Phantom Strays

by Lorraine Ray

A group of four women stood on a street corner near our pink county courthouse, a building with an ornate tiled dome. These women held hand-lettered posters, the words painted with day-glow colors, around the edges of which these ladies had rendered bucking broncos and bawling roped calves (in black silhouette). “No Cruelty to Animals!” and “Stop Harm to Horses!” were some of the slogans they had stenciled across the boards. The women protested the rodeo, shouting at passersby and shaking their boards at traffic.

  “They ought to arrest you jerks who like rodeos!” one of the ladies shrieked at a duded-out couple in full cowboy regalia. The man tipped his cowboy hat at them and smirked; the lady on his arm grimaced.

  “I’d like to see you roped and rounded up,” added another protester to an old, shocked gentleman in a pair of western slacks. He shoved his hands awkwardly in the pockets of these slacks which were embroidered with arrow slits.

  I strolled along on the other side of the street, wearing my hot pants and a top that exposed my stomach, a disco outfit rather than clothes for a rodeo, yet enjoying these angry women as much as I enjoyed the crowd; I was seeing the parade live and in person for perhaps the last time in my life.

  I had parked my car on the vacant lot near the railroad tracks. This was the old hobo jungle that worried Mother so badly back in 1964 when we couldn’t find Meredith and Margaret after the Beatles movie, only all those winos had long since moved on to someplace else (heaven?) by 1979, and Meredith had moved to Boston in 1975. I saw the Green Door across the street from the lot. That was the location Mother said was a smut peddler zone back then, a place I would have liked to write about, if only to let the world hear her talk about it, and the hobos, in her rambling style.

  The sidewalks thronged with people. The streets thronged with marching bands and livestock. There were plenty of mules in the parade. In the era when my great grandfather drifted into town after work in the railroads in Colorado and time spent as a civilian with the army of the northern plains, he specialized in pilfering beer barrels and building harnesses and packs for mules.

  I peered down a side street. A black limousine whizzed past. It was an important vision from the past and seeing it triggered a strange memory, something from a long, long time before when Meredith and Jack and I were running and chasing. During that special rodeo parade with the sand painter.

  Running and chasing… a limousine. That was it. We were chasing the black car and we crashed into an oily gate that slammed down behind the limo when it dropped into an underground parking garage. I wondered where that gate would be or if it still existed. And that long black car that we thought was important. We chased it until Jack got asthma. Sure, someone was supposed to be in it. Meredith told us that the limousine held—the governor of the state of Arizona! She told us that he had four stomachs and had to breed with cows. That was it. One of her crazy, wonderful stories. She was full of them, all the time, and they were well worth keeping and remembering.

  Father had been buying a stereo the day we saw the limo and the parade and when we got back to Dad, at the end of running around downtown, the man who carried the stereo out to the station wagon said something odd, a grand announcement or congratulations or something, and wrapped the stereo in a rug like a burrito. Father (after enjoying several rum and cokes) thought he received Mexican revolutionary broadcasts on the radio that night.

  A pair of large men in golf shirts and bell-bottoms leaned against the window of Rosefield’s Department store when I reached it. That reminded me of being there with the sand painter and Ethyl Fusselman. Another old memory arrived of the crowd laughing at Meredith when she claimed Navajo blood contained Freon and she said that was why the man in the black velvet shirt in the sunny store window hadn’t felt the heat. It was one of her crazy science facts; she had a million of them when we were kids, wonderful zany facts. The Navajo man had sat, there, that’s right, in this same window of Rosefield’s Department Store and I could see what was probably the same ratty rug which had been under him, and the secret door that opened to gain access to the window, and that door had been opened partly that day and I had seen a woman behind him in the store. And his stiff fingers trailing sand made him seem like a manikin. I could still remember the colored sand and his painting with squash and what resembled giant construction cranes. Jack had pulled down his lower eyelids to show the ghastly face of the lost ‘49ers. The old miners had been in the sun too long and it baked their brains until they got lost in the desert and were wandering around saying strange things and dying. We used to pretend we were dying ‘49ers in the alleyway with whole gangs of neighbor kids, and our wagon had big hoops and a cloth cover that turned it into a miniature Conestoga. Mom had gotten the conversion kit for our Radio Flyer in Indiana.

  Hadn’t I watched a rainy parade once on TV? When a boy put a bean up his nose? There were rainy parades which featured mounted men filing past slowly and sadly under slickers, hats dripping water in the downpours and the participants waving to the thin groups of hardy parade-goers peeking out from under the edges of umbrellas. The ponies shed rain prodigiously and their hooves slopped into puddles.

  Seeing the parade again was educational. It was as though I had found a whole bunch of strays in a canyon.

  The style of the rodeo parade watchers had changed over the intervening years since I had been at that significant rodeo with Ethyl Fusselman, who I remembered (since Dr. Porter had shown me her photo) in all her awfulness, the hanging dewlaps, the purse, her horrid green eyes. This one might be my last rodeo parade, perhaps, if I left Southern Arizona and never returned. If I did nothing with the early material the world gave me, would I ever do anything worthwhile? Could I abandon the Ittty-Bitty Cocky Egg unhatched? Was it correct to consider my work too much of an abomination, a composite of too many disparate elements? Would I be right to forget about Peg’s conversation when I promised to be the girl to collect the desert’s treasures? She might have been only humoring a young child. Why did I have to believe it meant anything at all?

  A great ox with a powdery white face, lots of dewlaps, pinkish spots, and a nodding head, lumbered down Congress, hitched to a cart full of chopped mesquite limbs with a drover at its side. The drover dressed as an old carter on a journey from Hermosillo to Tucson before the arrival of the railroad when that Mexican city provisioned us. Something about this animal attracted my attention as I watched from my spot behind the crowd that was six deep in the old downtown streets (this was destined to be the last parade downtown as well). The ox was held at its neck by a carved wooden yoke and it plodded slowly past the Fox Theater and past me toward the storefront of Meyer’s White House Emporium.

  Just then someone blasted an air horn.

  The ox jerked its head up. It shook itself and heaved its shoulders forward. The next instant the ox lunged and the great carved wooden yoke snapped. That old tack snapped with the force of the ox’s full lunge and the pieces of wood fell about. The ox continued trundling forward for a moment until it realized it had freed itself. It stumbled away from the cart, and then the startled ox, charged toward screaming onlookers.

  It bounded forward, and the crowd parted, miraculously in two. The ox gathered its strength and crashed up the curb toward the sidewalk. More onlookers parted and the ox reared itself at the Meyer window. The white shape leapt and its horns and head smashed the department store glass. Police sirens wailed. The nearby mob shouted and screamed.

  Glass shattered everywhere and people ran. Blood from the ox’s neck dripped down the wall of the store. The drover jumped onto the sidewalk with its whip and a rope.

  Police began pushing people back from where the ox was. I moved one block east.

  In that block the parade watchers stood even deeper at the curb. People grumbled about the little they could see beyond the wall of cowboy hats, which no one would consider removing.

  “There he is!” shouted someone.

  “Who?” asked another.

  “The governor,” someone
replied.

  And Arizona’s governor rode by stiffly on a tall palomino horse. His skin glistened over a pale gray color. It was a great shock when he died of a heart attack eight hours later.