 
### A PHANTOM HERD

Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Lorraine Ray

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CHAPTER 1

No sign of mashers, yet, and my trusty Big Chief tablet in front of me, I began by thinking about what first attracted our attention to the pale man and woman on a late spring day in 1962.

The day turned out to be significant because my sister made up an important fib, one that I repeated and embellished later. The fib happened when Meredith claimed we owned a ranch and scads of cattle. It was important, the kind of whopper you need when you're a writer trying to give the reader something to hang on to, something that will interest them right from the start. That's called the hook. You need myths and lies to tantalize them, to hook them, but to get those lies, unfortunately, you have to meet scary people and do a lot of spooky things. Nobody tells you that. Nobody tells you how really scary the things you do will be. Like talking to weirdoes and folklorists, who are really, really dangerous people, and trying to give cowboy movie stars LSD and being threatened by nutty special collection librarians who tell you they have little knives and send you green plastic scorpions and promise to show you the surprise at the end of the Surprise Symphony. These are the forces of chaos in the herd of stories which the writer is tasked with corralling. A writer also has to keep track of their strays, stray stories, that is. A writer has to be good at roundups, and also avoid stampeding the reader with a herd of cowboy-inspired symbolism.

The day of the big fib in 1962 begins with us crouched under a palo verde tree, a vantage point used to watch a pale lady flounce away from a big old shiny automobile. Every step that lady took led her away from the dirt road toward the place where we'd hidden ourselves. The way she was walking was crazy, though as I write that, I realize it was hard to tell precisely what made us think she was so nuts, because it involved a lot of things about her lumped together, and she was seen such a long time ago in an Arizona that has since vanished and which I can barely conjure up for you, though I desperately want to. Her craziness showed in the way her high heels jabbed the sand and sunk in, setting her white ankles wobbling, and in the sound of her la-de-da voice (who was she talking to and what was she saying anyway?), a voice that belonged on a yacht out in the Atlantic and not in our desert near the border with Mexico, and finally in the fact that she acted as though she owned the place. Yes, she owned Arizona shortly after leaving her car, which was being parked beside a boulder, and this business of the shiny automobile parking itself (the sun was so bright on the windshield that we couldn't see anyone sitting behind the wheel) seemed mysterious until we noticed the lady coaxing the driver to come out and join her using a big scooping motion of her arm, a white arm, all of her glowed like a hunk of cold alabaster.

"Bring the camera, will you, sweetie?" said this crazy lady. "I want a photo here, in the cactuses. Come on. You know you promised me photos. I like the way it looks here."

The driver eventually complied, shoving his door open and emerging from behind the windshield glare with a camera in his hand. I remembered watching the door teeter and swing and hearing it close with a dull, ghostly thud. When the man strolled around the back of the car, I noticed that being out in the desert in his business suit made him look nutty too, like a rumpled gray rock that had heaved itself out of a hill somewhere in upstate New York and was then crossing in front of a backdrop of nine thousand feet of lavender, pink and gray rocks, which was the Catalina Mountain Range seen through the hot and dusty atmosphere of an afternoon in early April.

Pursuing the pale woman, zigzagging through the dense, towering saguaros and the smaller desert plants, this rumpled rock avoided a jungle of cholla cactus, what we then called jumping cactus, and lime-green and yellow palo verde trees, which were leafing out with tiny oval shaped leaves and blooming, pale yellow star-shaped blossoms, their branches humming with black bumble bees, wasps and ordinary honey bees. "What do you have in mind?" we heard the man ask, suspiciously. "I'm all for a little hike, but not that hill. Don't break another heel. Didn't those shoes cost you enough?"

"Where are you?" he asked after she hadn't answered.

He ducked his head under the branches of a tree. "Oh, there you are."

"Why don't you wait for me?"

"Where are we going?"

At one enormous barrel cactus, which was at least five feet long and which had toppled over, the lady waited, evidently for the man to bring the camera. The cactus was sticking out of the sandy soil, at a low angle, slanted almost the same way that the buried prow of a boat might emerge from a beach. It was an eerie wreckage that served as a warning to humans.

Not that this particular lady took any warning from it. While she stood there, the lady amused herself by playfully jabbing the fallen cactus in its side, in the green flesh where the barbs gapped a little, with the pointy toe of her high heel shoe!

We were shocked to see anyone kicking one of our cactuses. There lay one of our gorgeous barrel cacti, dying, the roots were torn out of the soil, and you could see gravel and rocks gripped in the net of the roots as though it had made a last desperate attempt to stay upright, and this evil lady stood above it just kicking it for all it was worth. She was kicking it even though the thing was down, tilted on its side like some animal in distress. In fact the whole scene was worse even because the cactus had managed a final act of extraordinary beauty. During the prior August, before its downfall, I suppose, it must have bloomed, and now in the spring it wore a hat of bright yellow fruit, a sort of wreath of waxy ornaments, each fruit shaped like a teeny pineapple with a black straw crown. With all these pineapples on its tip, the big barrel cactus was a corpse decked out for its funeral in a straw party hat. Any ordinary human would have seen something poignant in this, but she kept right on kicking it. I tell you the lady was a monster.

"Sweetie, I'm waiting," she wailed.

I think the shock of seeing her doing that explains why we didn't leave right away. I don't think my older sister, Meredith, my older brother, Jack, or I had ever seen anything like that before, certainly not at the cactus monument; hurting anything there was illegal, not to mention immoral, and the monument rangers patrolled the dirt roads and scrutinized visitors with binoculars, or at least our teachers and our parents threatened us with those facts. While we could have climbed the hill and joined our parents, who were picnicking at a ramada, instead we kept watching, in horror and anger, these disreputable strangers abusing our desert.

"The park ranger oughta come out here and arrest them," said Jack.

"Yeah," agreed Meredith. "They're asking for it. Who do they think they are anyways?"

An appropriate distance back (although to my way of thinking you might have had to travel a long way into Mexico to get far enough away from her) the man hiked up the fabric of his slacks at the knee and knelt down, not to pray over the body of the dying cactus as any decent person would have, but to make a thorough examination of the spot where his expensive trousers would come close to touching the ground when he set up his shots. After examining the ground, and with a distasteful look on his face, he used his thumb and forefinger as though he was about to play a game of marbles to flick away several palo verde beans, and they rattled to the side nervously like embarrassed old stagehands who had unintentionally interrupted a performance. I suppose he didn't want those things anywhere near him; he thought himself quite special, and he thought the beans were filthy. As soon as the beans were out of the way, he began setting up his shot. In those days, with that type of camera, it would have meant aligning the sliced images of the woman in the lens so that her torso and her head graphed onto her legs. His camera was one of those old Leica jobs in a brown leather cover. A pretty good camera.

"Okey-dokey," he said finally to the woman. "Do something from a bullfight, a whatever-you-call it, a veronica, or something, will you? The saguaros look great in the background and I've got a part of those purple mountains peeking out just above your left shoulder." His voice came from somewhere in New England; not from anywhere in the West. Yes, I'm certain he was a New Englander.

Gathering handfuls of her wide skirt, the woman spread the turquoise squaw dress she wore, with its festival of silver and black rickrack running around like electrified railroad track. First she made butterfly wings beside her, while he took several shots, and then she spread the skirt at the side like a curtain behind the long-suffering cactus.

"Whee! Whirly, whirly. How's this, sweetie?" she asked happily, stupidly, evilly.

And I realize now that another crazy, weird thing about her was that squaw dress. Squaw dresses swirled through my childhood on the bodies of women, the big pleated skirts, running at the bottom with rickrack like electrified fences. In colors, they ranged from pink to brown, from mustard to turquoise. They had a mandarin neck with a modest slit, and rickrack ran down and up that slit, too. Squaw dresses rasped children like barbed wire. It was the metallic rickrack that did that and sometimes the starch in the skirts or the slips that women wore to push the skirt out. Squaw dresses had gone out of style by 1962, if they ever were in style, but I suppose tourists still bought them and wore them around the Old Pueblo. Or have I lost control of an aspect of my story?

"How's this?" she called again to the man. She swirled the pleated fabric of her skirt in the air, in the face of the cactus, and across her body like a bullfighter's cape. She pouted her red lips, raised one penciled brow and posed, head on, and at profile. "They're going to love these at the club," she said. "I don't think anybody's been to Arizona. Not that I can remember. And on our honeymoon, too. That makes it extra special. Everybody's going to be positively green. They're back there now, in the snow, shoveling their cars out, aren't they, sweetie?"

"Sure are, honey."

"I can't wait to have our first dinner party together and show these slides."

"Ah huh," he said.

The man snapped pictures of her steadily, grudgingly, then eagerly as she grew more playful and pretended to be a big game hunter with one foot on top of the carcass of the downed cactus. "Good. Keep going. Love it. Zowie, kitten! You are something else. I don't think I can show these at the club. These are going to be strictly for private use."

The big game hunter pose was the limit for us.

"These are people from the East," whispered my big sister Meredith as this outrage was going on before our eyes, and as she spoke, her glasses, with their sparkles on the corners, twinkled at Jack and me, twinkled magically, as she imparted her whispery wisdom to us. "They're from Back East in our country, a part where we've never been, but it's a good thing, too, that we haven't. Look at them real good. How they act when they get out here in Arizona is something you really ought to see up close. It's real sickening. They don't have any respect for the desert."

"Fabulous!" the man exclaimed. Something about what she was doing stimulated him.

After throwing her head backwards several times, she contorted herself into a ridiculous pose and held it. Her lower back arched painfully, her chin stuck to her collarbone, and her face turned toward the camera with her breasts jutting out. It was hard to imagine how anyone could get themselves into that position, not to mention holding it. It was sort of a fifties glamor model shot, I guess. "Do I really look good? I don't think I do," the lady asked coyly fishing for a compliment. "I don't really have what it takes to make an impression. I could never be any good as a model."

"Good? Baby, believe me, you're the cat's meow." He eagerly snapped another picture.

"Prrrrrrrr," went the weird woman slashing her fingers out like a paw and pretending to lick the back of her hand and clean her face. He took photos as she froze while swiping one eye.

This was one of the strangest performances we had ever seen. Our librarian mother certainly didn't behave like that.

"Look at them carefully," Meredith continued, still whispering, and she had a lovely way of making it seem that you were important enough to hear some secret facts that she was privy to, "and you'll learn to know them when you see them and stay far, far away. You see their pale skin? It's terrible, isn't it? Scary skin. That's skin like a grub when you've dug it up from the ground with a stick. They're like grubs. All of them. You wouldn't ever want to touch skin like that, would you? It would be very bad if you did. Skin that white carries diseases. You wouldn't want to catch what they have, would you?" Jack and I shook our heads which was hard to do when you were four years old and squatting on your heels and it made my head dizzy and I had to put my fingertips down on the layer of old palo verde beans underneath me. "There's only one way to get skin like that and that's if you ever go back East and live. So whatever you do, don't do that. You see the way they will treat our cactus? That's the way they always are when they're on vacation out here. They don't like our stuff. They don't really like the desert at all. The only reason they come here is to go back and brag to everyone about how much better it is in New York. They only like their own place, but we're only supposed to like theirs. We have to read about their maple trees and their lobsters and their mansions and know everything about them in school but we can't read anything about our desert 'cause it's not worth anything to them. These people control everything you read, practically. All the school books come from there. All the books come from there. All from the same place. They tell us what we have to think. Look at them. They're just plain old dumbos."

I suppose seeing an Eastern lady kicking one of our cactuses did feed Meredith's prejudice against the East Coast; she felt we were the victim of a grand conspiracy against the West. Truthfully, we were denied the ability to educate ourselves about our local environment; there was not a single book about the Southwest in our school library, and almost all the books were published in the East. But it was Meredith who cultivated this visceral, negative reaction to Easterners; not me.

"They're a bunch of creeps," whispered Jack back, pinching the seam of his baggy jeans. "I wish I could push em outta Arizona. If I had a big hand, I would push em a long ways away from here."

Now the crazy lady really began to perform, in fact, some of the ways she was arranging herself above the long prone cactus were coy, and others were downright suggestive, and the man loosened his collar. "You're making it pretty hot out here for me," he said with a laugh. "I guess I'll have get us back to the motel room and cool you down."

"Yeah, baby, you'd better. You'd better take care of your baby dolly," and now she had descended to producing a very nasal baby talk, "Oodly woodly baby girly wants her scutum uptummy man to wuv her uppy good-good."

Though the three of us couldn't then understand what she was suggesting by all her weird baby talk and peculiar poses above the cactus, these last coy photos would be useful to prove that squaw dresses were worn in the Old Pueblo in the sixties and I suppose you thought I was going to say the photos would prove that two ordinary adults, a male and a female, are capable of almost anything when out in the open and when they think no one's looking. Nobody would want to prove that, because everybody knows it's true. But maybe you think I mentioned her squaw dress because I now want to change what she wore, to change her into a light sheath dress, lifting the tabs and sliding the dress off and replacing it like a paper doll outfit. But did you notice that squaw dresses aren't the real issue? I suppose you understand that I am telling you about her squaw dress to avoid telling you something interesting about the art I'm making. Her squaw dress was not interesting, and it wasn't what happened next.

"Isn't it gorgeous?" gasped the woman, suddenly speaking coldly, normally, and stepping away from the cactus and folding her arms on her chest. She was squinting at us, in our direction, I should say, because it wasn't clear yet whether she had seen the three of us where we were crouching under the hazy shadow of the palo verde or whether perhaps she had heard Meredith when she was whispering her lengthy warning about New Englanders. Though the broken light and shadow from the branches above cast a complex camouflage, we were beginning to suspect that she knew we were crouching there, watching.

"Oh, those lemony fruit! What lovely things!" the woman exclaimed. "Lovely, lovely. They're as yellow as newly blooming daffodil. I wish I could pack them up in a teeny tiny box and take them home with us."

Besides being crazy and stupid—only stupid women and folklorists used teeny and tiny together—we now knew she was completely evil, pretending suddenly to have a respectful attitude toward the cactus that she'd kicked and stomped earlier. It was an act for our benefit. But I hope you aren't expecting these Easterners to become dangerous gangsters and go after us. There are several things about them that we already knew with confidence: they were Easterners; they were cruel and thoughtless, and therefore they were undoubtedly rich. They were crazy, stupid, rich people from the East who enjoyed kicking our cacti.

The woman lifted her chin and her eyebrows together, indicating there was something interesting going on behind the man. She meant us.

"What's wrong?" asked the man, pulling the camera away from his face and leaning it on his knee. "You blow hot and cold."

"Ah hem," she said. She lifted her chin and eyebrows again. "Behind you."

"Huh?"

"There are some children. Hiding. Behind you," she said. The baby doll act was gone and she was angry.

We understood her better than the man and had already begun concealing ourselves in some brittle weeds that were growing at the side of the palo verde trunk, but to do that, because the branches under a palo verde are so low, we couldn't stand but had to walk on our heels in a waddling fashion like a troop of ducks. But who was stupid there? During one of my shuffling waddles, a dried palo verde bean snapped under my foot.

The man swung around, toward us, and then stood up. Using his hand as a sun visor, he scanned a larger palo verde, where we weren't, and a gravelly clearing beside us which was glowing with yellow desert marigold blooms, each held up to the sun on a long pale green stem. The bright flat heads bobbed above their fuzzy pale green bodies in a slight breeze as though to bow and scrape and say "it's not us, not us, not us." These blooms in their clearing had their backs against the steep red rocks of a hill. We had come down that hill on a path, walked into the clearing, and hidden ourselves under the small palo verde when the lady and the car first appeared.

"Hello?" he said, walking slowly toward the clearing with his eyes searching vaguely everywhere for any sound or movement. All the buzzing bees made that difficult. His head kept zipping around at the noisy black blobs.

"Hello?" he said again tentatively.

I watched a stiff black beetle crawl out of some weedy gray grass near my feet. It fought to drag itself over one of the bent stalks which my foot had flattened. Its glossy body had specks of mica dust on the sides and the effort of pulling itself up made it shake like a drunken sailor.

"Don't answer him," Meredith whispered to Jack and me. "Whatever you do don't answer. Just ignore him. He's trying to draw us out and get us to talk to them, but we're not gonna fall for it. They're evil, the two of them. Very, very evil. About the worst I've ever seen come to visit Arizona."

"Where are you?" the man asked.

"We can't let them get any information from us," Meredith whispered. She was full of fierce warnings that day. "Whatever happens, if we're captured by them, we have to remember to tell them nothing. Stay strong no matter what. What they want is information. They'll use it against us. Who knows what they're up to? No good for sure. They're some of the worst people I've ever seen, kicking a cactus like that. If they get holda any of us, there's no telling what they'll do. Remember, keep quiet. Don't tell em anything. We might have a chance if we stick together and be quiet."

The man's head jerked around at the sound of a bumble bee droning its way, bumping and bashing along the sides of a rust-colored, lichen-splotched and peeling boulder. Then a cawing bird dove through some underbrush near the road, causing our pursuer to twist his head around several times and finally spot the three of us in front of the boulder crouching in weeds under the see-through bright green canopy of one of the smaller palo verde trees.

"Oh, hello." His voice sounded raspy and unsure and he hurriedly fumbled to fit the leather cover over the camera as though he sensed that we thought they have been doing something despicable. "What were you doing?" he asked, both flustered and irritated, and I noticed, before he had time to fit the cover over it, that the dials and levers of his camera were like the legs and eyes of a horrid, prying insect.

"Hello?" said the man again.

Their usual buzz was the bees' nonplussed reply.

The man stood with his hands on his hips. "We can see you, you know. We know you're there. Why don't you come out?"

"Yes," said the woman, more bluntly, stepping closer to where we were hidden, "come out of there now. Come out from where you are hiding. You aren't fooling anyone by staying there. You're being silly." Her steps toward us frightened a young whiptail lizard and it shot from the shade beside a stick to the shade of a pincushion cactus. The lizard froze there with its small bright eyes glowing like tiny stars.

We waddled back further in the weeds, though there were spider webs dangling from the tree limbs and one sharp green shoot skewered my arm and left a red scratch and another poked my head and lifted a section of my blonde hair straight off my scalp.

"Where did you come from? How did you get here? Where are your parents? Are they parked near?" said the man, now crashing through the marigolds and the bees toward us. I wondered what was going to happen if he reached us, if he was planning to impose a punishment on us. At the drip line outside the palo verde tree's canopy, he stood, then suddenly slid around a small green patch of jumping cactus. Too late, we realized they planned to flush us out and corner us in the marigold patch.

"Were you spying on us?" asked the lady. Our faces turned toward her.

"I asked where you came from," said the man, crashing in at us from another direction. We turned our faces toward him. "You should answer adults when they ask you questions," he continued, stooping under the branches and snapping them off in front of him.

Then she stepped in to help herd us out.

"Answer him," she barked.

The way the two of them questioned us reminded me of a Nazi interrogation scene from a bad World War II movie. We swung our heads around and discovered her coming in at us too. From our low angle near the ground she seemed to be nothing but a big triangular turquoise squaw dress skirt, stiff, pleated, edged with black and yellow rick rack, sweeping dangerously near us. In my opinion, repugnant was the best description of squaw dresses.

Meanwhile, the man had come closer and suddenly he lunged forward and we were forced to fly out from under the canopy or be caught.

"Go, go," said Meredith, pushing Jack. "Get out ahead of them. Run. Get!" We fought our way through the sharp branches and bees, shoving and wriggling out to the marigold-filled clearing.

All around us the heads of the brilliant yellow flowers bobbed dumbly in the breeze. Which way could we run? I touched the sweaty back of Meredith's shirt in a panic to send her somewhere so that I could follow. Not only was I afraid of these people, but I hated bees. Before Meredith could decide where we could go, the woman blocked the route past the tree. Then the man stumbled out between us and the boulder, our only other way out. They had trapped us in the clearing.

The moment we stood still, any bees we had disturbed returned to their flowers; busy with their work, they never noticed our conflict.

The man shot a quick glance at our clothes—my brother's dusty, baggy jeans, my shrunken top of phony red, white and blue bandana cloth with a zip pocket in the front and mismatched green shorts, and the worn, puckered face of Mickey Mantle on my sister's T-shirt. I was conscious for the first time in my life that we wore the clothes of a lower class, that something about what we wore was not quite right. I had always thought before that we were just right, that the age and fit of our clothes suited us, but something about this encounter took away my confidence. I was ashamed.

"When an adult asks a question you should answer it. I want to know where you came from," said the man peevishly. "And why were you spying on us?"

"We weren't spying on you," replied Meredith coolly. A surge of pride coursed through my body. To think that my own sister was so brave as to speak back at these people, these scary, belligerent adults, adults from the East, who we didn't know and who were challenging us and cornering us. I stared at her open mouthed. She was nine years old and she was my hero.

"Nobody was even looking at you," Meredith continued calmly. "We came over here from our big old ranch," she said lying loudly and with a great deal of boastful pride. She paused for a moment; I suspect now that she was thinking up a name. "It's called the Bar X Circle 9 Supremo Rancherito by most people, but we just call it the Circle 9 for short. We got about 129,000 head of prime cattle grazing out here in the old Rinconerones. What with the valleys and the mountain tops there's plenty of room for em. But I guess you didn't know that. You're pretty much surrounded by our cattle out here, but don't be scared, they's harmless. We just left the old chuckwagon over that there hill you see behind us, but it's bout time we moseyed back to it. We mightta left the campfire burning and somebody oughtta see to that pretty doggone soon because something like the beans might be burning up and burnt up beans stink, I hate em like a curse, dagnabbit, and you can't be too careful with fire it might just burn down the old chuckwagon, doggone it, and then we'd be in a pickle..."

Imagine, I thought, I owned about 129,000 head of prime cattle! It was as though, through her words to the man and woman, Meredith had painted our herd on the side of a cave, shown it to me, a sketchy horde of cattle grazing or running, tossing their heads, as shadows and dust. That was something to note. Something of might and purpose. And here I was thinking I was just an ordinary kid living in a lousy tract home without much furniture and, as I had then realized because of my encounter with these terrible people, wearing shoddy clothes. I was astonished at this information, our vast secret wealth, which was being revealed to me for the first time, at least it was the first time I had been conscious of ever hearing it. Maybe people had been talking about it all along, and I hadn't been listening properly? I would have to review carefully a lot of conversations that took place around me. Doesn't a writer have to listen properly, even if she's going to lie about what she's hearing later? How can you lie effectively if you don't know the truth? But it was hard to believe what Meredith said, though I figured it had to be true. To me at that time she stood as an absolute authority figure, the person you asked about anything in the world, because she would have worked out the answer already, concisely. She spoke with confidence and calm about anything in the world about which I needed information and her self-assurance was contagious; it was the kinda cool that infected kids. Well, weak little kids like me.

And I had never caught her in a lie before. What would make me suspect she was lying to the pale woman and man? And as you'll see, Jack had seemed ready to chime right in, to know all about it himself?

But why hadn't she ever told me that we owned a ranch and a lot of cows? That was the kind of information I needed. I always seemed to be out of the loop. Why were we trapped living in our lousy house and not our fabulous rancherito? What was its name again? I'd already forgotten! Did some mysterious, romantic fact that I was unaware of keep us forever from fulfilling our destiny, from claiming our fantastic inheritance?

It was a marvelous myth, the ranch story Meredith had spun. It made us important, and powerful. In it, I was part of an influential family, part of the authority over 129,000 head of cattle, with a supremo rancho and all the trappings, cowboy hands, branding irons, chuckwagon even, yes, Meredith had said that. I wanted to keep the myth, the lie, to remember it, and keep it.

Meredith tried to make a move around our interlocutor, but he blocked her path. "Stay here," he said, studying her like a toxic spill.

Meredith smiled, a squinty smile that wrinkled her nose and pulled her lip up showing the gap between her front teeth. She shoved the frame of her glasses up her nose and behind the glass you could see her gray eyes which were wise, wild, and skeptical. Her brown hair was curly and cut short. It sprung off her face at the sides, and an important lock of it lifted off her head at her brow, a bit like the curly hair on a calf that the mother cow licks. She liked to call herself 'Bill,' but the sparkling corners of her cat glasses gave away her sex every time.

"You're lying," said the woman. She narrowed her eyes at us and stood with her arms crossed on her chest. "You don't live on any such ranch. You're a big liar. Why are you going around like fools telling people you meet utter nonsense like that? Anyone can see you aren't living on a ranch. And there aren't any chuckwagons anymore, for your information. They got rid of those about fifty years ago. Any fool knows that. You sound like a bad television script. _Gunsmoke_ or _Rawhide_ or that malarkey that's on television every night." She was touching a raw nerve there; those were our favorite shows. To block even more of our escape, she stepped to a place beside the man. Her voice betrayed the fact that she was frustrated to feel her temper rising over such an insignificant encounter with three poor little messy kids.

"We do so live on a big old ranch," said my brother Jack suddenly. "It's the hugest anywhere around these parts. Everybody knows our ranch. Everybody who's from here. Our cattle brand is famous. We call our old station wagon a chuckwagon, that's all. I guess you don't know everything."

"You're lying. There aren't any ranches out here," the man pointed out. "This happens to be a national monument. No one can live within miles of this road. Tell us where your parents are. I want you to take me to them."

It was hard for us to keep the shock off our faces when he said that. Now we knew we were really going to be in for it, if we didn't get away from these crazy pale tourists. Our parents never took our side if an adult accused us of anything, no matter how absurd the accusation was. These adults weren't going to let up. The fact was we actual hadn't done anything wrong, unless you consider blundering into a private moment between two adults a crime, which apparently they did. They were going to demand to see our parents. Because we'd watched them being jerks!

"We do so live on a big old ranch, but it's not real nearby," said Jack obstinately. "You don't know nothing about nothing out here. You can't know about it because you aren't from here, no how, so you never know nothing about anything that's here. You can't know stuff cause you aren't from here. Anybody knows that."

While Jack talked, using his usual funny string of negatives (nothing, no how and never) and it seemed to me that he might be making sense to the adults, although in fact he was talking in nervous circles about what people ought to know, Meredith gave me the eye—the significant eye, a sort of peculiar twitchy wink she had in her lazy eye—she'd had to have an operation on that eye that kept going out and Jack was going to have to have the same operation—which meant we were going to have to skedaddle, make a break for it and head for the rocks. As I said before, over the rocky hill at our backs our parents were picnicking under a ramada. We'd climbed the rocks, though we had been told not to, and had been watching these people joke around with and photograph the dying barrel cactus, but we'd had enough. Meredith knew the scenic road this man and woman had driven on looped around several more hills before it reached the other side of this hill. With any luck, the man, though he was angry, wouldn't get in the car and try to follow us and neither of them would feel like climbing the hill, which was steep and covered with cactus.

"Listen, don't get smart mouthed with me," said the man. "Children who disrespect adults need to be brought into line. That's what I think. And the three of you were spying on us. I caught you doing that. There's nothing I hate more than sneaky kids. They always need to learn a lesson. But liars, children who make up stories, are probably the worst. They are going to grow up to be a bunch of terrible Americans who will ruin this great country..."

"Run!" Meredith commanded. Simultaneous to her giving us this order, her plump waist twisted and she swung around. Her dark blue Keds sneakers shot sand at me as she fled clumsily toward the back of the boulder.

"Up jumped the devil!" shrieked Jack at the startled man and woman and he ran away, too, following Meredith. This was a favorite saying of his, which did not have any particular meaning, but he always delivered it well. It startled many people because he shouted it without warning.

The stunned man's hand clamped down onto my shoulder; I was the only one left near him. Luckily, I was four years old and therefore I didn't happen to have much of a shoulder yet.

"Now you! I have you," he said victoriously.

But I dropped down quickly and wriggled my teeny shoulder free. He hadn't figured on such a small shoulder, you see, and it was easy for me to drop it away from him. I did it rather well and was able to scramble away from the horrid Easterners and scamper behind the boulder to a narrow opening Meredith must have seen on our way down the rocks earlier. Meredith was running up the trail we'd come down, moving wildly, her arms pumping, her legs twisting, and her shoes slapping the rocks and dirt, raising puffs of smoky dust. In the shadowy gap behind the boulder, we cried "hurry, hurry, hurry" to one another and squeezed through desperately.

"Hey, hey. Hey. Come back!" shouted the man and it sounded as though he were right behind us, about to grab somebody from behind. "I was talking to you. You kids! You should stay when adults are talking to you. I want you to take us to your parents. Come back here, now. I want your parents to know what their children are doing. You don't get away that easily. I'm going to tell your parents a thing or two."

Boy, that was not what we wanted.

Meredith found more of the faint path up the hill on the other side of the boulder and Jack and I followed her somehow, though we were spending most of our time craning and cringing to see who was coming behind us. We doubted the woman with the wobbly ankles would chase us, but the man might.

Rocks, rocks, we ran up into the hot rocks and the cacti. Hands on the rocks, hands off the cacti. Hands on the rocks, hands off the cacti. Partway up the path, I started to turn around again.

"Hey, hey! You kids!" the man yelled. "Lying will get you nowhere. Your plot is stupid. You've forgotten the hook of your novel. I'm going to have to—"

"See you in the funny pages!" Jack shouted back at the man.

"Keep running," Meredith extolled us, "Keep going up. Don't look back until we've reached the top. Don't stop. Just look ahead. Just go, go! We're getting out of here, darn him, and he's not gonna get us. We're gonna get free of them. They aren't even following us. They can't follow us. They don't know where we're going. They're a coupla dummies! Don't look back!" Meredith's chubby figure ordered from above. She was gasping and Jack was already wheezing. Real bad asthma, that was what Jack had. I felt the shadows darken and the ground lighten and my head pound, but I kept going, I kept lifting my knees and finding a new place where I could exactly fit my foot. The process of fitting my foot brought me up the steep, rocky hill.

Near the summit, I braved a second glance backward. There stood the angry man and the crazy woman in the squaw dress, now only a squashed turquoise dot with a puny pink head on it, but her la-de-da voice carried in the dry desert air and I think I heard her say, "Look at that! Those kids can run straight up into the rocks. I'll be damned, John. They're running straight up and over the top of those sharp rocks and all those cactuses."

Up, up, up to the summit of the rocky, saguaro-studded, Arizona hill.

CHAPTER 2

The sky at the zenith above domed the world that day with a ceiling the color of a pale sapphire. In this sacred dome, a buzzard circled lazily in an updraft. Various minute and filmy clouds puffed nervously past the sun. And that same sun blazed atop our desert which spread beneath us. A complete picture of earthly loveliness.

"They're down there," said Jack, talking about the pale man and woman. "Darn them stupid people."

"Ah, don't let them worry you. We're safe. They're not gonna follow us," said Meredith, breathlessly reaching the summit. "They're gonna stay right down there where they are," she said, dismissing them with a wave of one arm. "Dummies, that's what they were. Gee, I thought...ah, well, they were dummies, for sure."

"Yeah," said Jack. "I don't give a hoot for em. They ain't worth a hoot or a holler. They didn't know nothing about nothing. They thought they could scare us, that's all."

"Yeah, no hoot," I echoed unconvincingly, slicing the air with a disdainful wave that copied Meredith's. I was struggling to join them on the summit.

Meredith and Jack's laughter cut at me sharply.

"No hoot," said Jack mocking me to Meredith. "Whatta nut." He shoved me gently off the summit. I stood down.

"I'm a nut," I said complacently.

In every direction around us, a thousand saguaros all standing sentinel, all standing proud, rose up from the desert floor and mounted the rocks and the foothills on the south side of the mountains. Saguaros climbed into the canyons and marched toward the arroyos. The near vertical light caught on the crook of the huge cactus arms and made the pleats of green skin glow as a verdant shaft. Coming straight down, because it was noon, the light showed the seams on the cacti, as though the giants were large stuffed toys bursting at their seams with millions of loose threads.

They were our giants, and we loved them. Our southwestern cacti were glorious; the great green giants, the blazing candelabras, showing the way to Mexico, showing our land, stretched out beneath us and all the way to the haze of the horizon.

And we loved the purple mountains thrusting high into the sky. They were ours, too. Their sides concealed innumerable caves in canyons, their ridgelines showed dark blue saddles, and there were small brooks and oaks and pines hidden at the top. To us, no lofty cathedral in Europe built by man had the impact of those mountains, stretching 9,000 feet upward and spanning the whole northern horizon with lavender and gray and pink rocks, jumbled and jammed together. I didn't care that our town looked sprawling and dusty at the foot of those mountains. We had not built anything to rival the mountains because we were at peace with them and allowed them to dominate the landscape. We could run along parallel to them, playing in the city's arroyos and vacant lots and I always considered them part of my games.

The Santa Rita Mountains were in between us and Mexico. Then due west, the sharp black backs of the Tucson Mountains reared up. To our right, the Santa Catalina Mountains stretched away in a northwesterly direction. Along the base of that range were the old ranches and mines. Behind us were the Rincons, the lowest range, the one with caverns.

"Look at those fat green cactuses," said Jack, still wheezing, but a little less. "Some are growing outta rocks! Right outta rocks and into the sky."

"Sure," said Meredith, "they can grow atop a rock lot'sa times. They're tough. Nothing's too hard for them to do. They fall over and squish people pretty much regular as clockwork. It's in the papers all the time. You gotta watch out for those if you're hiking. I'll warn you if one's about to fall. The Apaches used those to kill people. Soldiers, mostly. That was a good trick they had when they used cactuses as weapons and stopped the United States Army in its tracks. A dog gone good trick. Apaches could take to the rocks, and how. Water? Shoot, they didn't need it. Or food. They didn't need it, either. They could chew rawhide and stuff. Eat cactus buds. Boy, there's a lot of green stuff out there. Mexico's thatta way behind the mountain and a ways further on. Wish we were in Nogales today. Like to shop for some toys and puppets and junk. They got a lot of good junk down there in Nogales. I like those shops down there. Pretty neat stuff. Damn, that's a good place. Or I'd like to be out catching lizards. Think of all the lizards down there. If we could get em. We could have em."

"Yeah. A lizard factory," said Jack.

"Yeah, a million of em. We could probably fill up a lot of terrariums and stuff. Have our own bunch of lizards and take care of em and everything. We could be experts and stuff," said Meredith.

"That would be something," said Jack. He hooked his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans. That was a thing he liked to do. His pants were kinda loose and he could keep them up better.

"We got a lotta good stuff here. Good stuff we can do and good stuff we can see. Everybody thinks this place is no good. They don't know nothing. Like those people down there. Those dummies. Whatta couple of pale, sickly dummies. They didn't even try to run after us. Whew. I thought they were tougher. They seemed like pretty tough characters. I wasn't really scared of em at all. Not really. They didn't have me worried. I saw the pale skin and knew they were unhealthy people. They don't even understand this place."

Meredith liked to think that we were of another place, the edge of our country, the farthest removed you could be physically and culturally from the power centers of the East Coast. But instead of being ashamed of this fact, Meredith had somehow trained us to project an obtuse pride at our removal from any place of importance. She promoted the idea of the importance of our alien nature, the way we had been stuck off by ourselves and made different; we wanted nothing of the world of wealth and power in our nation, though Meredith had never exactly explained why this was so. Mexico lay in a blur to the south, the lovely city of Nogales yielded rum for my father, giving us the black plastic bears that hung on each rum bottle, the black and the special, smaller silver bears. We were of a place somewhat comfortable with its neighbor, Mexico, when the rest of the country had absorbed little of their culture. We were comfortable with deprivation, the desert was as inhospitable to visitors as we had been to the pale man and woman. We were so far from the Puritans there was no longer any connection to that stuffy, cold world of Homburgs and woolen coats. We had stripped ourselves of artifice and were cured of the American disease: material ambition. We were of another place. And we were proud of it.

And I was proud to be with Meredith and Jack, though they acted ashamed of me for my many obvious weaknesses. Though the encounter with the Easterners had been horribly frightening, though we had come close to being in big trouble with our parents who would never take our side against the strangest claims of a persecuting adult, we enjoyed the idea that we had shown those rotten Eastern people a thing or two about the spunk of a bunch of Arizona kids. We had taught them to appreciate us. In our minds our encounter was the pinnacle, the zenith of success. Never mind that the woman had ridiculed us for our obviously manufactured tale about the fabulous ranch we owned. Collectively we seemed unable to question the wisdom of lying to these people. It seemed that we had made the decision to do anything to maintain our face.

The woman had commented favorably on our rock climbing abilities; until then we had always hoped someone would think we were as good as the Native American Apaches at that; they were notorious for fleeing from the U.S. Army by dashing up into the rocks and disappearing before the cavalry could tie up their horses. Although the lady had said nothing about us and Apaches, in our minds she had. Meredith began claiming the pale lady had compared us favorably to Apaches.

"Did you hear what she said? She said we were running up in the rocks like Apaches. She couldn't believe it. She thought we were namby-pambies, a bunch of babies, but we weren't. We ran away from them and took to the hills. We weren't stopped by a little cacti and sharp rocks. No siree, Bob. We know how to take to the rocks and climb em. We know how to stay outta the cacti, sure. She was shocked at us. Did you hear her? She didn't even know we could do stuff like that. Sure, we do it all the time."

But I knew better, at least regarding my own feeble efforts. Compared to what an ancient, even critically wounded Apache warrior could have done with that hill or even a toddler of the Apache tribe, we were pathetic, me especially. I whimpered as I moved downhill. We might imagine ourselves as prototypical mighty Western children. We might pride ourselves with the notion that we were rugged, outdoorsy type children who were tanned and lean and energetically xenophobic, meaning that we hated the entire East Coast, but I knew better.

For years we remembered this encounter with the horrible man and woman as our greatest moment, our mythic, childhood triumph over the East.

And with our triumph, that scene was gone, the story cycle finished. The pale man and crazy woman were done, whisked off stage and out of the theater, the curtain fell, though I was still digesting the facts, from the authority of Meredith and Jack, that we owned a ranch, 129,000 head of cattle, and a chuckwagon I had never laid eyes on. I was hoping I would be able to see it sometime. Where, I wondered, was it located? Were we keeping it hidden for some reason?

And I was still afraid of our persecutors.

But you need scary encounters like that, like the pale man and woman, if you're going to write. You need to have awful things really happen to you, and not just hear about them happening to others. Then you need to remember them, and cut them out, one by one, not losing a single speck of the real in the wilderness of the unreal. Cut them out, and bring them in, bring them home at the end of the trail, to the expectant reader.

"Get out! What are you—? Get out of those gall darn sharp rocks! The three of you!" Mother called from the shade of the ramada when she noticed our silhouettes at the top of the rugged hill. She was making sandwiches and her shadowy figure in a long cotton dress with a big pleated skirt appeared to be shaking a knife, a paring knife for peeling our apples, at us. We jumped at the sound of her voice and began scrabbling down toward her as she continued yelling. "For heavens sake! Get down here where the car is and where I can see you! Didn't I explain myself adequately? Didn't I tell you where to stay? Didn't I tell you to stay put? Get down off the top of that hill, and I mean pronto."

She stood with her hands on her hips watching us struggle down the hill. "By cracky, you kids. There have got to be scorpions galore in those gall darn sharp rocks! More scorpions than Billy-be darned. Scorpions waiting for you, silly kids! By cracky, you are asking for trouble!"

Meredith and Jack scuttled down the hill quickly. I struggled far behind them, hesitant, mournful, worried.

"Look at them! Just look at them!" she appealed to our father to join in with her hysterical reaction to our rock climbing expedition. Father sat impassively on a picnic table slowly smoking a cigarette while eating a mayonnaise and peanut butter sandwich, his huarache sandals pressed against a boulder. He might have managed a brief disinterested glance in our direction.

"Help your baby sister!" she ordered, talking about me, though neither Jack nor Meredith came back up to aid me as I tentatively picked my way down the rocks. It took me a long time to go down hills and I often slid on my bottom if the ground became the least bit loose, though Jack and Meredith hated me for doing that. For my many weaknesses, they hated me with a passion.

Mother went quiet for a minute and we could hear a new brisk breeze, and the strange call of a Gila Woodpecker, and that bird dove and swooped out of a saguaro toward the side of a rock. The bird perched there stupidly for a minute, picked at some lime green and gray lichen and dove off toward a saguaro growing at the shoulder of the road.

Then Mother began again. "Meredith, didn't I warn you that those rocks are just full of scorpions and snakes with all the spring rains this year and the heat coming on early? What do you mean by leading your little brother and your baby sister up there into danger? I thought you were only going around the side of the hill a little bit. That was what you told your father and me. You said you were going around the bottom of the hill. Just a little bit of a walk on level ground. Didn't I tell you not to climb up there? Jack's asthma is at a dangerous stage. Do you want to kill him? Is that what you have in mind? Didn't I tell you about the danger of climbing around in rocks in the spring? You kids are forever asking for trouble! I thought you were down here on the lower slope. Why, there might be a thousand scorpions running around in those gall darn rocks. There's a scorpion up there for each of you with your name on it."

That was a very absurd image, something Mother was adept at producing during her long tirades. She watched us come down further. "By cracky, I guess I've no choice but to have to give each of you a thorough lickin in the car."

"I'm taking off my belt. Who needs a beltin?" asked Father, but he actually did nothing and kept on munching his sandwich. In those days his youth betrayed him; he resembled a beatnik himself: the hem of his loose jeans were rolled up as were the sleeves of his white T-shirt (a cigarette pack was encased in the fold like some strange rectangular chrysalis riding on his bicep) and he had planted his huaraches against a boulder; three silver buttons, small, medium and large, up the center of the creaky sandals were painted red, green and white, the colors of the Mexican flag. His grandmother on his father's side was from Mexico, but his parents had divorced and he was always trying futilely to regain the lost connection to his father's culture. The frame of his black browline glasses was clear at the bottom. High brown hair at the front suggested a modified version of an Elvis pompadour. "Which one of them is it that needs a belting?" he asked, not daring to choose one on his own, leaving it to her to decide. I doubt he was wearing a belt that day.

"Well, right now, I think I'd say all three of them," said Mother debating our fate from behind her gray and black sunglasses. She was standing at a picnic table under the ramada spreading peanut butter on slices of bread and folding them in half. "All three of them deserve a thorough lickin. I'm gonna lick Jack for giving himself asthma. I thought he had more sense than the girls."

"Take one of these dog gone sandwiches," she said wearily when we slid to a stop in the dirt near the ramada. "And I split a coke." The bubbly black brew had been divvied out into small black pools in various plastic thermos lids.

Our eyes were huge, filled to overflowing with sadness and guilt and mostly useless and wracking self-pity. We were afraid to come too near her while she was in the mood she was in. We looked at the hot dusty road, too. Although we had told each other that we were rid of the angry man, all three of us thought he could decide to drive after us or climb over the hill and maybe bring the crazy lady along, too, although she might have a hard time walking that far.

"And eat them where we can see you," said Father.

Within minutes my brother and sister and I were ripping big bread crumbs smeared with peanut butter from our sandwiches and dropping them atop a line of black ants that were swarming a nearby garbage can.

"Take that!" said Meredith maliciously to the ants under siege.

"Look out below!" said Jack. "Bombs away!" He'd seen too many World War II bomber movies.

"Don't feed the ants our hard-earned peanut butter!" Mother cried out in horror when she realized what we'd been doing. Meredith, who was about to drop a large slab of her crust on the ants, froze the crust in midair, diverted it, and popped it into her mouth instead. She walked away with the peculiar hitching hop she'd developed, imitating the scruffy crippled character named Chester Goode on _Gunsmoke_. We followed her, a small herd of willful children, holding bubbly black nectar in our thermos cups like chalices of sacred wine. We were Meredith's devotees, her novices, her acolytes, and we rarely left her side.

Meredith walking away didn't stop Mother's tirade, her great volcanic fulmination at our disregard, our profligacy. "What in the world would make the three of you think you ought to destroy your wholesome peanut butter sandwiches and feed them to an animal? To ants?" And then a strange tongue-lashing, an epic, off-the-cuff saga, transpired: Mother being one of the few people in the world who often could not just scold her fellow humans but had to create in the process a fascinating, convoluted and guilt-ridden story cycle from a mundane act like wasting a few scraps of peanut butter on ants.

"Your father worked hard as a draftsman, risking his eyesight, slaving away at the draftsman's table with those difficult architectural plans, night and day, to earn the money to be able to give it to me so that I could drive to Food Giant and buy, for you three ungrateful children, that jar of peanut butter," she began, initiating the chain of misery and eternal obligation surrounding the wastage of peanut butter, and a librarian's short geographical, agricultural survey of our country's productivity. "And that peanut butter had to be grown in a field way down in the south in some of the darkest, richest soil in this great country of America with an old tractor that had probably seen some better days and that tractor had to plow that dark rich soil on a cold dawn and I'll bet it broke down six times before that field was ever plowed correctly for peanut planting and you better believe that every line that tractor lay down was straight or that farmer would have plowed the field over, right smack dab from the start, and that was where the peanuts were planted by the wrinkled hands of an old Southern gentleman—who knows his name, because I'm the only one who's listening to this gall darned story and really interested in the way real things are made in this world!—and those peanuts had to be dug out of the ground when they were ready to be harvested and those peanuts had to be washed in a great big tub and those peanuts had to be trucked across the continent and those peanuts had to be run on assembly lines until they hardly knew who they were any more and they had to be roasted in a great, hot oven, and this is also what your Swiss relatives did in Indiana to make a living, roasting peanuts, so hot that people had to be checking its gauges and valves night and day in case it got too hot and exploded those peanuts and the whole factory with it, hotter than Billy-be darned, and then those peanuts that you are dropping on ants so carelessly had to be dumped into hoppers to be mixed up in a great big vat and poured into a glass and a label had to be stuck onto it and it had to be boxed and it had to be trucked all the way out here to Arizona from a factory in Chicago at great expense and trouble and now you're about to feed it to an ant. Well, that isn't what those hard-working Americans who made that jar of peanut butter expected and it isn't what I had in mind when I bought it at Food Giant with a coupon and your father's hard-earned money! That wasn't what I had in mind when I drove it home and carried it in and put it on the shelf at home. I don't think I thought I would be feeding an ant when I spread that on a piece of bread! We're not rich enough to waste our food on ants, you kids."

She took a break and began slicing apples. "And don't you go into those rocks again," Mother said, shaking the knife at us again as she returned to the prior complaint. "I saw you climbing down from those rocks and I knew there was going to be trouble. I've seen enough of Arizona to know a place where there's going to be scorpions in the rocks. Why, doggone it, children have crawled into rocks never to be seen again. And their parents have mourned, but what good did it do them? They should have stayed out of the rocks. Foolish children have fallen headfirst into mines, mines with no bottoms, never to be seen again, and never to make any bother either, not to mention the fact that that hill is the perfect place for baby scorpions to be crawling around waiting for some foolish child to come along and stick their hand down a crack accidentally. If you put your hand down in the wrong crack, well, by golly, I don't even want to think about what could happen to you. Swelling up would be the best part of what would happen. I've seen plenty of scorpions and scorpion stings. Don't think I haven't. Why, wasn't I just telling you about one of those small golden ones out under the clothesline a few years ago? Those are the most poisonous ones that nearly struck you, kid," she said, pointed the knife at me, "under the clothesline. There it was racing around underneath you. Here, there, right under the bare feet of my youngest child. By rights you should have died that same day. There I was hanging out clothes and I slid my sunglasses down my nose and I saw it right at your feet. A baby scorpion, kid. You've got to watch for baby scorpions. And centipedes. You got to watch for them...."

My mother's voice always rose when she told me the story of the scorpion. I suppose she was horrified when she asked me to see how death had scampered at my feet, and the intricate details of the outside our house, the colors and shapes of pebbles and shadows on the floor of the desert as they must have been in 1957. I imagined the black iron poles of our clothesline, which were beautifully embellished with bluing and rust, branded the ground beneath my mother and I that morning with two dark elongated crosses, and the shadows of the five clothesline wires connected these crosses along the lower bricks of our neighbor's patio wall and formed an undivided length of musical bars over which the shadows of the clothespins were scattered like the notes of a jittery jig, this being the late fifties when the ritualized chore of Monday morning laundry and hanging out clothes on the clothesline ranked as both a religion and an art in our American home. Cold war contrails from the exhaust of an unseen jet crisscrossed the sky above us and crumpled down toward the brown desert very much like one of the sugary cereal toppings on the great golden flakes in our vital cereal bowls. My mother squeezed the spring of a wooden clothespin, jabbing the open beak of the pin over the cuff of an upside-down pair of my father's jeans. When those pants were pinned, she dragged the plastic wheels of our yellow and white striped laundry cart across the sand and caliche; the wobbly wheels scrunched and gritted the ground noisily, attracting me from where I stood on the concrete landing outside the little brick washhouse at the back of the garage, and suddenly, I suppose, I craved the comfort of burying my face in the pleats of her big paisley skirt.

Walking, I imagine, involved the lifting of thick thighs, the bending of stubborn knees, and the clenching and unclenching of my toes, which were bare on the cool gray concrete. But as difficult as all these actions were, the lure of my mother and her skirt was so strong for me that the muscles in my lower back began firing in robot-like impulses, and I found myself tottering out from the washhouse in her direction. My fingers groped the air above me, and I have my mother's word that, after leaving the support of the door, I waddled out a few steps toward her. Then, when I was making real progress in her direction, my antagonist appeared.

The scorpion slipped out of a foundation crack in the western side of the washhouse and scurried around the corner of that little structure to a spot between us, between my mother and me.

From that spot that it first chose, the scorpion skittered forward tentatively, and then scampered a little sideways, turned, writhed, and retreated over the rough mortar mixed with mud that two years earlier my father had shoveled over the slope as a transition between the single back step and the slightly lower patch where he raised the clothesline. But here in the telling of this significant tale of my early life, namely how my life itself was threatened when I was barely more than a year old (a story which I ought to be thankful for because it's so dramatic, and it isn't a lie), I become as unsure about what direction to take with my story as the scorpion I'm describing. I find myself more apt to travel backwards or skip sideways than I am to forge boldly ahead and simply tell you, create for you again, everything that happened. While I remind myself to step out bravely, while I have my mother's word that I, the baby on the step, didn't falter, didn't dither, over what to do next, and probably never noticed the scorpion, I find myself focusing on the details of what my ugly nemesis looked like.

In this effort I am frustrated by the removal, with time, of any way to know the variety of scorpion which was scrabbling underneath me. Nevertheless, I go on thinking about it. Was the body of the thing entirely pale greenish yellow, and did it measure a quarter-inch in length, and was it therefore a Sculptured Centruroide with a sting that is often fatal? Or could it have been a baby _Hadrurus arizonensis_ with a darker thorax, perhaps shedding its first skin that day, and, curiously, leaving forever the charge of its own dear scorpion mother that it loved and knew so well—as well as any scorpion ever can be said to know its mother?

"Stay right there!" Mother yelled.

Suspend my fat foot with its babyish toes forever if it takes my research that long, suspend it so that it hovers in the air and only threatens to fall and receive my karmic sting from the scorpion. Let the shadow of my baby toes coming down and the scorpion evading that shape, and me thinking of the story of me evading the shape that is evading me, explain the sudden lurch Mother said I took down the step, releasing my toehold on life, as every mortal one day must release their hold on this wonderful world. Let my foot fall where it may, toward whatever skittering beast; let the brute carry its blonde joints beneath me; let my mother's eyes take note of it, and yet I tell you before she can knock the laundry cart out of the way and dash over to scoop me up, I will always time the step right, the beast will run away and leave me to be held accountable for every breath afterward. That is the miracle of the real past, which shows the powerlessness of writing. The nervous scorpion, which only my mother's eyes noticed, wiggled out from its crack, turned, scuttled, and could even have flexed its tail under my foot, but then that wispy harbinger of death decided on a different course.

Certainly the sting of the scorpion, had I received it then, could have been lethal and in that case the writing that you are now enjoying would have been impossible, destroyed along with me. The cycle of stories, frankly the all the lies, would have ended. I would never have had all the trouble I've had over the herd of phantom cattle. And Meredith and Jack and I wouldn't have lived through that night when her boyfriend tried to give Mr. Wayne LSD. And the librarian, well, he wouldn't have seen me in the special collections room and threatened me with his knife and tantalized me with his tale of Belinda. That's a stray story I lost. The story of Belinda could have been the greatest story ever, a real treasure, or, perhaps, another hack tale of a hippie gone wrong. I'll never know which. That stray story is gone, unless I manage to make up my own lie about it, but you won't be able to tell the difference. That's what makes art plastic, in the sense of being malleable and changeable.

The reality of life, or I really mean death, could have swept away the vain, unreality of writing. You see my life, my writing, from the very start was a phantom. What difference does it make if I tell it wrong now? I see that the idea that I, the writer, control things may be utter nonsense. Images appeared and disappeared before me under the power of some Unknown Trickster. If the material of my life was plastic, the material of my writing is too. I must build it and not worry. I have to stop trying to control the shape of the herd, but simply, simply move it forward. A story like Belinda's has to fall by the wayside, and the writer with her ego has to learn to disappear along with Belinda.

In this vein, I realized it could so easily never have been—that morning in early spring, a year after the scorpion almost struck me—when a patch of sun in a great elongated golden trapezoid flowed from the southeast window in the bedroom I shared with Meredith (and a drawer full of her forbidden dolls arranged in open-lidded boxes like perfect coffins with colored tissue blankets of pink, aqua, and blue). That trapezoid of watery sunlight, which was almost like an odd-shaped aquarium tank, stretched out as far as the spot where I crouched on the rug in the living room. In that barren room, I had been spending the morning stacking blocks on the scratchy gray wool rug, and I could smell the shaggy stink of sheep and the sharp oiliness of a rubber pad underneath. The room was without much furniture; erecting the shell of our walls has cost my parents so much that the purchase of anything more than beds, a single sofa, a few chairs and a dining table was unimaginable for years. In this wide open space I was balancing colorful plastic blocks atop oil cloth blocks, the thick loops of yarn on the corners of the cloth blocks made my castle wall unstable. Before I stacked each plastic block I shook them first to hear the hissing slide of the teeny beads inside, and I scratched the green and yellow corner of one particular plastic block against my new top teeth and the oddest O and an irritatingly indistinct outline of oxen on another red and blue plastic block. I glanced up briefly at certain animated antics displayed by the dust motes in the golden light, their pirouettes in that bright trapezoid were especially elegant, though I had seen those before, and I listened while the mushy heartbeat of a coffee percolator on our kitchen counter gradually ebbed, like the ocean retreating on the shore at low tide. Happily, I then plunged my arms, nearly up to the elbow, in the golden light.

"You're having a good time by yourself, I see," said Mother, looking in on me from the doorway, "Well, well, I don't suppose anyone else is reading this far into your book or paying much heed to what you're telling them, though. Why all the detailed description of a time past? Aren't you the fancy one? Who cares about that? Why don't you tell them something interesting like a detailed life history of a person from Indiana? Now there's something that people will take an interest in. You could tell about a man whose name was Lugar who used to beat up a lady that worked in my mother's restaurant. That was a real interesting case. He was terribly evil and his story would make a good subject. Mrs. Lugar was a teeny thing and scared to death of him when he was drunk or angry. Boy, he was the real thing, kid, real violent. You could sell people him. I think he went to the penitentiary, but don't quote me on that. Now that's a real human interest story. You'd have to make up a lot of it, though, because I don't know anything more about him, old Lugar. Or tell the story about the white button in the mashed potatoes. That's homey, like _Little Women_. Something wholesome will sell. Ah, well. Keep playing."

