Phantom Strays

by Lorraine Ray

Heroic and muscular clouds sprang onto the illusionist’s space. They exercised their bulky mass in calisthenics, in ample lunges across the sky, in flexing their bulging biceps and building themselves up, building smooth sinews of gorgeous gray, that, in occasionally open attitudes, revealed steely shades of blue which formed the bulging veins on their brawn, their bloated bodies sopping with life-giving water that we, the world’s desert dwellers, greedily anticipated, hungrily awaited, and then finally, fearfully and fretfully, doubted. An anvil cloud, which these monstrous muscles battered flat, evolved into the roof of an old half-ruined hacienda; and in the stucco folds of the hacienda walls, dagger blades of ivy slathered themselves, insinuating their terrible home-wrecking heads, and battlements buffeted towers, and my eyes freed rubble-filled gates and gained impossible entries. But why not call what I saw gliding over that rising white plane a whirling baroque ceiling, an artistic triumph done entirely in trompe l’oeil, at the cost of the future vigor of the artist’s hand? And thinking this, I noticed the clouds whip themselves into shells, masks, garlands, and fantastic, great grinning foxes which wobbled sidewise through the wintry heavens, bouncing from bank to bank, tossed by the terrible updrafts and rattled by the rain. “Stop,” I said, grabbing the old man’s arm before he could crank the microfiche lever again, “won’t you please go back a page? I think I saw a photo of the day all those kids went wild downtown. My sister and her friend Margaret wouldn’t stop lining up for A Hard Day’s Night.”

  The timid professor who slumped in the steel chair beside me in the Ag Reading Room at the University of Arizona and who had been operating the microfiche machine, which was like a hooded metal siphon dumping darkness over his frowsy white head, seemed rather astonished when I spoke; his mouth made an absolutely perfectly open o; I, the young woman who had been so quietly seated in a chair at his side, and who he had envisioned, in his increasingly faulty peripheral vision, to be diligently jotting down notes from her own reel as it was projected on her own microfiche machine, had in fact been peering over his sloping shoulder studying his newspaper page and had taken the bold move now of grabbing the saggy elbow of his old gray sweater; “My dear young lady, did you just speak to me?”

  “Won’t you go back a page, Dr. Porter?”

  “You did speak!”

  The old coot’s face registered surprise, but nevertheless he complied, and, cranked the lever back, running it counterclockwise, until, reflected onto his glasses where the clouds once had been, a layer of cold news from the Citizen crawled across his gleaming irises; the print marched past like lines of bustling black ants, creeping, claws open and on the move relentlessly until the Beatles page appeared.

  “Was this what you wanted?” he asked.

  “Yes, I saw the man who took that photo. Well, go on. Go where you want to now.”

  The frowsy man cranked the lever again like an organ pipe. He slowed once or twice until a society page and the blurry photo, a small smudged rectangle in the lower left hand corner of a column, suddenly appeared. “Say!” I cried. “That’s it. I want that.”

  “All right.” Dr. Porter pinched the frame of his glasses at the hinges and jerked his head up and down several times, examining the length of the projected page, checking the average ability to read the text as an indication of the state of focus. “Now, just a minute. There is, I believe, a way to focus this thing.” He fumbled his left hand toward another silver knob which made crisper the e’s and s’s. “Not very successfully.”

  “I know her,” I said, leaning toward the murky gray face of something that was very like a woman, though I couldn’t be entirely sure because the pearls at her neck reminded me of a long, curled scorpion tail. “I’m sure that I spoke to her once. Here in Tucson. We were all in front of a window downtown before the rodeo parade. She stood beside us when we watched a sand painter make a Storm Pattern or maybe it was Corn Maidens.”

  Quite sadly the broad, but tenderly timid, smile of absolutely better-knowing-butter spread over what had been the lower half of his glad, gleaming face, and yet there was something noble, something protective, in the way he tried ably to cover up his own certainty, his self-assured bemusement, using an old man’s catastrophic cough and the feigned search for an elusive, essential peppermint; patting in turn all his pant pockets and then the baggy depths of the pockets in his sweater which were like great valleys. “You won’t be offended, I’m sure, when I say in all due sincerity, truly, that I doubt that,” Mortimer came out with finally, a little watery in his eyes and choked. And the way his voice delivered this let me know he would regard me always as a friend, as a fellow library researcher, and quite kindly, but that he had to insist on his, a mathematician’s, firmer grip on facts. He popped the lozenge in his mouth, a hint of mint wheezing out, and he tilted back his head in order to confirm the date in the corner of the closest page. “You would have been...quite especially teeny, I think.”

