Phantom Strays

by Lorraine Ray

My parents drove me out for a last visit to the country. After six months the reality had gradually sunk in that I would be leaving Arizona, following Jack to Los Angeles. The pair of them, Mom and Dad, pretended that all three of us had made the best decision, that there was nothing for us in the Southwest but hokum and bunk, but I could hear the hurt in their voices when they said it. At least it was our hokum and bunk.

  Once we reached the ghost town which Mother had wanted to see because it and I found a seat on a rail fence, I could hear them talking to each other about finding old bottles, and Mother repeated that old nutty impression of hers about the Cowboy Princes of Arizona. “There were such wealthy families living in these old vast places in Arizona, oh, homesteads the size of counties in the east and living in such splendor and lush beauty. Cowboy Princes, practically, and she went to school with one of them, that silly kid of ours but she doesn’t realize it. A person so wealthy it was difficult to keep track of what all they owned. Sure, he was pure wealth. But you wouldn’t have known it because they kept it to themselves wonderfully. Not that I was envious of them. No sir. Being a girl from an Indiana farm is good enough for me. But there she was going to school with a Cowboy Prince as big as you please. She doesn’t even remember it. First Meredith picks up and moves to Boston, and then Jack heads out to Los Angeles. Now she is going to the coast. No regard for the past they’re leaving behind. Why these kids knew special people. Not just the riff-raff of Arizona. No siree Bob. The real genuine gentry. Those people lived in real style, not like the rest of us. Their homes were treasures. Positively treasures. It was a treat to visit those places. What a wonderful thing to visit those vast ranches, rancheros of the old times, the hospitality and real wealth displayed, goodness, only the best food and clothing. Things we hardly knew about. A glance into a style of living that we could never hope to replicate. That time has come and gone, I’m afraid. The time of the Arizona gentry. But that was the way it was.”

  “That’s the way it was moving west,” Dad replied, correcting her almost by rote. Well, that jounced my memory. Hadn’t he always told something like that, almost those same words, to end a crazy story? What was so crazy about it? Was it the way the plot went? No, it didn’t have a plot at all. That was the thing. It was a story of endless modifiers, crazy phrases. Sure, Meredith had told me that on the night when Paul rang our doorbell. She’d tried to compose one for me.

  “I wish we could find an old beer bottle.”

  “Why, wouldn’t a ketchup bottle be good enough?”

  “I want a genuine old beer bottle.”

  “All she’s found is a rusty old rat trap. I don’t see why she wants to take that with her to LA.”

  I felt tears stream down either side of my face. Sitting out there above the weeds on the splintery rail, I cried, for I suddenly remembered “That’s the Way It Was Moving West.”

  Remembered it purely, perfectly, in its shining idiocy and two-beat iambic throb.

  And the Walacachuchu Bird. That was another stray story that came to me.

  Farther down the rail, I saw something gray moving slowly. “Oh no,” said an anxious Inca Dove. “Oh no. Kill me.”

  Oh no was right.

  What the hell was I doing leaving my desert?

  I wept freely to think I had caved in to practicality and was leaving my desert finally.

  Pink-laced edges on the billowy cumulonimbus.

  The earth around the fence post sunk slightly and there a cow had perhaps used the upright post for a long comforting scratch and in the process left a precise hoof print, a murky pool for butterflies and flies. It had rained for several hours and even as I sat there the hoof mark slowly filled with water. The sodden hoof print beside the split-rail fence oozed zoologically deprived pink desert mud and water and that water reflected the pinkish sky.

  Oh, we were all going away from it. Not just from childhood, the agony was more than that. Not simply leaving our childhood, but leaving the independence we once had had to challenge the power of the East, to assert ourselves. To take our place and make it the center of a unique artistic universe. To assail art. To make the assertion of self that Meredith once possessed. No more Meredith, no more Jack, and now no more me, all of us would now be gone from the desert, from Arizona. No more wild ways. No more roistering on the dusty streets. No more lies and false bravado. No more governors with four stomachs. Everything fell away to darkness, just dark streets of long loneliness and abject ordinariness. The death of a million good ideas.

  Meredith had given in and become one of them, the people she once called pale grubs, the Eastern establishment. She bought the superior place argument and left her childish ways in our hokey west. Why was I only now realizing that I could not really believe in the superiority of another place until I had dealt with what was here in my childhood place. At least I needed to make a statement as an artist. I couldn’t walk away from it with an easy heart.

  Why couldn’t I? Why couldn’t I quit this place with ease? Why was the pit of my stomach falling out, why was a worm gnawing me away on the inside? A stabbing feeling in my chest took my breath away. All because of art? Because I was never going to create the art I wanted to or that I thought the world deserved? Was it worth this melt-down inside? Was it worth anything at all? I’d never know until I made it, would I?

  I never would write about this place. I never would provide my life energy to the task of showing this beauty to others. I would never take a reader on a journey with me to the only place I really knew. If I moved away without committing to return or to encapsulate a small particle of it this would never come to fruition. The loss was indescribably painful, literally wrenching my guts around inside me.