I turned my chubby arms in the sunlight and watched the bright light which served to soften the edge of me, bending me, merging with me into a watery wiggle. I twiddled my fingers and took my arms out of the light and then plunged them in again, up past my elbows. My very skin felt molten. It was then when I was enjoying my molten arms when The Most Extraordinary Thing danced by outside the front window.

I caught only the movement in my peripheral vision. My first thought was that I'd spotted a baby rabbit, perhaps even one of the long-eared jack rabbits, cavorting in some peculiar manner. Live rabbits were still something special, even when my home and its small triangle of tantalizing green lawn in a sea of gravel sliced into rabbit territory, the dry dirt and endless plain of creosote bushes that made up our desert valley. Live rabbits could be caught in a box with the lure of a fresh carrot, or so we believed. Meredith, Jack and I obsessed about them, and Father, with his draftsman's skills, helped us sketch elaborate plans on paper of traps to catch bunnies. We saved cardboard boxes, and, optimistically, read books about the do's and don'ts of raising rabbits, rabbits that never took our bait.

The prospect of seeing a bunny brought me slowly to my feet, drew me to the low ledge of our northern windowsill. I took the block with the ox with me to the window where I saw our crescent of stunted bottle brush bushes evenly spaced along the inner span of our semicircular gravel drive offering a smooth rim in front of the pink porch trim and burnt adobe of the home on the other side of the unpaved street. The bright pink dawn burned across the yellow expanse of dormant Bermuda lawn over there and seared the branches of an olive tree and the sliced, enticing view of a weedy alleyway behind. Curbs glowed, bricks lit up, and a milk truck lumbered by loudly.

My two stout forearms, tanned and tinted a rosy red by the unrelenting Arizona sun, lay stacked on top of each other on the narrow width of the cold masonry windowsill in our living room's single, northern window, and, as I fiddled with the window crank, turning the loose knob on top, I waited for something to happen outside. Eventually, my patience was rewarded.

A sudden breeze teased the tip of something silvery, then lifted it, and lofted it, and brought it to view. A shining hoop sprang into action, tumbling over and over, bright and light. Like the center-ring star of a circus show, the gossamer wheel, flipped forward happily. It was a see-through circle, a lovely orbit, filtering light through the discarded skin of the old fellow who supposedly gave us a world of sin. Even from the window I could glimpse the overlapping diamonds on the hide, the faint scale pattern, which remained on the crisp wrapper, an imprint of the animal which had made its life inside. The skin split at the head and remained intact as a tube of white light, slightly worn on the edges, and in fact the head of the snake skin appeared to be swallowing the tail, forming a circle; a world without end.

The scaly hoop, hopping and skipping in the gravel as though it has a life of its own, as though it was there to amuse me with an act which I alone got to view that wonderful, wintry desert day, somersaulted brightly, tumbling, whirling, spinning and revolving, it twirled itself into a perfect hoop guided by—the old Drover, the Unseen Hand, the Trickster's Magic?

The desert is the Trickster's favorite place to appear, to inspire with grand illusions as he did again and again throughout my life. It was a mysterious world, to be forever containing these scenes, a thousand stages, under a thousand big tops, circus rings with each center-ring holding its own phantasmagoric circus show. The hoop I saw skipped across the gravel, hopping and rolling, moving forward happily, as though perfectly informed as to its ultimate purpose. Why wasn't I?

Suddenly, the puffed-out skin fell and twiddled along the gravel in a corkscrew manner. When I had gotten used to watching it writhe that way, the snake skin sprang up into a hoop shape again. And on it rolled, that bright halo of holy happiness, that miracle of nature, hopping and skipping across our front yard gravel. The snake skin bumbled across in plain view of me and then it whisked away, stage right; it couldn't have traveled far along our rough roads and front yards before it caught in a cactus and the hot sun disintegrated it, melting away the crisp wrapper until it resembled nothingness.

A writer always keeps her eyes on the phantoms, on the clear hide of the Devil, on snake skins blowing by the window of a desert town.

That year most of the streets of town, even the big ones, were just empty stretches of creosote bushes on both sides of a dirt track; you would pass along in the bright light, jolted by the rocks and perhaps at times with your car angling away from another vehicle you passed because of the raised center of the road. You could travel for miles seeing few pedestrians and fewer stoplights, just signs. The cars you could discover coming your way because of the plume of dust their tires raised, unless it was the summer monsoon and the streets were thick with slippery mud. At times your car dropped into the bottom of an arroyo; few arroyo crossings had bridges. At the bottom the car would hit small boulders and have to plow through and skitter atop the pink sand. You could look up the arroyos on either side of the road and see the thick roots of mesquite trees woven in strands on the walls of the arroyo, bursting out of the banks of desert dirt, hanging in the open air. The witches' brooms at the top of the mesquite crawled over the sun.

My mother and I drove on one of those dirt roads later that year, the same year when the snake hoop rolled by outside our front window. We were on an errand run for Thanksgiving and we had already purchased our turkey, which was in a box.

"You gotta stay outta arroyos, kid. I'm telling you, by cracky, and you ought to listen. You're brother and sister got dragged down there once by some bad kids from up on the other side of the park. Those kids were rascals. Their mothers just opened the backdoor every morning and put em out like puppies. All they did was go around the desert making trouble and setting fires like Billy-be darned. Of course their mothers didn't care. A gang of toughs is who they were. After they dragged Meredith and Jack into the arroyo they told them to stay down there in the arroyo until the rains came. Ha! Imagine that! Those fools of mine thought they had to do what a bunch of tough kids said. Well, by cracky, I never found out who did it, but I had my suspicions. I had to go find the kids myself. I was so mad I could have spit. I knew to look for em in the arroyo because I had told them not to play anywhere near there, so, of course, where were they? In the gall darn arroyo, crying, huddled together, worrying about staying there by themselves all night without dinner. They said they had to stay down there until the rains came. That would have been about six danged months. Crazy? I tell you kid, those big kids of mine are awful-ly crazy."

The arroyos curved away in an ominous manner that made you think someone deadly, the Hairy Man, Father suggested, lurked around the corner. This Hairy Man was a beastly maniac who liked to menace children who played near desert arroyos. Besides a head of matted hair, he had terrible fangs and long green fingernails. He did his menacing as a favor to parents, apparently, but nevertheless we dug our forts into the walls of the arroyos and used the roots to swing on and to form bars for prisons. Hairy Man prisons. If the Hairy Man tried to get us, we would tell him a little child was hiding themselves in the fort's corner; we always dug a deep one of those. This, we were sure, would trick him. His eyesight, we reasoned, wouldn't be very good with all that matted hair hanging in his eyes. We planned to quickly weave long sticks or loose roots across the vertical roots to trap him.

The crumbling remains of an old tubercular sanitarium stood far back from the road that day like an awkward guest who'd stayed too long at a party. Those places were still dotted around town, but they were mostly rubble, and old men stumbled out of the entrances, more drunk than tubercular.

"There's an old sanatorium, kid," Mother said suddenly, waving at the big ruin, "Tuberculosis was what those people in the sanatorium had at the time. It was a problem for the country with all those sick people. They came out here to Arizona thinking sunshine would cure them and it did, occasionally. Wonder who all died in that big old place. I feel real sad to think about it. Nothing left of it and it must have been something at the time. Ruined to bits. Is there one window that isn't broken? Can't see one that's intact. Doors hanging loose on their hinges. Gosh, that's a pity to see. That used to be a fine place. I suppose they'll tear it down in a year."

The tiny separate homes on the same property, which had been built for tubercular patients with families, were rented by Beatniks at this time, as Mother explained, one of whom sat that day near his sunny doorway on a picnic bench and plunked a guitar, wistfully pondering the long winter shadow of his foot and his landlady's vast collection of potted cacti.

"Look at the little houses at the side. Families stayed in those teeny places when someone had tuberculosis. Used to call it consumption, actually. Looks like they're full of those crazy kids, those Beatniks now. Playing guitars in the daytime. By cracky."

Cars were few and far between when I stood on the high transmission hump of the '49 Chevy in the middle of the floorboards, in the backseat, wedging myself into a small gap between the front seatbacks. These seats wore olive green coats and the cloth near my face gave off a scent of dust and kapok. Our car was a two door model and the front seats folded forward. No mechanism held them back and sometimes a sudden stop would fold the empty seat forward slightly and when we came to a complete stop the seat would flop back in place, as though it bowed. If I hadn't braced myself, in those days before seatbelts, I sometimes was thrown forward too, and landed on the bowing seatback momentarily.

In the front window I could see down the dirt road for several dusty miles through the flying dirt which was orange and yellow that day. I didn't see a single auto or person. I kept looking though, hoping a coyote might trot across or a roadrunner or a family of quail, running out energetically at our side.

Mother steered off the dirt to a space in front of a store.

"You stay put, kid. I'll be back in a minute," she got out and let the car door slam.

How can I know what my mother's errand was or call her back from it now? How can I retroactively insist she stay in the car instead of leaving me with the paper bag full of groceries (especially with dinner rolls made at the Broadway Village Bakery by Mrs. Kaiser, a specialty at Christmas and Thanksgiving) and our Thanksgiving turkey in a box, and my brother's sailor coat? Mother had already retrieved the navy blue coat with its golden anchor buttons from the dry cleaners and it was hanging on one of the hooks in the ceiling of the backseat. When Mother parked the car and went in somewhere, a breeze through the open car window flapped the wrap, ripples of the paper twiddled the dark blue ocean of my brother's sailor coat.

The kleptomaniac's attention might have been drawn by the flapping paper on the dry cleaning when my mother parked in front of the store. I suppose, from her hiding place around the brick wall, the noise or movement attracted her. But perhaps she had only been waiting for the first car she saw in that space, after hiding her own car behind a mesquite tree at the side of the building; or perhaps there was an alley at the back that led out to another street and her car was there; at any rate when we pulled in I'm sure my mother never saw her. But she saw us.

As soon as Mother disappeared inside, the kleptomaniac snuck toward the humped fender of our olive green Chevy. On that crisp November morning, with the intention of stealing from the car, she came. How could she know I would later steal her and place her in this book for your inspection? I have her pinned down for you. I have rustled her, cut her out, branded her, and added her to my herd.

How gently she laid her hand on the light olive colored curve of the right front fender; it was the calmest approach to corruption, a tentative caress by her palm. The surface of the fender must have been a little warm even on that November morning because the sun shone intensely on our town and there wasn't a mesquite or a palo verde in front of the store to filter the light. Then one long finger of the lady's hand stopped and hovered in the air above the fender as though she were contemplating whether or not to approach any closer.

She dropped her hand on the car, and that creepy woman oozed about on the edge, sneaking nearer to the door handle. I suppose, because she went ahead with her plan, that she didn't see me at first standing in the far corner of the back seat of the car; I was only two years old, and it was never easy to see inside those old sedans with their high seat backs. She laid her hand on the metal and she came closer. Hand over hand, she swam herself forward to the door of the car; still I couldn't see her face, only her torso showed in the window. A headless, legless torso. Blouse, pearls, twin set. She pedaled her arm out, squeezed the handle of the car door, opening it silently.

She shoved the front seat forward, and dropped her head down to peer in. At me.

"My goodness," she said, lifting her sunglasses to sweep the interior of the car and make sure I was alone. "All on your lonesome, sweetie pie?"

Then arm over arm, she swam toward me in the stream of sunlit, mote-filled air, smooth strokes, flowing evenly and naturally, but sneaking, a trial of the hand on the hanger, lifting my brother's sailor coat off the hook, passing it in front of my face, and letting it relax over her arm, a waterfall of crinkled white paper. She swam her arm out again to our groceries, fingering the top of the paper bag, squeezing together the edges and lifting her hand deliberately. An excitement, an eager assessment of what I was going to do–to scream, perhaps? And she let out a little yelp of happiness when she saw our turkey snugly tucked in its very own cardboard box coffin.

And she stole it, too.

"Bye-bye, sweetie pie," was what she said to me as she did it.

"Bye," I answered back.

When my mother returned to the car, she didn't notice the theft immediately; we arrived home before she missed the turkey, the bag of groceries and my brother's sailor suit, stolen by an unknown kleptomaniac wearing a twin set and pearls.

"Listen, kid, you've got to tell me what happened!"

"Happed?" I echoed.

"Who took the sacks? Who took our groceries!"

I looked at her quizzically and began twisting hair around my finger to pull it out. This was something I liked to do.

"Stop that," she ordered. "Who took the grocery sacks out of our car? Out of the car when Mommy left you?"

"You?"

"Well, for heaven's sake! Why didn't you call out or something? Oh, gosh, you don't even know what I'm saying."

Mother reported the theft to the police, and in a week or so a detective contacted her regarding the loss. The kleptomaniac had actually been caught after emptying dozens of cars on the same street for weeks. Although there were receipts from the used clothing place where she'd sold my brother's coat, we lost the turkey and the groceries.

"Well, by cracky, I never would have believed it if I had made the whole thing up," said mother philosophically, winding herself up for another epic monologue when she was done talking to the detective about the robbery, "to think in a million years. Such a thing happening to us. But if it had to be us she robbed, then that was the way it had to be. I won't participate in prosecuting her for stealing Mrs. Kaiser's rolls and all our Thanksgiving goodies. I am partial to Mrs. Kaiser's rolls, however, and there's no denying it. I won't pretend I'm not disappointed. But to send her to jail on my testimony, well, no, never. I won't do it. It's my opinion, as I explained to the officer who phoned me so kindly, that her crime was punishment enough, especially in light of the fact that her name appeared in the newspaper connected with the string of thefts. She was...imagine it if you will...from one of the best families living on the shoreline of Chicago. Oh, on that famous street with the mansions. I can't remember the name. A family of stupendous wealth, whose riches came from a shipping empire unimaginable in its extent, I can't imagine it myself, as a poor farm girl from Indiana, and she was the kind of woman who, oh, knew what was what, and who was who, and maybe where was where, and she was the kind of woman who knew on a first-name basis all the very best, highest quality people in the Southwest. Hmmm. Why, she lived in the most fabulous mansion in the foothills when she was here in town. An exclusive address and a home designed by the very best architect, and I looked it up; when I came to town, kid, I worked for him as a private secretary for an entire year. She, who robbed us, traveled to Santa Fe on a regular basis on the train, taking only the very best accommodations. Lived here in the winter only. Bought exquisite art (or, I suppose, stole it!) So well educated. The idea that she would steal, but I suppose she couldn't help herself. It's a form of madness, you know, kid. That such a woman has robbed us! A child's sailor coat of ours. Of course, she could see, easily, that it was the best quality. I foolishly insisted on buying a very good sailor coat for your brother last winter, which he is now about to outgrow, and you will wear that coat, kid. Now that I have it back. Nothing wrong with a girl utilizing a sailor coat of the very best quality. The fact that she was wealthy never makes it right. Not in my book. But it makes the thing glamorous, I suppose. Our little brush with fame! And I have learned to practice forgiveness. What's the use of Christianity if you don't employ it once in a blue moon?"

The facts were simple—a wealthy insane woman had opened our car door and rustled our clothes and our food. But Mother seemed to imply that she was welcome to it. The kleptomaniac had bestowed something wonderful on us. Our possessions—and to Mother this part seemed miraculous—were good enough to be stolen by the very best people.

A writer remains in cars when wealthy kleptomaniacs, who like teeny art from Santa Fe, arrive, because stealing is vital to a writer, an integral part of their makeup. They must observe it up close, especially when they are young, before they have any morals to muddy up issues. You've got to steal, distort, and mislead and not feel a bit of remorse.

But besides stealing things, I find it rather strange that things can steal up upon an unsuspecting writer. Memories that are hidden or memories of any art that fails to develop.

CHAPTER 3

Imagine an egg, or if you will, a chicken that was destined to be. This chicken/egg emerged in my thoughts later that year; I realize now that it was my original flirtation with the excitement of imaginary things and it came into my mind suddenly upon seeing a pile of garden soil heaped in a great brown pyramid in my father's wheelbarrow in the spring of 1960.

It had been my Mexican grandfather's wheelbarrow before, a barrow built to outlast several generations of ranching men, a real workman's barrow, formed of solid iron, heavily rusted, a dangerous thing if it fell on a kid. What made it worse was the fact that the rim of the barrow's bed was coated with several layers of old mortar, which made it even heavier, and in that caked state, it roared when it rolled, a mighty bass voice of industry and honor.

I remember dashing around the sides of this wheelbarrow barefooted in the grassy lawn in our backyard; it was early May and the winter rye grass already drooped from the longer hours of intense desert sun; the blades of grass felt limp under my toes and didn't spring back when I stepped on them; upon close inspection, I could see individual green blades in the lawn which had shriveled, blackened and wrinkled like tiny whip snakes; when enough of the green blades had shriveled, the overall lawn would slump and look trampled and in a few days nothing would be left, bar a few patches of brittle yellow ghosts snarled together in shady corners.

"Squish the grass. Squish it with your feet!" Meredith ordered.

We, her minions, dutifully ran on the grass pounding the wilting stalks with our heels, grinding the withering blades with our toes.

"No, no, stop that. What are you doing. Leave the grass alone. I want the grass to last, doggone you," said Mother, cranking open the kitchen window and rapping her knuckles on a pane when she saw what we were doing. Piles of bubbles dripped from her head. She was using the sprayer at the sink to wash her hair. "Some ladies from the church are coming this week to teach me bridge. Don't you dare do that damage to the lawn."

"Don't squish the grass with your feet," Meredith instantly countermanded her own order.

When I had finished flouncing around in the dying grass, I plunged my hands into the mound of soil in the barrow and twiddled my fingers in the cool dark. The sensation was like exploring with your hands some other region of the world which your sight could never reach because once you pried open the earth that world would change, things would squirm away that had been there before and your very act of digging would move the particles to different places and rub them against each other; I touched tiny pebbles and balls of wood, hunks of gravel and twigs in the earth; then the earth from above caved onto the backs of my hands, streamed down the side of the earth pyramid and trickled over the back of my wrists. The stimulation of the earth was direct on my skin, direct to my senses. I could feel the heat of the surface of the dirt pile, the coolness of the inside. I could smell the dirt grit, the fustiness of parts of it.

I pulled my hands out of the earth and paced around the wheelbarrow, studying the dark soil and the way the shadows of the afternoon sun cast a crisp black line at the back of the barrow; the surface of the pyramid was not entirely smooth; I noticed several balls of earth, which were nothing but dirt clods, of course. The clods cast round shadows backward on the pile.

I picked up one dirt clod. I examined it closely with eyes that wanted to note and remember every detail of the soil that made up my earth. The firm outer surface of the clod fascinated me; on this surface there were thousands of intricate drawings, teeny nonobjective themes. Though uniform and compact from afar, each dirt clod had flecks of bark, tiny logs with splintery or rounded ends, and shining orbs of green and yellow sand, silvery mica bits, and sand rubies on them when you examined them closely. In fact the clods had mountains of gems capturing light. And the teeny flea-like bugs, hopping here and there, the trails, canyons, rivulets. Miniature millipedes with dragon-like heads wiggled in agony at the sun and they were reddish-colored and retreated in squirming fashions from the light as I turn the clods into the brilliant rays. The sheltered moisture of the sunless world received light perhaps for the first time.

I picked up a few of them and turned them around in the sun. They possessed me strangely, those dirt clods. They were alien things to me; I came to the conclusion that the clods scattered about on the brown pyramid with the afternoon sun streaming on them and the shadows cast diagonally across the brown expanse of dirt were actually cases or shells enclosing future living beings. I was convinced there was a rolled up baby inside. I named the mysterious beings, which were both the case itself and the being inside, The Itty Bitty Cocky Babies, which I shorten to Cocky Babies.

These future beings were not likely to ever be ordinary animals; the obstinate Cocky Babies never agreed to hatch, preferring to stay slyly curled up inside their brown dirt clods; I imagined the small feet of this animal tucked under its chin inside the brown egg; each egg was smaller than my fist and rounded on the ends; on closer examination, the wheelbarrow of dirt yielded two or three more clods which contained these baby beings; I could see the Cocky Babies inside and detected their presence by the heft of the clod; I took one of them carefully into the house, cradling it in my two hands, and I sat it first on the shelves of a tin toy kitchen dresser and then on the shelf with my dolls.

I sat listening to the sound of voices outside, communing with my clod; there was a pleasant time each year in our desert, a season when the small high windows of my room could be cranked open, when it was neither winter, chilly in the desert without plants or wet air to hold in the heat, or blazing summer; the linoleum felt smooth and comforting to my bare feet. When I set the dirt clod on the shelf beside my prim dolls there was something soothing about the clod's lack of features; something of promise about its brown, obdurate, no-nonsense nothingness.

I sat looking at this dirt clod for ten minutes or more and after a while I was sure I could detect life-like forces stewing inside.

"What do you think you see in that?" asked Meredith, after I brought it back outside and she happened to notice me cradling it.

"Itty-Bitty-Cocky Baby," I said.

"A what?"

"A Bocky Caby."

"That is not a real egg, kid," said Meredith, her voice dripping in sarcasm.

"Cocky Baby. Cocky Baby, Cocky Baby. Ha!" shouted Jack. He was pretending to shoot it with a machine gun. Meredith and Jack were wearing surplus Army helmets and our Mother's Women-Marine shirts. "Hold it over this way and I'll blast it with some machine gun fire. We must release the demon."

"No."

"Then I'll chop it with my bayonet," said Jack, running the plastic bayonet point at me.

"Won't." I swooped the dirt clod away from the menacing toy bayonet.

"Ah, you and your Cocky Baby," said Jack. "Whatta nut."

I was certain that my excellent vision could somehow penetrate the soil casing of these dirt clods and reach the inner sanctum where the invisible sentient beings developed. I also knew scientific facts about these dirt clods. I had a sort of mastery over their destiny which I knew no one else was privy to. It was the idea that I alone had mastery over the facts of the Itty-Bitty-Cocky Baby that so intrigued me. These beings growing inside, I understood, would remain in there forever without agreeing to come out, thus, nothing came first, neither chicken or egg and this strange Cocky Baby was always in a state of almost-being, or ripe readiness.

In form, the Cocky Baby, should it ever have decided to emerge, which of course it wouldn't, but if it had, it would have resembled a feathered platypus crossed with a furry rooster, though I was never certain which parts would have been the feathered platypus (perhaps it was the hindquarters) and which part the furry rooster (perhaps the head); I was not sure whether I intended the whole result to be cute or ugly; maybe at age three esthetic judgments were vague; but my eyes burned into the heart of the clods that I propped on the shelf and I began to believe profoundly in the Itty-Bitty Cocky Baby, almost to the point of worship. At the same time I am convinced that, should it be excavated, a nest of these egg clods will be found under one particular brown square of linoleum under the floor of the small bedroom I shared with my sister; this infestation of imagination, this fertile, teeming nest of beings, was in a state of always not being, right under the linoleum block, though unseen and unknown by the rest of the world.

The potential art is an art itself; the incipient beginning is art; the thing is always, yet never; the Cocky Baby emblematizes the excited feeling an artistic being has inside her when the art she wishes to depict for others is growing inside her, but has not yet been revealed to the other beings, and may not have been fully revealed to the artist yet. The feeling is mysterious and hopeful, leading up to the time when it is going to be born.

The Cocky Baby was an almost-being which never reached the stage of hatching, for the Cocky Baby would never emerge from its shell and, in fact, is created to be only the egg with the potential of a life story inside of it. The Cocky Baby includes the fascination with the future when the egg will finally reveal what is inside, and yet that moment which will never actually come, but always be in the future a second forward in time from the moment in which you contemplate the egg. The Cocky Baby is a being that is always about to come into his own, yet never quite gets the chance. This baby could at any moment pop out of the linoleum square, straight from the ground, maybe the way animals aestivate during the hot summer days. In the same way that the secret world of art, unseen, lurks in the minds of creative people.

But there is something rather reptilian about this mind of the artist, something a little too scheming. Lizards hatched from eggs and snakes do, too. The need to take care of the Cocky Baby intrigued the child/woman in me and at the same time that the suckling nature of my art rather repulsed me. How was I to get rid of the responsibility of this being that refused to be born? How would I ever discharge my part in its life? Would I forever have to watch it develop if it refused to do that?

It is the writer, the artist, the musician that has to see and hear accurately the eggs of the circus acts of the world and be prepared to collect them. Time will kill the art, though. Time makes everything a phantom and before it does, the artist must steal images away with them and preserve them somehow. The artist must pray the art decides to be born.

The Cocky Baby withholds himself from the world. He refused to be pinned down. I'm never certain if this is willful or if he is unable to hatch, whether he is afraid of the world or if he fears that he will frighten the world. He is not too good for the world, but always in a state of readiness, yet not arriving, but willing to arrive eventually. It is possible the Cocky Baby fears criticism, that he is hypersensitive and suffers from feelings of inadequacy; in that way he may be the precursor of my own interest in destroying my art, in teen years grating away at my poems, for example; or he may only have stood for the creative genius behind work, the lurking substance that has to exist for art to be constructed. But the Cocky Baby was also a monster that spliced together awkward, unconvincing lies into one abhorrent animal for display to the ghoul-loving public, wishing for their bread and circuses.

While the hoop of snakeskin disappeared, and the Cocky Baby withheld itself from me, later that year I saw a treasure, a pink striped and coppery flask, as beautiful as any held in an ancient poet's hand, spilling wine as the songster and tale-tellers talked and talked. My coppery flask was the bloom on a barrel cactus.

My father was installing the new air conditioning unit on a concrete pad near the crack where the scorpion (that nearly killed me) had disappeared. That crack sported a small barrel cactus and a few years later that barrel cactus grew to a stupendous size.

"If I were a smart person," said Father, "I'd chop that damn thing outta there. But I ask myself 'why do that?' It wants to live there, and Mother Nature chose to put it there. I don't see a reason to kill it. Do you know, I saw it growing a few months after they poured the foundation? It was very small then, about the size of your big toe, and you are small and your toes are very small, and when I saw it, I didn't think it would survive with all the construction around it. The bricklayers must have laid the bricks almost on top of it. Look how big the thing is in just five years. Now it's blooming. After the first summer rains. This is about the most beautiful thing I've seen in a long time."

"Gotta get this concrete smooth for the pad for the air conditioner. Phew. How much more smoothing is this concrete going to take? Shall I call it quits?"

Ten ridges or pleats spanned the barrel, and up these pleats clusters of russet and gray needles marched. The spines grew in clusters of nine with the needles near the base of each cluster aging to resemble brittle gray hairs pronging out and bending in strange directions as though falling back or melting in the presence of the central hook, or perhaps in awe of the glorious bloom at the top which happened first in early August of the fourth year of its life. This is how the coppery orange tongue of the bloom on the cactus formed: emerging first as a pimple, a red knob formed on the very top of the green barrel, this bloom expanded to a small red cabbage and this cabbage began swelling out from the green hide until it resembled a teeny turban, swirled with red and yellow. Finally, a bulbous club carried the turban upward and that turban unfurled to reveal the pedals of a glossy coppery orange flask. The most exquisite hues of gold and silver lined the flask, my treasure. And the dusty soft center was barely revealed before the bees swarmed, diving headfirst into the mob of pistols, wiggling their striped bottoms, digging, and drinking. Day after day the beautiful cups of waxy flowers, fifteen in number some years, provide bountiful pale yellow pollen from the large clumps of pistols. Eventually the flowers wilted, and the barrel cactus produced a waxy yellow fruit with a top of stiff black straw—what I saw on the toppled barrel cactus that the pale man and lady photographed. And these fruits which are like crowns of miniature pineapples were a glorious lemony yellow color and remained throughout each winter long after the glossy flowers were gone.

At first this barrel cactus must have been nothing more than a tiny black speck of a seed lodged in that crack, but it sprouted in less than a year; over time the root end of the barrel cactus atrophied, and the flesh near the roots puckered to a hard tan point, trailing the dry sinewy roots, which could be seen because they weren't planted in any soil. These roots collected the slightest drips of moisture in the atmosphere in order to pump the drops into the green barrel; over time the top of the cactus curled over, leaning southwest as all barrel cacti do, and simply put, the unflappable cactus, the huge green mound, grew, not seeming to be embarrassed by its predicament, into a comma.

Commas provide suspense; commas imply great need, or importance, or make one feel the stutter of speech or in my case emphasize the hesitancy of my imperfect ideas. The shiny, black full stop of the barrel cactus seed, became a comma, indecisive, a sign that the reader needs to take a temporary, quick breath when reading. A comma has a way of asking for dignity, inspiring rectitude in speech that parallels the way the cactus carries itself. A comma can be inserted before a humorous addendum, the little add-on that improves. Or a comma may fall in place before the phrase which modifies the hung-out cactus, an awkward phrase that is brief, prickly, and succinct. A comma usefully separates ideas and lists of prickly plants in our densely packed desert: barrel cactus, palo verde, saguaro, desert broom, desert marigold, palo verde, mesquite, palo verde, barrel cactus.

Yes, the spot where the scorpion disappeared became a cactus comma, interred in the foundation and neatly separating us from the neighbors; a big green and bristly thing that in its prickles tells people to pause while approaching, thinking, as you do when you blunder into a cactus: thorns, suck in your breath, wait.

"We won't have to wait another day for those wonderful pomegranates—and I wish I knew how they get those to grow so gall darn big and juicy—up at Ralph Campbell's house, and that means you kids can come along and play with Mikey in his room, while I talk to Mr. and Mrs. Campbell and pick some fruit. Ralph says the fruit is pulling down the branches all around his trees; it's so heavy, and he is afraid it will fall or the birds will get at them. There could be some wind coming, and that will drop the fruit like Billy-be darned. I want to make some darn good jelly with those fruits of his this year and it was nice of him to offer them. It's gonna be a lot of work to make the jelly. 'Who will pick the fruit?' 'I will,' said the Little Red Hen. 'And who will cook the fruit?' 'I will' said the Little Red Hen. 'And who will clean the glasses?' 'I will said the Little Red Hen.' And—"

"And she didn't," said Jack and Meredith evilly, reversing the old hen tale which we despised.

"And she did! 'Who will eat the jelly?' 'I will,' said the Little Red Hen."

"I hate the Little Red Hen," said Meredith gladly. "She's a fink."

"Mrs. Campbell only does a few jars and they have four trees on their side yard! Nothing is better than pomegranate jelly."

"Let's just buy it then," said Jack. "There's too much of this Red Hen business. That means work."

"Oh no! Buy it! Heavens no! They have all the news from Indiana as Mrs. Campbell's sister lives, oh, over the line in Ohio, now I've forgotten the county, but close enough to the folks. I hear the weather is pretty good in Indiana this year and the crops are coming in way above what anyone predicted—"

"Indiana ought to go to blazes. Dad says that," Jack ventured.

"—and that's going to make it a happy Christmas all around. I believe Mrs. Campbell's sister's husband's brother or nephew owns an orchard in southern Indiana. I believe I heard her say that one time. I wonder if the apple crop is any good. Well, I don't think the freezes were much to snort at last spring, so maybe not. Well, bundle up and let's get up to Ralph's."

Mr. and Mrs. Campbell wore matching plaid jackets and stood on the porch. Mikey Campbell had been brought out, too. A debilitating disease, never discussed, made his head large and his limbs puny and frail. His parents carried him everywhere. He had light blonde hair and was already fourteen years old, though he appeared to be smaller than Jack.

"Here they come! Here come the kids! No need to worry about calling them!" called Mr. Ralph Campbell to his wife when we crunched across the white gravel of his little semicircular drive with three ocotillos plants, monkey coach whips or Devil's coach whips, one growing for each of their family, in the center of the gravel fan. The shadowy lines of the ocotillo wiggled over the gravel like tentacles.

Ralph hurried out to meet us and turned back to his house, hunched in his plaid coat with long straight pieces of his gray hair falling into his eyes. He had hairy eyebrows and big hands. Until his decision to sell up and come to Arizona for their son Mike's health, he'd been a farmer. The tip of his large hooked nose was always a little too pink from alcohol, even early in the morning.

Ralph walked with us toward his red concrete porch. "The kids are here," he announced happily.

"Hey you guys," shouted Mikey at us as we approached the rusty white porch skimmer where he had been left. His tiny hand was clinging to the arm of the skimmer. He was bobbing up and down with excitement at our arrival.

The winter sun was low in the midmorning sky. A cold wind skimmed the first winter storm over the big purple mountains behind the Campbell home. Long white wisps of clouds scalloped the sky's middle.

Mrs. Campbell carried her son to his room, and plopped him in the middle of his queen-sized bed. We followed like a dutiful set of ducklings, my sister and I dressed in matching black and white houndstooth coats. Mrs. Campbell turned on the TV. She also cranked open a little window and went outside. If Mikey needed anything, he could holler and his mother would hear.

This TV of his own was something we were very jealous of. He told us he had stayed up for Chiller with Kindly, Loveable Dr. Scar as the host, and seen "The Castle and the Cat," a horrifying movie. He showed us the first TV remote we had ever seen. He even changed a channel for us.

Mikey told Jack to go into his dresser drawer and get out his box of ping pong balls. With the use of a fly swatter, Mikey could play a badminton game on the bed whenever we came over. We hopped around the room retrieving the balls that he shot every which way, rather randomly, against walls, TV screens, dressers, and closet drawers. He never spoke to us about anything but TV and ping pong. Being fourteen, he didn't think we'd have much to say of interest to him.

"What's the news from your sister?" I heard mother asking Mrs. Campbell outside. "I love to know what's happening in the Midwest. In the towns around my folks they're all talking about the bank in Indianapolis that went broke. A lot of loans from there in Warren, let me tell you. The folks are hearing all about it in town. Going to ruin a few people, including the mayor. Mother hears it in the store and the drivers' license bureau. Lots of bad loans collapsing. Central Indiana always had strong banks."

"I sent it flying over there!" Mikey screamed from the bed.

"I'll get it," said Meredith, diving quickly.

In the high window I could see the pomegranate trees trembling from the pickers surrounding them. I could see Mr. Campbell's big hands fumbling to pull the enormous splotchy pomegranate fruits.

"Look out for this one!" said Mikey, shooting another ping pong ball at the ceiling.

"Whoa!" said Meredith. "Catch it!"

"Not much news in Ohio. All of it good, though, what little there is. Nobody's sick or anything in the family, as I hear tell, but there's a bad cough somewhere. One of the cow is sick. I don't know what, but they have it on its own. Got a special shed for that. Suppose it will die, if the vet don't come out and cure it soon. Was a good cow of theirs, that one. One of my nieces is a senior in High School. She's gonna go to Washington D.C. on a bus for graduation. I did it myself."

"I did too," our mother claimed.

Someone scooted a loaded bag along the ground.

"Say these bags are really getting full," said Ralph.

"She's excited about Kennedy," continued Mrs. Campbell, "She was a nut about him. Oh, it's a wonderful year in western Ohio, at least, near abouts where their farm is. The whole area did well this year. Crop-wise, I guess you mean. The towns are bustling as it approaches the holiday. Lots of people coming and buying plenty. My brother is going up to Chicago for some business. Gonna be there a week, I guess. As I hear tell. Overall pretty good for my kin, I'd say."

"I expect it's about the same in Indiana."

"Oh, I spec so everywhere."

"Rain's been falling generally all summer and then in the fall, I think. I've been talking to my sisters on the phone."

"Oh yes. A good year for the rains, but nothing damaging."

"Get ready, I'm going hit this one hard," Mikey promised.

"No. No tornados at all in the county."

"Well, there was one that touched down near Markle in September."

"Oh, are you from around there?"

"Why yes, don't you remember?"

"We know a lot of people in Arizona from Indiana. You'd be surprised, Juney."

"Ah huh, well, there's bound to be."

"Don't miss tornadoes," said Ralph slyly. "Here's some big ones on the other side."

"Oh, get her those then."

"I brought out plenty of paper bags. Maybe you know someone you can give them to? At the church?"

"Say, that's an idea. I brought the kids. They can carry a few bags if they aren't too heavy."

"If we leave any, they're just going to be wasted."

"Well, don't try the high ones. I don't want anyone falling for jelly!"

"What would you say to a coffee, Juney?"

"Now that is something I always say yes to."

"Don't like the look of those clouds. Storm front."

"Suppose it's rain?" asked Ralph, opening the back gate.

"Doesn't look the least bit like rain. Where are the monsoons this year? That's what I'd like to know. Everybody was complaining last night at the Odd Fellows Hall. Then Bertha Ogden said the same thing on the phone this morning." Bertha Ogden was my grandmother's best friend who phoned Gumm, our father's mother, early every morning.

"Oh, were you out last night?" asked Mother.

"Yes, I was at the Odd Fellows," Gumm repeated.

Waiting for a promising halo of clouds hung over one of the saddles in the mountains to make me feel something, I listen to them anticipate rain which makes most in the desert happy, when I felt nothing but the dull desert air swinging past my legs above the dinky goldfish pond in my grandmother's backyard on Fourth of July, 1961. Dullness, which would be what my face would show, even if everyone else around that pond would be smiling. Those smiling parents welded themselves to the iron chairs that were formed of straps of flat iron bent to the body and in these iron chairs they sunk into the Bermuda Grass, so that the adults seemed to float above the brilliant green turf. My grandmother with her stern face and pin in the middle of her dress that fell well below her knee, an ace bandage on her left ankle seen vaguely like some dark omen living under her nylons, foot a-jiggle, shaking her drink, watching her goldfish and the halo of cloud.

"And yesterday I worked a shift at Benz' until five. Wasn't my shift but I was doing a favor for Jane. Not that I'll get a favor in return. Just see what happens if I ask to change my shift. Well, not a soul will volunteer to do it. Just about killed my feet they were aching so much at the end of the day. The store was so busy I never got my break. Then I had the worst, the most difficult client, and had to cut some very obstinate material for her and her daughter. Making a fancy dress. Velvet. That wasn't too pretty when I finished cutting it and she and her daughter complained to Hal and he chewed me out about it. Said I was arrogant and rude to customers. She wanted me fired and said I deserved whatever she got from me and more so. She says 'can't you cut that right?' 'Isn't there someone here who can cut this better than you? You are butchering that fabric!' I held my tongue for most of her insults and I was proud of it, but finally I broke down and got sarcastic. What do you expect when a person is getting ridden by someone like that lady and her daughter? Butchering? Well, it's about time I quit, that's what I think. Don't know how I made it to the Hall in time for the dinner. Had a run in my nylons and my new dress showed the slip so I had to pin it up. All the way around. And I thought I checked that. Maybe I misplaced the slip I bought. Maybe I only thought that was the new slip, but it wasn't."

Father, knocking back his rum and coke, made an incomprehensible snide remark about his mother and the innumerable lost things in her house and her buying slips by the dozens so she used up all her money from working at Benz' which was always tiring her out and making her feet ache. Social Security better hurry up and come. That was what he said. Get that Social Security bill passed and shut up his mother.

"Then I had to pick up old Mrs. Ogden at her son's place and he lives halfway to Nogales out on that horrible road to the reservation where everybody gets killed and you know I don't care to drive out there at night all on my lonesome. Not even half a moon last night. Dark as sin. The wind was blowing too. I hated to do it, to go out there. She was ready when I came to the door, though. She's good about that. I should have just honked and expected her to come out. But yes, we had an installation. And a lovely dinner, meatloaf and a tomato casserole, very elegant that was I don't know who made it but it was a treat, but she didn't know her lines again. Wasn't what it should have been. I've seen better. Mrs. Ogden agreed with me on that. All the Militants did. She didn't know her lines. She should have said, 'the Noble Garter shall upon the receipt of the word of the Scarlett Degree' but instead she said 'the Noble Garter when having possession of the letter from the most noble Scarlett Degree.' Why she's making up lines! I am surprised she didn't flub up 'I AM A REBEKAH."

"Who? Who did what?" asked Berk, managing to interrupt the lengthy monologue of his mother-in-law.

"Why the young silly whippersnapper of a fool they've gone and elected to be head of the Noble of the Garters. Was only last month when they did it. She doesn't have a head to remember her lines. Not at all. I tell you. She's the most muddled up little thing. Why they all should have known from how many times she flubbed up what she was supposed to say for Recorder of the Noble. When the report of the Recorder to the Noble is finished the Recorder says: 'So follows the watch-words of our Order.' But she said: 'And here follows the watch-words.' Pah! If you're going to make up words, you might as well create your own club."

"Trouble is they elect the person who's popular," said Madeline. "I've seen the same thing happen time and time again when I was in Theta Rho and in the Officer's Wives Clubs at Wright-Patterson. Not the one who can really do the job. Just the most popular person."

"Yes, the most popular. But she doesn't know her lines. I tell you it about ruined the installation. Just about. 'Truth is the standard by which we value friends!' 'Truth is the standard by which we value people!' 'Friendship is like a golden chain' she says. When she didn't go on, the whole Lodge yelled back 'that ties our hearts together!' Doesn't know what the Beehive symbolizes to a Rebekah. Couldn't explain the Moon and the Seven Stars! A Rebekah should be able to say, 'The Moon and the Seven Stars represent the never failing order which pervades the Universe of God and all of nature, and suggests to the members the value of system, regularity, tolerance and forbearance.' She froze up and mumbled some nonsense about the moon off the top of her head. And the Militant told her to know how to respond to that question! But a lot of the Lodge is happy with ruined installations. The more ruined they are the better as long as she's beaming around. But they'll come to regret it. Yes, they will. When they realize how badly she does. I don't even want to think about what she'll do as the Grand Noble for the entire year."

"I wouldn't worry about it," said our mother.

"Oh, I'm not worried. I'm enjoying it, in my peculiar fashion. Like watching a forty car train wreck. I ought to drive over to San Diego or visit my sister Bertha in Michigan. Would be nice to see the old farm again, too. And Bertha and Cy. But I don't look forward to driving the way I used to. Can't get anyone to go with me. Don't suppose any of you would lend me a grandchild for the trip?"

We all, the grandchildren, flinched in horror, though I probably didn't know exactly what was being suggested. The thought of merely driving in her old white 1951 Indian Head torpedo-back Pontiac anywhere was terrifying as she had a lead foot, and I witnessed this when she once took me from school to a dental appointment, and people said she was so crabby "she wouldn't get along with Jesus if he had the misfortune to live with her."

"Why don't you fly, mother?" asked Madeline.

"Like you do?" said my grandmother turning to her son-in-law, Berk.

"Sure," said Berk.

"I've seen lots of inventions in my life, but I will not see earth with no earth below me until I am taken to heaven... Have you read the predictions of Mother Shipton in that clipping of mine? Very telling. Chilling. 'A Carriage without a horse shall go; Disaster fill the world with woe....'"

"So says a warty old English biddy born in a cave," mumbled our father sullenly into his rum and coke.

Berk, smiling gaily, red cheeked, blonde, Air Force pilot rising in the ranks. Madeline watched her son Rik in braces for the last time. They were discussing wheelchairs. All of us, the grandchildren, were in the itchy green grass, Meredith, Jack, my cousin Rik, my cousin Jan, and myself. Sandy listened to music on her own in the house.

The fireworks over the old stadium were what we waited for there, darkness and the fireworks. Or a hint of rain.

"Now what did you do that for?" said my grandmother to Meredith who tossed a rock into the goldfish pond.

"To scare em."

"Well, that isn't considerate. Why don't you leave them alone? They aren't throwing rocks at you?"

"I don't care. If they do," said Rikki. "They're bad shots."

"Yeah, they're bad shots," said Jack.

"The logic of the children," said my grandmother sarcastically. "I could write a book, but nobody would buy it. Where's the basket for the kids?"

"Did we forget to bring it out?" asked Mother.

"Yes. We did. Go inside somebody," our grandmother ordered.

"Ben, you do it," said Mother.

"Don't look at me," he complained.

"Send the kids in," Madeline suggested.

"That's it. It's near the water heater. You know," said Gumm. "I've got to stop them tearing up my grass and throwing rocks at the fish," she added to the adults.

"They need a lickin," said Mother helpfully.

An Indian basket with a lid in which she kept the blue plastic jointed man, some blocks, a Wooly Willy magnet game, a handmade stuffed dog with several missing limbs. This basket of toys sat beside her water heater and had a smell of the old refrigerator that was on the concrete floor of the back room where my grandmother slept.

"They can bring out the basket in the grass. Tell them to go in. Don't be afraid. Open the back door. Doris Grimm is out. The boarder is out! Don't be afraid. Look at them! Afraid to go in their grandmother's house. Doris isn't in. By the water heater, they should know. Bring it out into the grass and they'll have something to play and not just throw rocks at my goldfish and yank up the Bermuda runners. I leave my drippy hose out here to get the grass thick and here the kids are yanking it out to beat the band."

"I hope there aren't any monsters in here," said Jack as we went up the steps and into her house. Our older cousin wasn't anywhere near and the boarder's empty room had an unseen ticking clock.

"Oh," said Rikki jauntily dragging his legs in braces up the steps, "Don't worry about monsters. The United States Air Force will take care of anything that comes our way in the way of monsters. You can depend on the Air Force. My Dad knows all about what we've got protecting us and it's something special. Nothing can get at us. America has special weapons against any monsters. It doesn't have to worry you. Just sleep the night through in safety."

"What about the sea?" asked Meredith.

"We got special weapons to kill em really fast. They won't even get up the beach. That's the beauty of the American Air Force. We've got everything beat."

We brought out the basket, but left it in the grass. When the adults weren't looking we snuck off to the front yard.

This same state of dullness persisted while I studied the old home for vets across the street from my grandmother's house where the American flag flapped, revealing and obscuring the rows of wheelchairs full of shrunken, shadowy old men, World War I veterans, who had been blinded in the trenches in France, crippled by bombs, made legless, I think. These vets often hollered across the road at us, cursed us without reason, without cessation. "Go to hell with you! You, playing there! I see you hiding behind the fence. I see you. Goddamn you. Go play in hell, why don't you? Goddamn you, you stinking little, noisy kids. We hate you."

And that Fourth of July Gumm came lurching around the house, saying, "Did they yell at you? Now, tell the truth, you didn't antagonize them? You didn't shake your bottoms at them, did you? Did they holler? I've half a mind to go over and speak to the man and woman who take care of them, but it's best to forgive them. I live peaceably. I do good unto all. But they are not doing good to you."

"Come on around the back." She herded us together. "Come around and leave them alone. Someday I'm going to go over there and talk to those men. Yelling at children with that kind of language is not right. Cursing. Where are their manners? Being disabled is no excuse for cursing at children."

"I'm not allowed to curse," said Rikki sanctimoniously.

"Well, that's right," said Gumm.

And then in the twilight sky, the cloud actually made a perfect donut riding the tip of Finger Rock, which our father called Dracula's castle, and the adults, speaking from their iron chairs spread out on the thick Bermuda lawn, around her goldfish pond that was surrounded with basalt rocks, my mother and father, an aunt and uncle, and cousins, discussed Michigan and communists in slushy voices.

"I found the old song book of the Grange. The Grange movement back home in Michigan. Mother's name was in the front, because she played the piano, very well I might add, for the meetings which were sometimes at the old farm in Michigan. I never had the patience to learn piano myself, but my older sister Bertha did. She plays at her house in Lansing for her husband, Cy. A beautiful piano which mother had bought. Of course, Bertha got everything from the old home. She had all the fine things given to her. I once got a little set of the prettiest doll dishes. Well, I didn't even believe they could be for me at all. 'Are these for me? Can these really be for me?' I asked. I was born premature and they put me in a box near the stove and they fed me constantly on lamb broth. Always liked a piece of lamb. My whole life since. So does my sister Bertha. Did you know she once had tea for Hemingway, Juney?"

"Yes, I believe you mentioned that several times."

"When he was an unknown writer. Cy was a doctor, you see, and Hemingway's father was a doctor. Bertha was well educated, but not me, oh no. I wanted to play in the fields instead of learning my lessons properly. But this old song book of the Grange is very interesting. Such a wonderful movement. A farm movement. Mother and Father were prominent in the Grange at home in Michigan. You probably know about it, Juney."

"I don't know what it is," said Meredith.

"I've heard you mention it," said Father.

"Well, I know absolutely what it was," said Mother. "And did you know that it was practically a communist movement?" My mother, chuckling quietly, stirred her ice tea around. I watched to see what my grandmother would say to that!

"What? Communist?"

"Yes."

"No. You can't be right. Father did not approve of communism. He wanted it run out of the country, run off the face of the earth. Why, he hated the very word, the very idea of it. He said it made his blood boil when he thought of it. He and the old man on the other side, on Harry's side, that was something to see when the two of them were together. Harry's father liked Mr. Sinclair who ran for Governor in California and he was one of those socialists. Never seen two men go after each other so. They fought like tigers. Arguing and fighting to beat the band. Golly, it was something. Father said Mr. Sinclair was a prime example of an idiot. That meat industry book was from Sinclair. All about unclean meat? In the factories? I heard it was mostly true, though. I don't blame him for writing what was true, even if it made America look bad. Dad thought he ought to shut up about the bad things and work behind the scenes to make those changes. Sure, changes were needed, but why make out that our country was bad. Dad thought he probably was telling the truth. Dad would have known, well, I'm not sure he ever went to the stockyards in Chicago or anything. I was a Michigan farm girl and I couldn't say for sure about what might or might not have been happening in Chicago. Sure, it might be bad down there. Harry's old man made me read aloud to him when I married Harry from that book of his. _The Jungle_ , that was it! Could not think of the name for the life of me. Said he would not let his son marry an illiterate sixteen-year-old girl and I had to prove I could read out of _The Jungle_. When I quit school, I went up to the old school teacher to say goodbye. She was nothing but an old maid, dried up and everything. A spinster was what she was. And she said, so coy like, that I would regret what I was doing, dropping out of school to marry."

"Oh, spinsters," said Madeline. "They think you would regret dropping out of school."

"Well, you did didn't you?" said our sassy Mom. She was being real smart-alecky to her mother-in-law.

Our grandmother looked sharply at her daughter-in-law. She knew that was a dig, and so did the rest of us. But it was an honest dig, and our grandmother couldn't get mad. "Yes, I did. Yes and no, Harry was no prize. Shoulda stayed in school. Maybe. I never could spell to beat the band. Tried to learn Spanish. I was going a little in the right direction. _Poco_ _y poco_."

"Pokey? Slow?" asked Jack.

" _Poco_ means a little," said Gumm, sternly and wisely.

"But the Grange was a populist movement all about banks being bad," said Mother, going back to the original topic. "It really is a populist movement. Not pro-banks. You could call it socialist or communist."

"Well, I saw some things about banks in the lyrics. But Father agreed with what the lyrics said and I agree with that!"

"Well, isn't that socialist?" Mother pointed out. "Or going that way. Surely if you think banks aren't always upright you think—"

"No. That just might be true, but it doesn't make me a socialist, Juney."

"Your father was a wealthy man. Didn't he have a lot of money in banks?"

"Well, I don't know about that. He had plenty of money. He was a success at everything he tried. Enough to buy the boarding house here and the place in San Diego, yes. But Dad sure had the biggest barn in the county. Right outside Lansing, Michigan. West of it. Maybe he put all his money into the barn. It was beautiful. Huge and red. Real beautiful. Built perfectly with perfect boards. It was a beauty."

"If you go back to Indiana and want a trip, you might drive up to Michigan and visit there. Bertha would tell you how to find the barn. I'd love a picture of it."

"Well, we might. We might just visit Bertha."

"Biggest barn in the county, but cheap, though. Dad, I mean. Mother wasn't cheap. When they owned the boarding house in San Diego after they sold the Russell House here, they wouldn't even buy themselves a phone. They used the one for the boarding house. I'd have to ask for them when I called if one of the boarders answered, which they mostly did because they were younger and moved to the phone right away. It was awkward like. I didn't like it one bit and I tried to talk to Mother and Father about it. I said 'why don't you get yourself a phone so I can call you directly and privately in your own rooms?' Dad wouldn't do it. He said the one for the boarding house was good enough for him. He claimed he had nothing to hide from all the world, but I didn't like calling on that phone and having everyone hearing our business about my DIVORCE. And if I went to visit and called back to Harry, well, I had to speak so that everyone in the boarding house could hear everything I said. And they had the biggest barn near Lansing. Did I ever tell you about how my brother and I tried to make a fortune from horseradish?"

"A hundred times," said my father glumly.

"Yes, you might have," said Mom. "It made you sick, didn't it?"

"What about the time the horse and buggy wrecked on our fence?"

"No, I didn't—"

"Oh God," said Father.

"Well, we heard an awful loud commotion. Out on the road. Dad could see people running on the road in front of our property. He was about to slice the roast at the time. And he said 'What's going on? Pull back the curtain. Why, can't I even slice the Sunday roast without interruptions?' Nobody ever ran in front of our property before and it shocked Dad. Our house was on a little rise and we could see the road, through the fence and some little hedges we had, but we couldn't see what was making those people run that day. So we all went out. Left our food cooling on the table. Even mother, and she was very sensitive about her roast and how we treated it. You'd have thought it was still living, said Dad, the way she went on about the roast. Ah well, it made me laugh. Ah, that day, let's see, we all ran out to see what was happening. We lived on a turning of the road. The road made a sharp turn and it was dangerous if you didn't know what you were doing with a team. Out we went. Mother in her apron. And there we found it. A horrible scene. Dead people. I had never seen dead people before. Mother saw them while she was still in her dirty apron. Not strangers or relatives. It was a bad scene. Let me tell you. Blood. Wow. Horse had to be shot with Dad's rifle. I don't want to tell what was wrong with him. He went back in the house to get it. Buggy was split in two ....practically."

"Don't say that 'had to shoot the horse' to her," said Mother, talking about me, indicating me with a little flip of her hand in my direction.

"Why not?"

"She's rather sentimental."

"Does she get emotional? About horses?"

"Get emotional? She's closer to hysterical all the time. Most of the time she's crying. The kids call her Little Running Water. I had to take all the sad animal stories away from her."

"Well, I never."

"I know."

"Oh, everybody has a personality." But she looked at me, studied me, with serious disapproval. "Even if it isn't what others would like." She looked me over again as though she had never properly seen my flaws before. "Why does she have that bald patch?"

"She winds her hair around her fingers and yanks it out," said Mother.

"Well, I never. Say, my goodness, lookie who's coming. Here's my friend Anna stepping over for a visit. Doesn't she dress poorly, though? Poor little thing. Not eating enough. Thin as a rail and twice as brittle. Doesn't do her any good to go without food. She's living on a good pension from the school district. Her being a principal. Smart woman, too. Anna, good to see you! Come through the gate. Don't be shy. Did you hear us out back? Were you ringing the bell?"

"Yes, I was," said Anna timidly. She once had taught on the Yaqui reservation, but she couldn't get the back gate open. "Can't get the latch up. How do you do it, Ola?"

"Somebody help her," ordered my grandmother to those of us around her. "I've only showed her a million times before."

"You have to lift the gate a little, Anna," said my dad patiently. He got up to show her how. "Nobody will come to help you but me."

"Thank you."

"Well, we were out here in back!" my grandmother called to Anna.

"Yes, mother saw the cars. I thought I heard voices," said Anna quietly. She clutched her purse against her tiny and thin body, which barely suggested by her dress a style unpopular in the thirties. Small pince-nez glasses pinched her nose and her hair was tightly curled against her head. She had a hooked nose and long bony arms.

Struggling across the grassy lawn, wobbling through the thick Bermuda grass and scaring grasshoppers ahead of her, insect which were whizzing away and almost up her skirt.

"She sent you over to snoop, huh?" said Gumm, talking about Anna's mother.

"Yes, that's true. That's right," said Anna, cheerfully enough.

Everybody laughed that Anna had been good-humored enough to agree.

"Old snoopy."

