he jots this down on a slip of paper, fails to alarm me, doesn’t remotely phase me or give me a moment’s pause to consider the wisdom of inserting such a person into my writing.

  I glare sullenly at the pages of the book and take so long inspecting them—an entire afternoon—only allotting time out once for my statistics class at which I arrive breathless and late, that I awaken something undesirable in a weird librarian who works the second floor rare book room in the University of Arizona main library. For weeks I’ve been too busy mentally recreating and writing about how my mother pinned the clothes, and how the scorpion wiggled, and how I stepped down, to notice this librarian’s interest in me or to guess that he is planning a siege upon my affections, and that within a few days he’ll be more frightening than any past scorpion.

  And while I’m still mulling over the mysterious history of squaw dresses, and telling myself that the kind of ladies my mother befriended, those churchgoing Midwesterner ladies, might have lagged far behind the fashionable trends and that the same way tourists to Germany will don lederhosen or the tight bodices of a Tyrolean frau, tourists to Arizona used to swoop around in squaw dresses. At seventeen there were Big Chief pads and lined yellow legal notepads that I used for writing. Then that wonderful phrase, melodious and mellifluous, the phrase to beat all others and the first one that I created and therefore loved so passionately (and this is a novel about the greatest of all earthly loves) more than I loved life itself, held sway over me for a long time around my nineteenth birthday and it survives entombed beginning about two point three centimeters away from the red line of the margin, worked in my crabbed scrawl in black ink across the top of a sheet of green graph paper. Better than the echoes of the murmured nothingness of a long-lost lover, “couched against a guava crate,” still ignites extraordinary excitement as I roll it, not exactly trippingly, but tantalizingly, off my tongue. Pairing bookends, or perhaps an exoskeleton, of hard c’s around the softer, fruitier center of “against a guava” gave the illusion of building a body and I thought of phrases as living entities. I hereby confess that the silly little phrase is all that remains of the abandoned opening of a novel about a disillusioned and delusional young man, the heir to a fruit processing plant in Tucson, with a plot as disjointed and scattered as the spine of a long-dead rattlesnake, and I am still not certain if I envisioned the red-haired horse-faced young man who was doing the couching at his couch atop a guava crate and then couched against another guava crate one or if he was just on concrete and more importantly I did not know all of the other things that he felt, the meals and meetings of his life, after this uncomfortable couch in the warehouse, and better yet the way he might have leapt off the pages of the rest of this abandoned wreck of a novel that I never worked out, even in my mind, although I revisited it several times with the same sense of viewing a useless artifact.

  A rare antiquarian nature book propped in front of me, and I’m as happy as a snake on a night crawl on warm pavement, the foxy pages of the book which rasp and crunch when I leaf through them, tells me that the young Hadrurus, forced to part with its first skin and its mother at the same moment, displays confusion and indecision. Doesn’t this describe what I know of the scorpion’s movements that day, and, strangely enough, doesn’t it also describe me right now, the doubt I feel when I question the details of what really happened all those years ago, the indecision that makes the choices I do make appear less than ideal within minutes of choosing them, the uncertainty that makes me question my ability to portray the simplest aspect of a story, and the anger I feel at myself for allowing my own petty concern over my artistic struggle to overwhelm and upstage my art? I wonder if the venom bulb of the scorpion appeared as crisply outlined and as swollen in real life as the illustrations in this old book, or if the tail curled over, or if it stretched out behind the beast, riding quite low to the ground, or even if the awful thing in front of me could have been hairy.

  And in all this wondering, it’s quite curious, but it’s the tale itself that is dying, and not me a long time ago.

  The rare book librarian strokes his beard, licks his lips and studies me from behind the counter. Though he already has a wife his great goggling blue eyes anticipate the longed-for arrival of his dangerous girlfriend with an interest in scorpions; already he’s wondering if I’ll like the small glass case with a scorpion mounted on a square of watery aqua silk which he remembers seeing on a dusty shelf at the back of The Frontier Antique Emporium out on DeMoss Petrie Road, and he’s wondering whether he can strike a bargain with the crabby owner for a price for the case under twenty dollars. In a furtive glance at me over his coffee cup during a break, which he takes in a back office, he can be seen tipping the lip of the cup too far from vertical, and his coffee splashes his face and dribbles into his tangled brown beard. He charges out of the office, responding to the ting of the bell on the counter like a slathering Pavlov dog and, wheeling around a stool, he unlatches the hinged section of the counter quickly to assist a tall young man who is as stiff as the new manila folder tucked under his arm.

  At the sound of that same counter bell, a shriveled, hook-nosed gentleman with long white hair shuffles by and places his leather briefcase and his motorcycle helmet on the table across from me. The geezer arrives with a great deal of ceremony, sweeping off the pinstriped jacket of his suit to reveal a vest; and then, hanging the jacket on the chair, adjusting, primping, and centering it, he sits, worn hands neatly folded on the table in front of him as though he’s anticipating meeting his teacher on the first day of school.