 
### PHANTOM STRAYS

Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 Lorraine Ray

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Reader please note: This novel follows _A Phantom Herd_.

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CHAPTER ONE

"Heavens to Betsy!" exclaimed Mother, tooting the horn and stomping the brakes to avoid hitting a boy who leapt out from between parked cars and darted across Franklin Avenue straight into the path of our '49 Chevy. Our car stopped inches from this nutty kid, who still ran across the street, and when the boy reached the far side of our hood, he spun around and rapped our front fender with his knuckles. "John, Paul, George and Ringo!" was what he shouted at us, and then he added "Forever!" as an afterthought.

I'm remembering the scene so well because of this running boy's forever, which I never forgot in the intervening fifteen years and which I may very well remember for all the days of my life, which is as much forever as I will get. And remembering his forever for such a long time, I've wrested control of the beginning of that stray story, one story from my ungainly herd of memories, and I can sit with my blue fountain pen and a Big Chief tablet at a table in the Agriculture library across from a shelf of Cotton Pest Quarterlies, and recall for you an even earlier Arizona in which that two-door Chevy of ours didn't have any seatbelts and the front passenger seatback folded forward with a shove of your hand, or the forward motion of the car if an adult wasn't in the seat. When Mother trod on the brakes to avoid hitting the nutty boy, the top of my seat did its usual forward flop, delivering a blow to my back and catapulting me into the dashboard where its weight pinned me down.

I always feared that dashboard because it resembled equipment from Dr. Frankenstein's lab with its huge dials and creepy chrome knobs; somehow though, I never got anything but my feelings hurt by landing there, and my getting trapped under the seat happened so frequently when we drove around town in late 1964 that Mother ignored my predicament or any romantic notions I had about dials and knobs and laboratories, and consequently she launched into another of her strangely beautiful monologues. "I have to wonder," she began, watching the boy disappear in the crowd, "if these darn kids actually want me to hit them, and if that's their silly plan in those scrambled brains of theirs? Is that really what they're gunning for? Well, what else should I think? For heaven's sake, this is the second darn boy to run out like that, dashing across the street like a crazy jaybird, not a care in the world. Police everywhere and they don't do a gall-darn thing about these kooky kids playing chicken with cars. I tell you, it's enough to make me spit real honest-to-goodness spit, and all I can say is they ought to be ashamed of themselves. Brainless gazabos. That's what they are. And where is that dag-gone sister of yours? I've lost a kid, kid. I have to face the fact that I've gotten us into a real mess down here and I don't see a darn thing that would help us get outta this, no matter what I try, no matter which way I turn."

I lifted the heavy, kapok-filled seatback by straightening my legs on the floorboards and pushing with my back. "Keep searching for her," ordered Mother as I reemerged, "Get out from under that gall-darn seat and help me look. I've got to drive through this mob of nutty kids. Now, will you look at this? More dang police! Standing around doing nothing. I should say they're doing a very good job of it, by cracky. Why don't they arrest these kids for running out into the street?"

I spun around in the seat and pulled myself up on my knees in order to lean with all my weight on the back cushion. While I shoved the cushion in place, I looked out the Chevy's rear windows. The seriousness of downtown, the adult business center of our little desert town near the Mexican border, had been hijacked by roving bands of singing and shouting teens, and dozens of onlookers enjoyed their stupendous stupidity and had come out to see them flowing magnificently by, jamming the sidewalks and flooding the streets. Bemused bankers in the lobby of the Valley National Bank and a few abashed men in white cowboy shirts and Stetson hats smiled shyly as the screaming teens swarmed the sidewalks. An air conditioning and refrigeration repairman chuckled at them from a panel truck which was painted with a large goofy man with a telephone receiver in his hand and the town's newest, catchiest radio and TV ad, "Call for Wally!" Several secretaries stood in the doorway of a lawyer's office tugging the hems of their twin sets and grinning. One of them raised her arms and conducted the singing with two index fingers. Under a late summer sky, even a desert mountain, its gray physique seen only as a slice, peeked bashfully around the brick bulk of the Pima Hotel as a suited man, urgently adjusting his tie, came running from an alley with a camera and a tripod. He set up the shot to capture the antics.

Antics. Those were what the teenagers did and I was aghast when two broad-shouldered girls in berets and identical plaid dresses clattered up beside our car. They wobbled in their high heels and shouted "We love Paulo! Paulo forever!" over and over while they waved teeny hand-made flags (possibly cotton handkerchiefs received after graduating catechism class). A younger boy who followed them made a face at me with two of his fingers stretching the sides of his mouth like a frog. " _Siempre Los Beatles_ ," he croaked into my open car window. Then he scrambled ahead; the three of them walked faster than that darn old car of ours could move in the crush!

"Well, I never," said Mother, blinking back her all-encompassing horror of being spoken to in Spanish by a boy. "And won't you please sit forward in your seat, young lady? You're always playing around in that seat of yours. Pulling it down over you so you can hide under it like a ridiculous gazabo. Leaning on it to beat the band. I wish you'd decide to leave it alone. You're destroying the mechanism. That's why it's loose. Heaven only knows why it hasn't broken completely before now. What are you trying to be, a one-person demolishing crew? Cars cost money, kid. And we're not made of money. Your father is practically losing his eyesight as an engineer staying up with those architectural plans of his every gall-darn night until ten o'clock. Now what!" she screeched.