"Old snoopy, that's me. Can't even get through your gate," said Anna sadly.

"Oh, everybody has trouble with it. I gotta try to do something sometime," said Father. "I've got a fix in mind but it involves changing the hinge"

"Yes, he's going to do something...sometime. Well, I've got the family over. The grandchildren and Ben and Juney. And my daughter and Rikki are here." Rikki was with us in his braces. It must have been one of the last times before he went into a chair.

"Oh sure, hi folks," said Anna.

"Take a chair. The kids can lay in the grass. We're waiting for the fireworks to start. They want to ask you out for Thanksgiving," said Gumm.

"Oh?"

"Yes, we do, Anna. It would be a great honor. And bring your mother, too," said our mother.

"Well, that'll be fine. When is Thanksgiving this year?"

"Why, Anna!" cried Gumm in shock, "It's the same time it always is. In November. They're asking you real early. That's all."

Everybody in the backyard laughed at poor befuddled Anna. And she had been a principal of a school!

"I think you should bring Mother," said Gumm.

"I don't think she'll be able to go. She thinks Poncho Villa is going to attack us soon. If I take her anywhere she starts moaning about Poncho and murder! She gets so nervous she shakes and starts talking wildly. It's embarrassing. Very."

Everybody laughed real hard about Anna's mother. My dad whipped his leg and laughed so hard he spilled a little of his rum and coke over his jeans. He took his cigarette out of his mouth so he could laugh so hard it made him cough into his fist a whole bunch. "Ha ha! You're kidding! Oh no!"

"Golly, that's funny," said Madeline.

Berk drank up and smiled broadly. His Dutch face was breaking in two.

"Oh boy, it's funny on this street. Anna keeps me in stiches. Now you know why I'm so jolly. It's Anna and her mother," cried Gumm.

"Yes, I'm the one making your mother laugh so much, sorry. But no, I'm not kidding at all about mother. She is getting really bad. She thinks Poncho Villa is on the loose and he is going to ride up the arroyos from Nogales and we won't have a chance when he starts executing us all. She keeps dragging down her suitcase from the hall closet so we be prepared and pack up and leave town before Poncho and his gang gets us. She got herself positioned at the back window because she thinks she'll be able to see the dust his horses will raise. She was hysterical when it rained in April because she thought we wouldn't be able to see Poncho's horses when they rode up the arroyos from the pass in Nogales."

"Ha!" exclaimed Father, beating his leg again and laughing.

"Do you suppose she's doing that now?" asked Mother.

"Yes, I do imagine she is. There's hardly anything else she does now. I can't even get her to eat properly."

Everybody laughed even harder.

"Poor thing!" cried Mother.

"Oh, you don't tell. Hey, I hafta tell the Lodge about that. Doesn't she know he's dead? Poncho's dead?" asked Gumm.

"No, she doesn't know what year it is." Anna laughed, a little sadder now that everyone's mirth had worn off.

"Maybe you shouldn't leave her alone," said Madeline. "It doesn't even seem safe."

"You're right. It isn't. I'll go right back in a minute. I can't leave her at all anymore. I'll get my cousin to eat with her. For Thanksgiving. If you still want a member of such a peculiar family at your big dinner."

"Sure we do!" said Mother.

"Oh, that's all right then. You can come out with me and not worry if your cousin is with her," said Gumm.

"Sure."

"Humor her. Poor old dear."

"Yes."

"Anna, I'm making you an African," cried Gumm suddenly, merrily.

"A what?" asked Anna in terror.

"So hard of hearing!" said my grandmother in a whisper, "An African, Anna. I making one for you and later I'll made another one which will be for your mother."

"What is it?" she cried.

"That's afghan, mother," said my father, correcting her again. She persisted in calling them Africans.

"Oh, that's right. What am I saying? An afghan. I'm making you an afghan."

"Okay. I'll come over and we'll see a show."

"No, well, yes, Anna. Come over and we'll see a show."

"I want to see _The Sound of Music_."

"Oh, I can see that again. That is the best movie ever made. Any time you want to go I'll join you Anna. We'll go downtown together. Just you and me. A day out."

"Sure we will. I'll get my cousin to stay with Mother."

"Sure, isn't she handy to do that?"

"Her husband comes, too. They make a game of it. He writes down what Mother says and he says it's better than _Reader's Digest_ 'Laughter Is the Best Medicine.' They save it and read it back again in the week. It keeps them laughing."

"Oh, I like that. "Laughter Is the Best Medicine.' Are you still getting _Reader's Digest_ , Ben?"

"Yes," said Father morosely.

"Well, do you like it?"

"It's good."

"The kids read it," Mother said.

"Oh, good."

"You haven't seen _The Sound of Music_?"

"No, but I hear it is very good."

"It's wonderful."

"Saw it was showing at the theater at the Marshall Square," said Anna.

"Oh, no, don't mention that Marshall woman to me. I simply can't stand the thought of her. How can anyone become famous and be so respected when she murdered her husband! She helped unwed mothers! Started a foundation for unwed mothers. Well, what I say is 'what is that compared to MURDER'? She shot her husband dead and she got away with it. All because of money, I say. She said he had cheated on her. Well, so did my husband and you don't give out the death penalty for somebody cheating on you. And she gave it to him. Bam, bam, bam. Three shots. One wasn't good enough. She got away with murder!"

"Well, mother..."

"I'll be seeing all of you!" said Anna. Anna leapt out of her seat at this mention of Mrs. Marshall, a common harangue of my grandmother's, which made poor Anna afraid at the mention of cheating and gunshots.

"Well, stay awhile Anna," Gumm protested. "You can stay. You only just sat yourself down and everybody was getting to talk to you."

But Anna fled. She flitted around at the gate until our father got up and opened it for her again.

After Anna was gone grandmother discussed Anna and Anna's mother briefly. "She's so delicate."

"I say that's what comes of isolation."

"Not enough food. That's for certain."

"A very sad situation."

"Intelligence often comes to a bad end. In women."

But should I go on assuming their comments are about Anna and not about me and then hear my name and the alliterative passage "Sam seldom seeks silly Sonoran sombreros," I would immediately experience such grief and humiliation at the thought that they were discussing my lisp among themselves that I would pour myself off the front of my chair and crawl away in the grass, sobbing. Everyone might look at me, at my bald spot where I'd pulled out my hair, and everyone might have their thoughts about my weaknesses, but I would not give up my sobbing state to make them happy.

"Little Running Water," said Meredith. "Run to the river, Little Running Water." That was her mocking Native American name for me.

Eventually, I stretched out beside the old stone metate which lolled in the setting sun, and then, when I was imagining that metate was the rasping pale pink fossilized tongue of a desert-dwelling monster, my smile was unconquerable though everyone then would want me looking guilty.

Years later on the same lawn I returned with a scrap of description, a short paragraph describing the hanging halo made of several puffy gray cumulous clouds above a desert mountain in July, and this scrap of paper was sandwiched in my jeans pocket. I had conceived the paragraph as a sort of prayerful work, and had carefully edited it all that winter, but after it was edited, I notice it was dead, vastly inferior, uninspired, a sham. I had killed it with time and too much attention. Frustration and anger overcame me and I planned to destroy what I wrote in the metate. I gave myself over to this emotion.

I saw wonderfully the way the same stone had an oval depression or hollow where the ground corn was supposed to mound up and as usual it was filled with a brackish pool of water from a careless squirt of the hose. And the white mano, the stone you rubbed against the metate, floated in the scummy puddle, and exactly mimicked an overweight swimmer in one of the slimy green tanks in the desert canyons of our surrounding mountains. To examine the metate's curious pale pink surface, to find that I was strangely excited by small bugs, was all that I needed for my mood to soar. Yet when years intervened and I recreated the Fourth of July scene in my head, I would notice that the word wiggle wrestled with the word wriggle which in turn battled with squirm for supremacy and the result was tremendous heartache, a falling feeling, free floating frustrating loss.

This is followed by peace at the bottom of the loop of creativity when I realized that those caverns and the exact movement of the teeny centipedes and fleas were already lost, and that the animals might even be dead, that its industry in eons would succeed in scraping away the very metate the bugs inhabited, and the real world of the bugs was as dead and as scattered as my art, and my art therefore was no less perfect. The pleasure of that image of the fat white belly of the rock lapped by black water was tinged with the thought that the water served to erode the very tank it 'swam' in. Maybe that explains why I wanted to use it. I seized it; the flattened ovoid nicely fit my hand.

"Excuse me," I whispered, slightly awed to be handling the mano, which I had always thought of as a head, a skull warmed that day. After begging its pardon, I quickly slip the scrap of paper with the description of the clouds out of the pocket of my jeans and trapped it against the metate with the mano.

Before they could escape, I ambushed my words quickly, slapping the wet side of the mano down on the paper; I pulled the mano back across the words and was gratified to see the offending paper arch up in agony; then I shoved the mano forward, rasping it across the stone; all it took was a couple quick swipes, carrying dribs of water from the puddle to make the job easier, and the stone pulverized my words.

The fragment bore an early sample of my writing. Now all that remained was a lumpy mass of blue-gray paste (yes, comically, the paper now resembles the storm cloud I had so fervently desired to describe) smeared on the metate; with a teen's turgid love of the symbolic, I jabbed the tip of my thumb into the small smudge of cold mush and brought it to my lips; I sucked my thumb and taste the starchy blob. It was almost palatable. Today nothing remains of the failed paragraph but the memory of writing it, destroying it, and tasting it.

And so the weathered metate devoured my writing years ago, and those lines which disappear in their original physical form when the paper that described a cloud was pulverized into a cold pulp, now materialize on this new flattened plane, a new art, sketching for you that story of the metate and my act of wastage, for your mental consumption.

Flitting around the edge of my mind are the analogies to explain the reason I chose to grind up my writing on a metate and not simply toss the paper away in a garbage can, and some of my reasons are quite ridiculous; I could explain to you that over my lifetime writing has mutated into an act comparable to grinding; that the words I choose often liquefy horrifyingly, phrases disintegrate, paragraphs deteriorate, as I attempt to manipulate them on the page; perhaps the grinding stone supplies the analogy I need when every plot I devise seems to be people with fantastic phantoms and the actions of these phantoms inevitably turn into meaningless mush; a metate may have meaning to me because my words seem to dissolve in my hands like a fine misty powder even as I attempt ever more frantically to make them more refined; that I overwork every passage until it has been reduced to a cold vapid slime; or do I mean, by telling you about the metate, to depict the workman-like way that I simply went back again and again to writing, with my nose to the grindstone, day in and day out, grinding out family meals?; is writing a daily chore or routine?; do I like to think of the words I write as rhythms or movement, the way a grinder at a metate will work her shoulders, elbows, and hands and have to glide back and forth in front of her rock?; did the back and forth movement of the worker at the metate mimic the pulse of the Anglo-Saxon words, the steady stroke of an iambic beat and is it fitting that my iambic beats are destroyed by a rock which beat the paper to shreds? Are my words, or my plots, abrasive, grating, or crushing to others? Is the effort of creating beauty crushing me, wearing away little bits of my being? Am I a nutmeg paired with its grater?

Get out the old metate so that I might let it devour my words of a cloud like a halo, of the most handsome man I've ever seen, of a white ox smashing the window of a cowboy store, of the man who helped me find my art, and that art which disappears in its original physical form when the paper which describes it is pulverized into cold blobs, and now materialized on this new flattened plane, a new art, which sketches for you the story of the old metate and my act of wastage, which you have just consumed mentally.

But then, in the ultimate irony, I contemplate mincing more of my words. "It's hard to say what first attracted our attention to the pale lady" might meet the fate of my cloud passage all those years ago. Or start at the end and destroy the librarian who will soon be holding me hostage. I could destroy my newest art now, before you could read it, starting at the first sentence; and the act of grating my old art would be another new art, which I could write about again. Though I have shown that a conventional metate does an excellent job of dissolving every bit of what you write and entertaining you in the process, providing your elbows and shoulders with a good workout to boot, the old metate is gone from the porch of my grandmother's bungalow, along with my actual grandmother. But I know that the earliest Hohokam settlers often favored the volcanic rocks which were still in the ground for their metates; they brought their mesquite beans, and corn to these built-in metates, so to speak, hefting tubular pestles which were like miniature submarines to a vertical position above the hole and then smashing them down on their flinty food. Imitating them, I could hike to the top of Tumamoc Hill or to the backside of the Rincon range, through the twiggy palo verde trees which in late May are full of rattling and blaring Apache cicadas, huge gray gnats with terrible great eyes, the gray of their bodies showing veins of white like the curly white hairs blooming from and crisscrossing the head of a middle-aged woman, until I could find one of the ready-made grinding holes, in a red, brown or black boulder. And imagining myself to be a very workman-like woman, looking out upon our valley, I would use one of these convenient grinding stones and happily drop in the first page you read and stamp it down, but now this new art I have just created has described the way I would destroy my old art, and it in turn would be fun to destroy. The thought of the very opening sentence of this work, my masterpiece, my life's creation, which you have just begun to read, being ripped away from the body of the work and spread-eagled on the black volcanic stone in a manner that is every bit like a goofy sacrificial victim, pinned down and then scraped and ripped and torn to teeny shreds by the pulverizing effect of a manifest mano amuses me almost as much as writing that just now did, as I contemplated tearing apart my art, before you ever experienced it, because I can sit back and watch in a crazy house mirror, writing devouring writing, devouring writing, just like a snake swallowing its own tail, or the process in which the egg proceeds the chicken, which engenders the egg, which pre-dates the chicken...

CHAPTER 4

A trick of my brother did hide some unwanted papers once, only temporarily. There was a small triangular area of desert growth which we always passed after crossing the street in front of our school, crossing it in 1962. If Jack came out early, my mother and I would not yet be rounding the corner of the street toward this barren stretch of earth and he would pass this triangle of desert growth before she saw us. Several stunted mesquites, a few creosotes and some withered blackened prickly pear cactus clung to life in the corner, which was liberally decorated with newspapers, beer bottles and, for years, an old pink towel. When Jack's undecipherable writing earned him bad marks and angry notes at the top of his papers, he saved them up in his desk and then, by running ahead, he found time to shove the thick stack of papers rolled into a cylinder into a snake hole in this messy desert. A whole thick stack of papers shoved in the hole, rolled together and shoved down there as a sacrifice to a subterranean world. Until Mother saw them.

"What are these!" said Mother when her superior eyesight detected, on the edges of the mangy papers, her son's faint name in her son's screwy scrawl and she walked up and bent down and snatched the cylinder of papers out with a cold, angry intensity that is only seen in the deeply disappointed mother. "What? What in the world are these papers of yours doing jammed in a snake hole! Well, I never. School papers jammed in a hole? Are you going to pretend someone else put them in here? Are you going to say such a ridiculous thing?"

"No," he said resignedly. "I put them there."

"Well Billy-be darned! Whatever were you thinking? As long as I live I'll never understand this! What do you have to say for yourself? What earthly reason could you have for doing such an absurd thing as this! How do you explain this?"

"I didn't want to bring them home," said Jack, offering a child's simple excuse.

"I should say not! Horrible papers. A son of mine doing such inferior work?"

Mother began leafing through the sheets, examining the teacher's comments. Small groups of children walked by on their way home, glancing sympathetically in our direction when they overheard our mother raving over the bad comments on Jack's papers. "Never in my wildest dreams did I dream of anything this wild. Oh, biddle-boddle, biddle-boddle, bo, bo, bo. I'm so mad I could spit. I'm madder than a wet hen. My goodness gracious, your teacher has been writing me frustrated messages. Look at these. Over and over for months. I haven't gotten any of these notes from her. She is 'very tired of your sloppy work and poor penmanship.' And she's right. The work is terrible. Your work 'isn't coming up to standards for a third grader.' I should say so. Your work 'shows little improvement or effort.' What a shame. She wants to know 'am I working with Jack?' Heavens to Betsy. How could you do this? How could you mortify me this way? Now I will have to explain that I never saw these paper from her, because you were hiding them in a hole in the desert. Oh, the embarrassment for me, a librarian from Indiana, to discover that my own son was hiding bad work from his mother, shoving it in a snake hole of all the things in the world. I went to school in a one-room schoolhouse with lots of tough boys from the surrounding farms, and they didn't give a hoot about school, but they never would have been so craven as to hide their bad papers from their own mothers. They took their punishment with courage. They took their lickins and liked them. They didn't hide their shortcomings. Maybe there's more strength in stupidity. All I know is when I had a little boy I expected him to be honest and truthful. That wasn't too much to expect, now was it? Maybe I'll tell your teacher that you were hiding your bad papers in a snake hole, but that is almost too much to be believed and too much for me to bear. I don't think I can take the humiliation. What kind of fools are you trying to make us out to be, huh? The stupid kind of fools who turn in sloppy work and don't give a hoot? The kind who hide their failures and try to avoid honest work and self-improvement? I am so disgusted by this that I can't even look at you. These papers were opportunities. Opportunities to strive. There is no Royal Road to learning, kid. You are looking for the easy way out! I'm here to tell you there is no easy way. You can look all your life, but you won't find it, because it doesn't exist."

Serendipity, that is the force that you must marshal to make art. Serendipity made Mother see her son's papers with her eagle eyes, notice the edge of those papers, and walk over to the hole and reach down and pull Jack's papers out of that hole, and serendipity prompts me to accept with grace the arrival of characters, and to use them when they're given to me and to support myself now with a stern rebuff; go on, it's life you're describing, and life necessitates courage. Step out bravely into the midst of mashers and maniacs with little knives. There is no Royal Road to learning. Don't look for the easy way out of the horror and the work and the mistakes. Make your mistakes, take your knocks, write your lies and work your mash of a mish-mashed life into something vaguely uninteresting.

The papers that I used over the years to write the stories that never succeeded come back to haunt me like ghostly mantles, these sheeted dead squeak and gibber, and stand as pale reminders of my many failures, my many attempts to start something literary. I wonder if nothing will help me dispose of these troublesome papers. Perhaps the papers are more troublesome than the people who stopped me. But I remind myself of something. Be thankful for the times and people who stopped you, because they are the material you use now, if that makes any sense. I am on a mission to tell you about the ways my art was kept from succeeding, and in doing that I hope to have some measure of success.

"And hurry before this gall darn rain sets in..." Mother said later that winter, ducking her head and leaning over toward the window beside her in order to peer at the gathering clouds which were directly above our station wagon as it skirted the edge of the Cactus Monument. "I've lived in the Midwest and I tell you I've got a feeling that this is not any ordinary storm."

"I'm driving as fast as I can, as fast as a reasonable person ought to on a poorly graded dirt road," said Father irritably. He hunched over the steering wheel and squinted through the blue haze of smoke around his head, drifting from his own cigarette in the open car ashtray.

"I meant," began Mother, "for the children to hurry and find one. I wasn't talking about you driving faster. They need to keep looking out the window, and not get distracted, if they really want one of their own. If they want one today." She was pretending it was us, the children, who wanted to become the proud owners of the dead saguaro skeleton. The idea was absurd, because she was the one who had organized the drive, filled her own thermos full of hot coffee, and tried to whip up in us the enthusiasm for this search saying that it was us who wanted our very own saguaro skeleton, wanted one sitting up against the patio wall in the corner of the backyard as a somber gray memento from 1962. We were terrified by the notion of what might come out of one of them; we knew perfectly well that they were full of tarantulas, scorpions, spiders, snakes and lizards. Hadn't she told us that a hundred times? Hadn't she warned us to stay well back from them? To keep our hands away from them? To shun them in every way possible? Now she was pretending we wanted one for a patio decoration.

"I certainly wasn't telling you that you ought to speed up," she went on to Father. "That would be very dangerous out here. These dirt roads in the country are so frightening. Of course you shouldn't speed. Why the very thought of speeding terrifies me. All you have to do is hit the soft shoulder at the right angle and speed, and the whole car would flip suddenly onto its roof. It's happened to so many sports cars that I've read about in the papers. Just racing along until they hit a soft shoulder and flipped. Tragic? MGs and such. Sports cars. Well, I should say. People have been completely decapitated. On a holiday in the desert and their car flips right over on the roof. Off with their heads. Anyway, I don't want you to hurry. It's cold, though. The clouds are very dark. Darker than Billy-be darned. I wonder..."

"You're wearing sunglasses!" Meredith protested.

We all laughed loudly and long.

"Oh yes, so I am," said Mother humorously. She raised her glasses to sit atop her head scarf. "No, it's still dark. I was right. The clouds are looking the way they do before... I'm worried that it might not be rain, but snow that's coming. I've seen clouds like this in Indiana. Worrying clouds," she added as an afterthought. She fussed with the knot at her throat. She wore a red and yellowy white paisley wool scarf on her head and a green car coat, a short coat of fuzzy lime green with silky lime green lining and bulgy pockets full of cough drops and bobby pins and tissues.

"Snow! Oh, I hope it's going to snow!" cried Meredith. "It just has to snow tonight!"

"It's got to snow!" shouted Jack.

"Stop your shouting!" scolded Mother.

"I will not have people shouting in this car!" bellowed Father, "and furthermore anyone who continues shouting might find themselves left at the side of the road in the snow!"

It was me, the one who hadn't shouted, who was most stricken and then actually crying over the image of someone left alone in the desert when it snowed. I was susceptible to romantic concepts, as though I were living earlier stages of human literary evolution then and was stuck in the Romantic era and feeling the stirring loneliness of a solitary figure, striving against the world, the poor striver, the poor lonely deserted striver, left alone in the desert while it snowed, and there would be something spooky about that world for anyone. Even the beautiful way the snow stuck to the side of saguaros and the gay sight of snow on the tops of prickly pear cactuses would be no comfort for the poor person left sitting alone like that. Give me no image of a prisoner locked up in Schloss Chillon, with the cold floor and the rings and the chains, etc. I could not manage to think of the person left alone at the side of the road in the desert in winter. There was something very spooky about the desert plants coated with snow, there was no spot where someone might find cover, no comforting trees. Also the snow would drive animals down from the mountains, mule deer, and I was so timid that deer frightened me, which would be followed by hungry and cold mountain lions, and those were too terrible to even contemplate. That was not to mention the cold the person left at the side of the road would have to endure. Yes, the sight would be beautiful, but horrid.

"Who's making that noise?" demanded Father, knowing full well that it was me. "Who's whimpering like a noisy pup?"

"Little Running Water," said Jack, referring to me. That was Meredith and Jack's favorite moniker for me.

"Anyone who is crying," said Father, "had better stop that crying as best as they can before they find themselves left at the side of the road. Then they can make themselves very happy by crying alone in the snow."

"There's one!" called my sister, pointing out her window. "A dead saguaro cactus!"

"Oh, maybe," said Mother dubiously studying the patch of desert rubble in a ditch outside the car window and slightly ahead of us. The mountains were far in the distance, but black clouds had covered their tops and it certainly was snowing up on those slopes. "It has the right length, I guess. You kids have better eyesight. It's you kids that want it," she lied.

"Well, I'll pull over and maybe you can decide that it isn't," said Father sarcastically. He swerved the station wagon off the dirt road to the bumpy shoulder all clods and ruts and small boulders and strips of flayed cactus skin.

"No, it is not one," said Mother.

"It's not," said Meredith.

"It's just an old heap of weeds and trash," said Jack, looking out the window.

"All right," said Father wearily.

He pulled the car out onto the road again.

"It's getting awfully dark and cold," he observed.

"Oh, that's one," said Mother immediately. And it was.

"God dammit," said Father, struggling to pull over again.

Then follow the trail of our outrageous behavior, our foray as grave robbers and find us moving in a line of diminishing height and wearing our thickest woolens toward the naked body of the thing. See us trudging around the trampled and rotting beds of prickly pear cactus, filled with bottles and trash, the pack rat nests exposed. Brushing back the scratchy limbs of the creosote which look lacey but scrape as effectively as an old ladies lacey cuff, wands of scratchy leaves that break off in your hair. The floor of the desert was spongy from the recent rains; dried joints of cactus, cholla mostly, were scattered by birds looking for beetles hidden underneath. The black form of a Phainopeplia perched high on a saguaro like a miniature alert undertaker. The witch world of a thicket of mesquite beckoned from the edge of an arroyo and you could see the thick clutches of mistletoe in its branches, making a witch's broom. The sharp edge of a palo verde limb tore into my coat.

The loud call and flapping wings of a Gila Woodpecker mocked us for our search among the dead.

We gathered around the fallen saguaro like the mourners at a grave site. Years earlier this saguaro must have been the victim of a severe frost or a potent microbe (borne on the light breeze) or a sudden, blinding lightning strike. At first this fallen saguaro cactus, one of the majesties of our corner of the world, must have been nothing more than a tipped over candelabra, that retained its green color for months and lay upon the ground as though it was only resting like some stallion in its bed of straw, still powerful, still inspiring and almost as though, if it chose to, it could get up. Then, gradually, the giant would begin turning yellow at the tips of its arms and slightly gray in the trunk where it touched the ground until, within a year, it is mostly yellow while inside it was a putrid pickle, rotting, attacked by fungus and mold, an secret charnel house, eagerly explored by burrowing insects, fungi, geckos, and mold, undergoing years of decomposition, exposed to the elements like the naked body of a warrior by a vengeful enemy, and made food for the birds in the old blind (blind!) poet's favorite phrase, and this grand thing in the end when none of its green flesh remained on its bones was fated to be forced into a car by a family in search of a unique patio decoration.

It now lay on the ground at our feet with all of its green skin rotted away and even the central guts gone.

"It must have been a pretty big one," said Jack.

"Six feet or more," said Father.

After we had stood over the long dead thing that we had spotted from the road, Father ordered us to stand back. He planned to disinter it violently.

Father grabbed the end of it which had a big knot and lifts it out of the weeds. He grabbed hold of the top and yanked it from its muddy bed where it had toppled, the long ribs of the skeleton splayed backwards like the gray fingers of ill old gentleman who delighted at the delivery of his first steaming bowl of broth, death being so narrowly escaped. Shaking it a few times, he dragged it aside from the place it has lain for so many years. We could see the hidden trails of bugs, spiders and lizards; the white grubs that had been sleeping peacefully in their chambers under the dead cactus writhed to see the light of day, even as dark as it is on an overcast winter afternoon.

He dropped it once in the weeds, the yellow weeds serving as a cushion, but the drop still dislodged gravel, dirt, and spilling out more spiders. Walking, carefully, away. Then he dropped it another time, picking it up and pummeling it gently up and down in the weeds. A disoriented black beetle flopped out on its back and clawed itself upright frantically. Father shoved the dead saguaro to one side as we stood around watching and he began, with the low gray clouds spitting icy rain at us, he began to rock it back and forth in the brittle grass. He picked it up again and dragged it several feet with us following and then dropped it gently several more times.

"That's right, that's good," said Mother, approving of the way he was guaranteeing that there was nothing left inside it. "That's exactly right. That's the way to do it. I'm glad it isn't too heavy for you. Be careful. Everyone be careful. We ought to have gloves. With this cold weather, though, I suppose nothing will come out too fast."

She was like some horrid woman delighted at the fate of a noble advisory, chop up the prey, good, good. Then he picked it up for the last time and dragged it across the clearing. We followed him as he made his way around cactus piles and palo verde trees. Opening the station wagon tailgate, he thrust the thick knotted end of the poor thing in the bed of the wagon. It screeched against the floorboards as it slid in and it dropped a trail of gravel, brown mesquite beans, teeny yellow and gray leaves, and the shiny brown carcass of a beetle first down the floppy ribs and then onto the station wagon bed.

And there stretched the dead thing, blubbering awfully, chattering its teeth, a smear of mud, pink on the dry edges and brown in the wetter parts on the floorboards and then up the tailgate showed where it had been dragged.

"Got it up inside without breaking it. Goodness me, it's a large one, isn't it?" Mother said, admiring the corpse. "Up on the tailgate. That was it. Slid it in carefully. Well, well. We did it now. Are you kids finally happy? Will you stop asking for your own saguaro? Now this will be something. This will look interesting in the corner of our patio. What a good conversation piece. I can have people over and have them look at the patio wall. A very interesting form, indeed, and I was trained in art appreciation. I learned to appreciate form in nature."

My father picked me up suddenly and hoisted me into the back of the station wagon. "Keep your eyes on that. And let us know if anything crawls out," he said.

My mother, lingering at the tailgate, pinching together the neck of her blouse, peered over the top of her sunglasses at certain ominous crevices of the cactus skeleton, while Father closed the tailgate and whistled his way around to the front of the station wagon jiggling the key fob and expressing his fond wish to be home soon with a beer. "I wonder..." Mother said weakly, her voice trailing off with indecision.

'I wonder' is a dangerous thing to say, but nothing dangerous is forever, certainly not wondering, and there is an end to that when the last thing we wonder about is finally revealed. The world may not be forever, and art, oh hell, art least of all. Yes, there is a way to escape art; it isn't a permanent disability, it's impermanent, stealing away, illusive, escaping, always slipping through your fingers.

I sat fearfully on the wheel well across from the dead cactus, ready to discharge my duty to let out a very loud yelp if anything should start to crawl from it.

But I did not want the job of watching that thing.

Out of those dark crevices and cracks, the narrator, a talented teller of tales, could make almost anything creep, could make anything slither slowly, joint by joint, any alien, animal, snake or vapor. Tellers of tales are of such a disposition.

The ribs, I noticed, which formed the skeleton of the cactus and kept it upright, curled backwards slightly. The root end of the saguaro formed a bulbous knot and the curling wood made a whorl on either side like empty eye sockets, like the single eye of a squid, or a horrible Cyclops' eye, which heroes had to poke out in order to make their escape from doom ridden caves, yes, I wanted to punch out that single threatening eye that watched me impassively from its position on the floorboards of the back of the station wagon. I had been charged with watching it, though I would have rather looked anywhere else but there, and that eye contemplated me with the wisdom and coldness of inanimate things. It seemed to project my death, happily. It saw through my confidence to my flaws and fears.

Perhaps the job of a writer is to pay attention to cracks and crevices, like the one where the scorpion fled and the barrel cactus grew, to stare into the holes where the dark details of life germinate, for their fantastic potential to deliver the goods, the hook the reader needs. Yes, the meat of any story is in the teeniest cracks. This is the lurking substance like the Cocky Egg. The awful dawning future that tantalizes you into looking where you shouldn't, the dreadful yawn of the grave being the darkest place the mind tries ceaselessly to penetrate. You have to make friends with destiny no matter how scary and unfriendly it is, you have to embrace the material given you, and the frightening things that happen, the annoying people. The insistent people, who come in your life and seem to be stopping you from writing, are the people you find you must write about. Later.

That day the skeleton of the saguaro cactus shivered on the floorboards of the station wagon. The long spines shook with the terror of being in our car. It was a naked and wretched thing pulled out of the desert the way it had been; we had violated it.

"How's it back there?" said Jack. "Seen anything yet? Seen anything...crawling OUT!"

"No," I replied.

"Well then....up jumped the Devil!" He lunged violently in my direction, shouting his favorite exclamation in my ear, grinning a freakish face over the seat back. Lips drawn back like fangs. Fingers stuck from his head to make two devil prongs.

"Quit it," I muttered miserably after my legs shot out and I caught my own arms and kept them from flailing wildly. "Quit trying to scare me or you're gonna get it."

"Says who?" replied Jack. "You?"

We were flying down the dirt roads of the saguaro monument. The skeleton of the great giant bounced in the back of the station wagon where I was sitting; the long ribs laying out wobbled as the wheels of the car fought to stay on the humped dirt road. Suddenly, my father's wild driving set up an intense vibration, the old gray thing seemed to be jittering itself to bits, and in the jumping shakes it began to slide. Caked mud dropped off it. Father spun the wheel and the whole skeleton slid across the back of the car, it began careening toward me slowly and in that time I opened my mouth and the true horror of what I was seeing flowed out of my mouth without any control of my mind.

"Wha...ah...!" I began to scream, with no control of my mouth, but with an overwhelming sense of horror and fear. Something could be coming out of the thing, something could be potentially living inside that old saguaro, for I had seen what was under it when my father turned the thing over and that horror house was not something I wanted to think of coming out at me, but, no, the thing inside, in the deepest center, could be much worse and no amount of running through my mind of the scene of us dropping and rolling the saguaro could convince me that everything inside there had agreed to come out. There might be a something-or-other which obstinately clung to the inside of the dead cactus and was looking out at me now, studying me, waiting for the opportunity to shock and appall me when it finally crawled out. Maybe whatever lived inside could still be there, could still be looking at me and waiting for me to shift my gaze to something outside the car and when I was preoccupied with the look of the storm clouds or of the weeds at the side of the road or was looking for the shimmery distant waterfalls in the lower ranges of the desert mountain, that would be when the thing would decide to take a crawl toward me. I didn't even have to be really near it to know that it would scare me out of my mind. It would drive me mad to see it. I knew it was watching me, waiting for an opportunity to start out toward me. I couldn't take the suspense any more.

"What is that noise about?" says Mother, sharply. "What am I hearing back there? Something odd? Whimpering and whining, perhaps?"

"She's just screaming her head off, but it's coming out all quiet," said my sister, who was watching me all the time. My mouth was open and the crying scream was coming out and tears were running out of the corners of my eyes.

"What's back there to make her scream?" Mother asked urgently, turning around and lifting her sunglasses. "What's coming out of the cactus at her? Tell me now and we'll stop the car."

"I can't stop the car," said Father. "Don't even ask me to stop. There is a truck right on my bumper and I am not stopping this car for anything."

Jack looked around the back where I sat. "What is it?" he asked me. "What do you see?"

He watched the dead saguaro skeleton for a moment.

"There's nothing coming out," said my brother shrugging. "She's an idiot."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. She's just opening her mouth and there isn't any noise coming out and there isn't anything causing it. There's nothing back here," Jack explained.

"It's hysteria. Hysteria." And my mother became grim with the thought that as her last act of birthing she has given life to a hysterical child, one subject to great emotional swings, to fancies, to wild imaginings and vivid fears. This child of hers was not logical and lacked the intelligence necessary to snap herself out of deep feelings. She indulged herself in flights of fancy and did not come down out of them. Mother was a librarian who liked her imaginary tales, but knew how to keep them tamely on the shelf. She never let terror possess her completely. She never dissolved into actual tears.

"There's nothing coming out. There's nothing happening. In her book, so far, there's nothing happening. She's lost track of the hook and lost the reader," said my brother in total disbelieve at my open mouthed, silent, crying. He stared at me up close to see if he could get me to blink. He put his head in front of mine which blocked the dreadful image of the cactus. He looked closely at me and said, "Up jumped the Devil." At last, with my brother's face totally covering the image of the cactus, I was able to close my mouth and my tears dried.

In my mind there was everything about to happen, things crawling from the saguaro, indescribable horrors, creeping fiendish animals and small demons jumping and diving over the dried gray ribs of the cactus that were flopping and wobbling on the floorboards. The dark reaches of the cactus held frightening shadows, shades that took the shape of unimaginable humans and animals, which writhed and wiggled and beckoned me to join them in some fiendish rites or horrible antics. It was like that art of Hieronymus Bosch. This unknowable mass of things inside the cactus skeleton threatening to spill out the unnamed plenty of terrors; no village in Salem could have held worse ghosts and demons and witches than that cactus skeleton did for me. It was the embodiment of evil intentions, the home of manifold mischievous terror. Any witches familiar could have found itself a cozy home or dark retreat inside the long fingers of the fallen saguaro. The rattling fingers seemed to be the stretching digits of a witch, a witch working her magic over her boiling caldron, mixing up her horrible concoctions out of just the sorts of things that we'd seen crawling out from under the cactus. It seemed mad that my mother who was so worried about anything living coming into her own home, and always went into such terrors over the scorpion that nearly struck me, could put me in the bed of the station wagon with a skeletal cactus only four years after that happened. Where was the over-protective mother we knew and loved so well? Where was the lady who four months later would go on and on about the three of us climbing the hill at the Cactus Monument?

"And you did too, kid. Do you remember that tanned, bald boy with freckles in first grade? Well, he was one of the richest Cowboy Princes in the state of Arizona and you knew him, but you didn't know it. You didn't know that he was so incredibly rich, because he always blended right in, the way a Cowboy Prince would, as I told you. It's in their nature to blend into their environment naturally. Oh, Arizona is full of those rich people, those ranches of fantastic dimensions, old lands, too often taken from our Spanish brethren, or sometimes they intermarried..." This was about as close as Mother ever got to mentioning S E X.

The creative person has got to be a listener. I listened to the stories, as Mother told us one of her favorite fantasies. "Arizona is jam-packed, simply loaded with Cowboy Princes," Mother claimed happily, starting her version of a folk tall tale, a ridiculous story on a hot afternoon in the summer of 1962, "why, the place is so crowded with them that it's a wonder anyone else has got an inch of space to call their own." She spoke from the front seat of the green and white Ford station wagon as we drove out into the country on one of her long jaunts into the realm of the Cowboy Princes and the sad glass bottle hunts in ghost towns. On these trips she would consult maps, documents, and books and urge and then compel my frightened father to take turns down dangerous dirt roads, navigate rock strewn paths, glide over nearly vertical stretches that made it seem we were crawling alongside canyon walls, on roads that had Posted No Trespassing signs on them, dynamite warnings, hidden mine shaft notices, loose mountain lion postings, and clearly visible tracks of flesh-eating bears. She would command our father to drive over downed barbed wire and one time in Colorado she actually ordered him to drive on a certain street which resulted in us driving onto the path of an actual mule race, the crowd screaming obscenities at us and chasing our station wagon for several blocks. Another time she would sent us several miles down a river bed, only stopping when the steep walls closed in on the car. We had to back out for a mile with my father saying curse words which I had never heard spoken. The car would sink and the tires spin, but we got stuck only once and she tore up a cardboard box and threw it under the wheels to give us traction. Although none of our cars were in any way equipped for off-road adventures, they were ordinary sedans and station wagons, to her mind there was always an interesting old ranch house around the curve, a deserted home of a certain wealthy Cowboy Prince, which we would have to drive out and see.

Often, though we doubted it before, there would actually be an old house on the property she sent us to, though only someone fantasying could think it was the center of any fabulous ranch. Usually the home had windows shot out, the doors caved in, dilapidated fences around it, sometimes with a whole roll of barbed wire tossed in the front yard as though some lonely person had wrapped themselves in it for entertainment, gotten free, and run away forever. A misbegotten rusty windmill surmounted a plain dotted with grinning cow skulls. Quite a few of these houses looked more like a final warning to a young man of the folly of certain dreams, one being the command: Go West, Young Man! Owning a fabulous ranch somewhere far out in the middle of Arizona guaranteed you a rusty nail to puncture your heel and a case of deadly lockjaw.

A front yard riddled with snake holes would be the only thing that would dissuade her from going right up to the smashed windows and pressing her face near the broken glass and paint peeled frame and telling us that this must be the original homestead of the Original Fantastic Cowboy Prince. There was always a sense in her that we had blundered into a piece of great history. Nothing was allowed to be insignificant, unimportant, irrelevant to the course of American history or just plain dangerous and dumb.

She was very interested in old pianos she found on covered porches. She marched right up on the porch and banged on them, playing old songs she learned on porches in Indiana, "The Maiden's Prayer" usually, a complicated piece that involved vast, tremulous chords and crossing hands. They were songs unsuited to the place we were in, and the pianos were always out of tune.

The Cowboy Prince would be nowhere in sight in any of the abandoned homes; even the piano playing would not summon him. The man who actually would arrive sometimes had a gun trained on us and a barking dog and filthy trousers. Once the man who arrived had a large knife jammed into his waistband. He took no truck from strangers and bid us get off his land before he shot us all to hell and beyond. Mother brushed the whole incident off as unimportant and pretended she knew all about him from the caretaker on the telephone, someone had described him to her, and she reassured those of us who were worried that we were foolish to fear him, in fact he was only there to scare off the plebes, people who shouldn't be there, which obviously did not refer to us. About that time, Father usually clenched his jaw tightly and drove us home.

In the car that day her left arm, so thin and so brown, hung over the seatback as she spoke, we teased her by trying to barely touch the center of her palm and she tried to snatch at our hands or slap us, not looking directly at the three of us in the back seat, but letting her eyes float over the passing earth of Arizona, and she wore impenetrable dark glasses and her lipstick spoke, "yes, out at some fabulous ranches, here and there, in the back country of Arizona, farther out than we are now, way out near the borders, some glorious ranches, my goodness the money it would take to buy them, kids, I tell you there isn't any money like that anymore, ranches that were bigger than whole states in the East, and I tell you kids, make no mistake, those were mysterious ranches, ranches with real histories. And they lived like princes out there, these cowboys, out on their fabulous ranches and you could say they just about owned everything in their sight, mountains and hills, trees and arroyos, rocks and rivers. Owned everything on the face of the earth and underneath it, don't forget the mineral wealth, that made Arizona great too, for as far as they could see. You hear about it in movies, but it was real in Arizona, not a made-up thing. Sure, they have thousands of head of cattle and no need to pen them up–the ranch was so big."

"They'd come into town in, oh, old beaten up trucks, trucks that didn't look like much to those who weren't in the know about who the driver really was, and they drove themselves, of course, and they wore old worn-out jeans, and thin but expensive shirts, and dirty boots, but looks aren't everything, children, because they've got wealth, real wealth, I mean the old fashioned kind: land. Plenty of it. Land bigger than you'll see in most countries. Land that would impress almost anybody with any sense. Ranches as big as some counties in parts of America. You went to school with one of them, kid. I'm talking to you now." She stopped to point at me. "You actually went to school with one of the Cowboy Princes. Did you realize that, kid? You better listen up sharp because I'm talking about you." She said this to me again, but I was barely listening, lulled by the sound of her voice into semi-sleep.

Here was another amazing fact. It fit rather well in with the Rancho Supremo that Meredith said we owned, although Mother hadn't made any direct mention of it. That she believed in these people, these mythical, friendly rich people, people with excessive amounts of land and goodwill, some kind of benevolent squires, galloping over their land and eager to give it away, instead of putting up No Trespassing signs every few feet along the perimeter of their property, which was more like what really happened, what you really saw when you got near one of these oversized ranches, and she had faith that these Arizona land barons, if they ever even existed, would somehow want to have something to do with us, that she somehow vibrated at the same frequency, a certain knowledge of quality, and if there was no real ability for us to consume quality, living in a tract home wearing old, ill-fitting clothes, was unbelievable. She couldn't conceive of them looking down their noses at her or us, although there was ample evidence that this would be exactly what they would do. In her mind our finer qualities would shine through. She thought she was imparting this ability to glow with superiority to us. She believed their views and hers would coincide, never mind the fact, seemingly well known to her, that most of the wealthy ranchers in Arizona were confirmed reactionaries and quite a few were even John Birchers, even founding members of that horrid society. She hated hunting, which they did all the time, and barely tolerated fishing. She knew nothing about ranch life, although she did know quite a bit about life on a small farm in Indiana.

She would impart her fantasy to Meredith. I suppose that is where Rancho Supremo came from. Meredith had told the Easterners all about our ranch and the whole wonderful world that we owned. She was only making real the stories Mother told her. I was infected by the same thoughts without knowing it.

Mother believed that if we would only acknowledge the presence of these Princes in our midst in Arizona they would make themselves known to us in recognition of our higher breeding. Where this higher breeding had actually come into us was dubious. It was an amazingly romantic notion. By traveling into the countryside, Mother believed we were increasing our knowledge of the Cowboy Princes' environment, learning Arizona history and correspondingly we were increasing the chance that we would run into one of them at a country store, under a large oak tree, in the wilds of Arizona, and Mother seemed certain that then she would discuss library science or Hawthorne or some such thing and introduce her children to people of prominence, people of real substance, people who secretly owned Arizona. And she projected a supreme confidence that they would want to know us, if only they could. They would probably want to invite us to their ranches for the weekend and provide us with a little of their spare land, some out-of-the-way parcel that they currently were irritated by and which they had been thinking they would like to give away to some quality people like us.

That we were just their kind of people resonated with some part of the romance of her arrival in Arizona. As she told it, when she left the Women's Marine Corp, and traveled to Arizona to go to college on the G.I. Bill the first stop in Arizona had been Wilcox and the sight of real cowboys lounging against the wooden side of a hotel and sitting on the veranda caused her to never forget the importance of this image of little cowboys in the shade, leaning their chair backs against the store wall and watching the Southern Pacific pull into the station. Her memory of the small line of casual cowboys never left her.

It was hard to reconcile her belief in the Cowboy Princes with her actual life experience and friendships. She made connections easily with middleclass Midwesterners, people from Indiana and Ohio, people from small town America, like her, that knew about small farms and hard times, people who were "Midwest Friendly." She knew a few natives, a scattering of them, most of whom had long since lost all of their money, imagined or not, or were almost insane, if they were wealthy. Around truly wealthy people she appeared nervous, insecure, and uncomfortable. She supported the rights of the poor in the face of unfair working conditions and unsafe homes, but this notion of the Cowboy Prince lurked around to make her uncomfortable with poor people, too. She, who could detect quality, ought to be surrounded by it.

I rejected the Cowboy Prince as an unrealistic fantasy. Hadn't she believed fervently in this image of the Cowboy Princes and look where it had that gotten her. That was an extraordinary nonsensical notion. There were rich people in Arizona but most of them were not the benevolent figures she had created. Many of them embodied cruelty and enjoyed being crude and evil. They were fans of the John Birch society and argued that taxes needed to be kept low, people needed to advance themselves without the aid of the government, that they had the right to put cows on public lands and pay next to nothing, that beef was the most important product in America, that women were inferior, education wasn't necessary, relations with Mexico were impossible because they were worse than monkeys! How could she who was reasonably enlightened, entertain the notion that these people were going to be friends of ours?

Under no stretch of the imagination was Father a Cowboy Prince. We were living in a depressingly small home surrounded by dyed gravel. We barely had any furniture in our house for years and our clothes were always hand-me-downs. Throughout the early years of my life I wore both Meredith and Jack's outgrown clothing. Jack wore shirts that were painfully small for him.

On the way back to our house, Mother's voice often comforted me as she told and retold tales of the Cowboy Princes that she had known or imagined at the edges of her life, and along with her voice there was the comfort of the repeated, steady drip, drip, drip of water from a canvas water bag. On trips out of town, when one was venturing into the desert (as a protection in case the car broke down in the heat, or their radiator overheated) everyone had a flax bag full of water. Some people hung them on the outside of the radiator; some kept them inside the car. Ours commanded that we "Saturate Before Using." We liked ours in the rear passenger windows and because we had soaked it, and because of condensation, those bags inevitably dripped, and the dripping splat of the water on the station wagon floorboard kept time with my mother's voice like the steady tick of a mantle clock at midnight.

And with glorious this two-beat rhythms, like hooves on the clip-clop bearing the story along, like the Westerners crossing the Great Plains in their covered wagons, I planned many times to bestow the animal hoof beat/heartbeat from inside the human chest cavity to the empty cavity of blank paper pages, blank at the beginning of life and blank at the beginning of art, and all of it, the sounds of my real past life and my grandiose future lies, seem extraordinary, every splash echoes in me.

But I must confess, after a little thought, that the tap of the dropping water is too obscure, as elusive as another wonderful sound from the canteen, which comes to me as I write, a sound from the cap, a whistling, whizzing squeak which shoots sideways its exasperation, exasperation with me and my inability to tell my story, letting out great fizzes and hopeless pops. And to me that second sound mimics the universal squeal of complaint, like that which I hear again in my own life punctuating certain horrifying moments, the shear shrieking mess of my involvement with dangerous people in order to advance my art, wherever my art could be destined to advance to. But what I learn from writing is to be thankful for everything that comes, no matter the horror at the time and to think of the interference as the real force of live that the writer must experience and then put into the entirely false world of writing.

Each of these bags or canteens had a silver lid, held on with a silver chain. And then finally I hear the voice of the silver chain which holds the cap of the canteen to the neck with its little, uniform sequence of precise links. It begins jingling a long, loose narrative, a wild story, a story free with casual associations, through years spent nervously bottled-up, ready to spill its lovely, glittering lies.

And these are the canteen's sounds, its voice to me. Imperfect, like the canteen's rough canvas cover over the water-filled body, not unlike an Arizona pioneer's tanned and toughened hide, this noisy, beautiful story is preserved by the silence that I studiously maintained, during long rides across hot valleys.

CHAPTER 5

Collected in my memory, a certain sunny fall morning. It springs forth from later that year, 1962. I spent it at a church luncheon party with my mother and twenty or thirty ladies from the Women's Fellowship Circle of our Congregationalist church. The party was held at a home that nestled into a cactusy gully at the gates of the saguaro monument far out on the eastern edge of our valley. One of the ladies of our church who was a prominent member of the Circle, a group of mostly Midwestern ladies, hosted the Annual Autumn Potluck. This was the first and only year my mother attended, bringing me with her, me, the only child and mother, the only youngish woman.

The sweet old women at the meeting came from many obscure Midwestern bergs, all of them nothing more than whistle-stops, really, the kind of towns Sinclair Lewis gave to Carol Kennicott to fantasize her various failed reforms, towns that were hard to stomach, with self-satisfied Main Streets, which were very different from my queer, dusty Southwestern home. We had landed in an exotic, American place, where people drifted in and out to spend their winter days reclining on lawn chairs under the intense sun. My home was the kind of place people fled to when they were dying of tuberculosis, suffering from asthma, or enduring arthritis. Sun seekers, sun lovers crowded the state.

On the whole, the old ladies who had migrated out of these teeny burgs which were in many ways identical to Gopher Prairie had conversational interests which lay in bridge or canasta, which my mother tried briefly and discovered she detested, in the candies of the Midwest, which she took a genuine interest in, specializing in Swiss varieties and collecting a giant copper tub which was used in some mysterious candy factory, and in hand-wringing about the troubled way the financing of "the folks" new tractor had recently turned out. "The folks" were the people they had left behind in the Midwest.

When the ride which Mother had arranged came for us on the day of the party, I watched the big white auto crunch over the gray gravel of the semicircular drive in front of our house and followed its progress as it nosed around the stunted bottle brushes that were spaced evenly around the inner arc of the drive; Father had insisted that the gravel beyond the bottlebrushes, in the small semicircle, be the type that was dyed pink, and in the unrelenting hot sun of an October morning this backdrop to the little bushes was like a torrid zone of dilute blood. If you picked up an individual piece of this dyed gravel and looked closely at it, you could see ordinary gray gravel underneath the pink paint. The bent trunk of the Rus Lancia tree, a transplant from Africa, writhed in the very center of that bloody zone. The small bottlebrush plants were like a set of uptight acolytes surrounding the greater African tree. As a teenager I was horrified to be living in a house that still displayed the pink painted gravel, which was so gauche to me. We kept it there when it had long since gone out of style.

From my position standing beside Mother in the small shade of the red concrete porch, I could already see when the car came to a halt that the seats in the car, front and back, were packed with large, festively-dressed church ladies. On one side of the backseat there sat an especially large woman, one of the fellowship. She was so large that an adult would never fit beside her, so the driver of the car had already decided that I would have to slide in there.

"Send her around to the other side at the back, Juney," said this lady driver to my mother, when Mother opened the front door of the car. The person who needed to go around to the back was me. "She'll just squeeze in perfect."

"Go on," mother urged me, spinning around. "You heard her. Around to the back door on the far side and there's more room there than in the front."

I saw from her stern expression that Mother was anticipating trouble from me about this seating arrangement. If so, she was right. I stood my ground without budging. Perhaps, I thought, if I just stand on our gravel outside the car door where Mother is going and if I keep hoping, this order to find a seat in the back would be rescinded and I would get to sit with my mother in the front after all. I knew she wouldn't be able to close the door with me standing in it.

"Go around to the other door. Sit back there with the nice ladies," said Mother again stiffly when she dropped onto the car seat and found me in the open door and already trying to force my way onto her lap. Several of the ladies chuckled. "Go on," she said, blocking my access to her lap and almost swatting at me.

"Around to the back," she said, angrily pushing me out of the path of the swinging door.

Hell aptly describes the trip around the back of that idling, shivery car. I felt the early October sun boiling on the nape of my shaved neck. I had a large patch of prickly heat there, something I developed regularly in the late, sweaty part of our desert summer. I did not want to be wearing the dress Mother had put me in nor did I want to be sitting all by myself with those old church ladies in the backseat while Mother was up front. Hot tears welled in my eyes. I brushed my bangs off my forehead angrily; if the driver put the car in reverse I would be squished and that would teach Mother to abandon me to the backseat. I almost wished it would back.

The thick white car door popped open magically when I approached the door handle, and after a moment's hesitation, I squeezed myself in beside the largest, tannest lady imaginable and somehow she closed the door. The minute the heavy door had shut, banging my hip against the interior handle, this huge woman reached over the back of me and grasped my far shoulder with her big hand in order to squeeze me up against her flesh. Someone had hung one of those ubiquitous canvas bags, with water inside, from the rolled-up window. The water dribbled down on my calf when it didn't splat the floorboard of the car. I had to keep my knees leaning over toward the large lady's leg in order to avoid the water drops that wanted to drip onto the skin of my leg and slide into my sandals.

The lady smiled. She leaned over and her chins folded under her mouth, loads of brown folded chins; her broad brown face, framed by brown hair and bangs, smiled toward the front of the car, but her eyes rolled to the ceiling as though she were suffering to have me near her and then she said politely, in a long puffing effort, toward me, "Isn't this...going to be fun? We get to go...to a party...together. I'm Peg."

I listened to her question and introduction and glared at her glumly. Fun was not what it was, not for me, no, it was more like an agony to have to be the only child present with the prospect of going to a house with more old ladies, maybe twenty or thirty of them, smelling of perfume, pinching and poking at me, and to be driving all the way to the cactus monument with the water bag dripping beside me and mother in the front seat and this strange, large Peg person beside me. I felt isolated from my mother. To hear the adults laughing at me and feel their amusement with my small body, small voice, and small nods, burned a part of my soul. I began trying to twist thin sections of my hair at the top of my head, fingering out small segments and winding them around my finger and then tugging them. Even with the very short haircut Mother had ordered I could pull some hair out. The pain soothed me somehow and made the stress of being alone in the backseat somehow more manageable for me. I threw the loose hair down the side of the car seat. Peg didn't seem to notice.

Peg rolled her eyes up again examining the white plastic cover over the light in the car ceiling. "You live...so near the church. Aren't you lucky?" I nodded, but I wasn't sure that was true. "Do you like...your Sunday School teacher?" she asked me, suddenly, as though she wanted to pounce down on me with her question. I nodded solemnly. "Do you? Yes, you do? Ah-huh." She looked up at that ceiling again as though she were desperately seeking divine inspiration for her next question. It came out eventually in the same impulsive manner and she manifested a dire shortness of breath by speaking in tiny puffs. "I sure liked...my Sunday School teacher...a long time ago in Benton County, Indiana. Did you know that...you're mother and I...are both from Indiana?" I nodded. "You did? You did know that already? Well, then,...did you know that my old teacher...in Indiana...taught me a lot about the Bible? Her name was Mrs. Gar-de-Kellogg, and...isn't that a funny ...long name for a lady? Gar-de-Kellogg, Gar-de-Kellogg. I've remembered it...for all this time. She had about the funniest name in our town except for a man whose name was Buster T. Tooker that was another town character we used to laugh about a lot. Oh boy, we were mean...in those small town...to anybody different. Seems like...we couldn't get enough...of picking on people. Anyway, she was a nice lady and I remember her still even out here in Tucson. And do you know...she came out to Tucson once and I got to take her out to dinner...and we went to a Mexican restaurant? That was just super...special, let me tell you. She really liked Tucson, because it was so different...from Indiana where she was from on a river and where she lived for a while after she was married in Southern Indiana...with the covered bridges. Well, orange groves....really interested her...a lot...and date palm groves. Tucson has a lot...of those up near the mountains. Has she seen...the groves?"