  Besides thinking that that was a peculiar way to say that I was too young to have met the woman in the photo, it was also not logical for a man so immured in logic, and it shrank me into an odd curiosity, an especially teeny person, dismissed me, I was also insulted by the lack of confidence he exhibited in me when only that lunch I had confessed to him how I had begun a sly, systematic effort to ditch my college classes, especially statistics, and he had shared in embarrassed blushes his own odd obsession with painting mysterious Mexican haciendas.

  “I know I’m right, Dr. Porter. Tell me who she was.”

  Dr. Porter cleared his throat and obligingly hunched himself forward over the floating tidbit of text and his hand, coming across, rowed the fine lines of print across his wrinkled skin. “Ah, well, the name recorded here, as I see it, is Fusselman. Ethyl Elizabeth Fusselman.” The dozy old professor woke up slightly at the sound of his own voice announcing that name aloud and he tapped his pencil tip so that it skipped the menacing red fences on his field of pale green paper. “What! That woman! Actually, if it’s the same Fusselman that I’m thinking of, though certainly I know that it wouldn’t, and of course, couldn’t be, but if it was that woman, I can tell you I considered her a remarkably dangerous...er...”

  “Killer?” I asked in terror.

  “Ah, well...” he fudged.

  “Maniac?” I pressed.

  “No, not that.”

  “Arsonist then?”

  “No, not that either. She was a very dangerous folklorist.” A lengthy, pregnant pause followed while we listened to someone whistle “Stayin’ Alive.”

  “Dangerous folklorist! Do those things even go together?” I blurted angrily.

  “Hmm?”

  “Danger and folklore. You called her a dangerous folklorist and of course I’m wondering if they ever go together.” At times Dr. Porter took his sweet time to speak.

  “Oh yes!” he exclaimed and his face, which was usually very placid in the days since I had first noticed him sitting beside me in the microfiche room of the Ag library, registered shock and terror. “Yes, yes. Why certainly they do. What would ever make you doubt it, young lady? Why, folklorists are among the most dangerous forces to be reckoned with. I would never trust a folklorist. It’s the acquisitiveness, don’t you know.” He shuddered as he pronounced this last word. “The terrible, terrible, all-consuming acquisitiveness.”

  “What is it that they want to acquire?” I asked innocently.

  “The stories! They can’t write them themselves, don’t you know, they can’t even think of them,” his voice dropped to a whisper, “so they have to steal them!”

  “Steal?”

  “Steal!”

  “All writers steal,” I said dismissively. “I happen to be one and I know all about it.”

  “Oh, not to the extent of a folklorist. They are truly desperate people, young lady.”

  “Well, if you say so. I might have told her something worth stealing. I might have accidentally. I think it might be if I get them back I’ll finally be able to write about all the
treasures I’ve seen.”

  “That’s the year I lost my ghost herd,” he said.

  This struck me like nothing else ever before.

  “A ghost herd! Are you kidding? I made that up!” I cried.

  The librarian glared at me.

  “I made that up,” I repeated, whispering. “A long, long time ago.”

  “Oh no, you didn’t, young lady. It was real. I happened to own them. Fifty thousand head of prime ghost cattle,” said the old man sadly. He began to cry. “It was tragic!”

  “That many,” I gasped. How was it that I was going along with him? He told me a big lie, the way Meredith had with Ethyl Fusselman. Was I agreeing to this madness? Was I buying into what had been a strange childhood notion, which was now being foisted on me again by a stranger in the microfiche room? Why it had spilled out of my mouth with no more thought...Without thought. Could it be I had tapped into truth without knowing it?

  “They were lovely,” he said with a big round tear in the corner of his red eyes, “Lovely things with beautiful faces. I mostly kept them in Happy Valley over on the other side of the Rinconerones.”

  “Kept them?”

  “While I had them. They were undoubtedly your inspiration, however they belonged to me. The fact that they’re gone explains some of your troubles. She was a very thorough folklorist, but even she could be thwarted and might not have gotten the entire herd. You’ve heard of strays, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you could be just sitting around somewhere in Arizona one day with a sufficiently open mind when you’ll see one of them again. Maybe only one.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “You’ll have to be patient and keep an open mind. And with one stray you can gradually build up the herd. It will take a lot of imagining. Are you up to it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’d better be. At a critical moment in your life as a creative person you will get one inspiring image. If you don’t keep it for some reason, or you can’t get it back, you’ll be stymied. Your life story will be severely edited. You might even die without writing it!”

  “So what happened was critical?”

  “Critical. Maybe even life-threatening. Yes, absolutely, but what I would say is that you can get a stray of the herd back and with that eventually rebuild the whole thing.”