  Was I letting myself be driven out, maybe? By the librarian with bulgy eyes and the fact that he knew where I lived? Was it fear I was feeling? Was it just fear that I was not up to the task that somehow presented itself to me at a very early age? Why had that woman, that Peg woman, patted my hand and spoke to me in the car and implored me to find the desert’s treasures? Why hadn’t I forgotten that in all this time? Why not move on?

  Did my leaving mean that no one would ever write about where I was from in an authentic way? Or at least in my way of seeing it, with my kind of eyes? Or was there an absolute certainty that someone else would come along and be the vessel to write the big thing about this place? Could I count on that? I wanted my desert portrayed with a density that properly reflected the embroidery of excitement of my youthful images of the Sonoran desert. I wanted a complex mix of colors and images. I wanted the spooling out of threads of light color over the environment and the deep dense jungle or thicket of cacti, trees, bushes, shrubs, that tore at the cowboy’s chaps. That mix of colors and images was not the serene desert, a sand-swept clean place that it is in most desert stories from New Mexico and Northern Arizona. My desert was an environment as complex as any forest. A world teeming with life, a subtropical desert. Did it mean no one would tell about the mix of lovely colors in the desert? The scramble of heavenly grays and greens that I had seen on my way with the old ladies out to saguaro monument on the day Peg made me promise to be the one to find all the desert’s treasures?

  Would what I saw ever be written about by anyone else? Not exactly, of course, but might not someone else at some time come along with a similar vision and put themselves to the task later? Though it reassured, it didn’t feel like something I could rely on.

  If it was so important, why hadn’t I written it already? I couldn’t blame the bug-eyed librarian or the people at the bowling alley, or the mashers, the drug-crazed leader of the cult, the noisy people at restaurants, or even my own dear mother who I was about to forsake. I could blame no one but myself if nothing I wanted to write got written. I remembered once saying that the person who wrote a book might be the culprit themselves, if there was an aspect of the whodunit involved. Yes, why am I not the culprit who stopped the story? Or I could tell myself my vision was not worth committing to paper, t
hat would be the thing.

  Why believe that no one else would write this if I didn’t? Surely someone else would come along and see the beauty of the desert and do a good job of capturing it so that others would see it and understand the life I had led, the life in touch with the world. But would that person have the opportunity to write or the will or the energy? Would they see it when they were too old or too young? Would they see it, but forget it? There were a thousand ways the images could get lost even if someone else were to see their own version of what I had experienced. My old instinct said just put it down on paper and let it be done. Don’t fuss over it any more than you fussed over the way you stepped off the curb atop the scorpion when you were two. That was it, step out, with confidence.

  There was no reason really to believe that I would be the only person to see this. But yet it was safer to assume that I might be, safer if what I really cared about was the communication of the images, rather than my own ego. I would have to do whatever it took to make these images come alive on paper and if I was not strong enough, then the effort of doing might enable someone else to see it. If I stepped out boldly and tried, the mere trying might inspire someone else and eventually the whole thing would be captured.

  I heard my parents calling me from the far side of the adobe ruin. Something about a bottle they had found on the surface of the soil at the back of the blasted dump. I had only a few minutes more alone if anything significant was going to happen.

  Again, I gazed down at the Arizona soil where the oozy pink water filled the crescent cut of the hoof print. As I studied this small arched canvas something appeared on the surface of the goopy water. I squinted at it, focusing clearly. For an instant I thought it flitted away, but there it was again. A cloud. A cloud reflected in the hoof print.

  A cloud.

  But a cloud in the guise of a young steer!

  That was all I needed! Just the semblance of hope, the mere filament of the life of my future art. The glimmering ghost of that phantom would be enough to build again the whole superstructure, the ranches, the cows, and the time gone by. Dr. Porter had assured me of this and somehow I believed the ridiculous old coot.

  Art is the stern editor of your life. Art possesses you, controls you, and destroys you as much as you destroy it. Art is like a God because it redirects your life, cuts it, distorts it and makes it come alive. Art smears images, prompts experiences. Art is everything and it is ultimately nothing.

  But I vow that even now, when I’ve been so scared by my character, my Rex Almshouse who won’t leave me alone, I won’t give up writing everything, including him, no matter how badly this new someone scares me and manages to root me out of the best writing place I’ve found thus far. I won’t let any of the distractions stop me. I’ll start with something simple, something I can focus my mind on instead of the feeling of being pursued or the paranoid consciousness that now someone has it in for me. And when I am focusing on this moment or thing from the past, I will describe that thing correctly, embracing the hokey nature of it, of Arizona as I go along, but finding what is universal about that image and using it. And so I hear the splattering pit-pat of water striking the floorboards of a car as it drips from an old cloth covered canteen, the type people used to carry in their cars in case of radiator trouble when they made any journey across our desert valley, there being so few gas stations then. Mother and I are in a car with other old women from the church on our way to a fellowship meeting in the desert on the east side of town, and that splat of water from the canteen carefully divides time as precisely as the ticking of any venerable old grandfather clock in the carpeted hall of an inn at midnight, which is where a hundred authors before me have sat in a lonely room and their table might even have been rickety and the guest next door snoring loudly, and the pit-pat of the water that day sounds more significant to me, as my pit-pat steps go down the marble staircase in the library and echo with those of the spry old man who leads the way.

  THE END