"Oh yes, she knows about them, or she ought to know," mother answered. "She ought to know Tucson has date and orange groves." I was supposed to know many things about agricultural products. About vast orange groves and cotton farms and peanut farms, too.

"And the cactus. But my old teacher....had seen prickly pear. That she had seen...in Oklahoma. She told me she had never really seen...a real mountain, though, until she got to New Mexico...and Arizona. That's because Indiana is so flat. Do you remember...Indiana being flat? You do? Well, Mrs. Gar-de-....Kellogg taught me all about the characters...of the Bible and their stories. There are some good...stories in the Bible. Do you...know...your Bible stories?"

I nodded glumly.

"She doesn't," said Mother, chiming in from the front seat to my considerable chagrin, "She hardly knows them at all. If you quiz her she answers everything wrong and doesn't care. She isn't interested in the Bible at all. If you sit her down in front of Bible stories, she refuses to read them. Her older sister knows the characters and their stories better. She has a good grounding in the Bible. But this last one of mine is not interested at all. Not one iota. Well, certainly not in comparison to others her age in our family. Not the way her Indiana cousins do, I should say." This was an old sore point between us that she was bringing up again, because I refused, rather passively, to learn anything about the Bible people or even speak their names much of the time, no matter what coaching was attempted or what comments she made to evoke jealousy of my older sister or my cousins in me, something which she would not let up on, but kept on knocking away, knocking at that same old door. I hated the mention of these Indiana cousins and their perfect knowledge of Bible stories; she said while they were rowing on the Salamonie River they tested themselves and the best cousins were the ones that lived down in southern Indiana and were around the covered bridges and their memorization skills about the Bible beat everyone and they were just quiz-masters in their city and county and they even were going to state contests about the Bible. Bible quiz-masters, that was my cousins, but they didn't have to try so hard and show everybody up the way they did. That was unnatural. They didn't even have stuff like that, Bible quizzes, in Arizona so who the heck cared? Who were they anyway to be interested in these old stories in the Bible when there were better things to do? Those Indiana cousins just seemed to be doing nothing every day after school but studying Bible stories and getting all the names perfect and telling what all of the people did, which was a lot of strange stuff. And I didn't see the importance of having an interest in those people. Jesus was a good guy, but I wasn't sure about the rest of them; they might be culprits. If they wrote the stories themselves, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, those guys, they wouldn't make themselves culprits, would they? Didn't people write stories and make themselves heroes even if they were in truth culprits? That was human nature in action. Now, if Judas before he hung himself or whatever he did had written a gospel and said he was a real scoundrel I would take a real hearty interest in it. That might be a story worth reading. Jesus would probably say the same thing about listening to Judas' version of the whole thing. Jesus wasn't a pansy about bad guys and he said you had to hang out with bad guys to be sure of doing any honest to goodness good. Jesus' opinion was a bit like writing; the scary bad people make the best characters, if you can't reform and change a character your audience will feel bored.

"Her cousins are practically Bible experts at age ten, or seven, even. They can answer questions faster than you can ask them and they compete in all these Bible contests which are all around Indiana and the Midwest. Boy, do they ever win, win, win. They're going out to contests in Los Angeles and they're very disciplined," Mother explained.

This was a stab in my direction. I was conscious of the fact that Mother had not mentioned me in that praise either. This was a great shame. In her eyes I didn't know about the Bible and I wasn't disciplined enough to learn.

I narrowed my eyelids and felt the pain of praise that never was going to be mine. Why did she have to like something that was as useless as memorizing Bible facts? Why couldn't she brag about me for a change?

"Who's that, Juney?" asked the driver, dreamily.

"My Indiana nieces and nephews."

"Oh, they're in those Bible quizzes back there?"

"Sure, those are good," piped up the lady beside my mother in the middle of the front seat.

Suddenly, we turned into another housing development and abruptly into a drive. On a hot street the idling car basked in the sunny semicircular gravel drive, parked exactly halfway between twin towering coconut palms. The driver whispered to my mother some terrible secrets about the youngish lady whose house we were idling in front.

"Juney," she hissed, leaning her glossy gray and lavender permanent forward slightly, stiffly, and rolling her eyes sideways in her head to almost be able to see my mother without turning her head sideways and my mother correspondingly leaned slightly forward, not eagerly, but still receptively, respectfully, to hear what the old lady wanted to tell her. "They kept her locked in the cellar...God forgive them for what they did to her because she no more knew what she was doing that the puppet knows its master...what an old story it is...and all of this happening about twelve years ago and her left abandoned out on her own for the longest time...oh, about two years, I expect, on the old family farm and it had one of the biggest cellars in all of the county, they say."

"His family or hers?" asks a lady in the far corner of the back seat, "I only ask for a reason."

"Well," thought the driver. She put her finger to her lips, "I'll have to think about that one. I suppose it was in Hamilton County. No, I tell a lie, it was Butler."

I had no idea what these old Congregational church ladies were talking about. Their sentences conveyed secret messages, vague hints of confused worries, and labyrinths of emotions, which I egotistically related to myself. Morosely self-absorbed, I wondered if they were talking about me in some language of strange symbols and interconnections. They might be discussing my horrendous lisp, and the thought made me blink back bitter tears of disappointment and fury. From my overwhelming interest in myself, I was missing the details of another great story, perhaps it was my greatest treasure. A writer has to keep their thoughts on others at all times. The best stories in almost any situation are about someone else. One must be ready to redirect the reader and reposition the herd.

"Butler County! I had a cousin in that county once," says the lady beside me with satisfaction.

"I had one too," said the driver.

"Made her way...all the way out to Arizona."

"Well, heavens to murgitroyd."

"They took the girl to Chicago and then brought her out here."

"I never knew," said Mother, fascinated always with the trivial details of the lives of others, especially when they had trials and tribulations.

"And she had never been or even thought of asking?"

"Never wants to now."

A young woman in a serape and skirt came out of the house and everybody in the car shut up about her and stared as she fumbled with the keys, locked the door and checked the tap of her garden hose before she came out to the car and squeezed up the back seat worse. Peg had me thoroughly squashed against the door.

When we arrived at the party house, with its fence of living ocotillos, a buffet had been set out in the brilliant sun by the pool on some chrome furniture, fashionable furniture then. Under the porch a long centipede of various card tables with Mexican tablecloths offered up an array of food large enough to feed an army of Congregational women. Sickly-looking meatballs floated in greasy cheese, fried chicken with burned spots on the drumsticks crisscrossed atop each other like the singed carcasses of war, mountains of cold slaw with pimento slices cascaded down the watery cataracts of mayonnaise, and fish shapes made of Jell-O displayed sticky marshmallows floating inside like fish eggs. In addition, large conglomerate masses, when seen up close, proved to be molded rice dishes. There were so many of them, some with artichoke hearts, some with gangrenous eggplant.

The breeze came up before the time we were supposed to eat and small khaki leaves, identical rounded rectangles from the shedding mesquite tree, rained down, sprinkling themselves liberally over our food.

We stood in line as more cars, full of church ladies, arrived.

"There's Juney's little girl," said a wizened woman with large ears, indicating me by pointing her shaking finger at me. She had polished her fingernails a bright red shade and she held open a gate for some ladies behind her.

"Yes, the little girl is there, but I can barely see any of her," someone else complained. Apparently I was expected to be a prominent feature of the party.

"You can just see her feet behind her mother's. Those are her feet in the little white sandals."

"Yes, she's behind me," said mother, speaking up. She put her hand on my back and tried to push me forward, to shove me around her big skirt. When this didn't work, she swatted at me a little, not hard, but in a silly way to make me move out. I dodged her swats. "She likes to stand there and hang onto the back of my skirt. She's pulling it down from the belt and ruining the hang of it. Stop that!" she ordered.

"Ah, the little slip of a girl," said a white haired lady, peering behind my mother. "She's just there. A wisp of a girl. As little as a button. But what have you done with her hair?" The nice old woman pulled a frown, wrinkled her forehead.

"They call it a seal cut," Mother explained. "We wanted it cut real short for Indiana when we went back in August. The heat's so bad back there and she really gets the prickly heat on her neck and just digs and digs it until it's raw. She was winding her hair on her finger and pulling it out, too. I can't stop her. Nervous habits. She prone to peculiar hysterics, too."

"Oh, dear. She's so shy," another lady observed. "Won't you come out and say 'hi'?"

"No?"

"She cries if you look at her the wrong way," Mother explained. "Her older brother and sister call her 'Little Running Water.' If I step away, she steps back there again." Mother demonstrated this by stepping away and revealing me and I obliged her by stepping back behind her again.

"I think she doesn't like her hair like that," said the white-haired lady as a way to pass time before we reached all those different rice salads, drumsticks, potato salads. "She just doesn't like her hair like that one bit. A little girl is very sensitive about her looks, but no one around her thinks she is. They think she doesn't know what she looks like, but a little girl of four really wants to be beautiful and if you take that away from her, well, you've really taken away something that they'll never get back as long as they live. A little girl might not show it, but she would be much wounded with short hair like you cut on her. Nobody would like that haircut on themselves. Who would? That's what the problem is. She doesn't want her hair like that anymore forever. Well, who can blame her? It's not becoming on a girl. Not a girl with big ears like her. Dear, dear. Very unfortunate."

"Oh, I don't approve of vanity," said Mother, seething slightly at the old lady's reproof.

"Vanity! She'll certainly lose it thoroughly with that haircut," said another lady laughing.

"A scalping is more like it. A complete scalping, Juney," said another lady behind us, adding in her two cents.

"Poor thing. Just a little button. Come and sit with me little button!"

"She's very shy, Juney."

"Oh, don't pay any attention to her or you'll make her cry. As I said her brother and sister call her 'Little Running Water.'"

"Because you're part Indian, is it?"

"No, that heritage isn't recent, only from my mother's grandmother, well, they call her that because she cries. And wets the bed."

"Oh! I did that!" said the white-haired woman suddenly.

"Me too," said another woman, raising her hand and sniggering.

"I confess, me three!" said Peg.

"More than once," added the woman who called me Little Button.

During the luncheon, the young woman in the serape and skirt who everyone had gossiped about before we picked her up, stood in the line awkwardly holding onto her elbows with her hands. When she had filled her plate she sat in an equipale, a leather chair with a bottom like a drum. She had no more than sat down for an instant when, in trying to scoot back for someone passing, she pushed with her sandals and the equipale tipped over backwards, something they're prone to. Her legs flew up and she fell into a bed of cactus.

The whole crowd of women screeched. The hostess screeched the name of her husband to bring him out of the house, where he was hiding from the patio full of women. The young woman who had fallen held herself stiffly and then began crying. From the toppled-over chair in the bed of cactus this mortifying sight reached me, and of all the things in the world, I had never seen a grown woman crying like that and I wondered why did she continue not even struggling but just sitting there in the bed of cactus as though she were a marble statue. She was protected entirely, no barb could pass through the thick leather of the Mexican chair, and it flared at the top like a collar, but she still was crying with the indignity of her position, I suppose, and with the extreme fright and sympathy expressed by all of the other women which was too much compassion for her delicate system to handle.

The husband of the house came barreling out of a sliding glass door, across the patio, reassuring women and setting them aside, and walked out to the place of the accident. With many women screaming instructions he stomped on the bottom rung of the chair which righted it slowly and offered the girl his arm. The crowd of women applauded his gallantry and, when the victim was out of earshot, discussed her fragile emotional health. Of course, I thought they were discussing me.

Surely I can't also be imagining later, after the young woman fell and we ate, the beckoning hand of that wizened woman, whose large ears make her look every bit like a monkey, and whose dark purple squaw dress covers her ankles. But I can only sit and wonder now what in the world is going on when _Old Pueblo Style_ , written by a local dress shop owner and celebrity, informs me dryly that squaw dresses fell out of vogue long before I was a child. What kind of friends was Mother picking? The type who were still wearing squaw dresses when they had fallen out of fashion? They dressed like Midwestern ladies in what I thought were the costumes of farmer's wives; why couldn't they be fashionable? Why couldn't they be important? Why did they have to be dowdy and strange? Why weren't any of them successful?

Squaw dresses. I always think of them as weapons rather than clothes, with enormous pleated skirts that had been dyed unusual colors like ochre, burnt umber, turquoise, and coral. Miles and miles of scratchy metallic rickrack raced in lines of three around the hems and plunged up and down what was actually a very modest V-neck. An aunt or an acquaintance of your mother who came forward, arms outstretched, to hug you and kiss you wearing one of those squaw dresses would send you squirming for cover. How to get away, you'd wonder? Where to run? The rickrack rubbing against your skin was worse than wrestling barbed wire; you would end up with scratches on your arms and face and a prickly feeling all over. They were walking cacti, a barbed and thorny terrain of terror.

This lady seemed forever to be calling me out of the narrow space that I'd wedged myself into first behind mother and then between a jumping cactus thicket and a patio fence made of living ocotillo branches. It seemed that she wanted me to come out and give her a hug, though I know the silver metallic rickrack around the neck and sleeves of her dress would scrape my skin in a way that was going to be almost as painful as the scratch from a thorn on one of those cholla cactus pieces.

What hideous ladies these were to chase me around and try and hug me. Why didn't they leave me alone? I didn't wish them harm; I didn't want to bother them. Why couldn't they grant me the same consideration? They were obsessed with hugging me and touching my back.

"Come out of the cacti and hug Mrs. Holmes," said Mother. I had retreated to this space beside a cholla. Nobody could reach me there.

"Oh dearie, don't you want to join me? Come out and say howdy to everybody. We sure want to see you. Come on out and I'll take care of you. There's a lot of us that could take care of you. Come out and let us. You don't want to stay there and fall into a cactus like the big girl did, now do you? Come out where I can see you."

"Call her Little Button," suggested the lady who had named me that.

"Yes, Little Button?"

"Are you asking for a lickin?" Mother asked belligerently when I didn't respond. "Do you really need a lickin right now in front of all these fine ladies? Is that what you want me to have to do?"

"Oh, dearie, now, that wasn't what I wanted for her. Little thing. No lickin for her. I'm not trying to make trouble for her. Now let's not talk about that. She will come out when she feels safe. I don't want her to feel afraid."

"Come out of there now before I swat you!" Mother said, escalating things between us.

"Tell her I have a piece of cake here with her name on it," called the hostess. The old ladies nodded at that approach, subtly vetoing Mother's forceful directness.

"You draw more flies with sugar than vinegar," said a lady who was twirling her half-glasses on their chain.

"My husband always said that before he broke down and whipped em," said Peg.

Flabby arms of numerous old women worked on behalf of bringing me out to them. Numerous pleadings in the name of all the candies and special foods were made to tempt me. Mother was not amused by these efforts and assured them that ignoring me and threatening me occasionally was the only and best solution, but she stopped threatening to swat me as it seemed to horrify certain women at the meeting.

"Come out for that cake, at least."

"Yes, you don't want to miss your little cakey!"

I came out eventually for the marble cake they gave me. A large slab with interesting swirls of black and white, almost too beautiful to consume. I dug at it with my fork. I kept my left hand pushing my hair off my forehead. What little hair I had I didn't want to touch my skin; the touch reminded me of how short my hair had been cut. I ate all the frosting, ripping it off the back of the cake, scalping it quickly. Slowly, meticulously peeling back the luscious layer of sugar, bit by bit, revealing the cake flesh, peeling the frosting in a completely perfect piece, unbroken, not even stretched slightly. A little of the cake flesh clung desperately to the frosting. I carefully removed that with a surgeon's precision. I was studying the individual grains of cake and the air bubbles caused by leavening agents.

"What do you think you're doing, young lady? If you keep your lip out like that it's gonna freeze that way forever! Or a crow will land on it and peck it off. Sit yourself up properly and I mean pronto! Get your hand off your forehead. Are you trying to pretend that you have a headache? Who should be the one with a headache right now? Who should it be? Yes, that's right, Mother. Mother is the one who is embarrassed by her daughter acting up at the Congregational church party with all the nice ladies. I should have the headache and have my lower lip hanging out like a baby. I need to pout. That's not the way to eat a cake that this lady baked for the party and went to all this trouble. They had to call you out of a cactus patch! Imagine! A church lady was treated that way by you. You're eating with church ladies. Don't you appreciated that I am taking you with church ladies at an elegant party, a buffet, in this lovely patio and at a party when your brother and sister are at school? Nice marble cake baked beautifully. A beautiful sunny patio full of ladies from the church who want to see you after I've told them about you and them bringing all these wonderful receipts and you slouch in your chair and pout and rip the frosting off your special cake. Not a way to be at all. So much trouble from such a little thing."

"I call her my Little Button," said that lady brightly.

"I have other names," said Mother. "You'd better eat that cake before I take it away! Playing with your food, huh? Making a spectacle of yourself."

Mother glared at me and let me know I was on the wrong side of her plans to do well in the church circles. I had shamed her thoroughly by hiding in the cactus, by hiding behind her, and now I was scalping the frosting off my cake and eating it first.

"She's bound and determined to do it her way. Good for her, I say," said the bright woman. "Does me good to see her doing that. Eat your cake the way you want to. Doesn't make any difference to me. I used to do the same."

"She a very sentimental, emotional child."

"Takes all types."

These denizens of the rural town of the heartland kept their ways of cake baking and recipe clipping in the alien edge so close to Mexico. In a vaguely stupid way, my thought when I was a teen, Mexican things that surrounded us slipped into their language. Their nasal Midwestern accents alarmed me, as I feared catching them by association, and I was not amused by their mispronunciations of Spanish, though I seldom noticed my own. But when I was a teen my anger with them peaked into a fury. It irritated me that they were so preoccupied with what was going on in the Midwest, in the small towns they came from, that they still got their hometown newspapers delivered to Arizona, that they were less than completely western the way their children were, that they were still harkening back to places where grassy lawns without patio walls and lightning bugs that children caught in bottles were the norm.

I had no pity for them, for their obvious distress and dislocation, and if they didn't relish the dirt lots of our part of the country I wanted them to quiet about it, to stop discussing the other places with their green lawns, to stop dumping colored gravel on the desert, and I couldn't forgive them for still wanting to be what they once had been. I wanted them to make a clean break with the East.

They attended the same churches they had in the Midwest. They kept up with the crops planted on the old farms, even knowing the names of the seed varieties, and the work of the fields and they enjoyed journeys to the farms in Arizona. The still made preserves and couldn't tolerate the burping they got after digesting chili peppers. They regard tamales with a slightly askance eye and visited Mexican restaurants with a worried expression, but despite all this they were genuinely good people in a way that I could not see then, or years later.

They worried over the financial arrangements necessary for their brother's purchase of a new tractor; they discussed their worry with Juney. And the various difficulties he had had in the past with the financing of other tractors seemed to occupy her sympathy and the jealousy I felt at someone taking my mother's sympathy was large and rather overwhelming, emotionally. They had a mistrust of the Mexican, what was for me a fatal feeling of cultural superiority over the Mexicans. They went to Mexico and were charmed and bewildered. They would buy Mexican paper flowers and display them around their houses, or tin masks of Mayan gods on their patio walls, but they might not respect the buckled sidewalks of Nogales. But then did the Mexicans themselves find the cracked pavement charming, as I did, or just annoying and dangerous? In a way the estimation of the Midwestern ladies of the inefficiencies of Mexico was closer to the opinions of actual Mexicans than my ridiculous defense of the indefensible aspects of the land south of my home.

As strange as it seemed to me then, during a detour through our land, through the cactus forest on our way home, an old lady named Mrs. Le Brec of the Congregational church registry fell asleep. Just when our outing was getting exciting, just when I was sliding forward eagerly on the car seat and scanning both sides of the road leading into the Cactus Forest, enjoying the thick stands of saguaros, prickly pear and cholla, I glanced over to my side, to the corner of the backseat, and noticed her body slumped against the door.

All across the fabric of the old lady's red cotton dress, chubby Mexican jugs filled with black carnations danced the cha-cha with antic, mustard-colored swirls, but the dress was so rumpled by her slumping posture that it looked instead as though a mound of broken crockery and burnt flowers had buried her. The glasses on her knobby nose sat catawampus, and beneath those glasses her wrinkled little eyes were sealed against a brilliant desert sun that poured on her through the car window. In the way that the corners of her mouth pulled back and the fingers of one white wizened palm were curled upward, she resembled a hibernating lizard that you might find at the base of a shrub if you were shoveling desert dirt in midwinter. And it was mysterious to watch the loop of her purse wave in the air with the rising and the falling of her belly, a belly so compact and round, a fertile belly that had been the earliest playground to five children, I learned later.

But what of the huge stands of saguaros? They massed close, clearly standing as dear friends for life to me, to the old sleeping lady, to the earthen banks on either side of the downward sloping dirt road. A glimpse between two hills revealed thousands of other saguaros swarming over the rolling land, cacti so green and so golden, stalwart friends of ours, glowing on the rock ridges, and prickling the distant foot of a hazy blue mountain top. They stood on the brink of waterfalls. They clustered along rocky outcrops. They grew out of stone, and between boulders. They grew as a triumphant assembly, a vision of vegetative grandeur.

But she was completely missing everything, that silly Mrs. Le Brec! She was missing what I now know, looking back on it, must have been her last trip into the Cactus Forest—she died a few months later—and this despite the fact that she had been the one who had asked the driver, in a cantankerous and insistent voice, to take us there rather than drive us directly home from the Congregationalist Women's autumn potluck. Perhaps she had wanted to extend the length of the rare outing away from her little red brick home which was surrounded by nothing but white gravel and a single stunted mulberry tree. I heard the ladies at the party say she had already locked her door and was waiting with her purse on her arm on the barren porch when they rounded her drive. Before the car stopped fully, she had dashed across the porch and down the step to grab for the car door handle. When she wasn't anywhere near, several ladies had discussed the inferiority of her pomegranate jelly that generally turned out runny and sour, but somehow this struck me as improper when I knew the prior year she had been a Sunday school teacher.

And now she slept while wonderful things were happening outside the car!

"Desert's putting on quite a show today," said the driver.

I was especially disappointed that Mrs. Le Brec didn't wake up when we traveled through a very level section of the forest on a road which split the center of a great grove of ancient saguaros, such enormous green and venerable things they were, too. Their mammoth, twisting arms would have towered over the tallest man, and the pleats on the cactus skin, hastily sewn up with gray needles, were like the scars found on a fiercely loyal regiment of soldiers, or a legion of misunderstood Frankenstein monsters that had been cobbled together from prickly green strips. There were strange shadows cast by the oddly twisted cactus arms, and by the needles, down the side of the cactus and onto the ground.

Poor Mrs. Le Brec, she could only snore slightly and sleep while those fabulous monsters who were twice her age massed outside the window. So many of the saguaro arms did funny things, but Mrs. Le Brec didn't see them! She missed the cactus with its arms bent low as though they were holding something. She missed limbs that looked like cartoon noses, or those that resembled ears. My superannuated companion never saw the cactus arms that seemed to be calling down the heavens or the ones that blurred together with a turquoise sky and flowed their drab green color off onto a hill, the side of which suddenly blazed with golden light as the car swept around to reveal a newer, more glorious vista.

That was when holy yellow light, shimmering, shining, poured from a thousand barbs and showed us the glinting spears of a hillside of golden Teddy Bear Cholla. These fat cacti, with thick yellow arms, spewed spikes of light at us and were crisscrossed by low patches of other cacti: green prickly pear, purple Santa Rita, lowly hedgehogs and, amidst all the cacti, messy pack rat dens. These dens, these pack rat midden consisted of dark piles of sticks and bits of trash left at the car pullouts throughout the monument. Then when I was looking at the messy rat nests, beside the car, between, over, near, the barred back of a woodpecker swooped with its beak dipping up and down like a needle punching into and out of this sunny cactus quilt.

"I'm pretty sure, Juney," said the dreamy driver to my mother as she pointed at something on an approaching hill with a finger that might have been trembling, "that the crumbling wall up there is the old post, the post of the ranch I told you about. Boy, was it rough out there then on the old ranch."

All of us looked where she pointed, all of us, that is, except for the somnambulant shape of old Mrs. Le Brec.

"...such a ruin now, isn't it," continued the driver, "a real pity, up there on the hill, do you see it? That's where my father stayed for years until he was murdered by someone when I was just a baby and they kept me in town with my mother."

"Apaches?" someone asked.

"No. Good heavens, no. Not them. This was quite a bit after. I mean to say that was much earlier. No, they hung someone named Fenklestone or Fusselman for it. There was a theory that he didn't do it. But I don't like to think about that."

Suddenly, this brilliant glow of the cholla cactus was picked up and swiped across umber and russet hues of a melted mud wall, pockmarked and pick axed. In time's ultimate turning, that home of her father's had evolved into a mud ruin. The foundation lurked dangerously close to the high edge of a cliff face.

"Yes, something about it," said Mother from the driver's elbow, "seems familiar."

We had no more than glanced at this place of terrible import to the driver when the car suddenly plunged down the slope of a deep arroyo. Our heads snapped to our chests, and when we reached the bottom a deep throaty growl from beneath us warned that the undercarriage of the car had scraped several large rocks in the road.

"Oh, Lordy," exclaimed the driver, "Do you think I punched a hole in the oil pan? I didn't like that noise one bit!" She stopped the car at the side of the road and sat for a moment gripping the big aqua wheel. Finally, she got out quickly. For some reason she took her purse out with her and it dangled from her forearm as she strained to look under the chassis.

"Looks like someone's been digging," says Peg with a degree of alarm from her seat beside me. She was looking at the side of a road cut near us where there were numerous holes. "See where the bank is tumbling down. Someone's been at that with a shovel, recently."

"Terrible holes," says Mother in agreement from the front seat.

"The bank could fall in on someone and crush the life out of them," said Peg.

I knew that feeling thanks to the girth of Peg herself.

Then perhaps because of the lack of motion or from a delayed reaction to the scraping of the undercarriage, old Mrs. Le Brec wiggled her head. Her arm drooped and the weight of her tan purse made it slide down her nylons and her neck snapping forward as though she were reliving the car's dip into the arroyo's trough. As she stirred about, the strange jugs on her dress cracked and reassembled. The driver reentered the car and Mrs. Le Brec, plucked at the droopy strap of her slip and tugged at the waist of her girdle before her thin reedy voice could be heard barely rising above the sound of the wheels spitting gravel from the dirt road against the undercarriage and the engine working to climb us out of the arroyo.

"What I believe, what they said on one of those network news television programs that I saw last Thursday night when I was visiting my nephew," said Mrs. Le Brec, "and I found it to be very interesting and probably true, is that the value of all the lost and played-out mines in this part of the world alone, if they could be brought to life again and made productive, would put an end to any money troubles that President Kennedy could have in the months that lie ahead. That was what they claimed."

"Hmmm, yes," said the driver. "I agree that they haven't found all that there is in these parts. Many a lost mine exists and the ore in there, or I suppose you mean the taxes, would certainly help the country. Not to mention putting the miners to work."

"I believe it," said Peg, "Aren't some of the mountains out here thinner than eggshells. From all the excavations?"

Old Mrs. Le Brec frowned at Peg for trying to enter the conversation. For a moment the interference deflated her list of mines, a list she was planning to give us, or perhaps she feared the passing mention of eggshells might get all these Midwestern ladies talking about chickens, so she hurriedly started again where she had left off. "There's the Vulture Mine," said old Mrs. Le Brec, gaining interest in the idea that she could provide us with an exhaustive list of the lost treasures scattered about in Arizona, but she tried to go away from vultures, too, in case it made the ladies think of chickens, "the Lost Squaw, the Blind Donkey, the Lost Blind Donkey, the Mine of the Three Murdered Missionaries. Then there's Cochise's Mine, they never found that, and Coronado's Mine, and the Bloody Apache Mine. Of course there's the Iron Door Mine, the—"

"Say," interrupted Peg, "was your husband by any chance a mining engineer or something?"

"No, what makes you ask?" said old Mrs. Le Brec, grumpily.

"You take an interest in lost mines, that's all."

"I take an interest in everything," replied the old woman firmly. "That's the only way for a Christian to live! As I was saying, there's the Mine of the Oaks," continued Mrs. Le Brec, "and that's a very interesting story. They say it all began when a man stumbled into town with his chest full of arrows. It was as though he were a human pincushion..."

"Are you going to be the one who finds all that lost gold?" whispered Peg, leaning down solicitously over me. She understood that I had wanted to sit beside my mother and not beside an unknown old church lady. "Are you going to find the lost treasures out here?"

"Are you? Are you going to find that lost treasure?" she prompted me.

"Yes," I reply earnestly.

All the ladies, except Mrs. Le Brec, laughed, even Mother!

"Well...I'm going to remember that," said Peg, "I am. I'm going to...remember that you're...the little girl who'll...find all the desert's wonderful treasures. And when you find them...I want you to promise me that you'll keep them safe...keep all the treasures...of the desert safe forever. And let other people see them, but keep them safe and put them together." She took my thin hand and sat it on her big knee and all the way out of the cactus forest and to our home she patted my hand and repeated that I was to be the girl to find, and keep safe, the desert's treasures.

My desert passed in radiant beauty that day. Jumbled globs of tawny brown daubed the edges of the gray-green pads of the Santa Rita prickly pear cactus and the sky skimmed soft cobalt blues onto the chocolate mouth of a crumbling cave. The world then played out a length of jet beside a stripe of indigo, and this was the shadow inside the bend of an arroyo. Lemon yellow, in light application, crumbled over cacti pads and finished subtle changes to the green hues, the beautiful soft greens that splashed everywhere. The yellow of certain rocky walls sat well over the reds in other soils and combined with the sky to create, in threads, other interesting dull greens. Umber made a range of rich red browns, and cool gray clouds lightened each of the featured grays. The deep saturated chestnut on the trunk of a palo verde and the lovely, dull greens gave way to delightful ocher sand. The carmine of a Santa Rita cactus with other crimson and black melded into burgundies, and abounded on a busy plain where the olive of the saguaros merged with the black bark of several bare-leafed mesquite trees.

"Beautiful desert," said Peg suddenly. "All around us. Such beauty. So glad I can appreciate it today. With you," said Peg, patting my knee again.

Bright fiery orange on an ocotillo bloom skipped by in snippets. Certain bright chestnut browns and deep violets popped out of shadows. The dusty orange hues in a broad arroyo danced across golden yellow and orange grass. Ocher in the soil flowed onto loose shreds of bark on a dead Palo Verde. Sepias and umbers, cadmium red and cadmium orange dribbled by on boulders, the lichen on them adding lovely chalky greens and neutral and cool grays with pale yellows added.

We turned onto another ridge and my world spooled out light cadmium yellow, mostly from the papery flower heads of the desert marigold, and mashed it into the greens and the grays of lichen on the rocks; it mingled with orange and greenish black into the olive tones of these different palo verde tree trunks and the russet raspberry stain which dribbled aimlessly over the faces of the rocky road cut. And the look of Arizona, my dry and dusty margin of the world, delighted me.

The landscape then grew more densely packed with cacti, prickly pear, saguaro, and cholla. In the mix of green there were trees, palo verdes that looked like wispy-haired madwomen, clutching cacti to the base of them; these were the nurse palo verdes. The big barrels of some cacti leaned away to the southeast. The saguaros gradually appearing one or two at a time and then thickly massed at the side of the road; their arms signaling up or drooping down; old fat saguaros looking prosperous and many armed. Some thinner, less healthy specimens, clung to life on the barest piece of land.

I tried to remember a certain bank of an arroyo and the way a scraggly mesquite tree leaned out over the rocky bottom. On the verge of the cliff, a shining white stand of cholla with a yellow nest tucked in the center protruded. Along ridge lines on the mountains in the background silver trails, which were mountain streams, glistened in the winter light. I tried to memorize the clear blue sky and the bright crisp light that made the shadows of the prickly pears find their deepest purple and violets. I tried to remember the pattern of turned prickly pear pads which formed half-moon shadows and deep inky patches, the warm violet and indigo shadow loops all interlaced with the pale greens of the pads themselves. Long barbs stretched out from the edge of the prickly pear pads and they were like shining lances of tiny knights, or needles of justice. The bark of a certain dying palo verde trees had wrinkled elbows where the branches came out of the tree and even the dead limbs were held with great elegance against the sky. Entire trees had died and were in various shades of brown and white. Sheets of paper like bark fell about them like a dress that disintegrated at a party. The beans were everywhere. Beans were left draped over the pads of the prickly pear. Beans filled the crook of the limbs of the tree itself.

And the clouds. Soft bundles of white and gray against the crisp turquoise heavens. The clouds rode in majesty. It almost seemed that there were backs to the clouds, then shoulders, finally heads! A thrumming, majestic herd of—cloud cattle.

Tossing their heads, trampling the mountain saddles, persisting and growing. It was the herd! The herd of cattle Meredith had boasted of to the pale man and woman earlier that year. But this herd consisted of phantoms. A mass of moving beasts, trouncing our sky, shoving their way over the desert mountains, chaotic, wilful, and wild. These cattle were uncontrollable and maybe even stampeding, though I wasn't sure. I couldn't see anyone leading the herd and it was moving very fast to the East. But I knew this was it. The animals from Rancho Supremo were running the sky, filling it, thrumming my heart.

I was rich. These were my legacy. It was there. Phantom cattle in the sky. My herd for the roundup, all I had to do was get control of them. The treasures, gems, cattle, land, it was all mine for the taking. First just a few cows, then a whole herd of mighty beasts that I controlled, that I owned. Nobody else knew about them. This must have been what Meredith and Jack were talking about to the pale man and woman! Of course, they must have known from long before that the cattle existed and were ours. They must have known the same thing. This was our ranch, all right. This was our land. We really had a huge herd. There was no lie in it. The herd existed. I was an heiress to the great Rancho Supremo in the sky.

"What you seeing up there?" asked Peg. "What's up there that is so interesting?"

"My herd," I said.

"Well," she looked, and not missing a beat added, "I see. I see them in the clouds."

I feel the whole scene of our drive back that day persists so beautifully that it is a crime for one moment, one image, to be stolen away by another. That future moments will swallow up present moments, that time cannibalizes its young, that perceptions will crowd upon each other in layers so as to steal away the essence of everything, all this frantic tragedy which makes up my disappearing life, yes, that makes up life, is now--looking back at that ride seventeen years later—well known to me. Yes, time is the biggest rustler and it steals everything.

Time would gladly steal away all this day and wash it out, rub it flat, for time is a great destroyer of art and impression, a belching, greasy front loader that levels my life and my art. The blending palette of the past streaks by, beauty heaped upon beauty, until a terrible thought darts out. This ugly thought is exactly like a hideous little articulated scorpion, scurrying out from under a rock. "I'll never write this," is what that thought conveys. "I'll never be able to. I like it, even love it, but I can never create anything using it. The beauty of this freaky, far-away place with its huddled globes of shimmering cacti will forever defeat my descriptive ability." And this awful thought, which I have thought many times before, reaches out and seizes me by the throat, paralyzes me, weakens my knees, stabs at my heart.

The desert is the only place. I mean, that is, the only place for me that I wish to write about. But I'm unlucky in my obsession. I'm born in the desert, a place which others think is stripped and alien. It seems to me as though the whole world of important art, of everything beautiful, resides where there is abundant, traditional green. And it seems that someone important long ago wrote that memory itself must be green.

But I don't believe what I've been told. I don't believe the desert is barren for an instant, and I know there are interesting details in my world, subtle color changes and evidence of life, hidden life, harder to extract and therefore more gemlike and valuable. But can a desert that is not fertile in the ordinary sense be fertile in the imagination of an audience that I inspire?

Can that beauty can be captured by me? Can it be preserved like drips of the canteen, can I divvy out my life, my art?

The ride back with the ladies was an excellent opportunity to practice not speaking for long periods of time and to listen as the old ladies laughed and shared tales about their childhood memories of the Midwest and all their wintry days spent skating on ponds and their exaggerated innocent exploits in the corn fields. "In the corn field!" they shrieked and Peg, beside me, threw back her head and laughed so that I could feel her sides jiggling, something I would rather not have felt. "In the corn field?" someone asked from the front seat. "In the corn field!" they echoed loudly from the back, leaning forward and putting their hand on the back of the seat. "That was the way it was back then," said the driver. "In the cornfields!" someone shrieked. I didn't want to remember those calls and responses, and I blocked my hearing of them.

In those days, and in unexpected places as I mentioned, the old tubercular sanatoriums still loomed shyly, perhaps hidden behind a cactus hedge and far back from our long straight roads; I remember that day we passed a certain mysterious and grim place called the Grandfield Good Lung Home that was sitting somewhere out in the far reaches of town. Until they tore it down, in about 1970, I suppose, cars used to zoom by without anyone noticing the sad brick face with the gray sashes pulled closed on its melancholy eyes. Tuberculosis, by then, stayed out on the reservations mostly, but the quaint notion that Tucson's climate, its fresh air, sunshine and low-allergy saguaros could cure people of the killer lung disease was hinted at still in the sunny, cheerful postcards for sale at the motels, in the healthful orange and date stands on the side of the roads, oh, and in those neglected remains, the monstrous sanatoriums, and the teeny one room bungalows where the families of the tubercular stayed while they visited a patient in a sanitarium. Some of the old citizens whose cousins or little sisters had died of the disease stayed in Arizona afterwards, and the death of one of our loved ones was something my grandmother referred to obliquely at times as "poor Laura who died right after we came out."

"Wasn't someone you knew out here?" the driver asked my mother with a kind of ridiculous urgency, as though she had to know the answer immediately, as though any delay would mean that she wouldn't really be able to go one with her life as before she had planned; I thought the idea that she could care about these random facts of someone's family, someone who was also now dead and barely remembered by my grandmother, was totally absurd. "A relative of yours?" she asked even more solicitously. "I believe I heard you tell."

"Yes. I think it was at Grandfield where a Laura died. Grandfield or Garland. Something very close to that."

"Laura? That's a lovely name," someone said.

"It means beautiful in Spanish," said another, knowing, lady.

"Oh does it? Well, sure, I know that," said the driver. "You practically speak it don't you?" she asked Mother.

"What?" asked my mother in shock.

"Spanish. Because of your husband's family? Your husband's Spanish background." "Spanish" was a euphemism for Mexican and "background" sort of a vague way to claim kinship.

"No, I don't," she said honestly. "When I came out West, though, someone tried to hire me to teach Latin at a very exclusive private school here that, oh, took the best kids from back East."

"Is that so?"

Mother had impressed them, or else they were being kind in reaction to her feeble attempt to impress them. "Well, I said I'd only had one year of high school Latin, and that didn't qualify me to teach, I thought. And the person told me to buy a book of Latin and fake it until you learned it."

"Did you?"

"Of course not. That would have been highly dishonest," said Mother.

"Lots of people would have. For a job."

"But what about Laura?" asked Peg.

"She came all the way out from Michigan only to die out here. Her mother and my mother-in-law's mother were twins and they wouldn't be separated," Mother explained.

"Didn't so many feel that way. There ought to be a memorial to them somewhere out here," said Peg.

CHAPTER 6

You would have to go back to Arizona in the nineteen forties and fifties—and let me immediately discourage you from doing that—if you wanted to find squaw dresses hanging en masse from dress racks. Of course, they were always a Southwestern costume, or peculiarity, or politically incorrect horror, you might say, depending on your point of view. No one wore them on Park Avenue in New York, except in a strange photo in an old beauty magazine which I leafed through at a hair dressing parlor one morning in 1962 when I was getting my hair cut in that stylish seal cut that I wore to the church potluck which showed everyone how badly the prickly heat scabs had spread on the back of my neck. The two girls in that photo, the one in a lady's charro suit and the other in the squaw dress, looked mortified posing on New York's famous boulevard. No amount of white paint on their teeth or red lipstick on their lips could cheer up those frigid, angry smiles. They seem to be thinking, "If you ever pose us again in dresses that are decorated with rick-rack and sequins, we know people who can introduce you to the terrain at the bottom of the East River." Even out here on the frontier of fashion, squaw dresses sold rather slowly. The extent of their unpopularity became evident one late afternoon when I was about seven, a few years after I had seen that photo in the magazine.

Mode D'esert was a wayside place, an adobe home converted into a dress shop by a woman named Dottie Park. Dottie had once been a librarian until she suffered a nervous breakdown, the details of which were never divulged to me. My mother was loyal to her librarian friends who had suffered nervous breakdowns, and there were an awful lot of them. Librarians in Arizona had nervous breakdowns the way you and I have colds, or maybe it was just Mother's librarian friends that had all the breakdowns. At any rate, they were people we had to visit, and oh, those long, painful visits with the ticking grandfather clocks in the hall and my brother and me staring at the pathetic pots of cacti on the former librarians' coffee tables. I remember especially the money-making schemes these desperate ladies devised involving strings of chinaberry beads and jewelry made of cracked marbles, and, in the case of Dottie Park, the little out-of-the-way failing dress shop Mother felt she had to patronize.

Dottie's place sat way out on the edge of our desert town on a rutted dirt road. The fact that you had to drive on an unpaved road to reach Dottie's shop wasn't so unusual for those times, for even the center of town was dirt roads then. What was unusual was that she had a pet chuckwalla lizard in a wooden cage under a cottonwood tree. This tree shaded the bright pink Pueblo Revival home and a low outer wall around the entrance which formed a small courtyard outside the shop. I think Dottie had added the wall, because various Native American signs had been pressed crookedly into the mortar.

After arriving that late Friday afternoon in March, Jack and I hung around the chuckwalla cage for a while. We hated Dottie's dress shop with a passion and the sight of a lethargic lizard resting its head atop some wilted lettuce was frankly a great deal more cheerful than Dottie's dusty suits and handbags. A fly had landed on the lizard. We watched it crawling down the spine of the reptile, but the sad thing didn't even budge.

"Dottie oughta buy a little dress for the lizard," I said.

"Yeah," said Jack, "or a sombrero."

"If she does that, she could put a little 'Viva, Mexico!' sign on the cage," I suggested crudely.

"Hmmm," said Jack, "I'm just so bored."

"Me too. The only thing that would help that guy is dynamite," I said staring morosely at the lizard.

"I don't think even that would help him," Jack replied.

When we came into the shop, it was out of pure desperation, and the cow bell tied to the door clanked. I think a cow bell clanking is one of the world's saddest sounds, even if it's tied on a cow in a beautiful, grassy meadow, but especially when you hear it clank in an empty dress shop when you're a kid and you would rather be playing in a park. Mother looked over at us sharply but went back to talking with Dottie. Mother and Dottie discussed various modern fabrics, most of which she would have been shocked to realize were nothing but spun petroleum. Dacron, nylon, rayon and the benefits of these wonder weaves engrossed the two librarians. Mother was pretending to be a fashion fanatic, though it was rather obvious from her clunky heels and drab skirt that she was fantasizing.

Jack and I walked to a part of the shop which was farthest away from Mother and began counting dead flies in the window sill and lifting the skirts of the mannequins in the window to see if they wore underwear. This was something my brother and I enjoyed.

"Shoo. Go outside and play," Mother called to us.

We ignored her.

"Quit looking in here," she said angrily.

We put a mannequin's dress down for a moment. When Mother stopped looking at us, we lifted it again.

"Quit lifting up those dresses," said Mother in a more direct correction.

The cow bell clanked again.

"Oh, it's a customer," said Dottie in surprise.

We all looked at the door in amazement.

A woman wearing an expensive suit came in briskly.

"Mrs. Yates," cried Dottie, sucking in her breath.

"Mrs. Yates!" exclaimed Mother under her breath. "I didn't know you sold her dresses in your shop!"

"Well, hardly any," said Dottie quietly.

And it was Mrs. Yates that walked in after the cow bell. There she was as big, or I should say as little, as you please. The town's most prominent socialite, a style maven of the Southwest, was no more than five feet tall. She had her own dress factory that sewed fashionable togs, and she drove around town in a station wagon with the factory name emblazoned on the side. She was wealth, success and style incarnate.

After nosing around the shop for a moment, Mrs. Yates walked to the counter where Dottie folded blouses. Our mother was duly impressed and attempted to act casual, which of course made her look extremely nervous. After our mother was introduced as a dear friend from Dottie's days as a librarian, and after Mother stuttered out some comments about the wonderfulness of Mrs. Yates style sense and her charitable work, and Dottie concurred, Mrs. Yates spoke.

"I've got some dresses in the station wagon," she said sweetly. "I think you'll be pleasantly surprised."

Dottie plucked at her sleeve and squinted as though she were in pain. She folded another blouse slowly.

"I don't know, Mrs. Yates," she said finally. "I know your factory is producing quality goods that rival some of the best of New York fashion, and the fabric is tip-top. They really sell, too, and your girls sew beautifully, but I can't say as I have much capital now. The position, as to my capital, is simply awful. I don't think the bank would let me buy any more dresses. Why don't you try me again? In the fall?"

After staring at the fascinating, fashionable and powerful, Mrs. Yates, Mother took notice of the two of us again.

"Get outside!" she ordered.

We didn't hear how the conversation between Dottie and Mrs. Yates went after that because we didn't dream of disobeying our mother when she spoke to us in that tone.

Outside, the light shone sideways across a sea of olive green creosote bushes, which were waving in the warm light of March. A mockingbird called from the cottonwood, playfully singing to the setting sun. A glorious desert sunset proceeded beyond a splotchy boulder, just the hint of florid pinks and fruity reds to come.

Mrs. Yates had parked her station wagon near the box with the chuckwalla in it. We went back over to see the lizard and it hadn't done a darn thing. Suddenly, Dottie and Mrs. Yates came out the front door of the shop together.

As they came nearer the station wagon we could hear them talking.

"What have you got with you?" we heard a wary Dottie ask Mrs. Yates.

Old Mrs. Yates kept her mouth shut. Just about when I figured she wasn't going to ever answer, and they had almost reached the tailgate of the station wagon, Mrs. Yates said the two ominous words: "Squaw dresses."

"Oh dear," said Dottie, stopping to gasp. She fell back and clutched at her neck. She seemed be strangling, groping for air for a moment. "I'll have to say no right here. I can't consider taking those. No, I can't take any more of those dresses."

She said 'those' with emphasis as though she were talking about something hideous, perhaps a skin ailment.

"I want you to sell them," said old Mrs. Yates insistently.

"I tried," said Dottie, pleading. "Believe me, I tried and tried."

"Not quite hard enough," said Mrs. Yates. Her voice was hard and cold. This was not at all like the nicey-nice voice she had cultivated in the shop.

"No one seems to want a dress with that rick-rack on the bottom of their skirt. I can't do anything for you." Dottie swung around to go back to the shop.

My brother and I watched as Mrs. Yates squinted at Dottie's back for a moment and then, quickly, she snapped open the clasp of her purse and put her hand in. She seemed to hesitate, scanning the distant lengths of the dirt road in both directions, but missing us. She looked at the shop door. I suppose she didn't think about my brother and me, if she had, she still would have pulled out the gun.

"Miss Park," called old Mrs. Yates. When Dottie turned at the sound of her name, old Mrs. Yates trained the nose of the pistol at Dottie's flat chest.

"Listen, sister, no more moaning, hear me? You're taking all these squaw dresses off my hands, see, or I'll drill you one!" hissed Mrs. Yates. Her eyes were luminous black bugs.

Dottie gasped. Her arms shot up above her head and flopped about nervously. She was blubbering something indistinguishable.

"Get over there to the back of the wagon," Mrs. Yates said, motioning with the nose of the gun toward the bed of her station wagon.

"They're not selling," pleaded Dottie plaintively. "I have tried to sell them, but no one wants them. You don't understand."

"Shut up. I understand plenty. Open the tailgate. It's not locked, lift up the latch."

"I'm sorry you're in trouble, Mrs. Yates, but it's not right of you to put me in trouble, too."

"Pull out the box," Mrs. Yates' mouth dropped to one side when she spoke.

Dottie stood at the tailgate, utterly paralyzed. "This big box?" she asked lamely.

"That's right, that big box full of simply lovely squaw dresses. Now pull it out, or I'll plug you one."

"Oh, don't, you can't be serious!"

"You'll see in a minute if you don't listen to me."

"Don't shoot. Give me a chance. I'll have to crawl in," said Dottie.

"Then do it, silly."

"Please, don't shoot. Just don't shoot me."

"I'm not gonna, silly, as long as you do what I say. Now, get in and get the box."

Dottie crawled onto the tailgate. She seemed to have her eyes closed.

"Carry the box into the shop. I'm going to put the gun away, but don't forget I've got it."

Jack and I knew if Dottie and Mrs. Yates walked into the shop before us, Mrs. Yates would remember that our mother had sent us outside, and she might be suspicious that we had seen her threatening Dottie. My brother and I dashed to the door through some weeds. We threw ourselves over the wall and headed to the shop to warn mother that Mrs. Yates had a gun. We opened the door to the dark shop cautiously, so the cow bell didn't ring, and then we squirmed behind the tooled leather purses and saddle blanket car coats, and approached a display of squaw dresses undetected. This would be the best way to experience them when they are found in any large groups. If they know you're coming, squaw dresses have been known to grab small children unexpectedly.

"Mom, mom!" we cried when we found her feet moving behind a changing room curtain, "Something awful is happening!"

"Stay out of the dressing room!" she ordered.

"Mother, we need to tell you something!" said Jack urgently from outside the curtain.

"Go back outside," said Mother.

"Mom! Listen, please, listen," I said.

"I told you to play outside. I'm about to pick a dress."

"But something awful is happening!" said Jack.

"What do you mean?"

"Mrs. Yates is scaring Dottie!" I cried.

Just then the cowbell rang.

"Whatever are you talking about?" said Mother in a fed-up tone.

"Mrs. Yates! She has a gun! She's threatening your friend," Jack whispered.

"A gun? Nonsense. You stop talking that nonsense right away. I hope Mrs. Yates didn't hear you." Mother peeked out the curtain and assured herself that Mrs. Yates and Dottie had disappeared into the backroom.

"Yeah, we hope she didn't hear us too because she might shoot us!" my brother said.

"Why, you are the worst liar I have ever known. Anyone could see that you are lying. By cracky, I've never heard of such nonsense. To think that children of mine would make up silly stories about a prominent woman like Mrs. Yates. She is a saint for all the charity work she does. Whatever has possessed you to think up this story?" She came out of the dressing room in her drab clothes. She had a dark salmon-colored squaw dress folded over her arm.

Jack and I took a giant step backwards.

The squaw dress Mother picked had metallic silver and turquoise rick-rack sewn around the sleeves and hem.

The dress resembled electrified vomit.

"I found this stylish party dress," Mother said.

"Squaw dresses are coming back this fall," said Mrs. Yates. She swooped around a rack of puce capes and fell upon us unexpectedly. I felt her evil, raisin-like eyes upon me. Jack and I edged toward the shop door.

"I've never been partial to them, but this one seemed special," said Mother.

"You could go anywhere in that," said Mrs. Yates.

Yeah, I thought, you could go anywhere, but would you come back in the same shape mentally?

Mother paid poor Dottie with a check while she exchanged cheerful banter with Mrs. Yates. Mother didn't notice how shaky Dottie was.

And we left the shop with the squaw dress in a big pink box. I was the one who had to sit next to it on the backseat of our 1949 Chevy on the way home.

Poor, poor, Dottie. Her shop failed later that year and she lived on in the pink house alone, penniless, until our town gradually grew to envelope the old place. Mother once said Dottie had been reduced to eating mesquite beans that she collected from trees growing in the arroyos.

We visited her home a few more times that I can remember. I made it a point never to go near the roomful of Yates exclusive squaw dresses, and I never could read of the doings of fashionable Mrs. Yates in the society pages of our local newspaper without a spark of panic.

"It was my Woman-Marine brassiere," said Mother, sitting herself on the narrow seat of the maple rocker, "It had circles stitched around the bosoms." She ran whorls up both her breast. "I felt like a target wearing that thing."

My sister and I squealed, "Oh, but Mother, Mother! Did someone really steal your bra? Your Woman-Marine bra?" And we left her where she rested on the rocker with her eyes closed as we flitted around the sunny corners of the little bedroom repetitively posing, forming and reforming faint protests. "Oh, but Mother," we sighed while kissing the cold glass over a discontinuous cross-stitched courtship between a bewigged man and woman. Then we mewed, "Did someone steal?" And we sniffed her drawer sachets, each in turn—the top left smelled of lavender, the middle orange, the top right Eau de Ivanhoe. Our eyes probed the dank, mysterious interior of our grandmother's porcelain beauty jar and into it we intoned "Your bra, Mother, your bra." And when we finally returned to her, to her lovely, quiet figure on that rocking chair, it was to pounce on the runners behind her and try to pump the rocked, all the time panting, and "Woman-Marine bra! Woman-Marine bra!" But she was unmovable, impassive, and humorless. We flopped, stupefied, on the unmade bed.

"Get off," she said, suddenly rising more swiftly than we thought her able. She spanked our naked legs, saying, "I've got to make this."

We grasped the bedspread when she tried to take it and held on giggling until she spilled us off. She tossed it over us. "Silly girls."

"Where were you when you lost your bra?" began Meredith, squirming out from under the heavy spread.

"I've already told you."

I peeked out and saw her tug the sheets off the bed corners and wind them in a ball, which she tossed to the dirty-clothes hamper in the adjoining bathroom.

"What was it you said, Mother?" asked my sister, following her.

They came out together. "I said I was at the old Conquistador Hotel. I don't know why I begin stories when you're not listening."

"Who did it?" I asked, pulling the cover off and sitting up to stare at her "Who stole your bra? Was it Father?"

"No," she said.

"Was it your boyfriend? A boyfriend before Father?" asked my sister.

"No," she said.

"Was it a weird man or a crazy man or something?" said I.

She had a look for a moment, perhaps of indecision, a thought about the secrets of other people's lives and what judgments you might make upon them. She left the room and we heard the linen closet creak open and shut. When she returned she held neatly folded sheets and pillowcases and was shaking her head. "He was a funny man," she asserted.

"Tell us who he was," begged my sister.

"Yes, tell us," I cried.

"Tell us, tell us, tell us," we chanted.

"He was an old cattle baron who owned most of Arizona."

"Owned Arizona!"

We rolled our eyes back in our heads, fluttered our lashes, and flopped dumbfounded on the bed again.

"Off," she said, swatting at us.

We rolled away and watched her spread and settle and tuck the sheets which smelled deliciously warm like a day of desert sun. All the while she worked, she spoke and we listened to her talk the way she always did, by rote it seemed, by some force compelled to repeat the confused minutiae of other people's lives, the long histories that came only tangentially toward the issue at hand. "This old lady Amparo," Mother began mysteriously, "sat on a ranch, a ranch half the size of Southern Arizona. It was hers somehow, in a complicated way, perhaps through a land grand or an earlier marriage which I was never clear on. But with that land, with her owning as much as she did, men came to her for marriage. Perhaps a hundred of them competed for her favor. She had hunts for mountain lions and used those competitions to pick her husband. She chose—first, an Italian, then a Mexican, and an Englishman, and finally an American. She married four times, men from four different countries, and she outlived them all. The number of her children—was eight, I think. In the end she sat out in that great adobe ruin of hers like a horned toad on an anthill, pleased with her brandy, and her plotting, drawing up suits and writs against neighbors. And, well, one of her sons was this man."