The "what" she talked about materialized around us as a teeming river of those kids began flowing, and our Chevy inched forward with them, leading a line of cars around a corner to Church Street, which would send us inexorably toward Pennington Avenue, which would take us to Congress which would lead us finally to the Fox Theater where _A Hard Day's Night_ had been showing since 6am and would continue past midnight. The shouts on both sides of Church grew louder and came together into one pounding song that went, "We love you, Beatles. Oh yes we do. We love you, Beatles. And we'll be true. When we're not with you, we're blue. Oh Beatles, we love you." Once it ended it began again, but with the start staggered among all the different singers and the resulting mish-mash of sung words merged into a magnificent chorus to fill the cathedral of abject and prolonged Beatles worship which had formed, spontaneously, there.

Mother, who disapproved of the Beatles, hunched over the big Chevy steering wheel, a goofy wheel of Fortune if ever one existed, the pleated skirt of her cotton paisley dress nearly reaching the floorboards, both feet on the pedals (and this was always the way she drove automatics later) still searching everywhere for her lost daughter, studying the hysterical singing teens packing the sidewalks and the spaces between parked cars in every direction. As we turned left onto Pennington, she launched into another lengthy and complicated conniption.

"I tell you," she said, "I've seen this situation before. This whole darned thing. Where I saw it last was with the Beatniks over there on the coast at Venice Beach. Total madness would just about describe what happened there, kid. I think it was 1959 and your brother had turned four years old and that darn tooth of his had disintegrated in his mouth; broken slivers came out of his gum every hour like the Wreck of the Hesperus and late one Friday afternoon that old Dr. Winterhoffen, who drank himself to death, but who was a good dentist at the time, declared that they had to operate or face the risk of septicemia. Afterwards, when we drove to Venice, Jack still had to take penicillin pills and those weren't easy to get down him, let me tell you, those big old things. I'm embarrassed to say that Jack noticed bearded men kissing other men as big as you please in the sand at Venice beach. Well, I grew up on a farm so I've seen plenty of roosters atop roosters. You can't surprise an Indiana farm girl. No siree, Bob. Why that was nothing to shake a stick at, speaking from the point of view of a girl. From an Indiana farm. Aunt Glenn certainly understood the situation. 'Par for the course,' she said. That was because she taught second grade where all the boys are hugging and kissing each other, you know. It's something chronic with boys. You can't surprise a second grade teacher from Indiana. But besides men kissing men, those Beatnik fellows were plucking the gall-darned guitar all the live-long day... those Beatnik nuts thought nothing of living day in and day out on the beach. In bathing suits. Anyway, um, that isn't Meredith, is it? Over there to the right? Oh, no. Another girl. An awfully lot like her, though. As I said those Beatniks, they never changed out of their gall-darn bathing suits. Why, those nuts, they drank beer right out of the can as big as you please at ten o'clock in the morning. And they stood on the sidewalk under palm trees spouting the worst kind of poetry to all the passersby; not Wordsworth, let me tell you, no, no daffodils or clouds or wooly lambs for them. Heavens to Betsy. I won't tell you what constituted their poetry because it wouldn't be decent to discuss anywhere with anybody but a trained psychiatrist. And now, now for Heaven's sake, Meredith is involved in another nutty group... and why can't she stay loyal with those Beach Boys? What was wrong with them? Just when we bought all those red and white striped shirts for you kids. By cracky, at least those Beach Boys were American—I think. Well, if she imagines she's going to get involved with this foreign group she'll have another think coming. We aren't supporting the Mafia with any gall-darn foreign record purchases."

The Mafia and record purchases? Well, that vexes me, somehow, bringing forward a scene in the months prior; the writer has to save these things, and not let any stray remarks get lost in the fray. A writer has to mop up the messy bits. Tie up loose threads. Round up the wandering herd or flock down to the last...lamb, I guess.

Mother drove silently for a moment, her eyes darting here and there in a search of the throng for Meredith. "Now, when we reach that store up ahead on the right you look real hard down the alleyway in the direction of the parking garage. She might be standing there, though I can't imagine why in tarnation she thinks I'd meet her there when we agreed on the corner of Congress and Court."

Shouting, screaming, an ever widening river of teens formed as we turned onto Court and the teens huddled together in heaps of charm bracelets, anklets and pleated skirts on windowsills and car bumpers in every direction. These teen swarms appeared in the glass of a certain window of Rosefield's Department Store (and why is that store significant to me for I can't remember a gall-darn thing about it?), and across the cluttered windows of an Indian trading post to one of a pair of dusty old saloons, and the frontage of the Mexican boxing venue, _El Boxeo De Tucson._ A few teens, kissing record album covers, squatted together on adobe walls which were casually eroding into an empty lot sprinkled with sparkling broken glass; this vacant lot once formed a square of great import in our increasingly obscure Grand Old Vaquero past.