"The man who stole your bra?" asked my sister.

"Yes," said Mother, finishing the sheets and pulling the spread back on the bed. "But that was years later. He was an old man by then."

"And you were young?"

"Yes, I was young."

Mother worked at stripping the pillows out of their old cases.

"How did he do it?" I asked, mounting the rocker backwards and attempting to scoot it. "Tell us how it happened."

"I don't think I ought to. I don't think you're—"

"She was waltzing," Meredith interrupted, her eyes closed as she spun around the bed, "in the ballroom very happily with the man who owned Arizona. When he put his hand on her shoulder, she thought, 'Oh, my!' When he let his hand go down her shoulder, she thought, 'Oh, my!' But she didn't say anything. Then down and down and down his wicked hand snuck, father and farther until he reached the clasp of her bra and opened it and ripped the bra off!"

We screamed with laughter, my sister stumbling about and I drooping my head and arching my back until the rocker nearly tipped over.

"You girls," Mother protested. She left the room to stuff the old pillowcases in the dirty clothes and returned to replace them with the new. "You silly girls."

I came to her side and sat on the newly made bad. "How?" I asked, "How did it happen, Mother?" Her talking face was the shape of a great pale heart with luminous eyes and a frame of dark hair.

"I rode there on the bus. A lot of us went together from the dormitory at the University. That old hotel was built like a mission, and I can still see its copper-domed tower with an American flag rising out the top. I remember a lobby with French windows and paintings—frescoes—dark paintings of Spaniards and Indians, the color of molasses. Lots of fat men were sunning themselves in a solarium. There were lovely palm trees around the hotel pool and a lot of rich cattlemen swimming. We undressed in a bath house. I left my things in a locker near the door and changed into my suit. I remember entering the pool when one old cattleman dove. I felt something pass me and then saw that man come up under a girl; I picture them—one rising, streaming shape, him beneath her, her with a lowered head, making horns with her hands and bellowing, charging straight at me! At the last minute the girl saw someone at the side of the pool and rode away from me. People were screaming."

"Did you scream?" Meredith asked.

"No, but in the excitement this old man, this Amparo heir, snuck into the women's dressing room. When the hotel detective caught him he was dashing about, stuffing his pockets with bras and underwear like it was some wild roundup."

My sister and I stared at each other in awe. This vagary of human sexuality astounded us.

"Someone saw the arrest or else I'd have never known what happened. I didn't get my bra back, though. I went home on the bus." Then she added gaily, "Jiggling all the way."

"And Father saw you and fell in love with your jiggly boobies," said my sister.

"No," I admonished her and continued sternly, "Why did that man do that?"

"I suppose he was shy," she yawned, "He took the police to his ranch which was, oh, somewhere way out past Vail. They said his bedroom was nothing but a pile of moldering underthings, a great big, towering stack. He'd been all over Arizona and Mexico stealing panties and bras, slips and girdles. Some of them at the bottom of the pile were from the nineteen twenties. Or so they thought; it was awfully hard to tell, seeing as how most of the pile went just like compost and they had to shovel it out."

My sister began screeching with hilarity again. I felt persistent and shadowed Mother as she worked her way down the hall into the kitchen.

"Was that man punished?" I asked.

She was intent on making Father's lunch and searched for a can of tuna. She seemed not to hear me; but then she had a funny look for a moment and nodded her head, "Yes."

"What did they do to him?"

She opened the can.

"Did he go to prison?" I asked.

The oil from the can was draining into the sink.

"How was he punished?" I insisted.

"I thought I heard the mailman," Mother remarked and began moving toward the front door.

"Mother," I demanded of her retreating figure, "how was that man punished?"

"Well, he lived for ten more years..." was what she muttered.

We were looking at Father lying on the bed, Easter 1963. He was spread eagle on the mussed bedspread, moaning and running his hand through his hair and rubbing his chest.

"Crucify me, Christ! Oh, crucify me," he kept calling out to our mother. He had had too much to drink, or too much of something other than rum and coke or beer, both of which he was used to.

"Instead of lying there you fool, drunk and moaning in this shameful fashion on the night before Easter, and saying these terrible things that the children can hear, why don't you pull yourself together and tell the kids a story? Gall darn it. I have clothes to iron and put away." Mother said, coming partway up the hall where the light blazed. She stacked clothes into the linen closet. We were in the dark bedroom seated on corners of their big bed. She flicked off the hall light and the lighted tip of Dad's cigarette glowed where his face would have been.

"Yes...that's exactly what I'll do now, kids. Tell you a story or two. Where are you? Oh, who did I kick? Well, I didn't mean to. You know I didn't, so quit your crying. I'll tell the kids a story," he replied weakly. "I wish my toenails were shorter."

"That's not a very good story," said Jack, bravely.

"No comments from the peanut gallery," said Father. "I must think. But it's hard to think when my toenails are this long."

He thought awhile, belched loudly once, before he crossed his legs at his ankles and his hands on his belly. Now his hands left his head alone and he began stroking his beard. Then they tugged his ears. "My beard is too long. I wish I had a shave." He belched again and began one silly short story. "Have I told you, perhaps, of the Walacachuchu bird?" Later I figured out that this must have been an American version of the Scottish Haggis Bird tall tale.

"No," said Meredith, lying.

"Who knows what town it was in? Somewhere in the Deep South of America, I imagine. In a place once owned by the Indians. Don't ask me for the name of the tribe. I do not know things like the names of tribes." He belched massively and we could smell rum. "Who knows why it happened or even if it did happen, but they say a bird in this unknown land was named the Walacachuchu. This bird popped out of its egg with one leg shorter than the other. The leg that was short was the right. The one that was long was the other, the left. Now what could that bird do with its life? This was not a flying bird, you understand. It had to walk like the Dodo bird. You might think it would be in trouble when it walked. But the Lord works in mysterious ways for it happened this bird was born on a mountain. Now you know that if you walk clockwise around a hill going upward it will not matter that the right foot is shorter than the left. And sure enough—wait," Father seemed horribly ill for a moment, then went on, "the minute that bird pecked its way out of the egg it began walking up the hill clockwise. What did it do when it got to the top of the hill? Then it began going down the mountain walking counterclockwise. When it was at the bottom of the hill it went back up clockwise. It searched the ground for seeds this way."

"But it happened that sometimes a Walacachuchu bird was born with the left leg shorter than the right. What could the poor bird do with its life? This bird could not fly. It therefore had to walk up the hill counterclockwise, pecking at the ground all the way. When it got to the top it turned around and went down clockwise. The two birds could share the hill they were born on and so nature shows its perfectibility. What do you think about that?"

None of us thought anything much about this hill and silly birds walking around aimlessly. We fumbled around with a pile of plastic dinosaurs and soldiers. The bedspread wasn't a good place to set up a play area, but the linoleum floor was too cold on an early spring night.

"What did you think of that story? I asked you that," he repeated.

"It wasn't much of a story," said Jack, bravely.

"Well. Well, well. No comments from the peanut gallery, I said."

He didn't wait to collect more of our disappointment, but launched in one of his epics, my favorite, loosely known as "That's the Way It Was Moving West."

"Sit down. Don't jump. Now I'll tell you something. Listen here."

"No one jiggle the damn bed! I'm gonna take my belt off if you do!"

"Buckle up for safety," said my brother, impishly quoting the popular singing safety belt commercial.

"Now...listen to this...across, across the wide, wide fertile plain of America in those early years," he began, "that were then covered, covered I say kids, with teeming masses of frolicking antelope, the young antelope kicking their heels in the warm sunshine, which was the very best kind of sunshine, buttery yellow sunshine, just as though it was fresh from the churn, American sunshine of the Western Great Plains, beating down on the fertile antelopes who in their multitudes were butting their small horns, like the horn of plenty, the fruits of many of unknown plants, plants sinking their roots in the dark prairie soil and lifting their leaves into the sun, across these plains traveled, ever forward, ever westward, by the teeming mass of covered wagons, carrying Grandma and Grandpa too and all the belongings, the quilts and bedsteads, the beans and coffee, and these wagons crossed the prairie, jolting, jerking moving over the grassy continent, carrying in them the possessions of thousands of family and those families themselves moving steadily westward, those pioneers...into the sun...sorry kids I need to visit the bathroom for a moment."

He carefully propped his cigarette in a burning state on the edge of one of those bean bag ashtrays with a plaid bottom which was on the nightstand and rolling on his side lurched off the bed. He stood, waving back and forth wildly. He lurched to the side and said some curse word that was unintelligible. He stumbled into the door of their small bathroom, fumbling along the wall and switching on the blinding overhead light and for a second we could see each other sitting around the bed with shocked looks on our faces. We could hear him retching into the toilet at least four times.

"Crucify me," he said each time he vomited.

Finally the toilet stopped flushing.

When he came back in, we were subdued. "Where was I?" he asked, crawling back onto the bed weakly.

"...pioneers into the sun..." said Meredith.

"...yes...that was it...with the pioneers into the sun, the sun that grew the grasses that were feeding the springing antelope and bison of the fields, fields of grains and grasses, crossed and crisscrossed by bird wheeling freely in the skies, under the clear blue skies of the Great Western Plains, near the Rocky Mountains, beside the cool streams and the sod houses, the Westerners, leaving behind the Eastern things, in their lengthy wagon trains, powered by teams of oxen, teams of men, teams of women, clanging pans under the wagons, often followed in the case of your mother's family by a protecting Indian friend, tracks still there across the plains, the wheels crunching the soil, the grass, digging into the prairie, those wagons stopping below the star studded skies, many fires burning, all friends together, the young folks romping and not knowing their own strength, not knowing each other, then knowing each other, in the Biblical sense, forget that I said that, all enduring together the pounding rain, the biting winds, the sleet and hail, across mighty rivers, fording the fierce waters, plunging down the banks of steep ravines, oh, save the pioneers!, across gullies, through rivulets of icy water, trudged the oxen, step by step, falls the cold rain, feeding the grasses, wetting the covered wagons which pass like sails across the prairie, boxes on wheels, turning spokes, whips cracking to drive them breathing in dust, insects buzzing everywhere, all kinds of insects, whirling, buzzing, chirping from the ground, trees, bushes, and shafts of grass, grass everywhere, and the wagon goers, the friend of the Native and the cowboy, passing over these grains, grains of bounty and hopefulness for the future of man, feeding our nation the bread of plenty every morning and evening, of cowboy and cowgirl, crossing the plains in the wagons, the hoops of white bobbing with the measured tread of the great white oxen, oxen in teams, teams across the teeming frontier, and that's...that's the way it was moving west!"

"Now, get to bed all of you, tomorrow is church!" said Mother who had come up the hall with more of the freshly piled ironing.

Churches far on the east side of town caught the picaresque desert feel and were striking on early Easter Sunday mornings when shrubs and smaller cacti might be blooming. Hoards of parishioners also drove to isolated desert canyons for special Easter services amid saguaro cacti and boulders, the children hiking the dusty trails wearing new slacks and dresses, purses and bow ties, and squirming throughout the sermon and devout outdoor singing.

Our relationship with our church went deeper than Easter Sunday, though. Easter was only a single morning's torment; we attended church every single week, though my mother ruled, idiosyncratically, that if any child didn't want to go to church they would be allowed to stay home with our father (who never went) and listen to folk music recordings and read the Sunday morning cartoons. I rarely took her up on the offer.

See our church, oh, communists especially! This fond, obsessive wish formed in my mind shortly after Meredith explained in her dry, inimitable style the simple facts about the communists' hatred and scorn of all the world's religions. I listened to her claim that the communists were not going to be easily converted, but I felt that if our simple service could be beamed into the cold heart of the Soviet republic, Reverend Sheldon's sermon couldn't fail to bring a tear to Khrushchev's jaded eye. Then, in some vague scene, he would fall to his knees and praise Jesus Christ and release Eastern Europe from their bondage! I had such faith in the power of the Congregationalist church's piety, as instructed by Reverend Sheldon, that I believed even a short part of the sermon, before it could be jammed by those evil communists, especially of the sermon for the children, which was actually the only one I had any familiarity with, would convince a communist of the awe-inspiring power of God. I was not so sanguine about any of the other branches of my Protestant faith. No, Methodists, Lutherans, or Friends would succeed the way Congregationalists would! Not that I actually paid any attention to the characters of the Bible, nor the details of the Congregationalist creed, as my mother had explained to the ladies of the church in our ride out to the Cactus Monument. The Bible stories routinely bored me, and I found the names of the characters in the Old Testament exceedingly annoying, but I still felt communists needed to share in the activity that I found so very irritating.

And I wondered if the strange modern architecture of our little church—which inscribed on the desert sky an enormous white A, and formed inside a series of pine A's in lockstep—could beam out a message, and send the communist heart thumping as mine did when my eyes lifted to the apex of that wonderful A? The two sides of the church had long windows that stretched down as far as the floor and ended at the top when the piney ceiling beams angled toward the steep zenith. These A's made of pine beams were shooting magically through the glass windows and were bolted to concrete outside. Beneath each beam long modernist lights hung on wires. The overall affect was something like melting chewing gum blobs drooping from the ceiling of a sauna.

Our church had no marble walls or marble floors to look down on either, only dull gray concrete. A dark red carpet ran up the center aisle, and it was slightly frayed at the edges, as I recall. The minister spoke from behind a plain wooden pulpit, and an ordinary table, like that in every school, served as an altar, though the floor of the altar area, also of concrete and on the eastern end of the hall, rose a foot higher than the rest of the church. We had no tombs, statuary, or effigies, no decorated wood of any sort. Even the oak cross was modernistic, just stark wood without a hint that Jesus had been nailed to it. For floral effects, we had to be satisfied with a small arrangement in a glass vase on the school table.

No comfortable pews with the names of great families engraved on them graced our pittance of a church; we were too poor as a congregation to add any permanent seating and for decades, until the new church was built, nothing resembling pews was ever constructed. There were only rows of carefully placed tan metal folding chairs, chairs with cold shiny seats, like the face of the smooth, uncompromising Calvinists who founded our Congregationalist church. These folding chairs made the congregation resemble the monthly meeting of a small town, a gathering to hear the tedious results of a study by a planning commission, perhaps. I wonder if God was bored by us, too? The legs of the folding chairs were where we girls wound our feet, rubbing our white anklets against the cold metal and squeaking the black patent leather (shine them with Vaseline) of our shoes. When the hall was needed for a large fellowship pot luck or a youth event, the chairs were removed. Afterwards, the chairs were carefully returned, like some continuous, unavoidable infection.

There was no great art on any walls, there was no art at all, and only windows that showed the desert sky, dirt to the north, and planters to the south. How many Sundays did I stare out at those southern planters, filled with black earth and stunted shrubs, which stayed perpetually wet in the shaded nook?

Pink brick formed the outside of our church, and although the main hall had dramatic architecture, the effect was ruined by two additional pink brick buildings, they were called annexes, one on each side of the main hall, which ran like twin strip-mall shopping centers. With the main hall, the whole church complex formed a giant U, open to the west. A shaded sidewalk rimmed a Bermuda lawn in front of the A and between these low shopping centers. Poles, spaced in even intervals, supported a porch roof in front of the buildings, pole after pole painted a powdery pastel pink, which was popular in the early sixties. The south walk was shady and the north sunny. At the southern edge of the church property, a hedge of oleander bushes did an ineffective job of hiding the concrete masonry units, otherwise known as slump blocks, which formed the slab back of Save-Co, where an assortment of broken cardboard boxes, pallets and dumpsters littered the loading bays.

Metal folding chairs. Concrete floors with a thin carpet runner. The back-of-a-store dump next door! My church, potential inspiration to Christ-less communists, was pathetic!

Behind the altar, the secret realm of the church kitchen lurked. This nerve center bustled with activity and if a certain door near the pulpit gaped until the last minute before the service began, you could see busy, busty women and beer-bellied men roaming about the kitchen like peculiar fish in an aquarium, arguing and laughing, scooping coffee for a large aluminum urn and chatting, even during service. Apparently they didn't have to attend the actual sermon, those lucky, happy people. The morning light flowed freely into this kitchen like a welcoming flood, especially in midwinter, and I used to like to see the last light in there when the door swung open and then closed, and Reverend Sheldon entered, springing from this hidden kitchen, discarding a paper cup of water at the last minute before he stepped behind the pulpit and addressed the congregation.

Spreading his hands at the Invocation, we rose and intoned mightily together: "Almighty God, Father everlasting, who has set us in the fellowship of thy son Jesus Christ, be near to us in this time of meditation and communion. May our hearts be open to every sacred memory and serious impression. Let a portion of the spirit which led our Savior to the Cross descend upon us and fill our hearts with the love of God and man. Here and now may every selfish passion and desire be stilled, and may the peace of God which goes beyond all understanding keep out thoughts in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Our Father..."

Upon entering our church, you would notice a paper program on your metal seat, usually colored pale blue on the edges and showing folded praying hands, along with the offerings envelope for a weekly monetary contribution, and hymn books dropped on every other seat. In our years at Rincon Congregational, I rarely sat with the main body of the church in that big mass of folding chairs. Instead, we always took seats in the back alcove on the right of the entrance where two rows were set for latecomers and for the minister's family. Four of those chairs in the back row corner were meant for Mother, Shirley Sheldon, Jack and me. Meredith sang in the choir.

Shirley was the mentally retarded daughter of Reverend Sheldon and Mrs. Sheldon, and she was nearly thirty years old when I met her first. For some unexplained reason, I had been drafted as Shirley's chaperone at church. Mrs. Sheldon would take a moment from greeting church-goers to bring her daughter in and seat her beside me, with Mother on my other side. I could leave for Sunday school during the second stanza of the hymn after the children's sermon and before the adult sermon. A seat was left vacant on the other side of Shirley and as soon as Mrs. Sheldon would have greeted every latecomer outside, she would take the other seat beside Shirley and I was relieved of duty, as it were, and did not have to worry about Shirley's behavior. But only relieved temporarily. At the end of services, Mrs. Sheldon was again posted at the exit with her minister husband, shaking hands and greeting old church goers and potential new members, and I was supposed to rush out of church school and join Shirley on the Bermuda lawn. My job was to try and calm her. I believe my mother had volunteered my services, using me the way a stable pony calms a thoroughbred.

During services, Shirley and I shared a hymn book. Sometimes I studied her profile and fought off my hatred of her. She wore old fashioned dresses with narrow belts and wide skirts, perhaps only a few different ones. Her hair was dark brown, and it was always brushed and contained in a tight, old-fashioned perm around and above her ears, though I don't believe it was often clean. She wore pointy cat glasses like Meredith's with jewels on the hinges of the frames, and her pale face was extraordinarily long. Large, long-limbed and terribly thin, her shoulders hunched slightly, and she carried a purse full of handkerchiefs that she wouldn't use unless her mother made her. In the winter and spring she wore bulky cardigan sweaters that had been poorly knitted out of cheap thick yarns colored red, yellow, blue and black. Her eyes appeared normal; she wasn't Down's syndrome, but only a normal child deprived of oxygen at birth. There were so many pimples erupting around her mouth every week that it was impossible, though several times during the boring sermons I had tried, to number the glistening white heads. It was terrible to see each pimple sharply peaked and ringed with bright red and purple skin. Her mental retardation showed itself most obviously in her mouth which was always slack and her teeth which were grotesquely malformed. Unable to control her lips, her speech was more damaged, more slurred than mine, and she drooled during the entire sermon.

I heard it claimed that she had developed to the age of an eight year old, but this was rather vague, and I can attest that a child didn't get anything out of her company. Shirley's conversation consisted of repeated, unintelligible phrases, muffled by her thick tongue and crooked yellow teeth. Strangely, her words sounded as though she were drowning under them. Her wrists were cocked at crazy angles, and her arms flew around, tugging at her sweaters and touching her decorative pins and clip-on earrings.

During the hymn, Shirley sometimes wailed. None of the actual words of the song emerged. Oh, she let out loud shrieks and bellows that approximated the sounds of the words. She even hit the right notes, occasionally, but she never said what the hymns said.

But her bad singing was not the vital issue that I was to concern myself with. The real problem with Shirley was that after the invocation and the first hymn, when her father began the children's sermon, she would sometimes start a low groan or moan, a growling sort of a gurgle which she would keep up no matter what soothing sounds I, or my nervous mother, made no matter how we urged her not to do it or shook our heads at her or shushed her. Sometimes well-meaning ladies would decide, I suppose, that we were derelict in our duty by not stopping her outburst or that I in particular was not good enough at helping to stop Shirley, and these ladies would bend over Shirley and explain in a whisper that she ought to understand that it was her father who was addressing the entire congregation and that Shirley ought to know better. This sometimes improved Shirley's mood and sometimes made it worse, but it always made me angry that someone was usurping my job and they would look so kindly and well-meaning when they did, all the time looking at me as though to say, "yes, I saw that you were only a child and that your mother was wrong to give you this important job."

I thought Mother was wrong to give me that job, but after I had done it for several years I was jealous of anyone else, especially some random church member, who might want to take my burden away from me. I didn't want the job taken because someone thought I was incompetent. I wanted to slap those silly women and nothing made me happier than to have Shirley start up screaming when one of them began to whisper to her, though there was no reliable way to make her do that. Her groaning was clearly not any particular word or phrase that she wanted to impart, but a sort of communion with her father, the minister, or else her Holy Father, who knows. Sometimes this low groan or growl would evolve into something more violent and louder and at times Shirley even resorted to shrieking or wailing when her father spoke. Then a lot of the congregation would wheel around and stare at us and whisper, especially newcomers who had no idea that the person screaming was the minister's very own daughter. Mrs. Sheldon, if she was outside, would rush in quickly and yank Shirley outside. Sometimes Shirley didn't return.

So I hated her dumb profile. When I looked at her sideways, I hated her vehemently; I resented being chosen to sit next to her and wondered if other kids were laughing at me for having to sit there. I never once joined the body of the church, and I often wondered what that would be like. I sit at the back of all halls now, at the back, always nearest the exit.

Sometimes, when I felt especially self-righteously saintly and chosen, I wondered if other people, especially children, in the church studied me as I sat demurely on my metal folding chair beside the minister's retarded daughter and I wondered if they were jealous of me for getting such an important job which I preformed every week at great expense to my peace of mind. I supposed some of the people staring thought I was Shirley's family. I wondered when their eyes searched my face whether they were looking for a family resemblance. I supposed what they thought, but couldn't fix upon much of it. I imagined that I was an important person in the church. As distasteful as it might be, this position of importance was almost a recompense for the unpleasant aspects of sitting beside Shirley, but not really. Because I found taking care of Shirley to be exasperating.

Or did they pity me? I endured Shirley's wails close up, and they could almost burst your eardrums, and I breathed her foul breath, the stench was terrible, and watched long silver streams of drool fall out of her mouth and onto her hands, hands that I had to hold when I escorted her to our car and then took her to her side gate at home. Did they notice how close I had to sit to the minister's wife and pity me the mission, as Mrs. Sheldon was no one's favorite? I couldn't joke around, because Shirley didn't understand any jokes. I couldn't act silly because I had no one to act silly with and I was too close to Mrs. Sheldon. It felt very good when the time came for the children to be dismissed to Sunday school. I always wanted Shirley to act like she missed me when I went, but she never obliged; she stared into space whenever I left her side. I suppose that's why I wasn't ever sentimental about her when the time came for me to stop sitting beside her. When it was time to collect her and leave I became increasingly humiliated by standing anywhere near her. Were people noticing that I was with a mentally retarded grown-up?

Would I be storing up good works in God's book, I wondered? Would I be storing up memories for my own good book? Did God see the long stream of Sundays I spent at Shirley's side when I might have been happier elsewhere? Was he sick of my monotonous plot? Tired of hearing so much about me? Did he know how much I disliked Shirley and her awful drool and pimply face, even if I only thought that and never wrote it in a book? Was I cursed forever because Shirley made me sick? I didn't feel very sorry for her. She wasn't the type of messed up person you could build up a lot of feeling for. The real Shirley didn't seem to be there. She was kinda a blank, actually. I'm not even sure she was really there; I always thought Jesus had her with him and this was a fake Shirley. And could I still be storing up these good deeds in God's thoughts if at the same time I was quite annoyed by having to be the one to sit beside Shirley, and if I couldn't help observing carefully the more distasteful aspects of Shirley such as her foul breath and tiny pimples? Did I have to be having a good time at my good deed in order for it to count? Or was it even more of a good deed if I hated it? That was a cheerful thought.

As I said, after services, Shirley became our responsibility again. Reverend Sheldon and his wife stayed on for hours talking with the parishioners and attending to church business and it somehow had fallen on us to drive Shirley Sheldon home. She could be left in the house alone for the amount of time it took Mrs. Sheldon to come home with someone else. We were to take her to her home, the home the church let them have which was on the same street as ours but as far as you could go toward the church.

I always buckled her seat belt. She was proud of her watch and a bracelet and various clip-on earrings, and those pins.

Reverend Sheldon's home was built of yellow bricks and had two fat palm trees and another semi-circular gravel drive in front. An oleander hedge shielded the home from the main street where the church lay across a turning island. The front wall had pyracantha bushes espaliered against the bricks beside the window and wrapping around the corner of the house. One of the garden walls had pyracantha bushes also. The sparrows wheeled around in the bushes in a drunken orgy eating those berries.

From the car whenever we drove up to her house, we could see her little brown and black dachshund who was watching at the big picture window, standing on the back of the living room sofa. This dog yapped and jumped up and down as we drove around the semicircular drive and parked between the two stout palms. The little dog kept sliding down the back of the sofa and crashing into the small round colorful throw pillows. After he slid down, he came bounding back up to the glass, yapping and yapping as our car slowly rounded the little palm trees in the center of the drive.

The one who had to wait and see that she was in safe was me. I always walked with her around the side of the house to the gate, holding an umbrella in the winter if it rained, or sweating in the summer, beside the pyracantha bushes espaliered against the bricks. She could reach her awkward white hand over, with her wrist bare from a sweater that ended halfway up her forearm, an old odd style, and unlatch it, often leaving it to bang back on me. She went to the open sliding glass door where the dachshund barked and I felt like I was let into a little secret by seeing the authentic backyard of a minister, which was after all rather uninteresting and barren. White gravel and a few potted cacti. Shirley let herself in, the door had been left unlocked, but sometimes it took quite a bit of pleading to get her to do that instead of wandering around in the backyard. And when she went inside she was to wave at the front window, but she wouldn't remember that even, and we would sometimes have to wait and wait on the drive for her to remember. Often I was sent back to ring the doorbell and she blundered surprised to the door to see us again, and then I would wait until she remembered to close and lock the door.

What possible use was a person like Shirley, I wondered? What earthly good did she do anyone? Was she a source of joy to her joyless mother or her dachshund? Reverend Sheldon at least seemed a supremely happy man, perfectly at peace with the God who gave him only one child and that child with a defective mind.

On occasion Shirley rode home in another church goers' car. I never knew how the decision was made—it was one of those mysterious adult arrangements—but Shirley would disappear before I had crossed the lawn, clutching my Sunday school papers, proud of the artful manner with which I had swiped crayon color over the breasts of lambs and shepherds. Then my mother would invariably linger, an excruciatingly long time it seemed to me, at the mysterious, Dutch door of a certain cluttered church office in the northeast corner of the U-shaped church complex. I would run back to say goodbye to my friend Elaine and stumble toward Mother over the lawn and around the clutches of talking and laughing adults. There she held a long, rambling conversation with another one of these Midwestern refugees, a white-haired, dapper old lady named Molly C., the church treasurer, the denizen of this dark den, who rarely came out of the small church office and never stopped her work, after church service, of briskly ripping open the tops of white church offering envelopes. Each envelope had a devotional message printed in purple on them. "'Is our love only lip-service or 'tip-service'? Do we answer with our whole being? Our offering of money for Our Christian World Mission is an expression of our love for Christ.' Mrs. Richard Vitz, Lima, Ohio," read the back of one such envelope. The speed with which she ripped them apart made it seem as though the money inside had to be given air, even though the envelopes had small holes in them. She ripped them apart with a wrist movement almost as though they were crisp green bean pods and she were wearing an apron and sitting in a chair on her front porch at home in Ohio, snapping them into a bowl for her families' supper. When the envelope ripped open and she dumped the coins in the basket, she used her hand to spread them out and plucked out any bills.

There, on the lid of the Dutch door, my mother would stand, interminably it seemed, gossiping about their families and the weather. They discussed everything, in their remote, vague manner, through the open door even on the coolest winter mornings, when the desert had winds whipping through from the Pacific and the thermometer reached freezing, when the dormant Bermuda lawn, which was yellow in the winter, was covered with a frost you could slide on. One of their favorite topics were various storm systems which were about to sweep through western Ohio. My mother might be chirping on about how the storm had already downed telephone poles and caused wrecks in Wabash, Huntington, or South Bend, Indiana just the day before, Saturday, when she would have spoken by telephone to one of her sisters. Molly would proclaim in a wavering, nasal farmer wife's voice: "Looks like the folks are going to face a hard winter this year, Juney."

I grew to hate that voice and its concern for the weather affecting people who lived so far away in Indiana; I hated the way it whipped up sympathy in my mother who was so obdurate in the face of my continuous and orchestrated attempts to get sympathy from her. I might rip my knee open in a terribly fall and she would examine it with true indifference. Why, I was her own flesh and blood and she didn't give a darn, she would rather talk to stupid old Molly C.?

Why, I wondered, didn't Molly or my mother notice me outside the church office and pay attention to my evident needs? I, the pitifully cute little girl, the person who was suffering now because of their selfish need to talk to each other, desperately wanted to go home and play with my dolls and change out of my scratchy slip and my Sunday dress and tight black patent leather shoes, polished with Vaseline. I, who was left spinning around the long line of painted porch poles down the open hallways, suffered. The adults spoke mysteriously about scary things like the death of people. While I was around! Suffering!

Then I might see Reverend Sheldon. His black robes flying like bat wings as he passed over the lawn and the brilliant desert sun beaming off his bald head, he might be arranging a game of basketball at the courts at the back of the church. Reverend Sheldon's hairless skull, shining and red, came to an odd peak at the top, and he walked so quickly that it seemed he was urgently angry at someone. His legs were very long and in his robes, his shoulders looked huge and his arms mighty. There was an energetic way he grasped the hand and the forearm of male newcomers and old friends; he greeted people in a way that contrasted completely with Mrs. Sheldon's cold and detached how-de-do. She was terrifying with a long gray face and heavy lidded eyes, big jowls and a humorless attitude. Mother, as always, knew the state and county where Mrs. Sheldon hailed from. I wouldn't have wanted to remember this place if I could.

I fled back to Mother's protection if some adult should look like they had taken notice of me as I spun the church poles, kicked them with the toe of my dress shoes, over and over, and I thought they might wonder if I needed a 'talking to.' I was terrified of seeing the minister walk by while they talked and talked. I never wanted him to notice me. I don't think he ever did, though I worried about it obsessively. Why didn't they, why didn't my mother especially, have the good sense to stop talking and take care of my desperate needs?

"This one will do my brother in. His rheumatism's worse," Molly would say.

And the use of the phrase "the folks," on Molly Cameron's part, mystified and then rankled me. How, I wondered, could her folks actually be the same folks as ours, for I was certain that we weren't related to this pleasant, but undereducated, nasal-voiced, penny-counting denizen of the church office who took very little interest in me. As a person. She would say cheerfully, "The folk's will be out here in a week now, Juney," and her voice betrayed the increasing desperation she felt to see 'the folks' come out to Arizona. Living so long on this dry edge of the earth had been a little much for her; and I wonder now what anguish she felt every time her relatives went back to the old farm without her and her little pride with her place in the strange West must have been weak compensation for the loss of friendships and established course of her life, pots of jam at the county fair and known plants and animals, that she felt every time she was left in this strange place called Arizona by them, by "the folks."

I watched as the southern leaning winter sun spun gold on her nylons, turning her thick leg to sparkling joints, tan below her polyester skirt, and I watched her sweater-wrapped elbow as she cranked the arm of an adding machine and slid coins here and there, jotting notes on scrap paper and entering tallies in bookkeeping tables, in great old Congregation Annual Ledgers. She liked to work jigsaw puzzles in her spare time and cook highly inauthentic Mexican dishes using Velveeta cheese.

When was I going to be privy to the jokes of these people? Their banter seemed impossible to follow. I was not Midwestern. I couldn't follow their obscure jokes and serious concerns with chickens.

Had Molly ever attended church services herself? I felt that maybe at Christmas or Easter she would have, did probably step in the doors silently and take a seat, only for a short period of time, that perhaps one of the folding chairs at the back of the church was set aside especially for her. But I had never truly seen her there. Perhaps she did this when children like me were in Sunday school classes? I was dubious about that, though; shouldn't I have seen her once in the fourteen years we attended services; her only god seemed to be the god of counting the change in the envelopes, or the god of jigsaw puzzles, and "the folks." I think I might have glimpsed her in the kitchen area, through the door that opened right before service. Perhaps she slipped in unobserved sometimes. Because she sat with her cup of coffee in the darkened church office tallying the collection and wrapping the change. She knew everyone and they knew her.

Other ladies would sometimes walk by Molly's den. Then my mother and Molly and this new lady would begin again sharing all their news with each other. The additional process agonized me further.

The shrill sound of the voices of the church ladies haunted me, and I was only too conscious of the similar sound in my own speech later. I was deeply ashamed to hear it. But I made a judgment about the way they spoke, their awful nasal twang, the way the said "worsh" instead of "wash"; what utter stupidity, what madness, yet I can still hear them saying that and can hear and do still try to correct myself repeating that sound; my judgment was of the way they spoke words; I damned them for their way of pronouncing words, rather than judging them for their deeds on earth or even the meaning and content of the words, a more important judgment of a person. Would I have hated them if they'd had a Russian accent? After all they were nothing if not friendly, open, and trusting. They were good people.

But they were preoccupied with family trivialities and ignored the big issues of the day. Families shared a limited time on earth and people often died mysterious, sudden deaths.

CHAPTER 7

Then death entered our lives due to our own foolishness.

Here I am speaking of the death of a pet turtle from Woolworth's. Flower, as we named her, crept around her plastic bowl patiently enduring her life spent underneath a shell painted red with a pink rose. While planning to give her an overdue bath one day in June, we innocently sprayed her with a garden hose. That hose had spent several hours in the damn frying sun, and water straight from such a hose shoots out in a scalding state. Flower died screaming silently.

We buried her in a green shoebox. It was a well-attended service in the alley, and afterwards we played wagons to get our minds off the terrible thing we had done to poor Flower. I don't know if Blaine Newton attended the funeral or if we accidently told him what had happened while dragging wagons around with him. He lived up the street nearer the park, which was pretty far away, though, and I don't remember anything about him or about the rest of his family and could believe that he lived on his only wholly, if I didn't know that it was improbable for an eight year old to have no kin.

But with dusk on the evening of our murderous accident came the ominous tap, on the backdoor and into our hearts full of guilty remorse. Mother who was always in the kitchen at night, and was tending a roast and some peas, stepped into the den that we had enclosed and looked out under the sash of the window in the back door.

Blaine stood on the back step, looking pious and innocent. He was thin, pale, shaved-headed, and had deeply sunken eyes. We knew him to be entirely evil.

Oh, Mother, draw back from the door and turn out the porch light! Make Blaine go away, please. If my writing is plastic, the least I can do is not repeat what Blaine did to us. But I must. I can't forget this story as much as I want to. This story will not leave me; it remains to haunt and torment.

"Can I help you?" Mother asked him as he stood on the same porch landing where I had toddled as a child, watching Mother hang out clothes when the scorpion almost killed me.

"I have a message for your kids," said Blaine. I think he realized after these words came out of his mouth that the tone was wrong. He didn't sound friendly or interested in us. He sounded down-right hostile.

"Well, we're about to eat," said Mother dubiously. At least she read him right the first time he spoke.

"An important message," implored Blaine. This time he made his voice sound like he was our friend and he needed to tell us something vital. "They're gonna want to know what I know. It's something good."

"Oh. All right then. Meredith, there's a little friend here from up the street. He wants to tell you something good, he says."

We followed Meredith out of the kitchen, to the door at the back of the enclosed garage. We crept out and closed the door behind us.

The Sunday evening alley and sky cloaked itself in varying intensities of an indigo darkness. Palm trees and cypresses donned shaggy black overcoats; I could see them shaking in the breeze. There was barely any yellow light besides the merest hint of the setting sun and the cone from the porch light, forming a golden bell jar around us. The hot air hugged us as it always did in June. We should have been happy because school was ending in another week, but having killed our turtle that day, our thoughts were still thoroughly morose.

"What do you want?" asked Meredith sullenly to the boy who was younger than her.

"Hey, I've got some great news for you!" he said. He looked crazed when he said it. What was crazy was the way his voice quivered with excited evil and the way he tilted his chin up.

"We don't want any news from you," said Jack belligerently.

"What? You don't want good news? Great news?"

"What news is this?" said Meredith suspiciously. Her eyes which usually squinted at people were nothing but slits when they aimed at Blaine.

"Guess what?" said Blaine hollowly, "Your turtle isn't dead after all. You buried her alive. I went out in the alley a few minutes ago and I dug her up outta that little green Thomas McCann baby shoebox you buried her in and if you want her back you have to give me a quarter." His face beamed with pride at the just nature of his request. As only the truly evil do, he realized happily that our guilt about what had happened to our turtle could be used against us to put us into a tight bind. We wanted our turtle alive and would be vulnerable to anyone claiming that she was alive. The absolute power he had over us enthralled him.

Meredith, Jack and I looked at Blaine with absolute horror. We never thought to tell him to show us the now-living, dug-up turtle. We believed his lie. And this was where I realized that Meredith's wisdom had limits. We were stunned because we had buried her in exactly such a shoebox. The detail confused us, since we believed he hadn't been at the funeral.

"How's that?" asked Jack.

"Where's she?" asked Meredith. She neglected to say show her to us and you'll get your quarter.

"I got her. I got her all right. At my house. Pink rose on its back. Red shell. Just how you bought her at F.W. Woolworth's, except she's live again. She ain't dead anymore. Bring me out a quarter and I'll give her back to you. Otherwise, you lost her."

The description was apt. How did he know that the turtle was buried in a green shoebox unless he dug her up? Was one of our friends who had been at the funeral an evil person secretly? These confusing thoughts clouded our judgment. We never thought of him digging up the dead turtle and lying about it being alive.

"Wait here," said Meredith urgently.

She and Jack went inside. I somehow stayed on the step to see the horrible eager evilness of Blaine Newton, the awful avarice of humans, even small humans with small scale plots against their fellow man. The glee they feel when hurting others and the sneaky thoughts they have about the tragedies of others and how those tragedies can be turned to benefit the onlooker play across their faces. All of that showed on Blaine's long, paddle-like face. Even his freckles seemed evil to me. If you connected them across his features, I thought, you'd have an icky-looking dirty old spider's web. He was Huck Finn gone horribly, horribly wrong.

It is a writer's job to stay on the step with the Blaines of the world and face them down. You've got to get in with the worst of human nature and see it for what it really is. No amount of religion would change a person like Blaine. He was being born every day all over the good earth's continents. There were hundreds of millions of Blaines. I guess you could respect them for their ability to calculate how to benefit off of another person's agony. In a charitable view he taught us a good lesson.

"How do we get our turtle back?" Meredith asked once she had handed over the quarter.

Blaine took the quarter and dropped backward off the step with a happy hitch and a leap. He ran from us in a sort of kicking gleeful, joyful scramble, loose, wild, uninhibited and evil.

"Where's our turtle?" cried Jack.

"Ha, ha, I was fooling you!" Blaine shrieked. We couldn't see him, thank goodness. He was running with our quarter toward the dark alley.

When he was almost around the patio wall, he shouted back at us: "Your turtle is really dead! I fooled you!"

On a night when the sky was a black expanse of terror the huge stadium lights dimmed even the pinpricks of stars light-years away, and we kids sat on icy bleachers at the southern end of the field in the Knot Hole Club. A teeny set of bleachers with the whole concrete stadium around us in the night, only the north end showing the darkness place. There I sat with strangers, my brother and sister always left me. I found a place near any other little girl. And one night I was hit in the head with a candied apple, it was red candy. It hit hard, leaving candy in my hair, but bouncing off to hit some other kid's head. Other times people put chewed gum in your coat pocket. You had to ask to go to the bathroom. You walked across the edge of the field when the monitors thought it was safe, there being no team near the end zone. You had to walk under the dirty stadium to an old stinky bathroom for kids only.

We watched Johnny Lee, the diminutive son of the band director as he did various dances and twirled a baton. His blonde hair tossed about and he had very tanned skin that presented a high contrast with his white uniform. The uniform had a V-shape to the chest that made his waist seem unusually thin even for a skinny boy. He would throw off his hat. The hat had a chin strap and stood up like a white bloom of fuzzy yeast. He strutted around the stadium under the bright lights.

Johnny Lee scampered to the sideline and the stadium roared to greet the school wildcat inside its cage. Back then, back in those long gone times, my childhood in the desert, the university kept a live bobcat, a little tufted-eared cat with a snarl that never faded in a cage; the song leaders hoisted the cage on their shoulders with a litter and carried it around the football stadium at halftime. One of those song leaders got the job of jabbing the cat with a stick to make it snarl and the commentator held the mike up to hear the snarl good and loud, and the crowd roared even louder. Somehow that showed our Arizona fighting spirit.

Girls shot pencils around as they tried to twirl batons, too.

I had to walk slowly to get down or up the stadium seats. The crowd shouted ARIZONA! BEAR DOWN! Louder and louder.

Driving into the setting desert sun with the red taillights of cars backing up for blocks in front of us, on a night which was scoured by a cold wind and short wispy gray clouds, aligned like iron filings.

"I don't think," began Mother apprehensively, "that this big backup in the traffic down here is at all for the Boy Scout Pow Wow. That doesn't seem to be logical. Well, by cracky, Boy Scouts are popular, but this certainly has about it something very different than a gathering of Scouts. Of course, some of them could be going to the hamburger stands down here, well yes, those are pretty popular with the teenagers or they could be bowling; I think one of the alleys is...in this vicinity. Golly, there is no lying about it, some wild looking kids are jumping around in those hot rods and flashy cars. These aren't Boy Scouts, in my book. Say, I think this crowd is heading for the Apache. A Drive-In. A Friday night show! I don't approve of Hollywood any more than I do the recording industry, but, goodness now... this is special. Look what's showing, kids! Just look! By cracky, it's a Robert Mitchum western. I'll have to check the paper for the times of it, if I haven't wrapped the coffee grounds in the movie section already. A Robert Mitchum western! Well! I didn't know he had made anything recently at all. A western, too."

We slowed in the line of flashy hot rods and trucks and station wagons waiting to get into the drive-in. My father gripped the wheel in aggravation. "Let me know if there's an opening to get out of the goddamn lane, will you? We'll be stuck here for ten minutes if I don't get out of this lane."

"I want to see them throw the ashes into the bonfire at the Pow Wow," said Jack. "I don't wanna be late to that. My cub leader said we had to be on time and rally around our meeting place at seven."

"Sit back and relax. We won't miss a thing," Dad promised. "We've got half an hour still."

In front of us a bunch of kids performed a Fire Drill, running around the car and changing seats.

Dad glanced in his side view mirror. "I hope nobody comes along and clips the door off that car. Crazy goddamned kids!"

Mother didn't seem the least bit worried about watching some of the Robert Mitchum movie while we were stuck in the backed up lane, missing the Boy Scout Pow Wow.

I was stunned to look up and see a shot of a stampede of cows in the sky. The mass of cattle stabbed their horns and hooves up and down in the water, mooing and kicking as they plunged down a muddy embankment. A close-up of several bored, then frightened, cowboys filled the screen.

Those in the cars were trying to watch the opening scene of the stampede before they'd paid and they stared wide-eyed and with slack jaws at the huge screen boiling over with wild cattle and large cowboys smoking and slumping in their saddles. I watched in the waning light, in the headlight glare, a Mother in the back of a sedan who was changing her baby's diaper and never once looked at the child who similarly had wrenched his head around to look through the gap in the seats at the tall drive-in theater screen and its massive flaying cows tossing their horns. The writhing mass of stampeding cattle mesmerized everyone.

"I think those cows are gettin' rustled," said Meredith. "That's what the whole thing is about. I got it figured out."

"Yah, those are the bad guys," Jack explained. "They're stealing the herd from the good guys."

"Probably the whole movie is about the attempt to find the rustlers and get the herd back. That is a mystery and it would have a lot of adventure and suspense, too," Mother explained. "That's an old plot line. I suppose it's kinda worn out."

"There's the chuckwagon! Look at it go."

"The horses have gone wild."

"The horses are crashing the chuckwagon into the river!"

"I suppose we'll really have to see about this show next weekend. Yes, might be good. I'll research the hours. Well, I suppose sometime you can learn some lore and legends of the old west that way, stampedes and branding, square dances and railroads. Westerns are a waste of time in a way, but I think Robert Mitchum is about the best of the actors in those inferior roles."

"Ah, you just think he's pretty," said our father deprecatingly.

"What a thing to say!"

"We've broken free," he exclaimed, as we finally got to the front and could pass the drive-in.

"Awww," said Meredith, "we're missing the rustler movie!"

"Is this the goddamn turn?" Father asked everyone.

"Yes, it does seem to be the spot," said Mother, sadly abandoning the twelve foot high image of Robert Mitchum.

We had barely gotten out at the fairground's dirt parking lot when several gangs of Scouts dashed by screaming bloody murder. There were screaming boys in almost every direction you looked, snaking between cars, lolling out of windows, punching each other in the beds of trucks.

"Goodness, these boys are terribly wild out here. I don't know if it's a good idea to get them all together in one place like this. Are the boys you meet with in your cub den as wild as this, Jack? Ten times worse! I think I'll have to reconsider having them into the house for that electrical badge. I don't think Baden-Powell had this in mind when he started his organization. He imagined a lot of calm little boys having fun with puzzles, reading, organizing stamp collections, doing chores happily and singing songs around a campfire. For fun they might perhaps row happily on a lake, but not the hysterical nutty bunch that you have here. Where do they think they're going with all this running and dashing? I don't think this is safe."

"It's not very safe," Father concurred as two boys slammed into him, spun around and ran off without a word.

"It's very dark out here, even with all these bonfires scattered about. Why they are asking for broken necks. That's a very scary situation. Why doesn't someone point out that the boys are in danger of stabbing their eyes out with those sticks? By cracky, that isn't a safe activity. Not one iota of safety."

Boys ran everywhere, every which way, in the dark March night at the Rodeo Grounds. There the Boy Scouts held their Pow Wow, or wasn't it a State Jamboree?, under the desert night sky, all pinpricks of silver light in a velvety hush.

A great gated entrance loomed over our heads with signs of Southwestern Indians and cowboy lore. This gate ushered us into the crowded, dark and horrible dusty fairgrounds. Dark blue uniforms of the small cub scouts, olive green uniforms of older boys.

After Jack rallied at the flagpole and trooped off with his own cub den we walked on together. The dust rising in thick walloping whips from our feet in front, settling on the bottom of our jeans. It inundated my moccasins.

Boys screaming instructions to their mothers, fathers, and uncles, boys enduring their mother's fussiness, hair combing in the rear view mirror of the family truck, the mothers tightening the Wolf ring which slipped up on the bright yellow tie and held it on the neck. Dark blue uniforms running everywhere and shouting. In the crisp night the excited sticky smell of cotton candy and roasted peanuts floated in the air with the carnival barkers shouts. Hay bales here and there. A barking dogs. Dust. Laughing grandfathers. Poles, fires, and ambulances veering around enormous iron Quonset huts.

We saw in the sky a great log, brought down from the White Mountains and to this were lashed boards, thick handmade ropes, ladders, and rings. The huge log was being grappled and ridden by hundreds of boys with mud and tar as playthings, ropes swinging, ladders leaning over water, and in my mind the obstacles of the boys wove in a pattern of great dark import. A picture more complex than describable of small boys crawling, grasping robes, swinging, wiggling through the barrels and hoops, the obstacles of life in a never ending plain of struggling, battling Scouts. Some fell into the net below, some scurried across the log, or swung from the rings.

A huge tug-a-war between troops.

"Enter the Indian village," shouted a Troop Leader who was imitating one of the carnival barkers, "see how the Apache lived in our world! See a live demo of Boy Scout activities, and enter our authentic Indian village teepee! See the boys completing detailed leather working on teeny saddles!"

Knocking people aside, clambering over rails and obstacles to recite the Boy Scout Pledge together in the night sky, lit by the booming bonfires, ash floating everywhere, landing on my face, my neck, my hair. Boys knocking people aside and running into walls with grit and determination.

A spunky campfire sing-a-long woke the nearly dead grandfathers. A mascot of a mountain lion punched the night air–he alone was warm.

"We carry our friendship with us in these ashes from campfires shared with Scouting comrades in other lands," said the Troop Leader gravely into the blurring microphone. The bonfire crackled fiercely. Several boys stepped forward nervously and dumped the contents of their boxes into the fire. "May the joining of the remains of those now dead fires with these leaping flames bring to mind once more the unbroken chain of fellowship that binds Scouts and Guides around the world. These ashes contain the essence of Scout campfires. Rekindle the essence. Ashes are sprinkled into the flames of the next campfire. Take this into your heart and only those present take these ashes."

Some wild boys began throwing popcorn bags into the bonfires, "Take these! Make em damn ashes!"

"Oh dear, dear, boys, boys!" said an adult guide, admonishing them as they dashed away.

There! There ran the same zany boys chasing the fire engine! Crazy ambulance arriving, and running through the crowd and ready to set up a silly scene in the great hall.

We sat on tan metal folding chairs. Exactly like those in my church.

"Whater we in here for?" I asked.

"Oh, they're going to put on a show of some sorts. I don't know what. Maybe singing again or something. Should be good," said Mother reassuringly.

"I didn't like the singing outside."

A terrible team of Scouts dressed as doctors arrived and began consulting over the case of an unseen patient.

"Bring in the patient, will yah," one doctor said suddenly.

A gurney burst onto the stage.

The doctors pulled sausages from the patient's abdomen, banged him repeatedly on the head with a fake hammer, used great saws and drills and adzes on his ingrown toenail.

A teeny Scout with long mussed-up hair and wild eyes snuck out from under the gurney, so that only the screaming audience saw him. He started taking tools under the gurney and stealing the sausages.

Finally the startled doctors noticed him and chased him about the stage with the hammer.

Perhaps the prospect of tacos, an especially favorite food, made me so happy the evening after the Boy Scout Pow Wow that I invented a favorite game of mine—it had no name–whose purpose was to cross each row of large rocks in my mother's rock garden, she collected those on our trips to abandoned ranches and mines in Arizona, and I discovered that I liked to work my way across the stones, steadily and carefully, turning sharply and expertly at the end of the row and drop to the lower file of rocks, as though I were on a steep switchback track, Bright Angel Trail, for example, like those I had seen in the book _Brighty of the Grand Canyon_. There was a certain degree of confusion in my mind about whether I was a mule or a burro; I often confounded the two. But since mules and burros, especially those in the Grand Canyon, were surefooted, I must be, too; I made it a goal of mine never to let my 'hooves' miss touching a single rock, no matter which way my shoe would have to turn to do it, or if I would have to jam the toe of my sneaker in a hole, or twist my heel half way round. In fact, the more contorted the angle necessary, the better, for what I enjoyed most was the imperative, the absolute importance of touching each rock in a precise, unerring sequence. A large greenish hunk of copper ore, which the donkeys dropped down on, had to be followed by the standing slab of sandstone, a very tipsy platform, next to which there was a smooth brown rock, rather like an overcooked, oversized meatloaf. These were my precarious trails. If I had to wobble pigeon-toed along the edge of the white granite chunk like Charlie Chaplin, or straddle two knobs of basalt sideways, this increased my pleasure.

But the rock garden was crowded with at least five rows of twenty rocks each; weaving my way down without a single misstep was taxing. And if I slipped and touched the lower trail, it wasn't enough to simple replace my foot, I would have to start again at the top, all the while steeling myself for the need to make the next trip down perfectly.

In time the game became a horrible obsession and my missteps would lead me to a kind of nervous breakdown. I imagined by missing a single rock that I had actually fallen into the canyon and been crushed. If I had only fallen a short distance, I was certain I had broken a leg and my owner planned to shoot me. I limped away and hid behind the guava bushes.

In a process similar to the slow percolation of water through desert soil, I learned things, experienced life, noted details that perhaps were useful for a writer, but, perhaps because of the time involved, became ultimately irrelevant. But somehow in the late stages of my enlightenment, I tucked those worldly tidbits into a dusty and disused corner of my brain along with trivialities: various interesting dirges involving ghostly fandangos at desert forts, the lists of enchanting names for the string of donkeys that I thought I joined clip-clopping through the Grand Canyon with me, and the rituals I hoped to initiate for clubs which I created–the Secret Eye Club was one–which no one ever joined. I can now round these up as strays or let them wander freely over a landscape of the dusty western past.

I worked for the mines of Arizona, processing and collecting sand rubies in the band under the classroom windows where rain from the eaves of our school had left pure sand. With evaporative cooling falling on my sweaty back, striving in those collective scraping societies, I received a sense of the value of soil, and the value of colleagues. Enterprising children secretly smuggled their parents' used prescription bottles—vaporizing ointment, glass vials with stoppers, Duraglass green pharmaceutical bottles, and glass baby aspirin bottles with pink tops—to school and planned to fill them to the brim with rubies, which were easy to find and which I worked eagerly to uncover, gladly kneeling in the sand for all my lunch break to find the little insignificant gems, perhaps imagining that I sought the treasure Peg, the church lady, had been so sure existed in the desert, and never asking for my share of the bounty. And I didn't complain when sand rubies as a playground game fell out of favor. I accepted my fate and found something else to do with my time.

And a time of being absolutely, frighteningly, alone arrived. At the urging of her librarian friends, most of whom had had nervous breakdowns, my mother determined that she would acquire a master's degree in library science at the university. One of her needed classes in the first semester met past the hour at which I left school two days a weeks, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Meredith and Jack stayed later. Jack for another hour and Meredith's junior high was two miles away, and it took her until four to reach our house.

I was warned not to be hysterical about this development. Coming home alone, I was told in no uncertain terms, was certainly no big deal, and something I needn't cry about. I wouldn't be given a key to the house, either. I should let myself in the unlocked sliding glass door on the porch in the same way Shirley Sheldon had. Locking the door was taboo. Mother reasoned that if I were given a key to the house I would show off, show it to other kids who would realize I was a latch key kid, as they later called us. Mother, being one of the few mothers going back for an advanced degree therefore not staying at home all day every day, was ashamed of her position. I didn't know anything about her achievements; I only wanted to come home without terror on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But no one relented. The burden of fear was to be mine and mine alone. From this I learned that a writer must be prepared to accept all burdens of fear as they arrive, because fear delivers the writer to a place where they are forced to evaluate life and life's worth.

This time of being a latch-key kid, arriving home to an empty and unlocked house, quickly evolved into a time of great religiosity in my life. Who knew what fiend could have secreted himself in our closets during the day? I needed religion to comfort me in this time of great fear. I prayed fervently for help in overcoming the terror of entering that empty place with the sliding glass door unlocked for the entire day and twice a week I entered that Valley of the Shadow of Death.

The dreadful yellow chenille curtain that I had to sweep aside to get into my house terrified me. It, more than anything else, caused me to seek religion's solace. Mother insisted that this curtain at the sliding glass door be drawn shut when she left, even if it meant I had to come into a dark house. I often jammed my shoulder against the sliding glass handle to shift it, and as the door opened I would leap back, thinking that any mad man lurking behind the curtain would expect me to step in immediately and of course I would see the knife first as it plunged down. What I was going to do if ever I saw the knife was less certain. But I never saw one, and then the waiting game began. I had to wait out the murderer who was wondering what I was doing in the backyard on the other side of the curtain. I would watch the curtain and if I were lucky it might be a windy day and I could watch the fabric suck into the room and if I bent down I could see in and look for the madman with the knife. I roamed around the yard watching the curtain and saying The Lord's Prayer. I sat on the picnic table watching the curtain. Once I even waited for Jack to come home and pretended that I had already been inside when I hadn't. I had been outside watching the curtain.

I entered when eventually the need to use the restroom outweighed the fear of being stabbed as I entered. At other times I was simply dying for a cookie or a stack of peanut butter and honey saltine crackers and had to sweep my arm in and bundle the curtain in order to get past and come into the shadowy den.

As I enter every room I switched on the light, sometimes reaching around the door before I set foot in the room itself. (The Maniac would only be able to hack off my arm. I would deny him my torso.) It was hard for me to walk around the house with its many ticking clocks while I was making that walk alone, matching my single beating heart with the stronger metal hearts of the timepieces everywhere eating away at my life, relentlessly killing me. Each clock seemed like another animal's heartbeat. I did the walk around swiftly so that the maniac would not be able to catch me. I checked every closet. Especially my brother's. I turned on all the closet lights. I turned on the TV and all the radios. I got the record player out of the living room closet and played the old 45's that were blue and red and had songs about Mornin' Chores. I turned on the lights and opened the curtains to watch out the big front window for my brother to come across the gravel yard an hour later. It was the longest hour in my life. I was sure everyone who passed were ax murderers, looking for a lonely house to target. My heart might have stopped if the doorbell rang or the black rotary phone at the back of the piano had ever rang—thank goodness they didn't. As soon as I saw my brother I would start turning off the radios and the portable record player. I would run into the den, turn off that radio and sit in front of the TV. I didn't try to explain the lights that were on even in the closets.

The one thing that comforted me greatly, besides the TV being on and the radio being on and all the lights on in the closets, was to paste S and H green stamps into the wrinkly saving books. Reverently, hopeful for the mental peace of mindless work, I would carefully fill a bowl of water and carry it to the chrome table, sit on the chrome and vinyl chair, so that my back wasn't to the creepy kitchen window, and there I would anoint the stamps with water, counting the spaces I needed to fill in the next line, ripping the perforated stamps, aligning them after they were wet, and smoothing them carefully.

Dust smears my town. One beaming yellow sun drowns in the smear. Two flags beneath the sun begin the trouble.

There's my school. There are the flags. There's my mother turning back, back toward our small brick home, back toward a sink full of bubbles and breakfast dishes and the George and Square radio show, leaving me—a pale child with large brown eyes, short blonde hair, and a gap between my new front teeth—by myself, scuffing to first grade on a hardened mud rut. There's the creosote bush near the rutted path and the snake hole lurking at its base; my older brother once crammed his bad penmanship there. I see the hole and the bush and the sun and the flags, the American and the arc of happy ray-beams that Arizona salutes, flapping halfway down their pole.

Flags belong at the top of poles; Meredith draws them that way, and when they fly high they make me feel proud like something good about Arizona on national TV or the singing of hymns in church or the reports of the defeat of the communists in Viet Nam. But I don't ask the crossing guard at Fifth Street about the flags; with his badge and his steel bar he looks far too fierce. Instead I take the sidewalk entrance past the flagpole peering up at the low flopping cloth. Has the janitor forgotten to raise them? Why hasn't anyone at school pointed out his mistake? If the janitor has forgotten, surely Mr. Rykken, our principal, will punish him; he's strict; in his desk he keeps a two-inch thick paddle. But has he arrived yet? Behind a prim round privet his office does look dark. Is he inside watching, angry that I linger on the steps, that I stare up at the flags? The thought terrifies me. I scurry past his wicked window down the long open corridor to the playground.

At the water fountain on the playground I fall in line behind that nice big girl named Eloise Moreno. When Eloise spins around and swipes a dribble off her chin, our eyes meet, and I feel brave, so I ask about the flag. Eloise leans against the brick wall and says, confidentially, "They do that if somebody's dead."

A moment later the morning bell delivers its angry, clanging summons. Trudging to class in a very straight line, I think about what Eloise said. If someone from the school's dead, I hope it's Mr. Rykken. Although that's a bad thing to think, it's also too good to ever happen.

My teacher, Miss Flynn, leads the class into the room. At the back of the line I think my everyday morning prayer: may I never see an s ahead in a word, for I have a lisp and it makes people snicker.

They're inside, squealing at the teddy bear on his high shelf in the corner. Dressed like a pirate for Halloween with a black eye patch and a cardboard cutlass, his hat has a Jolly Roger on it, and he sits atop a box that is a boat. "The janitor and Miss Flynn dressed him that way," says Robert Ruiz, my friend across the aisle. "I saw them when I came back after school." Miss Flynn swishes by, sailing a paper with numbers to circle onto our desks. I think about asking Robert about the flags—why they hang low—when a thin freckled hand taps me on the shoulder. "Don't forget your speech therapy," says Miss Flynn.

On my way to my speech class a crooked dust devil swirls down from the empty desert lot, from the land everyone says Howard Hughes owns. He's a freak, that Howard Hughes; his nails curl ten inches long. Thinking of him, with the whirlwind around me, I dash for the door, and although the knob turns, the door stays down. When I try it again, a foot in the gap helps me snake my way through, but the door slams with a loud bang behind.

The little room is dark. There's light from a high, west-facing window, but the bare bulbs surrounding the set of dusty mirrors are switched off. That's a second surprise. I expect to see Mr. Harris in front of the lighted mirrors in a child's chair with his knees nearly at his ears. His dark eyebrows and his dark eyes and the way his hands caress the pages of books pleases me. But no one is there. The room is empty.

I sit and smooth the pleats of my skirt, trying to remember the beginning of Mr. Harris' lessons about the sounds of words and how to make them. He gives me rhyming hints to conquer my fear of the words that have letters I can hear in my head but not say out loud. "A final s," he likes to say, "should never be a nettle, remember that the sound is like a teeny hissing kettle." His eyes are so gentle and nice whenever he says that rhyme for the fearful lisping plurals: moths, slides, and rustlers. During my last session the past Friday, he recited his rhyme about the r being a kitten that purred deep in my throat and I thought that I would like to hold his hand and show him how I pretend to be the burro, _Brighty of the Grand Canyon_ , on the rocks beside my home. But he said such a strange thing then. "Do you know about the everlasting arms of God?" he asked, staring at the floor. "They can comfort you if ever you feel small." I began to ask, "Do you feel small?" but stopped myself because small began with an s and I hadn't wanted to lisp. Now I want to say the word small and his name as well, with a little kettle hiss on the end, for I plan to be better at every sound that day.

Mr. Harris keeps a tin filled with pumpkin candy. I can take some anytime. I search for it and find it with its black panther crouching on the lid. My fingers grasp one crescent-shaped orange slab. "Around the ragged rock the rugged rustlers ran." I repeat that phrase into the mirror and lick the cloying candy once. "Cake, cookies, candies." I practice that too. Then holding the candy between my thumb and forefinger, I daub it on my lips as though I am a starlet in front of my dressing mirror, all unready in my underwear.

For the first time, and with alarm, I notice a row of rag mops and empty buckets. The room is a broom closet. The mops, like evil men, stand at attention, awaiting orders. I shove my chair backward and flee.

Outside everything's better. The morning sun shines, yellow and round. A tranquil choir of wind carols in the pines. Quiet soothing pines, content with the plain brown birds pecking underneath their boughs. I walk on the sunny strip of the open school corridor, taking an interest in a steady stream of ants that disappear into a concrete crevice; small bits of candy dropped on their trail enrage and excite them. Sitting near the ants on a low brick wall, I chew my candy until my milkman, Mike, roars by in a big green truck. I jump up then to see him, and the shamrock, and the leprechaun on the side of his truck.

"Hi, Mike!" I leap up on the wall and wave.

"Oh, Mike!"

"Come back!"

Mike's gone, but a penny of my milk money from my pocket strikes bright ringing sounds on the poles under the overhang. Ta-ting-ding. Ta-ding-ting. I do that for a while. Then I swing some figure eights. Leaning out far, like a lady I've seen at the circus, I notice someone at the far end of the school. It's a janitor rubbing one hand with a red rag.

My collar tightens against my throat. I pull myself behind the pole, then peek out. The janitor tucks the rag in his back pocket and strides straight for the school office.

Back. Back to the speech therapy room. But where to hide? A large paper chart of an open mouth with a graveyard of teeth and a raw red tongue hangs at a tilt on yellowed tape at the side of a filing cabinet. I batter my way behind. And there, between the chart and the filing cabinet, I cower, listening for the coming footsteps.

A dusty smell of old paper tickles my nose. The big clock on the wall, which has always moved before, doesn't. A sparrow crashes the window and rockets away. The pink plastic dials on the front of Mr. Harris' record player make a funny clown face and a crazy man's face and the face of the man called Dr. Scar on the _Chiller_ TV show. I shudder at the row of threatening mops.

In a flood of light, the door opens. Someone is searching the room. "Come out of there," says an angry woman.

I keep still.

"I can see your shoes. Come out."

I wriggle free. A sour woman blocks the doorway, tucks her blouse into her skirt. "Are you waiting for Mr. Harris?"

I nod. I hate the word yes (with its sinister last s) and never say it.

"Come along," the lady orders.

On the way to the office the lady tugs at the standing collar of her dress and picks at her cuffs. "All this trouble," the lady says with a sniff. "I've got to leave early for lunch. I've got company coming. From Chicago. Do you know where Chicago is?"

I shake my head.

"I didn't think you would. Out here there's no regard for the really important places. New York. Boston. Those are cities. Sometimes I think the entire East Coast of America could fall into the ocean and no one out here would bother to read about it."

"Here she is," the lady announces to a bosomy woman when they enter the office.

"Well," says the bosomy woman, picking up the phone, "our Miss Flynn—" she rolls her eyes upward, "—never collects her mail in the morning."

"Isn't she the oddest bodkin?" says the lady.

The bosomy woman winks. "Sit here," she says. There's a chair beside her desk.

The other lady raps on a door and disappears. That's Mr. Rykken's office. I know it. The lady going in, knocking first, means he isn't dead.

What's the penalty for swinging on the poles? The two-inch thick paddle? I wonder how hard it will hit, and I know I'll find out soon.

"The principal will see you," says the lady, reemerging.

Mr. Rykken at his clean steel desk wakes from a therapeutic trance. His pale gray eyes water; his brown skin stretches into a smile under a mad halo of frowsy, white hair. A cheap print of a young woman picnicking beside a grassy green waterfall is propped on the desk before him, while the room in every corner holds a sense of emptiness, grass-stained golf shoes and a set of encyclopedias, bookmarked with sheets of colored facial tissue. As I sit down in a chair beside his desk, Mr. Rykken scribbles on a pad of paper. When he finishes, he tears off the note and folds it in half. "Did you especially like Mr. Hawwis?"

I nod, frowning; Mr. Rykken makes w's of r's.

"I thought so. I liked him myself. I know you will wemember the many things he taught you."

He glides open his bottom desk drawer. Now it's coming. Now I'll feel the paddle.

Into the drawer he reaches, bringing something out. A box of pencils slides across the desk with the folded note on top.

"Take these to Miss Flynn," he says, tapping them, "I suppose she's short of supplies."

I stare numbly.

"Go on," says Mr. Rykken.

I blunder back two steps.

"Go back to your class."

It's a long way back, a long lonely hall. A boy comes out of the bathroom and pretends to vomit. A ball hits some metal doors hard.

"Has Mr. Harris gone somewhere?" I ask Miss Flynn when I return to my room.

"My God," says Miss Flynn, scanning the note. "Dear, dear Jesus and God." Miss Flynn sits for a moment with her palm pressed to her forehead. "Put the note in your desk. Take it home to your mother. Hurry now. Don't miss your recess."

I leave the room, watching Miss Flynn, whose eyes glisten, whose mouth trembles.

When school ends that day I'm glad. I hurry away my fastest, past the creosote bush and the snake hole, along the hardened mud rut, to where my mother waits. Holding out the note, I run forward. Mother takes it and reads it to herself.

Oh, there's been a lot of tragedy at your school, my mother explains. Do you remember when Miss Flynn cut her hand on the broken aspirin jar? That was her big nervous breakdown. She lives above her father's funeral parlor and isn't that a strange place for a lady to sleep?

And what of Mr. Harris? Well, Mr. Harris disappointed someone. He was from Indiana or his father was or his mother was or he lived there once—my mother, a big Indiana booster, isn't certain. But the big kids will tell you what happened and there's no use trying to hide anything. He harmed himself. He put a bad finish to the end of his life. But we're Congregationalists and should feel nothing but pity about it. I should remember that.

At night my brother sits on the couch beside me. We watch a Jerry Lewis movie on TV and during a commercial he tells me what the older kids know. Mr. Harris hung himself. Whether you get hung or hang yourself it's all the same: your tongue swells up, turns purple, and sticks out between your teeth. When you go into your grave, you become a skeleton, but it takes a lot of time.

That night in my bed I tussle with my sheets. When I go into my grave, I'll become a skeleton, I tell myself. In the dark room the hunched coats in my closet become Mr. Harris teaching Mr. Rykken to say his r's. I hear Mr. Rykken muttering the rhyme about the rugged rustlers; I can't hear what Mr. Harris says. Only my controlled and repetitious thoughts about rabbits living in a shoebox produce sleep.

The next day is Halloween. I ought to be happy because it's my favorite holiday, but instead I feel the consequences of Mr. Harris' death.

In class I circle pumpkins and sing a song about ghosts sitting on a fence. Miss Flynn in a frenzy wants to see us happy and when, after lunch, she announces, "We're going to do something fun this afternoon," all the children clap.

Miss Flynn opens a low cabinet, which none of us have noticed before, and tells a boy to reach in and shunt out a box. The box is long, battered, and dusty.

The class gathers around, giggling, the boys jostling shoulders, the girls hauling up their anklets. I stand with them and try to be excited too, when Miss Flynn flings open the lid.

We look down at a big paper skeleton.

"We'll hold up Mr. Bones," says Miss Flynn, walking to the corner of the room and taking down the pole she uses to open the high windows, "and fly him past the classrooms. We'll create a little mischief! Shall we? Won't that be fun?"

"Yes, yes!" we cry.

With some twine she has in her desk Miss Flynn ties the skeleton to the pole. When it's attached, she lifts the pole and with a bob makes the skeleton bow.

Out of the classroom we trot, shivering in the sudden heat, the sun's intense yellow light. The skeleton swoops against the turquoise sky; it's the frightening standard under which we sally, following Miss Flynn around the side of the building to the north walls. There we sneak, smelling the damp air dropping down upon us from the rooms above. "Shhh," whispers Miss Flynn, "we're ready."

As the paper skeleton soars past the first room, laughter springs up and chairs topple and children dash to the windows. A boy with a pen in his hand climbs onto the window ledge and screams, "Get out of here, you skeleton man!"

"Let's go on," says Miss Flynn.

And together we steal forward to the second classroom and then to the third and then along a whole wing of the school.

I glance up. The skeleton sails above me, its dangling arms reaching down toward me, its smile a vacant sneer. Rattling its way around the world. Where in this world is comfort?

"You're crying," says Robert Ruiz.

"She is," says a girl.

"Why is she?"

"You're really crying, aren't you?"

"She is. She's crying. Look."

"Are you afraid of the skeleton?" asks a boy who's only a blur. "Are you a little scaredy-girl?"

We were shopping in Nogales one rainy day—well, rainy doesn't really describe it. A hurricane came up from the Sea of Cortez. That happens sometimes in the early fall.

Hooray for Mexico! Hooray for the cheap guitars and the dusty piñatas! Hooray for the wind and the rain!

Trash was flying everywhere. We'd barely crossed the border when the wind toppled a rack of ponchos; it flipped them over and spread them out and I thought they were going to take flight like a flock of headless witches.

Three or four people warned us to stop. When we passed that big hotel, Fray Marcos de Niza, a man shouted, "Hey, folks, you're going the wrong way! Don't you know there's a hurricane?"

And Dad shouted back, "Hurricane? What hurricane? I've got rum down here with my name on it."

His rum. The only reason we were with him was that every person, regardless of age, could bring in a fifth, duty-free.

I had the wind in my face. I was skipping on the pavement at my mother's side, smelling the far-off scent of wet creosote and vanilla and wool. I tried to study every shop window we passed, the baskets brimming with jumping beans, the rubbery dolls in sombreros, the onyx chess-sets. Then I saw it, the ultimate window. It had a display of carved wooden fleas spread out on a beautiful blue satin cloth. There they were--fleas reading the _New York_ _Times_ , driving Impalas, feeding chickens, holding hands, and painting the Sistine Chapel. I tugged Mother's dress. "We don't want to do any shopping," she reminded me.

"Keep up!" Dad bellowed, "or I'll sell you to some toothless old hag."

And it wasn't an idle threat to me. I could see the circles of women huddled together in the alleys, hiding the trinkets they sold in their rebozos. They were about to face a hurricane wrapped up like crepe paper surprise balls. I thought if Dad sold me to them they would put me to work selling chicle, and I was worrying about my future when one of my brothers shouted, 'The Constipated Conquistador!' That was what we called a crabby-faced Spaniard in a golden sun helmet that was painted on the backdrop of a photographer's donkey cart. Seeing him meant we were near Red Horse Liquors. Dad thought they had the best price on the demijohns of rum.

Once we were there we gathered under the awning. "No dilly-dallying," said Dad, barreling into the shop after his precious demijohns. Mom opened her purse and handed each of us a quarter. "Go around to the bakeries," she suggested, because they were around the corner on a back street. I should have, but instead I went back after one of those fleas.

I ran back to where I thought the shop with the toys was. Just then the rain began falling. Ice cold drops splashed down on the sidewalk and slammed into me. I couldn't see the shop; I suppose in my rush I had passed it. When I arrived at the bottom of Avenida Obregon, I turned around and ran back. Finally, I found it. The rain was coming down harder then.

There were bells tied to the shop door. When I came in, I surprised the saleswomen who were folding blouses and laughing, their hair pulled back tightly into sleek black buns. One of them was drinking from a tiny cup. I stood at the back of the window and examined the fleas. After many debates with myself, I settled on one dressed in a serape and strumming a guitar.

When I came out with my flea, the rain pounded the sidewalks. Water poured off the awnings; cold streams of it spurted unexpectedly out of drainpipes that led from the high roofs of the old adobes. The street had flooded to the curb; a brown river rushed by. I began running south toward The Red Horse, which was on the other side of the main street. As I ran, I tried to find a way to crossing where the flood was shallow. Pretty soon I came to an intersection where I had to ford deep water or stay where I was. A skinny man in a madras shirt ran toward me hollering, "Juditha! Juditha!" I thought he might offer to carry me. But he didn't. He simply ran past, and for the first time I felt afraid. The water was raging down from the hills. Nogales is like a funnel at the border. I hesitated and then leaped in. I felt it above my knees, warm water. It was moving so swiftly. I waded toward the opposite curb. Halfway across, things began happening. First there were sounds. I heard a glub, glub, glub noise. That was the warning.

The manhole cover shot up. Trash spewed out. There were bottles, toilet paper, and cigarette packages. It all came up. The water rose to my thighs. Then everything that had come up started going down. Round and round, the water just began turning and turning. The sewer guzzled down the contents of the street. For a moment I felt hypnotized by the open sewer hole. It was like a great navel, a link to another world. Even the heavy manhole cover was caught in the maelstrom.

The water tugged at my knees. It was hard to keep going. I lost my footing and fell. I tried to stand up. Then the whirlpool grabbed me and shoved me sideways, toward the sewer hole.

My mouth opened, but no sound came out. For some strange reason I was very careful to hold the little flea out of the water. I slid toward the hole again. I was heading for it and I knew if I went down the sewer I would drown.

What saved me at that moment was that I fell into a pothole. I sat on the muddy bottom of it. The pull of the water jammed me against the lip of the crater. But I wasn't safe. If I didn't go down the sewer, I was still sitting in the middle of the street and there was a real danger that I would be run over by a car.

I thought I would call out to someone. But there was no one to call to. I sat there without moving. There were things floating by. The fruit from a barrel cactus bobbed past looking exactly like a tiny yellow pineapple.

And that was when I saw him. He came down from the hills somewhere above the border, wading through water that was moving so swiftly I could have sworn he was walking down the crest of a waterfall. He wore a long brown cape like a musketeer or a monk or something. The cape dragged the surface of the water. His hair was all matted, dark underneath and light on top. But it was his face that was so unforgettable. He had such a long face. With heavy eyelids and such a grim expression. As he walked he dropped his head forward as though he had looked at the ground so long he could never look up again.

When he came near, I smelled a foul mixture of urine and garbage. The closer he came the more it seemed he was looking down at me. Nothing about my plight seemed to register with him, though, and he didn't speak. Then he stopped. He came near me and leaned down. I shielded my face, thinking he was going to strike me. Instead, his hands slipped under my arms and he lifted me up. Mud and water slid off my legs. He began carrying me. For a moment I thought he might take me to the sewer hole and drop me in. But no. He took me up the street. Near The Red Horse. He set me on the curb. Drenched. My patent leather shoes filled with mud. Grass and twigs. A chewing gum wrapper. Mud in my shorts and grit in my shoes. I washed them. I washed them off, I was thinking, "dip them in the water at the edge of the curb."

I found out he was well-known in Nogales. He was born into a very wealthy family, but he chose to live on the streets. They called him Las Cuerdas Marrones, Brown Strings, after his stringy brown hair and brown ripped cloak.

He was completely sane. It was tragic love that made him behave that way as he had a romance with a girl who rejected him and that drove him to the streets to wander around, dirty and alone. He lived in one of the mines east of the border crossing.

CHAPTER 8

"Now this whole Rodeo parade is not my style. I don't like the glorification of the cowboy culture in America. Who voted them the most popular and important people in history? Why don't they have a miner's parade and festival or a festival of lumberjacks. Yes, they were just as big in Arizona and even bigger. I don't like the hucksterism of it. Selling stuffed donkeys on a stick. What is that about? And banners as though there was a team to root for. Nonsense. The animals don't have a chance at the rodeo. Don't get me started on what they do to the horses and the bulls. That's no way to treat an animal. I'm a farm girl, remember. We didn't treat our animals that way. Whooping around and poking them and spurring them to jump in the air. Laughing when the human conquers them. That's no way to act, by cracky. The whole thing is a phony put up if you ask me. Promotion by a lot of show-off men who don't know a thing about animals."

"Now give me a circus any day. There's an honest display of animals. There's an honest American show, which has people doing things that are dangerous and the animals don't get abused. My dad liked his circus acts, and he tried to do what he saw in the circuses. That was a good challenge. When they came to Indiana, the people were the ones doing hard things in their barns to try to be like the trapeze artists, not using the animals, mostly. They tried to fly through the air and jump and land. Maybe upside down. Dad set up the barn to be like a circus. Made a rope and a haystack. That was good, honest fun."

"Sure, a show is fine. Who doesn't like a show? I think the rodeo mentality is all wrong, though. I'll take you to the parade, because you ought to see it and a few of the carriages and hitches are original, but I don't approve of the hucksterism, and don't you forget it. They ought to be ashamed of turning it into some kind of goofy occasion. Why, the people who come in to town are purely the carnival type of low people. They are no good lowlifes without a care for history of the west. The bands are okay and the historic vehicles, but that's about it. Those ladies in their tight spangled suits, well, that's not the Old West. That's just flash and the old West wasn't flashy. Some people can cheapen anything they put their mind to and turn it into a shoddy joke."

"Look at the way they treat Tombstone. Now there's a case in point when the story was blown out of proportion. There have to a hundred or a thousand better stories you could tell all the live-long day, even about the city of Tombstone itself, not to mention the entire state. But what do people remember? They remember that damn gunfight that was so trivial. The most ridiculous meaningless, corrupt story is all they focus on. Where are the ladies baking pies in the homes in Arizona, I might ask? Why when I worked at the Historical Society you know if people came in and asked for anything on the Tombstone story that old lady Miss Foxx would get so angry. And the other lady, well, she was losing her mind and when someone came in one day and asked for the box of information about the Gunfight at the O K Corral that lady went mad. She had a little gun in her purse and she pulled that gun on the patron! They had to cart her away to the state asylum. That's what Tombstone did to a good librarian. Drove her mad because she couldn't stand the trashing of history. She really knew her Arizona history. But I will say she had to have her hair cut in Phoenix. I thought that was mighty peculiar."

A writer has to listen carefully to the details of any and all stories about crazy librarians. A writer has to collect those stories, herd them together, and not lose a single stray story.

Until a few years ago, a rodeo parade wound through the streets of downtown. Traditionally, the parade morning was a Thursday in late February, the same day when the rodeo events, which we called La Fiesta de Los Vaqueros or the Cowboy's Party, began at the fairgrounds on Irvington. My mother preferred a quiet morning at home watching the parade on TV to hours spent crowding under the store awnings or standing at a curb in the scant shade of our modest high-rises watching the wild spectacle clatter past the banks and department stores. To her, the endless files of mules, ponies, carriages and mountain men which kicked off the rodeo brought with them a large amount of western hokum and bunk. She objected to the street vendors with their armloads of junky stuffed toys and flimsy felt banners, arguing that their morals were as cheap as their trinkets, and she despaired at the corny costumes of the crowd. I disagreed with her on this point; not that I thought the parade atmosphere was dignified, or the costumes of the crowd anything but their own private expression of solidarity with "cowboydom," but the nonsense surrounding the event delighted me, or at least the excitement captured my imagination. A grandma who once a year reached into the back of her closet and dragged out a tattered serape and a sombrero only to sit in a lawn chair at the curb, suck on pumpkin candy, and shout throughout the parade typified a part of the West. I liked her spirit or involvement with the West. To me, the "Real West" was whatever was really happening there.

Mother insisted everything be kept properly sober and dignified; it was a librarian's bowdlerized version of the West that she wanted: chronicles of cattle drives with maps and keys, cheerful statistics about the Navajo, endless charts of mining data. She looked askance at the displays of gaudy and horrific wanted posters; she hated hints of the state's early impropriety. I suppose she felt insecure about the wisdom of her move to Arizona and any taint of the tacky and cheap made her doubt herself.

"The Arizona I knew was a place of quality people. The really wealthy barons you could say who owned vast tracts of land covered with elk. You know I mean the Cowboy Princes, as I said, who you went to school with, kid, if you could only remember them. When I first came to Arizona, there were a lot of quality ranch families who were an exclusive group, yet would rub elbows in the town anonymously in jeans. Many's the time I realized I was talking to someone of real interest and of large land holdings, oh, say, on the San Pedro or the Gila. Well, they were simply the owners of ranches the size of the state of Connecticut, but now you are being sold this vision of the West which glorifies the drug addicts, prostitutes and gun slingers who were nothing but trashy people. I am certainly willing to say all aspects of the West need to be depicted, but there is an unhealthy emphasis on the sensational and the gory. People would do well to know the really interesting details of mining enterprises, say, or the founding of towns. Plenty of upstanding citizens came here, but you wouldn't think it from those who revel in the unwholesome activities of the down and out. Sure, there were disreputable people here, but why dwell upon their dark deeds. I like a good story as well as anyone, kid, but I don't want this place to seem to be nothing but cowboys."

Notwithstanding Mother's disapproval, our parents took us to several rodeo parades over the years where we roistered on the streets, displaying our cocky faith in the uniqueness of our Arizona upbringing and gazing open-mouthed upon the eccentric vehicles and characters of what undoubtedly was a cartoonish version of Old Arizona. For hours gap-toothed prospectors, flaming prostitutes, and a twenty-mule team pulling the payload from El Dorado jolted by in what local boosters claimed was The World's Longest-Running Non-mechanized Parade.

I loved the parade. I'd like to believe others loved it too. Once I glimpsed a lean young man, most likely a lawyer, who was hurrying grimly through the parade crowd in the direction of the county courthouse. He ignored the parade and the crowd; no doubt he thought the rodeo ridiculous, yet one brief, unintentional, sideways glance at the wheel of mad Empress Carlota's coach, which was squeaking awfully, left him with a wide, wry smile. Afterwards, when he walked up Congress toward the courthouse, I could detect a spring in his step that hadn't been there before. That image of him grinning and perking up contains for me a thousand potential results, a thousand and one subsequent tales. I could imagine him, for example, impulsively joking with a judge that afternoon and striking up a friendship that lasted a lifetime, or perhaps the passing coach and horses reminded him of a long-forgotten interest in horseback riding and a certain young lady in a small Arizona town? The creative spark I received when I imagined the effect of all the rodeo trappings on the ambushed urban mind delighted me. When the parade left downtown and moved nearer the rodeo grounds a lot of this creative magic vanished.

Blustery winds scoured these early rodeo parades. In late February sand scrubs and sweeps southern Arizona, as though we are our country's neglected back porch enduring a spruce-up for company—our population of snow birds reaches its highest point in that month. These dusty, windy old February parades layer my mind. One grimy cavalcade piles upon another until a stratum of these wind-swept spectacles clogs my brain. The exact years of the different parades confuse me, though each must have been before the mid-sixties, and all of them have the same stock actors and props: dappled ponies, their glossy black tails and manes flapping behind them in the wind, their features washed-out by curtains of drifting dirt, but with their alien hammer-heads bowed toward their chests, nostrils pinched shut, and long eyelashes fluttering; wincing parade marshals who grip the brims of their ten gallon hats and wave and occasionally manage tight smiles as the airborne grit pelts them and sends the fringe of their suede vests streaming in the air as though the wind is slicing through them and carrying their bodies away in shreds; gaily striped popcorn boxes that scud along the pavement scattering their few remaining oily kernels; wrinkled newspapers spread eagle and crackling against chain link fences; shaggy palms, their skirts of dried fronds rustling nervously; and big billowing plastic bags which zip into the parade route as last-minute entries and soar skyward where they float like the bodies of bloated jellyfish, spooking the horses and puffing and flitting at the edges of my consciousness even today whenever the wind ransacks our desert valley.

A film, a screen, like the gauze dropped between Elizabethan audiences and the players in a mysterious mummery, obscures these old windy parades. Behind this veil, the flag bearers, stiffened by patriotism and the bandannas that bind their necks, suffer trials to maintain the dignity of the flag of our country. Angry hot gusts wrest control of their poles, and the flag bearers stiffen their resolve and wrench the nation's colors—the red and dark blue stripes that are bleached orange and a pale baby blue in our blinding sun and blowing dirt—off the asphalt and away from the steaming piles of green mule droppings. The teenage members of the marching bands suck in sand with the air at the side of their mouthpieces only to have the meager toots they manage to produce whisk away in the wind. The ranks of the Old Bastard's Band lurch along the street, their faces, which seem to be cryogenically preserved, are even less supplied with air than usual as they struggle to play the songs they haven't practiced. Their pursy faces are temporarily smoothed by the headwinds, which blast their frail bodies backwards and send the tips of their thick white moustaches stabbing the air on either side of their cheeks. Puffing out these cheeks and rolling their eyes, they march past with an old man's loose, ungainly shuffle.

Snatched-off hats roll away and the carefully lettered paper signs on the carts and wagons rip to shreds. Stiff breezes strip braves of their feathers; Becky Thatcher look-a-likes riding in wagons find their bonnet ties stretching, the bonnets themselves lifting off their curls. If the breeze is a headwind, the carriages drag, the carts crawl. A tailwind sends the parade careening forward crazily like some clockwork toy parade gone berserk. And though it's entirely possible that I witnessed the windy parades on separate occasions over several years, they are now permanently folded together in my mind like a packet of letters bound with a thick ribbon.

The ribbon image is crucial; photos from the air reveal the unflattering truth—the Old Pueblo consists of a sixty mile expanse of bare dirt dotted at the edges with spidery creosote bushes and interrupted by what appear to be thousands of scattered, insubstantial shacks. Gone are the quaint green saguaros transplanted into yards and standing sentinel like pleasant oversized pickles, gone are the charming adobes and courtyards with their gurgling, spirited fountains. In such a terrain any breeze snatches the loose dirt, flings it in the air, and deposits it as a hazy wash that sometimes gobbles up the foot of the mountains or at other times leaves a bathtub ring, a ribbon, halfway up the sky.

This smudge of desert soil around the city comes in varying hues; in the misty light of certain winter mornings it shows a uniform pale tan, at other times the color reveals golden tints, or is banded by old ivory or pale bluish gray, but more often than not, its pink, a salmon-colored ribbon slicing neatly across the confederate gray of the Catalina forerange and curving south across the bluer Rincons, leaping across the pass to Benson where the Apaches launched in their attacks upon the old presidio, smearing the Santa Ritas, and obscuring the sharp black volcanic peaks of the Tucson Mountains which crouch underneath the layer of dust like black cats that have rolled in the dirt to shed their fleas.

During one of these gusty parades in 1962, when a terrific wind had scoured the valley since dawn and painted a vast hoop of pink around our city, I found myself huddled on the sunny dirt bank of a shallow tree well with six or seven other children of various ages. None of them were my brother or sister (being older I suppose they must have stayed at the curb to watch the carriages and bands) and their faces were unremarkable and were, perhaps, unobserved; attention to anyone's features strained your senses because of the searing bright light of the desert in winter and because of the punishing wind that day which left us scrunching our eyelids to slits. At times the wind tugged our hair straight out from our heads in all directions, at other times our Medusa-like locks wiggled frantically before our eyes. Dappled dots of sunlight thrashed merrily all around the cup of this tree well like a flock of confused birds and from the spread of these dots of light, I can estimate that the sun was nearly vertical and that more than half of the parade had already passed. Another clue to the time is the fact that the bank of earth that formed the tree well warmed our calves. Perhaps ten o'clock had come already.

We children sat so that the toes of our shoes pointed down the slope of the embankment; we had long since lost interest in the spectacle of the parade itself and were more fascinated by each other. How we had gathered there, I can't say, for my memory begins only at the point where our shoes were pointing down in the dirt. A teeny girl, I remember, wore anklets and brown Mary Jane shoes with one buckle completely undone and the other half fastened–the flat strap of leather humped up in the buckle as though it were a brown worm. I suppose that in her mothers' rush to get ready for the parade that morning fastening the little girl's shoes properly had been neglected. Someone else sported red cowboy boots with white stitching and leather cutouts in the shape of prickly pear cacti and jack rabbits. There were several other pairs of duller cowboy boots with thoroughly scuffed toes, boots that must have been passed down from child to child, special rodeo boots. One small girl scuffed about in a too-large pair of brown buckskin Indian moccasins with tiny red and blue and orange beads sewn to the moccasin tongue in the shape of a stylized thunderbird. All these various shoes extended down into the bowl-like amphitheater of the tree well with the dapples of sunlight dancing over them.

The tree that this impromptu group congregated around was a small sour orange, one of hundreds of these blighted fruit trees planted in intervals along the parkways of the central streets by misguided city fathers–trees planted, and then neglected, never fed or pruned, and left without a source of water other than the Old Pueblo's spotty rainfall. Whether due to lack of water, natural inclination, or disease, stunted and contorted limbs resulted. Birds and most bugs refused to eat the ghastly fruit produced by the tree, and the sight in the spring and summer of the oranges lying scattered about the streets and the sidewalks would cause snowbirds to criticize the locals. The _Citizen_ published letters to the editor noting this "Western wastefulness." So much free fruit lying around tempted newcomers to sneak out at night with sacks and pillowcases which they hurriedly stuffed with the awful oranges, never realizing that no one would object if they came in daylight and took every sour oranges in the entire city, only a fool would bother defending them; at their next breakfast the thieves would discover (to their considerable horror) that the oranges yielded a pale juice which bit into your mouth like lemon juice.

Thrifty wives, with free time on their hands and too many sour oranges, took a few into their kitchen and experimented on them cannily for days only to give up in frustration or else eventually devised ridiculous recipes which called for fractions of a fractional teaspoons of the juice as flavor for a sickly sweet frosting. If they gave up the idea of eating them, they proposed skewering the skin of the sour oranges with cloves, punishing the innocent oranges for the sin of being unwholesome. Then, after the sour oranges' martyrdom, their dried corpses hung in closets.

The desert sun broiled the Old Pueblo, and there were so few overcast days to stop this broiling effect that sour oranges left on the ground seldom rotted, instead a summer of sun sucked the vital juices out of them as thoroughly as any vampire sucked blood; they shrunk into small, brittle husks, hollow shells. Even odder, the orange skin stayed smooth and didn't pucker. When it dried, the whole fruit reduced in size exactly like a shrunken head on a headhunter's belt. In the process of drying, the peel of the sour orange acquired huge open pores like those on the noses of old men; in their hues these dried oranges resembled Lascaux cave paintings; in parts, oranges and deep brown hues blew across the peel, in other sections inky stains dripped in lines and blobs across the dried surface of the orange. A subtle palette of browns and warm mustards might blend with sallow parts of the orange hemispheres, while on other oranges whole sides of the fruit would be slashed with red. Often circular black patches on the dried orange peels resembled the scorch rings found on the bottom of Hohokam pots, and when the dried oranges broke, the cracked pieces likened broken potsherds which poked from the banks of our arroyos. Some dried oranges were colored a uniform charcoal black, as though the sun had thoroughly scorched them, but at times these black oranges had ghostly whitish patches; other oranges had tinges of beautiful auburn and russet or subtle tawny shades which blended in spots or arcs across their hard bodies. No two oranges dried with the same colors or patterns and it was a fascinating hobby simply to examine them one by one.

But as fruit, the oranges failed; they were best put to use by delinquents who exercised their growing limbs by kicking them or throwing them at passing cars and trains; after decades of neglect most of the sour orange trees had become gnarled and stunted; the tree themselves withered away to gray, ghostly stumps, then disappeared entirely, the empty wells remained for a decade after the trees were gone and then even the wells filled with dirt and disappeared.

That day I sat in the basin of one of those doomed trees. Lurking with us under the crooked branches of this particular sour orange was a boy of eight or nine, a red-haired rooster of a kid, whose rowdy, rambunctious, and boisterously enthused behavior fed on the presence of such an audience in the pit or amphitheater formed by the tree well. At the sight of a sheriff with a big drooping moustache who rode by, one hand resting on his gun in its holster, our entertainer stood up and pointed his play pistol at the sky bawling: "I'm sheriff of this county" and at that he leaped onto a round rock and fired his cap pistol.

"Everybody here, listen! I'm sheriff and all of you better listen! Well, we have some work to do and I want you to do it for me! Everybody listen. We have to get ourselves working together!"

In his antics around the tree well he was weighed down by the considerable bulk of an oversized striped cotton vest, probably his father's, one of those serape vests without buttons which were popular in the Southwest as costumes for children who wanted to be Pancho Villa for Halloween and which his mother, like many others before her, had ruined by dunking in hot water; none of the dyes on those vests were color fast, in hot water the blue and black stripes blended onto the white and over each other, and though my adult mind now knows that it ran in the wash, it occurred to me then that the fingers of the wind, which clutched at all parts of us that day, had now managed to smear clothing dye.

Anyway, due to his superior size, I suppose, and his flaming red hair, this boy with the ruined serape seized power over us. Included in his dominion was his little sister who stood about my size and was equally timid. At some point while we huddled together hearing the jingling harnesses and the snappy tap of a cavalry drumstick on a taut drum skin our leader stood up and strutted around the dirt and Bermuda grass nearby as though he were thinking. He then began walking on the stacked heels of his cowboy boots, whirling his arms to maintain his balance; though his arms were still scrawny, the wrist ridiculously thin and bony, the elbows pointed and the hands little and thin like a woman's, my eyes noticed and appreciated the slightest bulge in his upper arm where later a man-sized muscle would develop; it was only a hint of a brawn on him, the barest hint, but it was the first time I remembered noticing that strength and respecting it; there was something about the potentiality of manhood which attracted me, just the inkling of a future being, a future metamorphosis of this being into a teen, and then a man. He had the ways of a wily person already in his eyes. In the way he traipsed around the tree hole, amusing us, and giving the other boys room to be themselves, I knew he was not a bully, yet he was clever enough to take on all the vicissitudes of the earth, bold and crafty, bearing the best of human nature. His arm was a symbol of the way things were going to be for him and also for me; that muscle would make him different in a few years and in an animal way, I suppose, some part of my subconscious mind responded to the potential of an efficient protector; soon his funny way of traipsing around the hole had us laughing, which drove him into a frenzy. He paced around the tree well rubbing his palms together briskly. If only he could devise another antic which would increase our amusement!

Nearing one of those dried oranges that were so plentiful on the ground around the tree, and finding that that particular one had landed on a partially buried adobe brick, he threw his arms above his head like a Spanish dancer.

"Everybody watch this! You're gonna be surprised!"

Then he raised one foot and drove the heavy heel of his cowboy boot down on the hollow orange, striking it so forcefully that the dried husk cracked with a BOOM as loud as a small bomb; an infant screamed itself awake at the sound of the explosion, and its mother shot an angry glance through the branches into the tree's interior though she was unable to see us; glossy chestnut horses pulling a wagon past the sour orange, pricked their ears and tossed their heads; a snare drummer paused at the unexpected thump in the middle of his roll; we were stunned by the sound for a moment and then we gasped, and what was better, we cheered to see a small yellow curl of pulverized orange smoke rise up from under the boy's boot like little tendrils of a fern. Where once an orange had been, there were now only smithereens, the littlest ones of which the wind quickly whipped away, and chips broken into sharp-edged triangles, like pieces of broken crockery or pottery shards.

More, we clamored! More!

"More! Get me some more of those! Everybody find them! Look everywhere. Look in the grass all around. And some are still on the tree! Some old dried up ones are on the tree! We gotta blow up a whole bunch more. Look, they're everywhere."

The dried oranges, scattered widely in the tree well, fed our fever for explosions. I joined our hero's little sister in collecting these dried oranges, finding many of them where they had fallen in a stand of tall, dormant Bermuda grass; they resembled orange balls, lost in the tall grass, that a dog had found and ravaged; by providing these oranges and collecting them with his timid little sister I felt connected, indirectly, to this hale god-boy, her brother.

"We must find all of them," I said earnestly, grabbing her by the hand.

"Let's walk in those weeds," she suggested, pointing to another part of the tree well that was also grassy.

"We'll find more there," I said, taking her somewhere else.

"I see one!" she said.

"Let's get it," I said.

"Gee, there's a lot of them here," she said.

"They're hiding," I said.

"They don't want us to find them!"

Once he had hammered nearly every dried orange lying in obvious spots in the tree well, another boy bullied us into going on excursions out of the tree's protection to provide our hero with more ammunition; we retrieved the blackened oranges for him, even if we had to snatch them from the street or from under the feet of great men, and we brought them forward apprehensively as though they were burnt offerings to a god. Burnt because the oranges had that blackened appearance, just as though they had been singed by a fire, which indeed is what a summer in the desert will do to anything lying out in the sun, and offerings because it seemed the other children, including myself, were the hero-boy's retainers, eager to respond when his assistant bellowed "More! Get us more! Everybody work to find them!"

But when on one occasion this unpleasant, bellowing assistant, in his quest to produce a lively, pleasing explosion for the hero-boy, received in good faith from one of us an orange which had not been thoroughly toasted and dried by the summer-long effect of scorching temperatures and intense sunshine, one in which the slightest smidgen of juice lingered leaving the orange with a pliant, elastic core, and when it failed to detonate properly under the hero-boy's feet, and several people giggled nervously, the assistant froze, glanced down with a glare, and bellowed "Daannnggg!" Our leader simply hobbled over to the curb with a shrug and hooked the leathery orange off the heel of his boot, leaving the orange as it came off, smeared pathetically over the edge of the curb like some mutilated accident victim. But as he came back his assistant cast a smoldering look of disgust at us as though no amount of his reprove could describe how repugnant the situation really was. We, he let us all know, ought to have known better than to have disappointed our leader. It seemed then that he transferred his hatred to us, to our uselessness and inferiority, and it was us, as well as the orange, that he despised. From then on, he examined our bombs thoroughly.

My fascination with this stomping boy and his assistant with the ugly temper, inevitably lessened as the morning wore on; his sister left me, but still I searched for oranges for him like a robot, and the sight of a large blackened orange which no one had yet claimed lured me into an area near the street where several low, twisted boughs trailed in the dirt. After working my way toward the swarthy orange, and making several frustrating thrusts with my short arms toward it, a swarm of delicate green lace wings fluttered up in my face and I discovered, by tracing their take-off, an opening in the branches right above me. When I popped up into it, I found I had arrived in a bower, a leafy cavity, where there was shelter from the wind and a small peephole which gave an unobstructed view of the parade.

The parade! In my delight with the explosions, and my pursuit of oranges, I had almost forgotten about the files and files of ponies and cowboys passing by on the street right outside the tree! Secure inside this bower-work cell, I worked my eye close up to the peephole that I had just discovered; the edges of the hole were surrounded by interesting orange leaves, many of which were knotted and gnarled into various nautilus or snaillike forms; the morning light burnished the outer shells of these curled leaves and intensified the crisp shadows of the folded undersides; the wind, tossing the tree limbs about, set the whorled leaves bobbing and shaking; though the shapes of the leaves were pitifully deformed when seen up close, in the blurred sunlight and with the limbs heaving in the wind, the effect of all those blighted leaves was to mimic the scrolls and curlicues on an ornate edge of a golden frame; it certainly seemed that a clever gardener had clipped the leaves to make this shining window on the world. The closest branches to my eye formed a small frame, only a few inches across, but looking through it I discovered there were others, in fact a whole series which extended forward in increasing diameters, and together they acted as a golden telescope or spyglass, the type that snap sections of smaller diameter together, and this spyglass seemed by its perspective to magnify the cowboys, oxen and stagecoaches that were travelling toward me and to present each image in momentary isolation, the same way artists who need inspiration for a new painting will slide a square which is snipped out of the middle of a sheet of blank paper around a large painting searching for a smaller, suitable aspect to paint, a masterpiece within the masterpiece, so to speak.

After several moments spent getting used to the view from my golden telescope, and allowing my eye to adjust to the odd light and the usual feeling of the air moving toward me, which made my eyelid snap shut compulsively until I got accustomed to it, I was delighted when an exquisite moving sculpture trotted into the shimmering frame. It was a creamy white pony, the color of a fine white marble, which had been harnessed to a black brougham in which an Arizona doctor of the 1880's rode the dusty roads to a house call. This pony pranced through the blowing dust in a manner that was perfectly fluid, its petite and sharp-edged hooves struck the pavement rhythmically as it trotted toward me, withers twitching, a long blonde forelock swept to one side and obscuring that eye like the hairstyle of the Surfer-Boy which had just becoming the teenage girl's obsession and had worked its way down to children. I watched as the pony pranced toward me angling slightly sideways as though it hoped to offer the most attractive three-quarters view of its milky breast, and somehow the angle it took kept it positioned inside the spyglass, though it became larger. The pony wore a winter coat; haunches which seemed to have been smooth normally were dappled with patches of thick white hair, and it had a very hairy muzzle. Its eyes on either side of its pretty head rolled about delightfully and the dock arched. The precision movements of its legs became more exaggerated as it came closer and it seemed as though each leg were drilled in the desired motion, trained to produce a fine moving miniature. The perfect dancing animal filled the frame exactly; the powerful arch of his neck just skimming under the top of the picture, the small mouth held pertly down, big lashes batting as he danced. The ears pricked upward perfectly, the mane curled on its strong neck, and the tail splayed in the wind.

A sinuous branch cut out across the opening and the pony's hooves suddenly seemed to be striking the very bark; it could have been a teeny horse dancing on that branch, enchanting me with a lovely trot, and then breaking into a canter.

Then the pony stepped out of the frame and the doctor's carriage flashed through and I returned to the vital business of finding and collecting seared oranges for the boy with the fascinating arms; I ducked down and sprinted here and there in the tree well snatching up the husks before any of the other children spied them; I stood with two grenades in line bouncing on the toes of my sneakers, ready to produce my hoard for the work of the boy bomber, and while I waited, I enjoyed the unparalleled sensation of excitement brewing inside me, bubbling happily, and it was a mad desire which was brimming over ever since I had seen the dwarf white horse prancing atop the tree limb. I now had a unceasing desire to own, not any real life-sized horse, but the animated, miniature horse; I coveted that sweet petite animal, and waves of ardent pleasure overtook me just to think of owning such a treasure; if only some mysterious magician poured these miniature horses out of a gorgeous green bottle; if only a genie would only conjure his from a brass lamp; if only he were tied up at a pint-sized hitching post behind some dusty boxes on a shelf at Toy Mart; as I finished stooping under a branch to gather another dried orange, I popped up inside my secret vantage point, my golden spyglass, again only to discover that someone had changed the channel so that the frame was occupied by other Lilliputian characters; this time it was human members of the world's parade, counterfeit conquistadors, who served out their ordinary days of drudgery as accountants and dentists. They trooped by, their plodding march and battered wooden breastplates and leaving the crowd with the impression that they were actually seeing a band of mournful desert tortoises; their numbers inevitably included that silliest of all conquistadors, Coronado, whose bewildered expression and pike probing the sky made him the butt of rude jokes. The morning light gleaming off his helmet. As Coronado bowed on, another conquistador, a plump, red-faced man, neatly filled the golden frame. I delighted in this small man's antics. Sporting a purple velvet doublet and tights, which made a marvelous contrast with the pale gray pavement and the moving curtains of dust, he marched blindly into the biting wind; his miniature thighs bulged, his calves pumped and his legs and arms were jointed so loosely it was as though a genius of a painter had managed to show movement and separation. Suddenly, just when his helmet threatened to whack the top of the golden frame, he placed his teeny hand over his heart, and his head raised momentarily while his eyes rolled upward like a dying warrior in an oil painting and then his fat series of chins dropped onto one another and the last chin dropped onto his chest. I was watching the breakdown of this sham conquistador, a double-chinned, and horribly overheated gentleman, whose thighs bulging out of his breeches, who could barely support his wooden shield in the wind and sun. He leaned out on his thick knee, tentatively, accepting the support of another conquistador, and he tried to slowly rotate the sore joint of his hip. He winced and clutched at his Samaritan. Two other conquistadors arrived to support him; he grimaced more and shook his head; most definitely the answer was no, any further travel on the faulty knee joint was a no-go. A nervous consultation among the men resulted in them waving down an approaching antique coach, I believe it was the one once owned by a mayor, to take him to the end of the parade. Hitching him slowly up the steps, the coach bowing to his weight, the people inside grabbing his arms as he allowed himself to be ignominiously handled, he stopped to wave goodbye the applauding crowd and then was unceremoniously wedged sideways through the narrow coach doorway; when his left knee began buckling.

Wouldn't the pair of them, the white horse and the fat uncomfortable conquistador, be splendid to own, I wondered to myself? If they were my dolls, my possessions, if their miniature destinies lay in my hands, wouldn't that be exquisite? The smooth white back of the horse could rest right under my palm, I would feel its tiny heart pumping blood around the body, its muscles ripples, a nervous feeling that the horse would have with such a big hand controlling it; the feel of its warm coat which I could brush, with a tiny brush, of course, would relax me, why I could feel myself relaxing with the thought of tending it minutely. If it kicked, I could feel its muscles tense before the back legs flew up. The world would have a perfect nature to it. And wouldn't they be fun to arrange? The real-life little man could be set to the task of exploring my room. What glorious days I could spend taming the horse and teaching it to perform tricks, interesting antics with its hooves among the perfume bottles and combs on the top of our dresser. Then the tiny pony would make me feel as though she were my own creation. And in thinking that I reached the thing I needed to think. That was it, the heart of what I wanted, not the substance but the idea of my own creation.

Intricate layers compounded to form this experience, a doll, a living doll, the thoughts of owning living dolls, and ultimately the creative act of imagining or creating living dolls. At first it was the possession of the creation that I sought, the doll itself, but I wanted someone else to manufacture them for me, to make me the dolls, but to give them life, to make them moving dolls. Then it became not the teeny pony or the teeny conquistador itself that fascinated me but only the idea of the excitement that came with creating them and moving them about. I could only penetrate the last idea at a shallow level. I thought about that for only an instance before the idea of the things themselves, my interest in their material substance, intruded itself again and I was unable to focus on the idea of the creative act because the look of their actual eyes, the touch of their actual bodies, overwhelmed the more interesting obsession with the idea of the process or act of creating them.

Shortly after I saw the conquistador and stood in line with my last dried orange for the boy-bomber, that year's parade ended.

CHAPTER 9

Another memory from a windy parades returns, 1966, blowing across my mind yet hidden behind the day's unsubstantial haziness; I recall a certain gentleman rider, prone to wild, old West, histrionics, to great and grand melodramatic gestures, and to powerful barking, who drifted slowly toward us where we stood at a curb. Seemingly borne by the wind itself, he was actually straddling the broad back of a colossal gray mule, a ghostly animal with freaky, light colored eyes and which was barely visible under an ivory skirt of dirt, of loose airborne powder, which resembled some immense billowing wedding veil of an old citizen of Tucson, which had discolored with age. Across the street the crowd and the windows of a department store had bleached to a gray sea. As this man on the mule floated near us, screeching and screaming something at first unintelligible, we came gradually to understand his words and know that he bellowed so loudly in order to impersonate Governor ______, our first territorial governor, on his famous year-long trek across the Midwestern United States which eventually saw him arrive in northern Arizona; the fat saddlebags strapped to the mule's tremendous rump, he repeatedly patted, and they were crammed to the brim with solid, disc-like buffalo chips that this man boasted to have collected on a journey across the plains, ready to make a fine fire for anyone's evening camp; besides his shouts of good cheer and his offers to share the fabulous hoard of buffalo chips with members of the crowd (and they screamed whenever he untied a saddlebag and rode toward them holding out one of the rigid golden pies) we enjoyed the bristly black sideburns which festooned both sides of his face; his cheeks were so hairy from the false pieces that he had a strange, monkey-like quality; the pair of massive whiskers, which were so obviously fake, had been slathered with spirit gum and pressed to his skin, though the glue hadn't stuck. When he rode parallel to us one of the false pieces worked itself loose and the vestige sideburn clung to his cheek under his ear and swung in the breeze like a stage door on a flimsy hinge.

"Oh that old gentleman is coming apart, kids! What does he think he's doing? Goodness, what a mad costume. He might be taking himself a bit too seriously," Mother said.

Taking for granted that those among the curbside crowd who were frantically pointing at the loose whisker were actually appreciating the verisimilitude of his 19th century frontier costume and his extraordinarily exaggerated pantomime with the buffalo chips, he expanded upon his store of grimaces and waved his arms even more madly. Eventually either a mighty gust tearing at his face or else his own big movements knocked the whisker completely off and sailed it, by the divine hand of God, onto a mound of steaming green dung; and, as though that were not horrifying enough, the hapless sideburn at rest on the pile was immediately run over by the front wheel of a miniature cart pulled by a miniature pony. The grinning clown who drove the cart honked his big rubber horn and waved, and then whipped the pony until it zoomed him to the opposite curb; he was oblivious to the cries of horror from those of us in the crowd who had seen what happened, and our governor, now with a very asymmetric monkey face, and his pale ghostly mule were wafted away, his bellows still heard when he wasn't visible, inside an even bigger gust of ivory dirt. This big cloud tore his image to shreds, but slowly, first taking away the mule and then his feet, his straddled legs, the saddle, his lower trunk, his jacket and finally his horrible grimacing head with its one thick sideburn.

But I steal memories. I find that I'm shocked when I discover that a cherished memory of a woman bouncing on a bucking horse, which I was certain was mine and that I remembered glimpsing intermittently through the lacy leaves of many overlapping creosote bushes, was in fact never a part of my memory at all, but belonged to Meredith. Somehow it leaked out, so that it was in my mind on a Thursday morning while standing in the front window of the old adobe house I never lived in on Allen Road.

The saddle trim and blanket that I never saw had a precision and orderliness that stimulated me, but the fat body of the lady rider, straining the seams of a cowgirl costume, fascinated me. She bobbled atop the flanks of the black horse, and it, in turn, shimmered brilliantly in the morning sun. The lady rider yanked the reins so hard that the horse shied, bucked, and galloped away with the lady still on its back, throwing her arms around wildly.

"Leave me out of your fantasies, your stories," she cries faintly. "I don't belong to you!"

My sister's memory, which I abscond with now, the run-away horse, and the desperate lady.

Rodeos cropped up each year. The rodeo stars swept into town and we got off school on a Thursday and Friday. But every rodeo differed and the next rodeo, after the windy one, occurred on a dreadful rainy day, which led us into the sunken living room of an old family friend.

"Rodeo Day! Well, no school for you, but my old friend from Fort Wayne, Indiana, Mrs. Jones, wants to see the three of you. She has a young boy visiting from New York. Was that a groan I heard in the back seat? I don't want to hear any of that! I want all of you to notice the quality of the things that are in Mrs. Jones' home," said Mother on the way to her old benefactor's, the lady from Fort Wayne who'd sponsored my mother when she left the Women Marines and traveled by train to Arizona to use her G.I. bill rights for college. She planned to leave us at Mrs. Jones' mansion for some very important dress shopping. Dress shopping was one of our least favorite activities, so we were relieved to discover we were being excluded. She went on to say that "Alma Jones is a very wealthy woman from near to my home and a friend of my family, her father was a Methodist minister with a gift for giving stirring sermons, and her husband was such an important banker from Fort Wayne, and they came out to Arizona for his health, his asthma, leaving the bank in good hands and producing income galore. They live off the income of the income! Well, and the best things in their home are more than you will see in many museums, let me tell you kids. So get an eyeful while you're there. By cracky, she has lovely things. I hope you respect her fine things and don't touch any of them. I will be very angry if you touch any of her things and ruin them."

Mrs. Jones herself loomed over us at the door of her white mansion. "Juney, well, here they are! Your children are growing!"

"I hope they behave," said Mother in a warning.

"Oh, they will," said Mrs. Jones. She was a large matronly woman, of obviously superior breeding and education, with watery blue-gray eyes that bulged, a large pale face and a pocket full of peppermint candies. Her mousy hair perpetually swept from her face into a huge bun at the back of her head. I think her shoulders were rounded, and she appealed to me more than she should have due to her social superiority, because of her Indiana accent, which was so like my mother's.

Her home, sure enough, overflowed with objet d'art from around the world, like some crazy nightmare, a cramped world of expensive possessions with no purpose, crowding against each other, clamoring for attention. A visitor stumbled into thick Persian rugs, Navajo rugs, Chesterfields, silk pillows, massive mahogany sideboards covered with Indian baskets (the large, dark, expensive ones), old pottery, oil paintings and cloisonné. The giant TV case displayed a large droopy donkey-tail succulent in a pink bowl. This plant lived on a doily island. And that year there was also a terrible little boy on the sofa in front of the massive black and white TV.

In front of the boy hot chocolate cooled.

This strange boy who had been deposited at her house for days, not just a rainy afternoon, had his hair shaped in a bowl cut and Mrs. Jones informed us that he was from Back East, from New York, New York, the location we despised most in America, the apex of the evil which was controlling us. New York City was about as Eastern, and as evil, as we thought you could get.

The boy himself barely spoke to us or made eye contact. He felt miserable and wouldn't get off the sofa to play a board game or look at the rain, which meant nothing to him, but everything to us. He stared at the gray picture of the rainy parade, the miserable riders, ponies, bands members, the splashing water and slowly rolling stagecoaches.

"What a downpour," said Mrs. Jones, "I hope the ponies can swim. Aren't we better off in our home?"

"Sure," said Meredith amiably enough.

The boy smirked.

Water poured off of a cowboy hat and he laughed, once, wryly, in abject superiority. "Ha! Some cowboy! Rough rider!"

Mrs. Jones led the three of us on an excursion out to her covered ramada, to try to play hopscotch, something she thought she remembered, but the wind was blowing so hard that rain came through the rose bushes and left us miserably cold. When we were at the ramada, the boy from New York came out once briefly to look at a snail crawl on her lawn. "I've seen that before," he said across the lawn, smugly creeping back inside to the sofa.

He didn't know what a palm tree was or a cactus, but he told Mrs. Jones that he didn't want to know. He didn't want to know anything about Arizona.

"This place is a freak show," he told us when Mrs. Jones left us alone for a few minutes.

"This box might interest you," said Mrs. Jones, when she realized that we were completely bored by the parade and its miserable, wet participants.

There seemed no chance of the boy from New York liking anything.

"But inside of it," she gushed, "inside is something special indeed, so special to me. I thought that it might interest you. You see there is a most fascinating carved bean which has come all the way to Arizona from the continent of Asia and the country of India."

She held it toward us in her palm. The white bean was tiny, that beautiful bean shape, a sort of echo of the human body in its curves. But the bean was carved into a teeny elephant. The horns, the tusks, the shape of ear of the Indian elephant.

"It has also had an interesting journey along the way. I showed it to a businessman on the jet airplane and do you know what he did with it? He took it into the palm of his hands just like this," she cradled it, "and stared at it for a long time and then..." her eyes got big, "a tear came right out of the corner of his eye, it welled right up and dripped out and he began to cry onto the seat beside me. I lent him my handkerchief."

We all sat there hearing her mahogany grandfather clock tick and none of us spoke.

"Do you believe he cried?" asked Mrs. Jones finally.

"No," said Meredith with some thought, "don't be angry, but we all supposed you're lying about that."

Mrs. Jones laughed a crazy laugh that echoed weirdly in the room.

"Oh," she said suddenly, "I hear your second hot chocolate boiling!"

When she left us alone we really studied that poor kid from New York City. He got a thorough going over and it wasn't kindness we had in our hearts toward him. If we could have taken him outside in the rain and thrown him in an arroyo we would have done it gleefully.

We gave him the dumb little bean as a compensation for our obvious hatred of him.

He sat there with the dumb box and the dumb little bean elephant on his lap not doing a thing and not complaining either.

Then his eyes got real big, as though he had thought of something brilliant.

He picked up the bean and slowly, carefully, and with a great deal of ceremony, he jammed it up his nose. Pretty far up, too.

We stared at him in awe.

"Why did you do that?" asked Meredith.

Mrs. Jones brought in the tray of hot chocolate and didn't she start telling us all about where the tray came from too.

"This tray was craved of rosewood of the finest origin in Germany. Don't you think the little fairies and tiny roses are realistic?"

We refused to respond, but our eyes, which should have been on the tray she described, kept rolling toward the boy with a bean up his nose.

"Are you boys and girls enjoying yourselves?" she asked, with real terror.

How were we going to tell her that her guest had put the bean up his nose?

"Let's really watch the rodeo parade," she suggested. "We can all drink our hot chocolate and watch the ponies marching."

The boy acted eager, but nervous. He had a secret smile.

"Where is my little bean?" asked Mrs. Jones suddenly in terror.

None of us said anything.

That boy just went on smiling.

"Did one of you take my little bean?"

We said nothing.

"I don't want to make you empty out your pockets. I really don't. But that bean was a sentimental favorite."

"He put it up his nose," said Meredith finally in a fit of honesty.

"Put it up his nose!" exclaimed Mrs. Jones in anguish. I wondered if her distress was at the fate of the bean or the boy. "What do you mean?"

"He shoved it up his nose. We all watched him do it."

She got up quickly and pushed the boy's head back to look.

"Did you?" she asked. She shook him. "Answer me! Did you put it up your nose?"

Finally, he nodded, though nodding seemed to pain him.

"Can you blow it out?"

He shook his head sullenly.

"Try!"

He blew into a tissue forcefully, then shook his head.

"I'll phone a doctor," said Mrs. Jones.

In those days of house calls the doctor still hadn't arrived when our mother took us away. We dearly wanted to see the bean yanked out of his nose.

During a windy parade, 1964, an old Navajo gentleman completed a sand painting in the window of a department store; the big stores in downtown Tucson hired the sand painters during rodeo week when crowds of snowbirds, many of them fresh from that dreadful place called Back East, milled their cold corpses around the streets of downtown soaking up our bright, ebullient February sunshine, that valuable solar benefit which poured itself in great liquid lumps onto our colorful but slightly disheveled streets. The particular store where I watched these gentlemen practice their art has long since fallen into ruins and been replaced, most likely, by a high-rise lawyers' complex; the fact that I ever saw them seems distinctly impossible now, a relic of bygone days or an illusion conjured up to support my art's needs.

During this time the Pioneer Hotel, one of many bustling centers of rodeo activity, hadn't burned down—Mr. and Mrs. Greensteen, who would choose to perish together in that fire rather than escape, lived luxurious lives in the penthouse suite of the old hotel—and it was possible to see real cowboys and livestock owners near the hotel lobby flashing enormous wads of twenty-dollar bills and photogenic smiles; they began arriving the weekend before the rodeo in waves, a bit like long-legged locust, getting in and out of elevators and Cadillacs, the masses of these long exotic cars flocked together like migratory birds which had their tall tail fins banded by chrome and had been painted the most astonishing shades of yellow, turquoise or pink.

I'm not sure to this day how the sand painters fit in, exactly who thought of bringing them to our town during rodeo week, or in what year they first arrived and were hired, by whom I'll never know, to dribble their exquisite sand art in our store windows. Navajos, whose cultural home is on the higher mesas of Arizona near the Utah border, didn't have much of a history in Southern Arizona, though many were boarded in town to attend high school and college and certainly found work here; it seems that the O'odham, who are intimately tied to the local history, never wove their baskets in any store windows, though they have an equally compelling art; I suppose the answer is that Navajos were a novelty and put on a good show. By the time I was ten, the banishment of sand painters from store window had occurred, and they had disappeared as thoroughly and as enigmatically as their sandy artwork used to—before they began gluing it to boards for tourists.

Do any other people anywhere else in the world create art using material as impermanent as loose particles of colored sand? If so, I haven't heard of them. The Navajo's palate consists of colored sands in small bowls that are arranged along the edge of a plateau of tawny sand that forms the canvas. The sand painter takes the sand into their closed fist and dribbles it out. What appeared at first to be aimless and indistinct efforts, mere dribs and drabs, gradually evolved into extraordinary murals. In the end the sand painter would lift their work and scatter the sand in the wind. Destroying their creation was part of the creative act. The idea of gluing the sand onto a board and selling the art was alien then, purely a modern notion.

The year I saw a sand painter, my father brought the three of us, Meredith, Jack, and me, downtown with him on the Thursday morning of rodeo week, the same morning of the rodeo parade, to pick up our new Magnavox stereophonic record player and radio receiver.

Mother didn't approve of stereos.

"I wish you would find something else to spend your money on. Something we could use a little bit more than a stereo. There are some many wholesome things that the house and the children need. I don't want the children sitting around listening to music, unless it happens to be folk music, maybe, but no, not even that. The recording industry is controlled by the gal-darn mob, oh, way back, as far back as Billy-be darned this recording industry goes and vaudeville types before that. Well, Shakespeare probably had to deal with some toughs that shook down the Old Globe, maybe, I don't know. I wouldn't trust the folk music industry even. Those guys got control of most of the entertainment business, even religious recordings and shows, by cracky, and dictated all the terms and who was going to be popular. Taking a cut of everything. Well, all you're doing by buying that stereo and Long Playing Recordings is propping up the Mafia as it controls America and I don't approve of that not matter what we get in return. Sure, we all enjoy a little music once and a while, however I don't think you should ignore the scandals in that music industry. They are as corrupt as can be, let me tell you, getting paid money for what goes on the radio and lying about contests and by buying their products you only perpetuate their hold on our country. Every time I turn on the radio and listen to the George and Square Show I think I ought not to be listening to it. It makes me madder than a wet hen. I want to hear the news."

"What recording would you like?" asked Father bravely, knowing better than we did that this was just letting off steam and she actually was about to tell him to buy a certain musical act.

We held our breath thinking that she was going to become angry, but her response astonished us.

"Well, the only recording I want is Nat King Cole. His singing pleases me. You may buy a Nat King Cole recording if you must. I'm not saying you should. I would sit down on a Sunday afternoon and listen to that recording, if you brought that home. I don't know the name of any of his recordings. I suppose any of them would do. But I'd listen all the way through, at least once. He is a great singer. I don't know if the Mafia controls him, but I hope not."

Rodeo week typically sent us into frenzies of happiness, or madness, depending on your prospective. The later view was my mother's, who faulted the Tucson schools for our hysterical condition. We decked ourselves out in outlandish rodeo costumes, western regalia, at school during that week. To her way of thinking our appearance at school in rodeo costumes drained our thinking power. Certainly we were preoccupied by the stiff holsters at our sides and the cap guns with chrome paint peeling off the metal and pebbles stuffed in the barrels. Instead of doing arithmetic on our papers, our fingers counted the lengthy series of empty cells in the leather bandoleers slung across our serapes; the slides of our father's bolo ties (with the preserved resin encased remains of a slight blonde scorpion or the pewter cow skulls with gleaming red jeweled eyes) kept travelling up and down the bola strings. How could we stop them? And we kept a steady eye on the hunk of turquoise around our necks that in the veins of black depicted a scene from a renaissance master or a Ming Cottage Contemplating Immortality. A beaten and bedraggled hat of our grandfather's when he visited the Old Pueblo possessed us with the wild desire to slap it against our schoolmates' faces. The straw sombrero we purchased in Nogales or the straw cowboy hat that the man who built a wall left behind kept urging us to cry "Yippee!" And especially distracting were those goofy Argentinean hats with green and red pom-poms bobbling playfully on the lower edge of the flat broad brims. They made us slap our soles down and dance.

"Run past Texas John Slaughter!" cried one boy. This was a playground monitor who was particularly fierce. She always planted one heel on the raised sprinkler head and wore a hat. I'm not sure who thought up the Texas John Slaughter name, but she might have been from Texas.

They all ran past her quickly screaming " _Arriba, Arriba_!"

"Hey, you kids! Come back here, all of yous. Get back here now!" screamed Texas John Slaughter. "I'm telling all of your teachers. Just because it's Rodeo doesn't mean you can go crazy."

But we did.

During classes we rapped and rubbing the metal tips of our bolo ties together and obsessively tapped and fiddled with the pocket snaps on our cowboy shirts. The leather belts with a space for your name branded in the back creaked relentlessly. Short vests in charming colors needed to be compulsively tugged down. And the chaps that heated in the sun and stunk like a dead cow needed to be stabbed by our pens. Pink or red boots on the girls allowed us to clomp noisily up the aisles between the desks when we were called up to the board to fail at two-digit multiplication.

Our mother objected especially to the appearance of slacks and especially jeans on the girls at school during rodeo. In her opinion, giving girls permission to don slacks for the three days prior to the holiday exceeded foolishness. Based on an intense and irrational Midwestern prudishness which could only be in response to an early childhood spent viewing too much barnyard sex, she reasoned that the continuous friction of any close, but loose, material, denim especially, with the sensitive skin on the inner thigh of a young female could produce unnatural levels of a carnal enthusiasm. One could guess where that would lead to; the Road to Perdition loomed in the offing. Elastic girdles because they held this area still and protected it from buffing or rubbing, which simulated sex, were correct garments to wear under slacks; skirts by not touching the inner thigh were less sexual, although you would think the access easier. This business about us wearing jeans was all rather mysterious to our prepubescent minds which hadn't yet worked out sex positions anyway and of course the true cause of our lunacy was much simpler; we got out of school on the Thursday and Friday of Rodeo week and as a result there was an air of celebratory stupidity which was as intense in Jack as it was in Meredith and me.

Besides allowing costumes, rodeo week had another consequence, one that children in the Old Pueblo dreaded. We arrived on the schoolyard our Adam's Apples assaulted by the enormous knot in our red and black bandannas, dreading that which was coming, like some monster in the hall which the celebrants would not discuss and were afraid even to name. During Rodeo week we were forced to dance square dances. A thoroughly depressing prospect, this mandatory enactment of the ritualized rip-roaring roundup, the square dance, had to be performed in squares of four couples and we had to hold hands, boys with girls, girls with boys. Lucky were the children left as extras in the last incomplete square. They got to perform their do-si-dos and Grande Allemande with an invisible partner.

I remember one year seeing a blue phonographic record with its paper label showing a giddy square-dance-loving couple, a swinging pair of goons turning over and over; her hair poking out from under her cowboy hat was a mass of perfect blonde curls and his hair cut in a butch stabbed the air with raw Americanism. This disk was divided by the slick and shiny concentric circles of silence which we so craved instead of the noisy scratching of the fiddles, the repetitious strumming guitars, and the insane yodels and calls of some noisome nobody who pretended to be a cowboy. My teacher that year read the caller's name solemnly of the back of the LP as though she actually knew him. She held up a notebook of collected programs, of the square dances all of the state that she had attended with someone named Grant. And then she took across her body the arms of some suffering boy and walked a promenade. Then they do-si-doed, back to back, until she crashed her sizable bottom into her desk and wallowed painfully back to the record player, the old gray school phonograph with its large black and gold knobs. The next tune would be "Hoe-down Downtown," she informed us. But before we started she described her after-hours spent, not in bars, not tending children, which she had never wanted, but in the wholesome musical diversion of dancing these square dances all over the state. And even the amusing spectacle of her in layers of frill and a plunging neckline, could not inspire us to wish for the three days of square dancing before we were released on good behavior.

But square dancing, thankfully, was over for the year. All the way down to the stereo store from our home which was then on the eastern outskirts of town my brother and sister and I scooted around the back of our station wagon like a pack of lean hounds. We were ravenous for our prey and our prey were Easterners. Let us at them, wherever they were hiding! We were sure we would eat them alive when we found them, and their pale bodies, sprinkled with a dusting of chili powder, would taste delicious! Easterners, I decided, would like square dances.

"Hey, look that! That's just the craziest! Whoopee!"

"Lady!"

"What lady? Where?"

"That lady! Look at her. Coming out of the hotel. Right there! She's wearing a dead fox and she looks like a dead rotting fox herself."

"Ha, ha, you think she's weird? Take a look at her husband's face!"

"He looks like this."

"Oh, gee! They look about as stiff as a couple of deadies!"

"He, he."

"Gee whizz, this is great!"

"That guy is funny. He's going to the rodeo in a business suit."

"What!"

"Look over there. There's a guy in a big furry coat."

"Hey, Goofy!"

"You outta be in Nude York!"

"Get outta here!"

"Go back to the grave. Paley boy!"

"Don't get scared by some horsey!"

It was wonderful to slide around, banging against the wheel wells, hollering out the open tailgate, shouting impertinent phrases, ridicule, and rude noises at anyone that we thought looked remotely like idiotic Easterners; pale austere ladies wearing black net veils over the upper half of their faces and whose throats sparkled with short crystal necklaces; overweight men wearing graveyard expressions and gray suits; boys in dressy shorts and matching hats, especially ones with propellers perched jauntily on the top and spinning slowly as though indicating the syrupy flow of their self-satisfied thoughts—they would be captains of industry in smoke-clogged, over-populated, and freezing cities. Pah on them!

Children crave someone to persecute; in this we were no different. Those dread Easterners, we held in several discussions among ourselves, were very likely to be the same people who, jealous of our liberating warmth in winter, our many bright and sunny afternoons when we ran without coats in our parks and didn't have to shovel snow, conspired to set the nation's school curriculums and composed our textbooks. Safely ensconced in New York City high rise offices, they spent long cold afternoon filling our textbooks with what we considered worthless drivel about sledding, snowmen, and subways, maple trees and ocean-side clam bakes; clam bakes! Of all the irrelevant things to someone surrounded by cacti in the desert; and it was they who made us to pretend to learn the history of the thirteen original colonies (and nothing about Arizona). Why, though it seemed impossible to imagine anyone more ignorant of Mexico than we were, Easterners when they came to Tucson, openly flaunted their stupidity toward things Mexican; we were much more subtly stupid. Trust an Easterner to wonder what a taco was and be unable to pronounce it. We asked ourselves what kind of person it could be that had never enjoyed a raisin in a tamale and didn't know the smell of fresh masa. Clearly, these were incomplete people. When would they learn to pronounce the words chimichanga or tortilla?

We were cultural zealots immersed completely in the reality of our own peculiar outskirts of the world and who were enraged by the cultural hegemony of the East. Their ability, because of population density, to dictate to us what the national culture would be, left us feeling powerless. In short, Easterners were our enemies; we were on a general campaign to commit depredations against them; to be tanner than them; to laugh much louder and longer; to jump off high wobbly structures shouting "Geronimo!" in their presence. Devil-may-care, dressed in T-shirts and jeans before they were the national costume, we hissed the word "Easterner" as though they were a specie of drab grubs which had infested the United States.

My father nosed the long hood of our green and white station wagon into the crisp winter shade outside of the awning that hung over the front door and windows of Don Juan's Television and Stereophonic Emporium. Nervous of denting the hubcaps, yet afraid of the encroaching parade traffic, he inched the station wagon in close to the high curb. The back of the wagon, where we were, stuck out past the end of the stereo store where there was a small dirt parking lot, the only open lot in what was a solid block of businesses; my eyes immediately focused on a thick brocade which appeared on a brick wall at the back of this vacant lot; I thought what I was seeing was an extraordinary tapestry, large and impressive enough to rival anything hung on a European cathedral wall, but gradually, after pricking it apart visually, I realized that what I had taken for a large picture was instead a series of small pictures, a collage consisting of season upon season of bullfighting posters plastered one atop the other and announcing in detail the schedule of fighting in Nogales, Sonora. The matadors and the dates appeared beneath the enormous black bulk of the bulls themselves and beneath the banners which promised in screaming letters the spectacular nature of the upcoming battles. The impression that these posters were a tapestry or a needlepoint was increased by the picadors' lances, which stuck out of the bulls at random angles like abandoned needles.

I used to color on a low mosaic table, which had the verdant scene of a mission across a lake on the tiles and which was purchased by my father in Guaymas, Mexico, and at this table I sat cross-legged in front of the large glassy eye of our black and white television; for hours every Saturday night while the snowy images of the prior Sunday's bullfights from various arenas across Mexico appeared in that strange aquarium glass of the TV, I impassively stroked coloring pages with thick crayons; the sublime woody aroma of a fresh coloring page reminds me of Hemingway's passionate sport, though it translated to me as a stagy soap opera as overly theatric as Mexican telenovelas but due to the language barrier these bullfights were a sufficiently dull backdrop for the much more exciting work of coloring. What cities these bullfights took place in I'll never know; I understood not a whit of what was happening, the sequence or significance of the stages of death of this great spectacle, or the elaborate move of the matadors, nor did I care to learn. The blood oozing down the injured bull's sides and dripping onto the sand of the arena appeared in black and white as a wet chocolate spill, a rather messy ice cream sundae. What tradition there was in bullfighting I did not care to know. The names of any of the weapons or the moves of the matador disinterested me. Only the padded horses occasionally drew my attention when they were slammed against the wooden corral; I liked their wild eyes when the bull moved them.

But on that wall on that rodeo day the collage of bullfighting posters, some faded some fresh, appeared in ragged rectangles of peeling paper, blistering up from summers spent in hundred degree heat. It was as though someone had plucked at threads in order to take a tapestry apart or as if over time the threads had worn and the tapestry had grown ragged.

Under the confusion of bullfighting on these posters two teeny characters reclined against the sunny brick wall, bedrolls tucked under the small of their backs while they passed a liquor bottle back and forth between them. Now, characters were what my mother called people you didn't want to look at too closely, the exception being interesting characters in a book whom you were certain you would want to sit beside with TV trays banging knees at dinner, even if they were as unsavory as Bill Sykes, but I studied these characters, scrutinized their filthy visages and their ragged clothes. I remember one of them had a snowy white beard that stretched to such a length that he tucked an unknown measure of it into his pant waistband and the end came back up as though (horribly!) it was his white pubic hair sprouting up to meet his beard. The band of his pants was wider than any I had seen; his funny old pants needed suspenders and could have been, I thought years later, the bottoms of a Confederate uniform, with the filth on them of a thousand disappointing roads and foreign fields. He wore a striped cap—was it a railroader's cap which helped him to hop on trains but had been reduced to a bad state by all the travelling?—and his eyes were teeny and looked as though they had been pressed too close together into a withered slice of white apple. He was terribly thin with small square-toed black boots caked with clay poking out oddly at the ends of his legs. His companion was as brown and as young and as smooth of face as the other man was pale and old and hairy. But they had struck up a friendship. That was another way, I realized, that I felt superior to Easterners who might have frowned on a Mexican and an old American hobo sharing swigs from the same bottle, even in the relative privacy of an early morning vacant lot, whereas that was ordinary stuff to us; there was only one nationality among hobos, and many of them, though not all, weren't reluctant to mix in with Mexicans if they passed through town; in the winter the fringes of downtown cities across the Southwest, especially the railroad easements, were practically nothing but masses of hobos and their sparkling, litter strewn camps could be glimpsed through a veil of creosote bushes, twinkling across the light pink dirt. I felt a certain pride in that, my town's open-mindedness, but this was because I cherished a great deal of misunderstandings.

Father had just put the car in park when Meredith leaped out of the open station wagon window. Father got out and slammed his door; before he entered the store he squinted dramatically in our direction and shook a single threatening finger. "Be back here in forty minutes and I mean it. I'll have the stereo and a dozen or so records picked out by then. I'm gonna get some Nat King Cole records for your mother and some jazz for me. Don't get hurt! Don't get lost! The crowds are bad down here today, so watch yourself. Watch out for the cars and look both ways if you cross the street. Keep ahold of your sister's hand the whole time."

He yanked the brass door of the stereo store with a glance back at us. "Ojos," was what he said as he strode inside. That was his favorite parting tag, and as teenagers it never failed to send us into peals of laughter, though it was years before we got the nerve to laugh and Jack would reply with "huevos" in his best Senor Wenchlas voice.

A streak of pale yellow sped by.

"Hey!" yelled Meredith at the speeding sedan. "There goes some big shot rancher. Dang, I bet he's rich, rich, rich. Look at that car of his. What a big shot. Probably cost him a few pennies." Smoky black windows and weird antennas on a Cadillac—this one was canary yellow—announced the passing presence of A Mysterious Arizona Big Shot. As I said, these rich old geezers could be seen in town at rodeo time; they liked the parade and the pancake breakfast at the Pioneer Hotel and, I suppose, driving around town buying concha belts that hung low on the sassy hips of their skinny teenaged granddaughters.

"If we catch up to him, he might like us if we tell him some stuff about how we play in the arroyos and stuff and he might think we are really great kids with a lot of potential and spunk and he might just decide to give us his fortune in the future, secretly, kinda," said Meredith, revealing by this comment her own treasured fantasy about riches, a wish-fulfillment daydream we had picked up from my mother who acting as a librarian in a small town on the Salamonie River and had read and reread, and suggested to the unwary reader, rather foxy and smudged copies of _Great Expectations_ and _Daddy Long Legs_. Possibly goofy Horatio Alger tales as well. We were always on the lookout for a free handout from random adults, who were no more apt to bestow their wealth on a trio of such unattractive children than our own parents were (for in their stinginess they did not even grant us a weekly allowance). Howard Hughes, we knew, owned certain tracts of desert land and we imagined, as someone later really claimed, that we might meet him casually and convince him to bestow the deed to several valuable properties on us.

My brother, wide-eyed at the mention of an available fortune which might be rapidly retreating, though all he would have desired from the money was the opportunity to purchase innumerable plastic model airplane kits, clambered over the station wagon tailgate and jumped down beside Meredith, his thumbs crooked around the belt loops at the front of his jeans in some unconscious homage to a cowboy Hercules, though Jack was frail, resembling Mahatma Gandhi with his chest imprisoned in shrunken white T-shirts. "Hey, Mister. Hey, come back here, Mister!" Jack yelled in the loudest voice that an asthmatic nine-year–old could produce. He was risking one of his frequent wheezing attacks.

" _Callensen el osico_!" screeched the young drunken derelict right back at us, and his shout echoed off the canyon of bricks that surrounded him. His Spanish came out horribly slurred and, I suppose, thinking to add further insult, but unsure if any of his words would sound any clearer, he threw back his head, so that his long bluish black hair hung down on his back like an ink spill, and he crowed: _urph-a-urph-urph, urph-a-urph-urph_ ; his tongue arched and flopped in his mouth in a way English-speakers could never hope to imitate; his arms, tucked under his armpits, began flapping at his sides and one leg lifted to paw the air as though he had metamorphosed into a new mythical beast, the upper half a rooster, the lower half a peeing male dog. It really was an extraordinary performance, eye-catching, but also disturbing in the way he expressed his real disgust for us.

A young couple, who had been strolling toward us on the sidewalk and had been all smiles for each other, loudly discussing horseback riding and their mutual excitement with our towering variety of cacti, scooted ahead nervously at the explosion of raucous crowing from the derelict; the young woman turned her face away from the vacant lot and sought the protection of her youthful man's chest; I could see the muscle in her forearm clench as she worked the strap of her purse under the lapel of her blue blazer and clutched the strap and the lapel together as though Faust and the Devil had begun to wrestle for her. Both their heels, which had been clicking in happy unison, now pounded the pavement urgently with ugly, opposing beats. The man who was walking with her leaned backward and his angry blue eyes shot here and there about the vacant lot, the very back of which finally yielded the pair of lounging hobos, and that man seemed to be thinking, I imagined, that the Spanish which had preceded the crowing had insinuated something obscene about his pert young companion. That was certainly one way in which I felt worldly-wise, superior, braver than that stiff man and woman, who I took to be a couple of dippy Easterners, for sure. There are some ridiculous people in this world, I thought, and most of them are Easterners. Hadn't they realized that the hobo, though he was certainly unsavory, had simply told Jack to shut up? If hobos could be said to have a job while they visited town, it most likely consisted of drifting around telling kids what to do, to mind their parents, to read and obey rules, and to shut up, things they never did themselves, of course, and it was as though they had been stationed around our Old Pueblo, in empty lots, arroyos and alleyways, purely as surrogate, stopgap parents. I often wondered if those tramps had left very many children elsewhere in America or Mexico, and being oppressed, as I imagined I was, by overbearing parents, I envied these liberated, fatherless children who would be climbing trees and bouncing down on saggy, buggy couches behind airy shacks, and swimming in mud holes, and what more apt demonstration could there be of a middleclass child's shallow understanding of actual poverty? Well, the hobos felt guilty enough about leaving their kids in those lovely airy shacks and mud holes that they harassed every kid they laid eyes on.

I straddled the tailgate on my stomach and began cautiously lowering one knee over the side when, to my surprise, Meredith and Jack dashed off in pursuit of the Cadillac. The fear of being left behind caused me to perform a kind of impromptu and imperfect back flip, something I never could have managed on my own as anything remotely resembling gymnastics terrified me. As I went over, the base of my skull conked the bumper; in silver that bumper showed a panorama of the sapphire sky and crazy clotted clouds, strangely barred and bending off at the edges as though the beautiful clouds had decided to retreat shyly around a convenient corner.

I looked into the chrome bumper for only a second more and yet in that second of time the herd of cattle that I had seen on my way home from the church potluck reappeared. The same billowing heads, jamming their way forward, the crowds of steers, bulls bellowing, heads raised and tongues lolling. It was the fabulous Phantom Herd that I had seen when in the car with Peg. I was certain of it. The mass of cows fled around the edge of the chrome bumper in a rapid boiling froth. Cows, bulls, and calves, heads held high, pushing and shoving, whipping themselves in a fury toward the mountains. As quickly as I had seen the Phantom Herd, they were gone.

After recovering from the blow to my head by jiggling it well, I came up slowly and shakily, and the derelicts, who were watching me, collapsed in sniggers.

"Hey, missy," called the white bearded one after swallowing another swig from the bottle and passing it to his companion, "come here. I got something to g-g-ive you." He sang the word 'give,' strung it out in a queer, suggestive way, a deliberate stutter that should have warned me that he wasn't serious. He held his fouled old arm out with the fingers of his outstretched hand cupped and the wrist cocked down as if he concealed a hard candy in his hand and he might drop that candy into my hand if I would just come near enough for him to manage it.

I ventured forward hesitantly, responding almost robotically to his primitive offer of calories free-for-the-taking in the way that I suppose millions of ravenous cave children and famished women before me had when lured by their stomachs to their black dooms then enslaved, hacked apart, or thrown off the edge of a cliff by a devilish madman, and all the while I was imagining, rather foolishly, that the horrible hand suspended in midair might conceal some delicious creamy nougat or a bit of fine, crackling butterscotch, safely sanitized in a wax paper wrapper, I hoped, though why I wanted anything that had been housed even temporarily in a pocket which hung anywhere near the body of that grimy miscreant is beyond the ability of my mature brain to fathom. But we adults can hardly stand to look back at our naked vulnerabilities and see the monstrous might-have-beens that haunt us, especially when we have our own children, and we realize we are just as paralyzed to do anything about their bad judgment as we were to stop ourselves in our past. We look on in horror at what we are about to do. A few steps closer brought me to the very edge of the oozy shore of a sallow pond, a broad and gummy puddle. Wet caliche can carry a scent which permeated the air above the water and this stopped me for a moment; this lake mercifully blocked my progress toward the outstretched hand, and then the old man who lay on the far lakeshore suddenly sucked in both his cheeks and mashed together his loathsome lips making a kissing fish-face and a slurping, suckling sound. What an appalling sight for the eyes of a girl! The young hobo howled to see how shocked I was by the old man's disgusting face, and I didn't wait to see more; I took off out of there pronto. I felt like damning aloud those drunken foolish hobos that plagued our town each winter. Why weren't they packed in railroad cars and sent on their way to break their backs in the fields of California?

My pursuit of Meredith and Jack, who trailed the elusive yellow Cadillac, resumed; I spotted my brother and sister entering a crowded wind-swept street where a line of fuming red, yellow and green buses with the ominous bulletin RODEO GROUNDS blaring in big white letters across the width of their black headliners waited patiently to swallow their allotted bellyful of overly-excited tourists.

"I don't know why they aren't letting us on yet."

"Yeah, we wanna go!" said a freckled face boy who was beating his mother's purse with a toy gun. "I wanna see some horses and junk."

"That isn't the right way to talk. And you're scratching my purse. Stop it. Put the gun away."

"Well, I wanna go!" he said hitting the purse again.

"They're moving us on. Look, we took a step forward."

"Excuse me. I'm sorry I jostled your arm. Someone in the crowd behind us is pushing."

"Can you make the steps all right?" said a man to his pregnant wife.

"I wish I had brought some food," remarked an older woman in front of them.

"Do you suppose we'll all fit?" asked a man at the back.

Two by two, like obliging animals entering an odd Ark, the ladies and gentlemen with an appetite for the reenactment of various acts of animal subjugation, stepped into their future, into their rodeo destiny, pulling children and the elderly up the steps behind them. Such an amazing assortment of goofy gaucho hats, fringe vests, and Mexican peasant blouses I'd never seen in my life, certainly not on grown men and women. The sight of all those duded-up people scrambling to get in the buses rivaled the antics seen in any monkey house at the zoo; the smaller children chattered, the women picked odds and ends out of their children's pockets, and the husbands looked stony and manly, like silver-backed gorillas, enduring the crush.

It dumfounded me to see tourists filing so willingly, so naively, into those cryptic buses; after all, what was there to guarantee that the driver would take you to the rodeo grounds and not to his uncle's tallow factory where you would be melted down for the quantity of fat in your body? It was several years later, of course, when a terrible thing—not quite as bad as being rendered down—did occur. One of those very same coaches with the words RODEO GROUNDS on the headliner parked at a curb in downtown Tucson, but this coach turned out to be anything but a bus to the rodeo. Every time a load of tourists filled a bus, this one particular bus advanced in the line until it reached the front and tourists randomly claimed their seats. The crammed bus drove off. Many people on it, being visitors to the state, never suspected when the bus took a slight detour. But when the driver kept driving, right past any turns that would lead to the rodeo grounds, those who were residents protested. The driver explained that traffic snarls meant a detour. Minutes later, the bus swung around the front of an old ruined warehouse and the driver unloaded the tourists into the waiting clutches of masked men with guns.

These men, without explaining their intentions, herded the group into the warehouse using cattle prods, barred the door, and drove away. The resulting hysteria and mass panic of the group was vividly described in the book: _Our Rodeo Ordeal_. Their distress inside the warehouse while they managed an escape made interesting news, but the police never caught the culprits nor explained their motive. The owner of the warehouse was as bewildered by what happened as the kidnapped people and the driver who took them there had disappeared.

We passed the buses and I remember seeing men, temporary hires, who had a look of desperation in their faces and they were standing on the sidewalks carrying huge bundles of sticks. At the top of the sticks either red straw donkeys or blue felt banners bunched together and the banners read "Join the Cowboy Party Today!" If I had had any money with me, I would have bought one of those stout, straw-stuffed donkeys. I was as susceptible to donkeys as just about anything in the world including butterscotch nougats.

Besides wishing for money to buy one of those donkeys, my aspiration as we ran through the shadowy valleys of banks, dime stores, and Indian curio shops that made up our teeny, colorful downtown was that lots of those damn, goofy Easterners could be standing around being thrilled by our display of western bravado, by the way we galloped down the streets, by our clomping boots, by our whooping voices, which mimicked what we hoped were official-sounding sirens. We slowed down with the crowds and I looked at the walls of people who were waiting for the parade to see if any pale emaciated Eastern grub children, wearing hats with spinning blades on the top, admired us, but instead my eyes found a large, tanned young man in a cowboy shirt.

This young cowboy embodied everything, everything worthwhile in the male of our species. A weedy pale blonde thatch, almost wild, sprouted out of his handsome head, a fabulous head, perfectly formed as any Adonis with sparkling eyes and a gorgeous mouth. His hair had been lightly shaved into a flat-topped butch, but that had grown out like a lawn. He had long, strong legs and perfect muscles, even in his neck. He was the Ultra Man, an Ubermensch, like a handsome cowboy in a cheesy ad, except real.

I loved the way the young man looked, moved, and talked and the way he evaluated the women around him. Although he escorted two women, one on each arm, his beauty eclipsed theirs. But the thing about him that fascinated me most was that he had several scars on his arms that they seemed to be stitched together like some grandma's crazy quilt and yet it wasn't repulsive, but only showing that he was a real cowboy, someone who had worked hard on a ranch or as a rodeo star.

O, what a majestic man! What a wondrous body I beheld in that cowhand, what a feat of god-like glory in the formation of his muscles. For a moment, I worshipped at the strange altar of the human form. Then we dashed away.

The first part of our adventure that day ended when the yellow Cadillac swooped into the opening of an underground parking lot and a grimy chain barrier, like the portcullis of a medieval castle, came creaking down from some dark greasy slot in the ceiling above and before we could get down the incline and wriggle under it, the ugly thing had banged closed in front of us.

"Whew," said Meredith, breathing hard as her body careened down the incline and stopped just short of slamming into the chain fence. "We lost him. Dang it! He got away from us. Our best chance at a treasure and we didn't make it in time. Boy, he looked pretty damn rich to me. That was a good chance right there. Phooey! We could have talked to him and made him be impressed with us. I was thinking of some stuff to tell, but we lost our chance."

She wove her fingers through the links for a second and then pushed off. Jack did the same, but I stopped short of shoving my hands into the greasy gate. Pacing the pavement in front of the chain barrier in a slow circle, Meredith shoved the palms of both her hands into the small of her back. "I'll just bet that was that old Wagstaff bozo. He owns about half of all Arizona. He splits it fair-and-square with the fed-er-al-lay government back in Washington. Nobody knows where to find him and we almost got our hands on him today. Gee-whiz, we were lucky! We were close to getting to talk to him. Just his lawyers and the governor know where he is all the time. The governor's got to know 'cause if he makes a law Wagstaff's got to say yeah or nay to it as it strikes him. He's the head honcho, see. He's the Jefe Supremo. They say he has to mate with a heifer, mostly brown and white ones are his favorites, and he ships them in from Show Low, twice a week or he goes completely bonkers and starts foaming at the mouth and then they have to hop to it double quick and get a siphon and make sure a whole gallon of the finest tequila flows directly into one of his stomachs as a source of comfort. He's got four of em, stomachs that is, just like any old cow. His mother was a Jersey from Minnesota. Pretty interesting gen-e-ol-o-gy."

Meredith, you see, really knew the authentic facts on a lot of Arizona's famous people, including, it seemed, half-people, half-cows; she was sort of a walking repository of fascinating information about the city and the state; I could never match her for all the things she knew, but I was shocked years later when she couldn't repeat any of these interesting facts, and yet I recalled most of them, even the most trivial details of the stories, by heart. But I know I didn't believe her about Wagstaff being in the yellow Cadillac because in my vague ideas about who really was inside that car I imagined all sorts of odd combinations of children and deformed adults, linked together like puzzle pieces.

"God, I wish I had his dough," said a wistful Jack, flopping his scrawny back with its protruding shoulder blades against a crumbling adobe wall. He fell into a breathless, dazed stupor, thinking about Wagstaff's mountain of money or else the mating of heifers with human beings. "I could get a lot of models. Planes, mostly. That's what I'd buy. I'd get that big old model kit of a B-52 they have up on a high shelf near the door at the model store. Right as you go out or come in you can see it. I seen it a hundred times. Or a P-32. That a nice model too. They got it in two scales. I don't know which is better. If I had his money I could buy them both! I wish I had that model. I wish I had his money."

"Doesn't everybody," said Meredith, awed herself by the contemplation of so much wealth.

"All those bucks," said Jack admiringly.

"If you had his dough, you could really get some neat-o stuff, but you'd probably be crazy," Meredith said, delivering a choice bit of her usual pithy and world-weary wisdom. "You be about as crazy as anybody could be and not be automatically thrown in the state nut house. Actually, you would get thrown in, because you are a nut." She punched Jack on the arm.

"I wish I had twice what he has," I chirped merrily. This silly remark erupted out of my mouth because at age six I often confused twice something with half of it. My blurted observation brought the conversation to a screeching halt as surely as if I had thrown down a live hand grenade. My old rule of never talking for days appealed to me again as it would throughout my life; whenever I talked I was good at providing the comment which stupefied everyone with its supreme idiocy, and apparently I had done it again, though at first I was uncertain what mistake I had made. My brother and sister studied me thoroughly, intently, and in the most unflattering manner and for such an excruciating period of time that I thought I might die from their profound disapproval; "half" I said, correcting myself, "half, half, half." They ignored my correction and continued to assess everything about me with those cold stares of superiority; they seemed to be wondering if it would be worth the effort to throw me under a passing car or whether it would be better to wait for the rainy season and drown me in the arroyo the way you would a blind, three-legged kitten.

The decision, while not really in my favor, was to do nothing then; Meredith and Jack, without so much as a casual adios to me, took to the jammed sidewalks, roistering and swaggering, pointing out assorted oddities to each other. Our town had a lot of oddities to point out in almost every direction. I followed them at a respectful distance, conscious of my own relative inadequacy.

"Hey," Meredith said suddenly, stopping the funny little hopping hitch she sometimes had when she walked and shooting out an arm to stop Jack when we got near a department store, "there's something really, really weird in that window over there." She pointed at a crowd pressing themselves closely to a large plate glass window on the eastern side of Rosefield's Department Store. Without waiting for Jack to respond she ran ahead to a spot right behind the crowd where she stood on tiptoes to catch a glimpse of what was in the window in front of the sea of adult bodies.

Jack and I rushed to her side.

"You know something," Jack began, "there's some old creepy guy in there doing something." He had found a vantage point under the elbow of a tall skinny man who was slowly unscrewing a small bluish bulb from the silver flash disk of his large, leather-bound camera.

"Where? I can't see anything," I moaned. A wall of zippers and pleats, creases and tucks presented themselves to me. No bending or stretching would grant me the slightest glimpse of anything but a mass of adult posteriors.

"What's he doing?" Meredith asked Jack.

"Uh, I don't know, but he's kneeling over something," Jack reported.

"We've got to get in there," said Meredith with a determination verging on obsession. "I'll bet he's doing something real neat-o."

She began ramming her way to the front of the ogling adults; Jack and I traveled in her wake. We pushed our way past the ladies' purses, which were rather like store turnstiles, and wedged our bodies through gaps in the wool suits and linen slacks that were as steamy and as stinky in the desert's warm winter sun as any pasture of sheep or field of flax on a hot day in June. The tweed on one man's suit bristled with so many loose balls of various colored wool that he resembled a molting llama. The cloth seams on either side of a zipper placket at the back of the skirt of one large woman had turned out and the silver zipper writhed like a hideous centipede that had been partially stomped on and was trying to squirm away to die.

We were rather amazed, when we had squashed our way around the various drab New England grubs, to see on the other side of the department store window, an armless female manikin in a cashmere twin-set and a tweed skirt, and underneath the spooky manikin an old Navajo man crouched on his knees on the stage-like platform. He leaned over a plateau of sand that had been carefully leveled and smoothed on a board.

The Navajo gentleman who was on display in the window that day wore a long-sleeved black velvet shirt and white cotton trousers. A red sash adorned his waist and a smaller black sash cinched his hair at his nape into the shape of a bone or a bow tie. Another red sash crossed his forehead. A fat chain of heishi beads, the thickness and color of moth caterpillars, and separating to those lengths, was strung on cotton string and encircled his neck. Loose skin folds, coppery reds and golden bronze, trickled down under his chin like the maze of canyons in his high home. He had a sad, tight, thin lipped mouth and heavy turquoise earrings so weighty that they had pulled holes through the lobes. Deep gullies ran under each of his brown eyes and down the sides of his nose, these were tributaries to the canyons on his neck. His shoulders fell away quickly to his waist.

A door behind him had been left partially ajar and when I peeked through it I could see an ordinary lady considering the purchase of underwear. For a while she puckered her lips in a silent pantomime and screwed up her eyes, then she began puffing out her cheeks; she flipped the band on one pair of underwear over several times, stretched the elastic on the leg and laid it down; she patted the underwear and checked the tag after carefully lifting her glasses, which were on a neck cord, and placing them on the end of her nose. She finally selected three pair, turning them over like leaves of delicate parchment and lifting them with the support of both hands; at the register she gave up her money reluctantly, counting the dollar bills and delving into a little stamped coin purse for her change. While this drama took place off wings, so to speak, the Navajo performed in his artificial case.

It was as though he were some exquisite butterfly pressed under glass, or, because of the sand and the fact that we were outside, a better analogy might be a zoo exhibit, some fascinating case of rare lizards that the ghoulish tourists to our desert delighted in. Such cages were cottage industries and hand lettered signs at the side of the road would draw passerby to the shade of a mesquite or a cottonwood tree where the family had placed the chuckwalla or collared lizard in a wooden cage with a sign asking for a dime from for the privilege of peeking at it.

I remember seeing his tightly closed fist, held upright, which was moving up the side of the rectangular picture and as the fist skimmed above the perfectly flat sand surface it dribbled a faint flow, like a wispy miniature cataract, but of rust-colored powder. The falling red on the buff background was enough like blood to make you think for a minute that he had slit his own wrist and was letting his blood squirt onto the sand. I noticed he was careful to color inside the lines, something I never could manage with my uncooperative crayons. And I can recall the sand painting had paramecium-shaped green corn bodies held in the hands of corn maidens who were like black building cranes hovering above a big striped squash. The squash hung on an oddly angular plant. The whole thing disturbed me; it seemed to me to be an apocalyptic vision of dangerous plant life.

My brother and I didn't waste much time watching him before we tapped on the window pane and made the sign of the dead and desiccated forty-niner (which involved sticking out our tongues and pulling our bottom eyelids down) to see if we could rattle the old coot. Those forty-niners many of whom had died while making a big sweep toward California through Yuma in the farthest southeast corner of Arizona came in for a lot of ridicule from us then. I guess it was the idea of adult failure, great desire followed by great defeat, which we relished; we enacted their death throes enthusiastically in the alleys behind our home, forming whole wagon trains of the gold driven, mop-headed madmen. We had alarmed more than a few adults who had come out to the alley at twilight, with their trash neatly bundled in string the way they did then, only to encounter a line of scruffy children moaning, gibbering and clutching at their throats. So, used to our usual success at disturbing adults, we were quite disappointed by the lack of reaction from this stolid Navajo; the sand continued to flow from his fist uninterrupted.

"That poor, poor man," went the wicked whisper I heard next, a sound that wound itself around me for years, that whistled in my ears like a gale through an arctic pass, that blew so cold over me then that years later I can still feel its icy arms embrace me. The cultivated whisper, full of carefully pronounced consonants, came at us suddenly from a position behind us and, in unison, we turned to regard HER.

I didn't know her name then, and it took serendipity involving an old man and a microfiche to help me uncover it years later, but somehow it was easy for us to tell that the words had emerged from the carefully colored cranberry lips of a large, pale woman, one of those dreadful grubs, like the pale lady and man who had kicked the barrel cactus, from the East Coast, surely. Frosty faint cumulous structures, cloud traces of the ghastly face powder that every old lady in those years dusted liberally over themselves, clung in a gossamer film to what looked like dewlaps, yes, dewlaps for certain, on a great white wattle of a neck, the convoluted crevasses into which no party of skiers would dare to playfully trail their poles, for those were polar inclines of unimaginable peril. She was chinless and had huge watery green eyes that popped out below thick black eyebrows and white hair. A faint scent of rancid lavender, perhaps from a handkerchief inside her purse, wafted toward us as though, during a delightful stroll down a country lane, a gate to a trampled and mucky sty had swung open. She jutted her pale face forward like an extraordinary talking ox, and when she spoke her upper lip hung over the lower and worked itself around every lying thing she said, or rather intoned, for she never simply 'said' anything. About her there hung a distinct aura of Eastern shops, money, and status; there was every possibility that she was eligible to join the DAR, that her great-great grandmother and every mother since had actually done so, and that people somewhere shuddered to visit her in her enormous, pitiless city mansion and country home overlooking a great shiny bay. Her busty bulk and wide hips stretched the seams of a strange, piney green suit, and short white gloves encased her hands; she had tucked the loose knot of a long, dotted Swiss scarf under one jacket lapel, and let the ends billow over the padded shoulders of the jacket. Her stiff beaded purse, a souvenir of Olde Mexico, grew an embroidered tree that had been hung with disks, fake coins, which jingled whenever she moved.

"Doesn't he look dreadfully hot?" she asked, and all the while one of her strange gloved forefingers, the one with the purse dangling under it, began pointing at the man rudely, jabbing in the direction where he crouched on the other side of the big window pane. "Dreadfully hot just sitting in there, working so hard on his quaint little sandy picture, hmm." Her words were pregnant with meaning, of which we were ignorant, though the idea that she was trolling for a response from us seemed apparent. She fixed her eyes on the three of us as though she wanted to make very sure that we were grasping everything she said, and that we were also looking at the man in the window while she was talking. I then had the uncomfortable impression that during the time when we had been busily watching the sand painter dribble his flattened construction cranes, she had been working her way secretly around the crowd, choosing a route through the onlookers that would eventually insinuated her figure behind us. I wondered if I had actually seen this in the reflection on the plate glass or if I had only sensed some residue of movement, some residual clue to her prior impulses that had tipped me off. But what possible reason could she have to seek us out?

Her finger continued to point at the man and she was still gabbing away about how hot she imagined him to be. "With a black velvet shirt on!" she exclaimed in hushed awe. "And in the full sun."

She waited, but none of us replied.

"Heavens!" she added in a stagy whisper. She finished by dropping her pointer finger and clutching the cloth purse to her belly and the shrub, or tree, embroidered on it, covered with its fake coins, jingled an assenting chorus of 'yes, yes, certainly yes.'

"He isn't hot at all," said Jack shooting his comment at her, impudently, and I would say now, imprudently.

The lady looked relieved to have finally drawn one of us out and she also gave me the impression that she was pleased by the strength of my brother's contrariness. He was famous for this and when he was younger he used to like sternly to say, "nobody, no how, never" when he didn't want to do something.

"Well, well," she said, pulling her head back on her shoulders, "aren't you a self-assured young gentleman." She stopped and, drawing her whole body back slightly, made as though she were doing a double take, assessing his cowboy boots and jeans for the very first time. "I mean to say, young gentleman cowboy," she said, correcting herself with emphasis on the word cowboy. "I can see you are a real cowboy. Now, tell me," she asked, coming in close to us with a greedy, crazy look on her face, "why don't you agree with me, why don't you think he's hot?"

"Let me explain what my brother is trying telling you," said Meredith blandly, elbowing Jack's jutting ribs lightly which was her cue to Jack that she was taking over. "Indians don't feel the heat like ordinary people would because they have some special blood from living around here for so long, ah, blood that's better for this place than any of us have." As usual, Meredith delivered this shocking, inaccurate fact about Native Americans in a deadpan drone with a blank expression on her face. She did not wish to betray the tiniest smidgen of wonder with the world by showing any enthusiasm on her face or in her voice. She strove to produce the effect that everything in the world was to her a non-event, nothing too terribly special, just an everyday occurrence, that the sophisticated beings that we imagined we were had already experienced just about the whole of the entire universe. What we hadn't experienced was, well, hardly worth much of an effort anyway.

"Oh, how very interesting," said the woman. She still whispered under the misapprehension, I suppose, that the man making the sand painting could hear what we were saying through the glass. "They don't feel any heat? Now tell me the truth, surely some?" she argued, leaning forward and studying each of us in turn.

Meredith waved off the question as too absolute. "Not to speak of, lady. They don't let it hurt em in any way."

At moments such as these, while Meredith was making free use of her vast store of questionable scientific wisdom and authentic gimcracks, suddenly, a surge of sisterly pride, and a real western conceit coursed through me, and the physical reaction in my body was like a team of horses' jerking on the tongue of a wagon following the pistol shot that began the Oklahoma land grab, this pride stretched, then stiffened, my spine and made my flesh tingle. It was an honor to be present when my sister's knowledgeable use of words made us, by proxy perhaps, appear knowledgeable, too. This self-satisfied, so-called superior Eastern lady, if indeed she was ever capable of being anything more than a pale sickly grub—and I was now fairly certain the answer to that was no—had probably just about met her match in us.

"How fascinating," said the awful woman focusing on us intently again. Those green eyes of hers fixed themselves to Meredith's pixie face, her short brown hair, then her glance swept down over the faded and puckered Mickey Mantle T-shirt Meredith rarely removed.

"Sure, it is," my sister said, shrugging, "Arizona, on the whole, is pretty interestin. I know about a hundred real neat-o facts about Arizona that I can think of, but I can't think of them right now." Meredith's eyes rolled up in the air as though some of those neat-o facts might be soaring around the air above the sidewalks.

Someone further back in the crowd snickered.

"Oh," said Meredith, thinking of something suddenly, "but one of them is, if they could crack the secret to Indian blood you could forget about Freon. Freon is what modern people who are not Indians just about have to use in their air conditioning systems in order to stand living in Arizona in the summertime. But Indians don't. It's a fact. Scientists would be wise to do a lot of studies about that stuff." Several more adults behind us had the nerve to join in laughing with the early onlooker who had snickered. Until then, I had been wholly unaware of our audience beyond of the lady. I perked up thinking that there were bound to be some other Easterners there in the crowd that we could impress with our authentic gimcracks and inaccurate scientific bunk. If you got a chance to make a rugged appearance in front of a bunch of Easterners, you'd better take it; they didn't come around every day, in fact they only came around in the winter for a few months being too wise to show up in the summer when it was one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Impressing Easterners whenever you saw them was a vital part of the everyday code that we operated under.

"Is that so?" said the weirdly horrible lady, reacting to Meredith's claims about Freon by sucking in her breath and placing a hand atop her mammoth right chest beneath which a heart was supposed to be beating. Her stance made it look as though she were about to recite the pledge of allegiance at a ballgame; her purse which hung from her right arm bounced off her big belly and the coins again jingled their agreement with everything she said. "My, my, how interesting. Scientific studies, you say? Maybe they'll take your advice. I wouldn't be surprised. You do learn some fascinating things when you travel to the far western regions of the country and especially when you visit this most wonderful state of Arizona. Why, this cactus land of yours with all its saguaros is almost like a fairyland for someone from...." She paused and during this momentary break in her gushing tribute to Arizona and the West, which was laid on so thickly that even I was unimpressed, I could clearly see the grimy gears turning inside that horrible head of hers, and it seemed as though she plunged her gloved hand mentally into a hat and drew out, ever so slowly, a small folded slip of paper with the name of a completely random Eastern state on it, "...Pennsylvania," she cried triumphantly. I knew immediately that she was no more from the state of Pennsylvania than I was from Transylvania; if asked, she would have been unable to name more than a few counties in that state, not that I could have caught her lie by asking; I doubt if I knew what a county was.

However, why did she need to deceive us? We didn't give a hoot about any dumb old Eastern states or anybody who lived in them nor did we care anything about them; they were just dumb old places that tried to rule the whole country all the time and succeeded, much to our frustration and growing feelings of cultural impotence. Why was she trying to conceal her true home from three kids she had just met on a sidewalk in Arizona?

"Sure," said Jack, drawing out the word to an amazing length; this, and the way his eyes were studying her, tipped me off to the fact that he was greeting this tidbit of information, her home state, with a degree of skepticism equal to mine.

But our doubts about her didn't seem to have sunk in or else they had and still our opinion of her lying ways didn't faze her. "Do you three children happen to live on one of those Arizona ranches that I've read so much about in our nation's magazines?" asked the lady, and she intermixed her words with loud, rather ridiculous gasps that served to attract the attention of more of the crowd around us. "A ranch as big, perhaps, as the whole state of Connecticut?" She leaned in eagerly when she asked this, and I had an even greater impression that this woman was pumping us for information. Suddenly I felt afraid that her interest in great big ranches, coupled with the size of the crowd around us, would tempt us to tell some great big whoppers.

"No—" I began, but as soon as this word left my lips I felt my chest being squeezed and Meredith was upon me; for a moment I disappeared entirely beneath her and she had four fingers pressed to my lips; I had been stopped before I could reveal that we were living in a small ranch-style tract home in a subdivision of unrelenting middle-class banality.

"I just love my dear, dear little sister," said Meredith patting my shoulder. "I like to squeeze her."

The woman had a startled look on her face as she watched me struggle to extricate myself from Meredith's relentless grasp.

"Yeah," said Meredith, allowing my escape but sending a wary look my way, "that is, yes, ma'am, we do live on one of those ranches you've read about. The Circle....ah, Bar S...Circle Bar X J9 Supremo Rancherito. That's our brand and the name of our ranch. We've got millions of cows spread all over the county. All the way down to the Mexicano border and...um...way up in the Mogollon Rim and the Grand Canyon a pretty long way in the northerly direction and over to Gila Bent and El Frida Y Meida. But we have to get those out of there. The snow's getting em down."

I remember being a little surprised, as I listened to this excellent lie, the number of our cattle in three years had grown to millions, because more of those people around us smiled and chuckled at Meredith's fantastic, overblown tale of cattle and the size of our family ranch. Then I remembered she had told this before to the crazy lady and man out at the cactus monument.

When my sister finished, the lady spontaneously and suddenly smacked her gloved hands together, swatting them once loudly, and the retort in my ears was like an awful clap of thunder which might ripple across mountains, stunning the foothills, resounding on the very broad floor of a darkened desert and flattening the lacey creosote limbs and pale furry gray flower stalks of the desert marigold.

"How fascinating!" she cried, and her pale green eyes widened, her bristly gray eyebrows rose into the white powder on her forehead. "So you're all real ranch buckaroos? Every last one of you?"

Then, as though she needed to emphasis the importance of her terrible question, to drive home the permanence of our deceit should we hold tight to our fib, one of her pristine white gloves shot off of her hip, where it had been resting after the awful clap, and spread itself flat. Tiny stitches puckered up the fingers of the white glove which was floating there; the fingers were like probes at our souls; then that spooky glove with its hidden horrible hand which I knew if I could ever see it would be whiter than any human's hand ought to be, shot out and swept its keen knife edge at us, coming out level and slicing through our envy of all the real ranch families, the real wealthy people of Arizona, slicing straight through the wicked, vain lies we had told, our tales about our fabulous, mythic ranch, which we were about to plant forever in the minds of innumerable strangers to make ourselves feel more important, more influential, than we were ever destined to be. All three of us took a giant, telling step backwards, away from her.

I began to sense that she was pulling our legs, that this was not a very nice lady, and that she might even be menacing. There was no doubt she knew Meredith was lying about the ranch, but it was too late to turn back, the die was cast, and though she might be the most evil woman in the world, we were already talking to her, endangering our souls by telling her a lot of bragging fibs.

"Uh, yeah," Jack replied, hooking his skinny thumbs around the belt loops on the front of his frayed jeans the same way he had when he had jumped out of our car, but now adding a self-conscious wrench of the belt loop that pulled them outward, and all the while his voice was adopting his own peculiar version of a westerner's laconic and lackadaisical drawl, "ranches are easy stuff for us. Shucks, real easy stuff. Give us a ranch to manage any old day. We'll manage it, why, what's the big problem. We got the cattle under hand and all the money figured out. We know how to rope and whoop and skedaddle the cattle this way and that all over the state. Don't hardly lose any of them when we're on the job." He pulled one of his thumbs out of the belt loop when he finished saying this and shoved the frame of his glasses up his nose; the toe of his boot (it was one of a fancy pair that was destined later to be mine and had the most lovely brown shiny slope inside where your foot slid in, as shiny as the surface of an English flint, though I only saw those years later) scuffed the sidewalk in a shy, shuffling imitation of a humble hometown cowboy, though our own, real, 64 acre ranch in the Avra Valley, homesteaded by our great-grandfather, had long before been deeded from my grandfather, the older, urbanized brother, to his younger brother, Jim after he had been gassed in World War I; and we had only visited it twice on Sunday afternoons, enduring in shy, embarrassed humility a tour of the ridiculously small measure of wealth and prestige we had lost. "We know cows and cows know us," he proclaimed, and most of the crowd chuckled, gentle, non-confrontational adult laughs, but a sound nevertheless which was capable of severely wounding me and made me ball up my fists and wish I was the one telling the lies so that I could make up a humdinger, some massive impressive mistruth about our lives, which would convince all those doubters of the wealth and might of what I truthfully knew to be my failed, feeble little family.

Jack continued: "We brand em and sort em and get em out of the messy old creosote and the arroyos and the prickly pears; they've got an awful bad habit of landing in those old prickly pears or brushing up against a jumping cacti. And as for stomping on Devil's Claw which is as good as a hobble for a young cow–excuse me, I mean a calf—they do that all the time when they aren't busy snapping off their horns accidentally. We shoot rattlesnakes that are biting at em and lions and stuff, too. Mountain lions, that is. African lions don't live in Arizona."

Scanning the three of us slowly with an emotion on her scary face that appeared to be nervous glee, she inquired if our boasted knowledge of the use of guns could be anything but real; fess-up, was what she was saying in other words; confess that you are lying now and I'll go easy on you later; but she concentrated her prying question especially, intently, on me, seeing the weakest link in that chain of children, and expressing her own trepidation even around the literary flintlocks which she said shot up the pages of any of Mister James Fennimore Cooper's novels, her favorite casual reading. Yes, those guns terrified her when in the hands of someone that she said was a real outdoorsman and awfully reliable around firearms called The Deerslayer. The thought of the slender frame of a captive deer being harnessed to some Easterner's heavy sleigh brought prickles of indignation to my hot cheeks; those sleigh-ers ought to have known better—I had no doubt now that Easterners were fiends–and I sincerely hoped, and enjoyed imagining them dashing through the snow and being promptly dashed into the side of a boulder when they plowed into a snow bank and broke their lily-white necks.

"Sure, it's real," said Jack, coming back at her when she had finished telling us all about her nervous reaction to Fennimore Cooper books. "You're afraid of pistols and rifles? That musta been the work of that deer slayer guy. An Easterner exaggerates just about everything around them in the puny old East. They think their boulders are the Rocky Mountains. They think a stream is the Mississippi. Guns are a natural part of our lives. The fact is we would have shot out of the side of our cradles, but they ain't a stable shooting platform." He finished his critique of Eastern braggadocio with this crazy image, straight off the pages of a Paul Bunyan tale, and shoved his hat back on his head. The crowd, which had remained hushed during Jack's bragging criticism, which had grown louder and louder as he spoke, suddenly broke out in an enormous and continuous roar of laughter; people clapped each other's backs and grinned at the foolishness. An old white haired lady standing by herself took out her handkerchief and blew her small nose as though listening to Jack had reminded her of the bravado of a long since grown-up brother or son.

Chief among the roarers gathered around us that day was an emaciated coot wearing a broad-rimmed tan felt cowboy hat, which was clearly his best hat, brushed up and brought straight out of a box. Hearing Jack's comical reproach of Easterners, he slapped his long flat thigh with a bronze hand—his whole arm was just brown shiny skin and bones and you could see his ribs through the thin cotton of his cowboy shirt—and he doubled over making a raspy, painful noise in his throat and shaking his head. The mother-of-pearl snaps on his loosened cuffs clacked together and sparkled in the morning sun as though bands of extraordinary lightning encircled his lean forearms. "That's good," he said, between incredulous shakes, "that's so good it's darn-right funny! I haven't heard anything so funny since I left work at the ice cream plant."

I don't know what possessed me then. I don't know what made me chime in with the declaration which has troubled me for years. Perhaps it was the fact that Meredith and Jack were getting the better of the situation, amusing that crowd of adults, and perhaps I wanted to be the one getting the attention, or maybe I wanted the adults not to laugh, if, as I suspected, their laughter was **at** us, and not with us. That galled me. Or perhaps it was because that lady's great globular green eyes had focused on me during Jack's lie about guns, but whatever the reason I blurted out the fateful words which I was to regret for years.

"And we have a ghost herd, too."

And we have a ghost herd, too. I'd given it all away without a thought. The things I was really going to need later had been disposed of that easily.

She swung back at me, there is no other way to explain the way she looked than to say she pounced on me, suddenly and profoundly, like a suspicious spider feeling a small fly who had the bad luck to twiddle a remote strand of a web, and she was very quick to drop her big, awful face down close to mine.

Oh, how I wish I had never spoken.

"What was that, my little one? What did you say? Something about a ghost herd? Will you kindly repeat what you said so that I can hear it properly?" The scent of foul old lavender overwhelmed me as though she had shoved my face in a hunk of mildewed weeds and I stared at the tiny cracks along the edges of her lips which were bleeding color out from her bright cranberry lips. Where her mouth should have been there was nothing but a bloody gash.

"There's about—" I squinted up my face the way I often would in the full face of the sun (for we never wore sunglasses then) and tried to come up with a large enough number to knock those self-satisfied adults on their keisters and I wanted the same number that Meredith had used on the pale man and woman, "—near about, a hundred thousand million head of prime ghost cattle." I claimed this absurd thing quietly, rather awestricken by my own audacity, and wondering myself what made a cow 'prime cattle' not to mention 'prime ghost cattle.' I wonder now which mythical television cowhand, transmitted to me in a snowy image on our great black and white television and perhaps delivering a rambling ad-libbed soliloquy while sipping out of a tin cup imaginary coffee on the prop of the chuckwagon's open tailgate or a wagon wheel, had perhaps paired those words that spilled out of my mouth.

"Ghosts? Cattle ghosts? You mean you are the owner of a ranch of supernatural cows? How can that be?" the lady asked rhetorically, straightening up with an enchanted look on her face that bordered on lunacy. "What a charming concept! I've stumbled upon something really fascinating here! Aren't these children interesting? Don't they have glorious imaginations these charming children?" She appealed to the people around her to agree and they smiled patronizingly.

It only took an instant for Meredith and Jack to realize that I had piqued her interest in the phantom cattle tale, and anything about the West that tantalized an Easterner, be it truth or tall tale, the rule was—carry on with it. So they boldly jumped in and slathered on their own details. Of course, Meredith recognized the tale as her own and simply took over, noticing that I had turned the cattle into ghosts.

"It's no imaginary thing, lady," Meredith began, seizing control of the story, "Not at all, not in the least. The atmosphere in the upper ionony sphere of the desert is charged with more particles of a particularly weird nature due to the parched land and the watery air and these forces can make for the appearance in the sky of extraordinary things. Things that are usually herds of cattle. There are hundreds of those cattle on our ranch. Or I should say above our ranch. It's a piece of heritage that we're proud to take care of. A part of our big, old Arizony." She ended this with a very upbeat, Chamber of Commerce attitude and a goofy smile.

Meredith was making this whole thing up, along the lines of what I had started. Or was she?

"Hundreds of cattle!" The lady was simply delighted. "Heritage, you say?" Her purse jingled as she merrily clapped her gloved hands.

"A piece of it," Meredith replied. She had a way of standing with her double jointed knees bent backwards and her arms crossed on her chest. She was doing that then.

"And you can see them in the skies?" asked the woman wonderingly. "Right up above the city?"

"They're mostly boiling up over the horizons," said Meredith, "and pounding their heels on the ridges. In our big sky. They don't call our state the big sky country, another state got that name, because our sky **is** big, maybe bigger than any other, but it's so damn packed with these cattle flying around you couldn't call such a crowded place big, could you?"

"No, I suppose not," the lady agreed. "But they're flying around?"

"Sure, they're flying," piped up Jack. "The Busy Sky Country is what they ought to call Arizona." Almost every adult within earshot was smiling; we beguiled them with our tale of ghost herds, ranches, guns and mysterious malarkey.

"How do you know they're yours?" she demanded suddenly, as though she had just thought of it and needed to show her newly awakened distrust. She put her gloved hands on the pine colored sides of her skirt where her large hips spread to near bursting and she straightened up. "Did you round them up from somewhere?"

"Well, now you're getting into the secrets of the ranch," said Meredith as she grimly crossed her arms on her chest. "You might just be trying to find out what you can from us, so you can rustle them!"

The people around us laughed, long and hearty laughs. Several ladies chortled so loudly that they put their hands on their husbands' shoulders for support in their merriment. Their eyes watered.

"A rustler," said the skinny old fellow who we had amused before, and he was bursting out with the fun he was having listening to us, "imagine her as a rustler! Don't that just beat everything? These kids are better than the radio programs!"

"Never!" cried the woman from 'Pennsylvania' in mock horror.

"I pick you out as a rustler type if ever there was one," said Jack dryly.

"Now you're fooling me," she protested. "You're playing with me, aren't you?"

"No, I'm not," said Jack plainly.

I took a long careful look at that lady. I knew suddenly that a dangerous rustler was exactly what she was. And she looked satisfied, she had gotten precisely what she wanted. And I, unfortunately, had been the one to give it to her.

So this was it the big mistake. Well, I made it and I had to pay for it.

During all the time that we had been telling the lady things she should never have found out, things that I was going to regret for many years, the Navajo went on with his sand painting design, meandering his fist of dribbling sand here and there, misting his fine stream of sand over his design on the board. He seemed to be drawing an intricate squashed world, a universe run over by a steam roller with those corn maidens lying out as though they were girder-bearing construction cranes that had fallen back from an impact crater and with the angular arms of flattened squash plants radiating out in many directions. Even the red and blue clouds had a flattened apocalyptic look that alarmed me. The hand of one of the corn maidens held the moisture pad which is a prayer to the rain gods. I remember a bunch of tobacco was in there for smoking in ceremonies. And pollen carried allergies to everyone and made plants grow. Navajos felt very dependent upon the spirits of the earth and the sky, but I have to say I was cynical about that stuff then.

We stayed at the window and watched him dribbling sand for a few minutes longer. The crowd ooh-ed and ah-ed, but after a while the spectators at the edges began to disperse. Someone shouted that the rodeo parade would soon be rounding a nearby corner.

"So the sands of time drift away and soon we shall all be dead, dead, dead," said Meredith unceremoniously.

The woman gasped.

"Come on," said Jack, "let's get out of here. This dumb old guy is never gonna finish his picture. We can't stay here all day."

It was less of a fight to get out of that crowd than it had been to get in and see the Navajo. But the crowd at the sidewalk was four persons deep and there were more barricades and policemen between Rosefield's and Don Juan's. The last thing I wanted to do during our struggle to get out was to turn back and see what that lady was doing, but I couldn't help myself.

It wasn't hard to find her because when I turned around I discovered her face was fixed on mine. Something about the way she looked reminded me of Blaine Newton. She had gotten something from us and I knew I was going to regret it.

When we finally returned to our station wagon, the new stereo was about to be put in the back. This act of heroism was to be performed by an enormous man in a silly green uniform, a uniform which was so formal it almost needed a pair of golden epaulettes. The warehouse worker's tiny head was mounted between giant beefy shoulders, and his arms came shooting out from either side. He spoke with an asthmatic rasp. Waving Father back, he slopped an aqua chenille rug which we had brought with us over the open tailgate. He lifted the console himself and eased the utterly grand stereophonic radio and record player onto our rug. He then wrapped it, expertly, with the rug as though it were a big burrito: side over, bottom tuck; top tuck, side over, his movements sent dust motes and loose strings flying.

After he slid the radio and record player into the station wagon bed he made careful adjustments to his person, fiddling attempts to stand erect and comb his hair, using a small black plastic comb which advertised Nogales Stagelines. He even adjusted his skinny brown belt and clicked his polish-daubed white wingtip broughams together.

"Don Juan's TV and Radio, and Don Juan himself, personally and genuinely, wish you the experience of the happiest of hours with your family," he said, then pausing and faltering. His eyes rolled back in his head and he summoned forth the last words. "Listening to symphonic music," he added. With a slight aristocratic bow he slipped our receipt inside a large mania envelope and presented it to Father.

Absentmindedly, Father handed the envelope to me while Meredith and Jack and I climbed in and he closed the tailgate.

All the way home I studied the crest on the front of that envelope. It was a Spanish coat of arms similar to the one of Christopher Columbus which I had seen in an old history textbook. When our station wagon crunched across the gravel drive and I entered our home, I took the envelope to my brother's closet and compared it to the page in that old book. The pages of that book were so well read the foxy surfaces were soft, fuzzy and warm to the touch, and the Columbus coat of arms had been printed there whole and then sectioned apart like a cut-away diagram of an ancient fossilized trilobite, or the four chambered heart of an obsolete beast. Oak leaves sprawled around the arms and an eyeless helmet with only a mouth and teeth guarded the top of the four chambers. Columbus's crest, showed in those four rooms: a castle, a lion, tropical islands and anchors.

In place of the oak leaves, Don Juan's crest was emblazoned with lightning bolts to represent sinister radio waves, and a microphone substituted for the eyeless helmet. In the four chambers of the coat of arms, Don Juan displayed: a radio tower, a pile of platter-shaped records hovering above a turn-table, a boy and girl dancing, and two tied quarter notes.

Almost immediately that grand stereo my father had bought from Don Juan's joint developed the most interesting and peculiar quirks. It was as though we had brought something otherworldly into our home, an entity designed to connect us to European politics and water fowl.

Father turned first to the radio.

You shuffled two doors, thin particle board panels, to reveal the lovely glowing radio dial sunken into the mahogany veneer. The red bar that marked the station numbers floated under glass in its own sea of golden station numbers.

"I could learn Spanish from this," said Father. "I could pick up the signal from Spanish language stations all over northern Mexico." The sudden, wild inspiration gripped him, inspiring him. It was as though he had been electrified. Floating about in the air were the keys to another world, words were passing unseen through the air. They were Spanish words and he would learn them simply by tuning in this fabulous radio set.

He got one of the black wrought iron ice cream store chairs that my mother had brought from Indiana, and sat solicitously beside the dial his fingers twiddling idly as he sought Spanish stations. The lighted rectangle of the dial glowed like a yellow sea. But hour after hour the radio stations he sought proved elusive.

He grew very excited after sundown though because he finally was receiving some noises that seemed to be coming from Sonora and seemed to have tuned in some far away signal from the distant hills of Mexico. What he was hearing was baffling, though because he was sure he was listening to them talking all about Trotsky and communist assassins. The buzzing static sounded like the murderous artillery of the death squads. In between the talk of assassins Spanish words came out in odd blurbs and hideous hisses: my father's knowledge of Spanish was minimal, illusionary, although his father spoke Spanish before he spoke English, his fragmentary knowledge combined with the intermittent transmissions of long distance radio combined to make the whole thing frightening.

"Evidence of the assassination," said Father, supremely surprised. "Fenklestone or Fusselman did it. They said something about evidence of an assassination. I'm sure I heard that. Wait." He listened intently. While he listened he drank more of his rum and coke from a swirly turquoise glass. He was pretty drunk, as usual.

"Someone get me a notepad," he ordered.

Meredith dutifully complied and began searching my mother's desk, which was in the living room and had a single broad drawer. Giving up on the desk, she walked into the kitchen and opened another drawer.

"What are you rooting around for?" said Mother dropping the top of her newspaper suspiciously, as she heard Meredith slide a kitchen drawer and shove boxes of rubber bands, crayons and twine around.

"Dad needs a notebook," Meredith explained. "He's found a Spanish station and he's going to write down some of the words. Is this junky old red leather one okay?"

"No. Put that back. That's got some important mortgage numbers in it that I need to keep. Tell him he needs to borrow a good language book. I'll get him one tomorrow."

"And gun oil," Father said from the other room, hearing the whole conversation between Meredith and our mother.

"What? What in the world do you need that for?" said Mother.

"There's stuff going on in Sonora you wouldn't believe. It's a whole camp of them, planning to come up here to America, to Arizona, maybe even through Tucson. We better get prepared. It's Trotsky and his bunch. They aren't dead after all! If Stalin's police in Russia gets a word of this, they'll be over here to deal with him and we could get caught in the crossfire."

"Trotsky!" mother exclaimed in astounded outrage, "He was murdered while he was sleeping in Mexico City. Years ago," she added, though we could see by the expression on her face that the exact date troubled her. "Let me get the almanac; I can tell you the year." Mother was a librarian and knew, when her memory failed her, where to get any pertinent dates in a flash.

"Lies, it's all lies. I tell you it was staged. If those Soviets can put a dead man in a tomb, under glass, pumped full of wax and parade people by the corpse day after day so they can see that his body doesn't rot, they certainly can stage a murder in Mexico. Everyone knows the police there will cooperate with just about anything."

Mother looked at him long and hard. "I'm putting the radio off limits for you," she said.

After this, Father slid the cabinet door over the radio side and revealed the stereo. He brought his stack of favorite recordings from the closet, an especially favorite one being the Sons of the Pioneer's singing "So Died Jenny," a song about an army mule that dies in service to her master. He liked to listen to it while frying tacos, but fairly soon after he brought it home the turntable developed an annoying squawk. It wasn't as loud as it was persistent and at a range only barely audible, but you could have sworn a duck waddled by when Jenny's skin came off with her blanket and she laid down by the fire with her legs in the air. Jenny, you see, was an army mule. The maudlin pioneer mourned him; this squawky duck ridiculed him. And each time Father turned off the fire, and went to the turntable to listen, the sound invariably disappeared. The golden arm that held the needle floated serenely over the black grooves of the big 78, and Meredith and Jack swore they did not even know how to quack like a duck.

On the Sunday afternoon of the four day rodeo holiday, we discovered that an old woman named Maude Moran, who scrubbed floors at the Arizona Historical Society, had been hired to baby-sit us while my parents attended a company party at a home in the desert foothills.

"Now listen here. Your father and I have made arrangements for a babysitter to come. We're up at the home of Mr. Mortimer Green in the Foothills, but you aren't to call there under any circumstance whatsoever. This lady who is coming is a wonderful person, who I have known personally for years and years. She is wonderful woman from, oh, somewhere in the Midwest and she has been scrubbing the floors of the Historical Society for eons. Every night in that old museum with all those old artifacts. She's not exactly normal, not exactly completely normal, but I'm sure you kids will get along with her easily and mind her always. She does not like disobedient children and I promised her my children were perfectly behaved. Children of mine will understand how spending so many hours alone at night might have made her a little bit touched in the head. Imagine the strain on her after all these years. She can't go down on the floor again. Poor old thing she must make a go of the babysitting and get out of floor scrubbing and of course because I used to work there and knew her I tried to hire her right away. I'm giving her name out to other ladies at the church, too. We're lucky to find such an upright old woman who wants to take care of you. She said she'd be very interested in you young people. She hasn't done much babysitting, but that's not important. I know any kids of mine are going to make her feel welcome. She has some TV dinners to heat for you and she'll play games with you, I think."

Father had to pick up Maud Moran at her little bungalow and bring her to our house because the old woman had never learned to drive. She lived in a teeny house on the edge of an arroyo. Our father said the house was back far from the road and some of the windows were painted.

Maude was a fat, toad-like woman from some unknown location in Minnesota. Her face had a hairy mole sprouting from her forehead. She had no waist and barely moved out of the kitchen chair once she had dropped into it, but her inactive body was made up for by her bullying behavior; she kept at us all the time actively suggesting, "If you wannah run around outside, that'll be all right with me. Or "If you wannah put on some rock and roll records, well, that'll be all right with me."

Meredith explained that though we loved rock and roll music more than anything in the world, we had been strictly warned not to touch the large, new stereo in its glossy cabinet of imitation mahogany. Punishments for touching the new stereo might include crawling around in the front lawn picking out gravel for an entire Saturday or even enduring a severe lickin' from our Dad's belt.

"When the cat's away the mice'll play," said Maude, gleefully undeterred. She checked the gray plastic timer on the oven and remarked that the TV dinners were half cooked. She slung a kitchen towel over her shoulder and then planted her feet on the floor before deciding to sit again at the table. She swiped her hands along the length of her thighs. Her old dress wrinkled up as though smiling at the thought of playful mice.

"I been scrubbing floors so long if I go in any house I can't help but look at the floors. Your mother is doing a remarkable job on these here."

"She makes us clean the tiles one at a time in the summer. And put on stinky polish with a rag," Jack explained angrily.

"And so she should. I made my son do the same every Saturday because I couldn't stand to scrub my own floors by myself so we did it together."

"Bet he didn't like to," said Meredith wisely.

"He never said so," said Maud tightly.

"Ah, as I say I have scrubbed floors in the old museum. Scary at night, that old museum. Those couches and living rooms with fake peas on plates. One night I saw the peas rearranging themselves on the plate. Sure enough. I hurry past those old rooms. Goodness it is strange there at night when you are alone. Carriages and stagecoaches sitting around by themselves. Look awful lonely. Awful spooky and lonely. I got up under one once when I was cleaning the floor underneath and I knocked myself out." Maud laughed at herself. "Woke up a few minutes later with a wet dress. I thought I wet myself, but it was my pail of mop water that I knocked over. I thought someone had snuck up and hit me on the head. Wasn't anything but my own foolishness. Hmmm. Least I think so. Well, let's have some music on that nice looking stereo of yours. I mean it. Get it out. I want to hear some."

"My parents will kill us if we turn it on," said Meredith, sounding horrified at this old lady's lack of respect for the property in the houses where she sat. "Mother said you would play games with us."

"No, I don't play any games," Maud assured us grimly.

What was she used to doing in people's homes, we wondered? Did she just march in and order kids around so that they broke all their parent's carefully devised rules? What had our parents been thinking when they hired this woman? Especially Mother. How could she be so critical of the seedy side of Arizona and leave in the hands of a woman like this? A floor cleaner pretending to be a babysitter! Or was Mother being really devious. Was she hired just to tempt us into breaking the rules? Were my parents working together to play some kind of strange mind game on us and get us to reveal our true insurrection?

"Pah! How're your parents gonna know we turned it on if at the end of playing the records we switch it off? The neighbors here are too far away, if you're thinking of that. You could fit another house between yours and your neighbors. I'm not going to tell. You need to think better, kid. You gotta think things through to their ending and then you've figured it out. Go get your rock and roll records. Get some of them. I don't care what they are, just rock and roll records. Hurry up. Let's hear 'em." She smacked her lips together in great pleasure and crossed her arms on her big belly in what was obviously a moment of intense anticipation and satisfaction. Rock and roll promised to enliven her meager existence as a floor scrubber at the historical society and she was not going to be denied by some rules-conscious little kids.

We sped away, ready to rip apart our closets in order to unearth all our rock and roll records and turn them over to the demanding form of Mrs. Moran, but as we banged against each other trying to get into the hall that led to our rooms, Jack froze, and turning back to our temptress he exclaimed: "We haven't got any rock and roll records!"

"You haven't got any!" barked the old woman hardly able to comprehend our incompetence.

"No," said Meredith, realizing the startling truth herself. "We want to buy some, but we haven't yet. We were going to save up for some 45s but they're pretty expensive. We just have kid records like stuff about farms and mornin' chores. And we have some folk music. There's no rock and roll records here at all!"

"Not even one?" she asked incredulously.

"No," we shouted in chorus.

"We got Benny Goodman," said Meredith. "Or Mantovani or Nat King Cole."

"That ain't it," said Maud. "That ain't rock and roll. None of it is. Too bad. I was counting on hearing some." Mrs. Moran stared up at the kitchen ceiling light with a look of deep disappointment. She seemed to consider several possibilities as one hand came up and squeezed her bottom lip. "Well, in that case I'll have to tell you a hairrah story after the TV dinners."

"A what?" asked Meredith.

"A hairrah story," she resolved. "That's the next best thing."

"What is that?" an astonished Jack asked.

"You do not know what hairrah is? Tairrah?"

"Terror!" we shrieked, understanding her suddenly all too well.

"A tairrah story," said Mrs. Moran settling in comfortably with her decision. She seemed to have delighted in our reaction.

"We'd rather hear any lovely fairy stories that you happen to know," said Meredith, thinking quickly.

"I'll bet you would," she said narrowing her eyes at Meredith with disdain, "but it just so happens that I don't know any loverly fairy stories. A hairrah story it will have to be."

Just then the timer bell on the oven dinged angrily. It sounded in my ears like a raucous ha-ha and we jerked our heads toward the oven and then the ominously dark winter window above the sink. We watched as the reflection of old Maud Moran rose incrementally and twisted the oven timer to off. We saw her squat figure glow with golden light when she tugged the handles and the two silver doors of our oven parted. Her peculiar features smiled slyly as she turned her back to us to pluck our space-age silver TV dinners from the oven. Like the stories of old, she resembled some terrible magical gnome or troll or demon that we had foolishly let in to our house while our parents were gone. We were under her spell and could not escape. In the window her true form emerged, even more awful than her physical being. She was a truly horrible hag with nothing but evil intent.

Old Mrs. Moran limped around the kitchen holding the aluminum trays in a dish towel and dropping TV dinners diffidently on plates in front of us. She threw one on the plate for herself.

"Hurry up eating you TV dinners and I'll think of which one of my tales is best for you kids." She sat down at the table with us.

"Shouldn't we set up our trays and watch TV with our TV dinners?" Meredith suggested slyly. She perceived that Maud could be lured away from telling us a story with the television.

This tempted the old lady, who perhaps did not own a TV. "Later," she said, thinking it through carefully. "I'll have plenty of time to watch it when you kids get to bed." She said this happily as though she was going to be delighted to use our TV and couch, but only in our absence. The thought that she would be sitting on my couch was heart-wrenching.

If she was a real babysitter, we thought, she would to know that horror stories right before bedtime were never good for kids. We ate slowly and fearfully while she studied us in creepy fascination. From the look of concentration on her face it seemed as though a particular horror story had to be brewed up inside her especially for us.

She sliced her Salisbury steak carefully and dipped it in the small square of mashed potatoes and then the oily gravy. For such a large cleaning lady, she ate in a delicate fashion, and gladly for us, slowly. Maybe she was trying to torture us with the thought of the terrible story she was brewing up for us.

"Okay," she said with very deliberate finality when we finished and we had licked every inch of our aluminum TV trays in order to delay the telling of this awful story. "The one that comes to mind for you is called The Bloody Stage."

"I think all three of us were supposed to have baths after our dinner," said Meredith cleverly. She tried to look every bit the part of the dutiful child suddenly remembering a parental instruction. She got up and started to leave the kitchen. I was afraid she would leave me alone so I scrambled to get off my seat, too.

"Sit down," said Maude coldly. "Sit down all of yah. You look clean enough to me. But if you want to go down that dark hallway alone when I finish my hairrah story, be my guest. Now, sit down. All of you!"

Jack and I, who had stood up with Meredith, collapsed at the chrome table in wobbly resignation when she yelled at us. This old bat was not someone you could resist easily. She was going to work her will on us and we were powerless to resist her. I admired Meredith for trying to save us, though it was futile against the power of this being.

"Now," Maude began, "this here story takes place out in the West, where you're from, here in Arizona. It happened in a real place called Skull Valley, which is not too far away from here. It was in the spring of 1885 and the whole town of Skull Valley was awaiting in the street outside the biggest saloon for the arrival of a certain stage from Nah Mexico. Everybody had turned out on the Main Street of the town because there was supposed to be some nah person of import on that stage. Some dignitary or someum. The mayor and all the people of Skull Valley were there, a lined up in front of the saloon, laughing and a joking, but they's wouldn't be fer much longer. That stage was late, very late, and people was then beginning to get worried. Sit down!" she thundered at Jack who was trying to sneak away.

"Where was the stage? Where was it at? That was what everybody was asking. Then they heard the hairrah of it. The hairrah of the jingling harnesses a coming down the hill at the end of Main Street in Skull Valley. A coming down... a coming down...in the dark desert night. What was it?"

"Ay!" shrieked Jack.

"I haven't even told you yet, you silly kid," said Maud. "Calm down. Sit down in your spot."

Jack fell back in his chair again. The scream had taken a lot out of him. His eyes were bugging out and I think he was having a mild asthma attack.

"Now, where was I before you took up and screamed like that? Oh yes. What was it? It was the Arizona stagecoach, sure enough. Down it came that long, lonely street with the wind howling like a banshee. Whooo, whooo. It was noon and—"

"You said it was night!" we all exclaimed simultaneously.

"I know I did. It weren't though. I realized that right now when I got to that part. I made a mistake telling the story. You outta have some patience with the storyteller. It's hard to remember all the details when you're trying to get the tarraih right. It was daylight. Noon. Bright as sin outside."

"You changed that," said Meredith sternly as though she were keeping count of the mistakes.

"I know I did, missie," she said wearily. "I said it was a mistake. Now, get ready to hear the end of my story!"

Meredith squinted at Maud, with disapproval and rebellion, but she thought better of doing anything to defy this strange lady. She sat down. Our parents had a lot to answer for by bringing this queer woman in our midst and letting her loose on our young imaginations. Of course, from my point of view she was just what a writer needs. The old cleaning ladies had good stories they could tell if you could stand to listen to them telling them smugly, wrapped in their old sweaters and smiling slyly. They were the best storytellers, but you had to endure the tairrah and the nasty comments about our intelligence, etc, in order to get from them the best stories they had to offer. Of course even years later I thought of her as a nuisance in my mind, something of no worth that I couldn't be rid of. I could still see her hunched reflection in the kitchen glass as "it" pulled our TV dinners from the oven. She had morphed into a hunchbacked gnome.

"The mayor of Skull Valley stepped out–he was a brave man—and stopped the horses with his big fist grabbing the harness of the lead horse. He was brave, but nobody, I mean to tell you nobody, wanted to look inside that there stagecoach because they sensed something was very, very wrong. Horrible, horrible wrong. They didn't want to see the tarraih. Then they began to see that the beautiful velvet cushions and the sateen walls inside that wonderful old stagecoach were all tord up."

"Don't you mean torn?" asked Meredith sharply.

"Yeah. Tord up to shreds, a hanging down the walls everywhere just as though somebody had clawed at them. Like a wild cat had been in there. But no cat coulda ever done it."

We could not keep our eyes off her terrible face.

"Then they saws the dead ones."

"Who?" asked Jack instantly.

"The dead stagecoach riders. All of them was slumped against each other in a corner of the stage. Sorta piled up like. As though they were raggedy dolls."

"What was it?" asked Meredith solemnly. "What was in there tearing the coach up like that and killing the people?"

"Yeah, Mrs. Moran, what was it in there?" asked Jack. He held himself rigidly on the edge of the chair and waited for her answer. All of us were hanging onto the hope that her answer would relieve us.

"Well you might ask," said Maude Moran, well satisfied as a storyteller that she maintained and whipped up our horrified interest in this "stagey" blood-soaked coach of hers which had drifted into a western town. She pulled her chunky hand-knitted pink sweater around her shoulders and sniffed loudly with great satisfaction. "Well you might wonder...everyone in town wondered, too. Everybody was silent and looking at that stagecoach to see what the answer would be to who had done such an ungodly thing. And then the stagecoach door creaked open ever so slowly. It took ever, ever so long for that door to open the littlest bit...to make the narrowest crack. That door just barely creaked, creaked out a bit and then...out...popped..." Our babysitter sat not saying another word, but rolling her eyes around in horror.

The kitchen remained still as we hung on her next words.

"Was it a monster?" asked Meredith. I jumped at the sound of her voice.

"No," said Maude. She pursed her lips and shook her head dramatically.

"The devil?" asked Jack weakly, as I told you this was his favorite thing to be popping up everywhere.

"No," said Maude solemnly.

She leaned toward us in the kitchen chair and whispered, "It were...a crazy... CLOWN! Now get to bed!"

Rodeos came and rodeos went, and that year that one had gone for us. We didn't actually see the rodeo parade or for that matter the rodeo itself, but that was the case most years. Our Western Heritage, which we proudly boasted of to Easterners, frequently didn't involve any real participation.

"I wonder how that old guy's picture turned out," I said, talking to my sister about the Navajo and his sand painting when I slipped between the bed sheets later. We swore we could hear the babysitter fumbling around with the unplugged stereo. "I wish we could go down and see it tomorrow. He'd probably be done by now, don't you think?" I asked this cheerfully, denying myself the authentic, rather shocked reaction I had had to its bomb-blasted, mechanical corn maidens and peculiar squash executed in colored sand.

"It won't be there anymore," said Meredith, drawing back a fist and landing a vicious punch in the center of her pillow.

"What?"

"I said 'It won't be there,'" Meredith repeated impatiently.

"Why not?" I asked in surprise.

"It'll be gone. Wiped out. That's why." She flopped her head down on her pillow and I could see her eyes gleaming a little in the dark bedroom we shared. I wondered if she was happy or crying.

"Huh? Why? Who's going to do that?"

In my young mind I believe I imagined a persistent vandal drooling happily as he loped through the streets of downtown Tucson. There were people like that, I knew it before I read about them, strange individuals who bought tickets to the museums of the world only to lunge forward crazily with a hammer and smash the toes off famous statues. Theirs was a strange compulsion, a desire to spoil the work of others. To the vandal it was exquisite agony to view intact art. Throwing acid on the Mona Lisa, razor-slashing a Van Gogh, all of this was the work of such people. They weren't like me when I destroyed my own art, that was the critic inside me exerting too much influence and the urge I had never involved destroying someone else's art. In my mind I saw this sand painting vandal sneak up to a rear door of Rosefield's and pry it open. He tiptoed through the dark store and climbed onto the window display through that secret door I'd seen. There he came to his knees and joyously, triumphantly, swiping the sand painting until the sand had blended to a uniform brownish gray. Like a Dick Tracy character, his pimply face was as featureless as the sand painting after he had finished with it. Featureless except for his evil, laughing, drooling mouth.

"Who would do that?" I asked.

"The guy himself, silly. Don't you know that Navajos wreck their sand paintings? Right after they make em." Meredith yawned. "It's some kind of Indian hoo-ha. They don't let their artwork last beyond the sunset of the day they make it. The teacher told us that in school when we saw a painting at some old dumb-o museum they drag everyone to. At the university. You'll go there and see the same sand painting, I bet. It was supposed to be destroyed, but they saved it to show kids like you and me."

"I don't like that. Them wrecking their own art."

"Why not?"

"It makes me feel sad."

"It's not any sadder than anything else."

"It is sadder."

"Listen, lots of things get destroyed right after they're made. God does it all the time. We had a sister that lived a day. God did that."

"What?"

"God does it every day."

"But that makes way for new stuff."

"Yeah, so the old man is freeing up the world of the burden of absorbing his creation. He takes it away with him and makes way for a new creation."

That impressed me. Oh, I'd be lying if I said I actually thought of the deep symbolic meaning of the impermanence of art or anything. I wasn't quite so profound at six years of age. But within a few years, when I was writing and destroying my art, I thought about that Navajo, what it meant to create only for yourself and to take it away with you, imperfectly remembered, as all life's memories are, leaving no record for others. Like a spy who destroys the records of his spying.

It was like a memory I had of a shoebox full of clay snakes. I had gone home from a relative's house with them, perhaps having made them there, having rolled them out between my eager hands, and those clay snakes in the shoe box were completely animated to me, as real as any pet. I could feel them through the cardboard crawling above my knee. The moonlight, through the car window, shone down on them and they were magical. But when I tried to write about it later, the snakes were only oily and still, glued to the bottom of the box. My art was never good enough to capture the perfect, elusive, imaginary animals.

It was several years later before I read about writers who imprisoned themselves in rooms, even in cork cells within those rooms, in an effort to recapture their past perfectly, recording every detail of the moment, every impression and sensation. But soon enough I understood the temptation they succumbed to, the maddening desire to record accurately some fleeting vision of beauty.

Yet somehow I also knew the past was an illusion, an irreproducible glob of messy moments made up of static clumps like my clay snakes. The prodding pricks of paint at the end of the pointillists' brush. Their daubs of color were individually imperfect yet with distance the eye would blend the various colors to form a colored shape. Distance from the object to the viewer's eye—was it age for the writer?

And there was something more that I knew. Reproducing the past would only be an ecstatic state, desirable for the writer, so long as everything there was pleasant. If all you have to remember is the smell of coffee and croissants, or the perfect yellow edge of a pat of butter on a blue plate, you have nothing to terrify you. Dwelling there might be pleasant and not an uncomfortable obsession. But some of us have things we remember which we'd just as soon forget. In most writer's pasts I was sure no naked man with a knife between his teeth came out of a streambed after him, or drew him to the side of a car asking for the directions to a park only to try and pull him through the car door. He lived in no dangerous desert on the forgotten edge of a continent. That fate was mine.

But the best stories have a morsel of horror still clinging to the bone. Lurking in my past, my irretrievable unreality, shades of a much worst time beckoned with their terrible tales untold.

It so happened that I awoke before Meredith did the next morning, the morning after Maude Moran's ridiculous tale and four days after the rodeo parade where I had seen the sand painter and the evil woman from Pennsylvania. It was a cloudy morning, a school morning, with cumulus clouds and brilliant rays of sunlight stitching them together.

I saw, through an opening in the curtain, a slice of sky; it was a keyhole cut at the bottom of the curtain where the waves of fabric gapped and allowed a glimpse of the desert sky at morning, a portion of heavenly sky, my spy hole to the day's stupendous dawn.

At first the sky was washed with pink, a comfortable rose blush, an oyster pink, delicate and smooth, which faded and was replaced by iron gray, the edges of which were flirting with shapes I couldn't fit together. But then I knew them.

I glimpsed the fantastic cloud cattle I had told the lady about there in the morning sky.

The wonderful beasts moving in a mass at my dictation, the mass of animals which were whimsically mine. It was like the white horse at the rodeo seen in the frame and my thoughts about the chain of creativity. Except that this was external to me somehow.

I saw one or two cattle, moving slowly, at first. They bumped shoulders, they heads lolling lazily. Then there were more, milling and mixing, churning and roiling to delight me.

Was I really the owner of a ghost herd, a vast empire of animals which I alone could turn across the sky at will?

At once I began using my powers and I rushed them into rivers, jammed them into crossing points and they swam, chins up, above the rushing billows, the waves of glorious gray waters where white caps peaked beside their heads. They lifted their tails and trotted together when I wanted. I could make them graze on the surface of a cumulonimbus or dive beneath. I willed them to move forward, back them into pens of clouds, turned them under trees and fixed them in place.

Certain cows would kick up their heels as I would gather them in masses and I would see their white forms falling away from the herd, scattering for their places and at times little doggies, separated from their mothers, came at their heels and received a sound kick from the biggest bulls. I could scatter them wildly over great open places, great golden meadows and gather them in the gloom. I sent them cascading wholesale down monstrously steep mountains, white heads pressed against each others necks and struggling and where the very tips of clouds played as the pine edge of the mountains I sent my herd clambering up beautiful amber hills toward the gray confines of a box canyon and spilling over the high saddles of the various ranges.

Had I voiced to that horrid lady what I had really seen?

Had I seen them before? Played with them like this, for I was so good at it? When had I made them, if I were in fact their creator?

Or had the cowboy curtains suggested them? Was it the rodeo pattern on the curtains that evoked the cloud scene I saw? The curtains had a turning brew of brown and green bronco busters, each clever cowboy in chaps and holding lariats and mounted on the back of a bucking horse; the cowboys had red kerchiefs and flying hats and teeny pockets; the horses that curled over in a useless attempt to spill their tormentors, those horses were more like crabs, their manes sharp edged like the edge of a crab shell, their lips curling back and showing their sharp teeth; here and there small green prickly pear cacti sprouted from small islands of sand.

Perhaps they really were mine. That had been my impression when I saw them on the way home from saguaro monument, and when I saw them reflected in the curving chrome of our station wagon bumper. They could very well by mine alone!

What secret pride I took in their disciplined behavior. My herding instincts were great. And I was great then, greater than ever since, controlling the empire of beauty, orchestrating my own dawn.

At the height of my personal ecstasy, a light green flood washed the sky above the Rincons and then permeated the whole sky from horizon to horizon in a great invasion of something verdant and living, but something living in the terrible sense.

The green was like something I had seen only days before, yet I couldn't remember what it was that I had seen and remembered, a tree, a leaf, perhaps I wondered, had something like that scared me? But then it came to me, yes, it had to be her terrible eyes.

It was the same green, the precise shade in fact, as the awful globular eyes of that terrible prying woman that we had seen and spoken to at the rodeo parade. The woman who I had told about the imaginary cattle.

And then it appeared. At first it seemed to be an ordinary cloud, not empowered with an extraordinary skills, but simply puffy and white. A perfectly white cloud, bountiful and clean, sliding across the sky serenely and making its way toward the east, but then I began to realize that it was an exact twin to her puffy white glove, the glove of the awful woman downtown, which was now pointing out destiny, floated low above my head, right above my house, and aiming, pointing, at the herd like some ridiculous finger sign showing the way on a road.

I tried to turn it around, to make it obey me the way the herd of cattle had. But I quickly found that it had its own will, independent of mine; it was invading my space and taking it over, seizing control of the cattle right before my eyes, rustling them where it would. Possessed as the gloved finger was by her desire, the marvelous mix of cattle fled in terror. They walked lockstep, away from me in a fury, melting away, evaporating forever, gone from our skies, and ever moving off in a flitting flirt, the disappearance of the magical moment, the casting out of all illusionary beings, the sky was denuded, unclothed. The cattle of the sky took off over the mountain toward New Mexico with a nervous flick of their tails, the calves lowing and looking at their mothers, the bulls storming away angrily, a smear of black on their bottoms, and a cloud of flies chasing them. Sunlight streamed over their hides in the last glorious vision of them, their whole churning mass a fleeing delight to the eye.

All of them chased away by a single threatening finger and this finger pointed inexorably forward in time.

**END OF** _A PHANTOM HERD_

A SECOND NOVEL WILL CONTINUE AS THE WRITER CONTENDS WITH MASHERS AND CORRALS STRAY STORIES

SYNOPSIS OF THIS VOLUME

AND MEET THE AUTHOR FOLLOW

A Phantom Herd

Novel Synopsis

**One** : 1) Big Chief notebook writing, library of the Agricultural College, University of Arizona, 1978 2) Easterners appear at Saguaro Monument, pale woman kicks a barrel cactus, photography, discovery, entrapment and subsequent interrogation, Meredith lies about our 129,000 head of cattle and Rancho Supremo, escape from the pale Easterners up the hill of rocks to summit, Spring 1962.

**Two** : 3) Our survey from the top of the hill at Saguaro Monument, imaginary Apache compliment from pale Eastern lady, mountain ranges, saguaros stretching to the border with Mexico, 1962 4) Mother's first tirade about baby scorpions, 1962 5) Mother's peanut butter tirade at Saguaro Monument, 1962 6) Scorpion second tirade 1962 and return to the time of the real scorpion outside washhouse on Seventh Street, 1957 7) Blocks in living room, Mother circa 1975 interrupts to tell Lugar story which she says is much better, snakeskin blows by north window on Seventh Street, 1959 8) Tubercular sanatoriums, Beatniks, Mother warns about arroyos, the kleptomaniac lady steals our groceries and my brother's sailor suit back from the cleaners, unknown location. Mother refuses to prosecute, explains reasons. Thanksgiving 1959.

**Three** : 9) Itty-Bitty Cocky Baby, 1960, spring and grass is dying, old iron wheelbarrow 10) The barrel cactus that grows into a comma out of the foundation where the scorpion disappeared years earlier, 1960 11) Ralph Campbell's home and pomegranate picking. Little Red Hen story.12) Arc of my emotions, the old pink metate, Gumm's backyard on Eighth Street, with Anna Henry visiting and tells about her mother, Poncho Villa, afghans, Gumm's work at Bentz' and cutting fabric, communists and socialists, wreck in front of her home in Michigan, the phone in the boarding house in San Diego, Odd Fellows the words of the lodge installation, lisping, and Rikki, Air Force protection of America from all potential monsters, Fourth of July 1961 and onto future of tearing up the paragraph on the metate, Gumm's front porch, 1971.

**Four** : 12) How Jack destroyed his school papers in the dirt lot on the corner of Fifth and Rosemont, 1962, Mother's Royal Road to Learning tirade 13) Saguaro Monument search for dead saguaro, 1962 snow and cold, January, disinterment and journey home in station wagon, up jumped the devil, and the writer's silent scream 14) Mother's Cowboy Prince fantasy, 1962, and various future variations on to visiting the old ruins of cowboy prince homes in later years 17) Canteen style water bag saying Saturate Before Using hanging in car window drips on me during car trips to ghost towns, 1962 and on, the rattle of the chain of the canteen water bag.

**Five** : 18) Dress shops, 1962, squaw dresses and Mrs. Yates arrives to threaten Dottie Park into buying her squaw dresses 19) Journey to the church luncheon with Peg and the Congregational church ladies, 1962 20) The buffet table and patio at the luncheon, 1962 21) Sad lady who has a past of abuse falls into cactus patch in an equipale chair and is rescued by husband of the host, 1962 22) "Mexican" things to Midwesterners 23) Lady with big ears and squaw dress tries to call me out of a cactus patch and coaxes me with cake and icing is pulled off my marble cake 24) Treasures on the way home with Peg, 1962, Mrs. Le Brec wakes up and talks about President Kennedy and lost mines, I see The Phantom Herd for the first time in the sky in the backseat.

**Six** : 24) Mother's Woman Marine Bra, Dad on an Easter Evening, he tells the tale of That's the Way It Was Moving West, 1963, and the Wallacachuchu bird, Springtime 24) Rincon church, 1960s, folding chairs, concrete floor, communists, Reverend Sheldon, Mrs. Sheldon, church kitchen and old people in kitchen 25) Shirley Sheldon in church, 1963 and on in years of the sixties when I took care of her and her shouting in church 26) Molly Cameron, church treasurer, 1964 and on after church and her counting the paper offerings bags 27) Taking Shirley home, 1965, her dog the yappy brown dachshund, and walking her to the gate, watching her walk to the sliding door, and how she waved at the front window.

**Seven** : 28) Blaine threatens us and extorts money from us for the supposedly living pet turtle 29) Knot Hole Club and football at the stadium 30) the Boy Scout Pow Wow and I see cattle rustlers on the big screen of the Apache Drive-In on the way to the Pow Wow, 31) Secret eye club with no members and donkey imaginings on the rocks 32) Coming home alone 1965-66 33) Big Paper Skeleton at the school with suicidal speech therapist and 34) Maelstrom in Nogales, the streets, the toys in the shops, fleas, getting rescued by stinky vagrant

**Eight** : 35) Mother's tirade about the culture of the rodeo and its tastelessness, and Rodeo Parades in general, 1964 36) Sour orange trees and their history in the town, 1966 37) "I am the sheriff of this county" boy and finding oranges with young girl, blasting oranges and taking orders 38) Tiny white horse and creativity inside the orange tree from spy-hole, and the little fat conquistador who is walking near the horse, dolls, also.

**Nine:** 39) several undated windy rodeo parades in the past 40) absconded memory of overweight lady on the horse, 1955 dusty autumn on Allen road 41) Marshall KGUN TV show appearance for , 1962 42) Boy who jams an intricately carved ivory bean up his nose at Mrs. Jones' house while we are watching the rodeo parade on TV 43) windy parade with Hopi sand painter, 1964 44) Mother's recording industry tirade, payola and Mafia claims, 45) Mother's opinion of Nat King Cole as a record she would gladly own 46) square dancing at school to a record and wearing levis to school for rodeo week 47) taunting the many Easterners we thought we saw downtown 48) bullfighting on TV from Mexico and coloring 49) a mysterious big shot in yellow Cadillac zooms by us and we chase him 50) hobos approached who are hollering 51) phantom herd seen for the last time before folklorist gets word of them reflected in chrome bumper of station wagon 52) people lined up for buses to the rodeo 53) story of the rodeo goers who were kidnapped 54) handsome young cowboy 55) missing out on the Mysterious Big Shot 56) Navajo in shop window of department store 57) evil folklorist rustler that we met outside department store window watching sand painter 58) phantom herd discussed with folklorist by error 59) return to stereo shop 60) Dad hears Trotsky plot while listening to Mexican radio on new stereo 61) Maude Moran babysits and tells a terror story 62) discussion of sand painting with Meredith 63) phantom herd seen departing at the insistence of a gloved hand.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Lorraine Ray is an avid reader and writer. She lives in an adobe home in the center of Tucson, Arizona with her husband and daughter.

You can download Lorraine's many other Smashwords editions from her author's page at: <https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LoRay>.

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