Drooping over three tiled steps leading into a tortilla factory (workers peeking out the screen door at them), three sobbing girls supported each other with heaving shoulders while behind them a brick wall showered bits of the tattered bullfight posters into a hot breeze. "Why won't they let us love them?" one of the girls wailed loudly into the wind. "Our love is true!" Then, being found by her alert father, he forcibly frog-marched her away.

"I'll tell you what these darn kids need and that is good old fashioned church-going, as quickly as possible and the result would be that they would get a little perspective on life," Mother said, beginning her complaints again, "Just so many silly geese. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Screaming things in public, shouting out their love for foreign musicians. Aren't our American musicians good enough? I tell you it's that darned Rudolph Valentino situation all over again. And how. A bunch of hysterical girls dreaming about these men, foreign characters, kid, who speak English with an accent...What a horror. And who was that Valentino character, anyway? An Italian, of highly questionable morals, that's who he was. And I heard other things, but I don't repeat rumors. By cracky, I never would have let Meredith go to this movie if I'd known it was going to cause craziness to erupt and we'd be stuck in the middle of it. Why didn't the newspapers warn us about this nuttiness? This is a colossal waste of my time, also. I've got to study my cataloguing and Dewey Decimal System. I'm having a quiz on Tuesday, dagnabbit, my first one, and that old Mrs. Altus is not a person who writes an easy quiz and the midterm should be a nightmare. But does my daughter understand that her mother is trying to get a master's degree in library science and might, therefore, have something better to do than drive around downtown looking for her silly daughter and her friend? I should say not. I don't blame Margaret; this is Meredith's fault. And I have to read that _One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding_ before Tuesday. Well, that's not my idea of entertainment, though the book has its good qualities, and I won't say I'm not sympathetic to the author's general purpose, but I for one don't like to read that sort of thing with fallen women featured prominently. Why shine a light only to show the bad? A fourteen year old doing those things? A woman would know better than to write down those things."

Briefly, the street quieted. "This is one ex-Woman Marine who feels that all her training isn't helping much. What we have here is a lost person. I have tried various things to find her, but I'm about at the end of my rope, kid. We've been up and down the same streets over and over again. We're looking in every direction. I tell you when I get hold of that Meredith character she'll get a piece of my mind...."

"Kid," she glanced over sharply at me and noticed that I'd quit searching for Meredith. I'd found the search a bit dull and hopeless and I had started enjoying the look of the beautiful late summer clouds, rather like animals—sheep perhaps—and listening to the dreamy quality of her voice with its amusing curses and idioms, stories and complaints. "You're not searching like I told you to. Why did you stop? We've got to get your sister. Keep an eye out in back of the buildings. She and Margaret have got to be here somewhere. They've got to be. They couldn't have disappeared completely. Downtown Tucson just isn't that big. Say, I'm pretty sure we've been down this same dag gone street at least three times, don't you think? Doesn't this one look familiar? What is the name of this street? What's on the street sign? Alley something? Oh, never mind. You certainly don't read fast. Reading that slow, you aren't going to be of much use anywhere, kid. Looks like an alleyway, anyway. Shoot, I can't go around the corner anymore without drawing the attention of the police. There are enough of them around."

From the general direction of nowhere, an officer stepped up to our car and tapped the window near Mother's head.

"Speak of the Devil," she yelped, cranking her window down farther.

"Lady," the cop bleated, "you can't park here. Will you please move this vehicle along?" He had a buzz cut and a fat lower lip. The shouting and screaming of the Beatles pack around us sounded so loud that Mother and I strained to hear what he said, though he leaned into our interior. "Your car is blocking the street."

"Well, I'm sorry, officer, but you have to understand. My daughter is lost. She came down here to see this dag-gum English band. A movie with her friend Margaret and she keeps getting back in the dag-on line to see it again. We've lost contact with her. The fact is she only turned twelve in April—"

"Lady," the policeman drawled with weary impatience, "there's a hundred kids here in the same situation. You're not telling me anything I don't already know. What I want you to do is to drive this vehicle of yours around the corner and on toward Congress. Double parking is a violation of the city code. I've got to give you a ticket you if you stay here any longer."

"Yes, officer. Oh golly," Mother said to me as she swung our grand old Chevy around the next street corner, "Biddle-boddle-biddle-boddle-bo-bo-bo. Why, I do believe as a matter of fact that this situation down here with this Beatles group creating a lot of chaos and confusion is almost worse than the aftermath of those darn rodeo parades that plague us every year, kid. And you know I'm no fan of the rodeos. All I can say is where in tarnation have those darn girls gone and hid themselves? I thought they'd be easy to find. There are swarms of winos down here. Big groups of them. Ruffians and toughs, all of them. Don't be fooled. Shoot! Right now having all these kids on the street is hiding the winos, but they're here in our midst, stinking of darn alcohol. Out on the yards near the railcars, too. A hobo jungle, a wino convention. Living in lean-tos, shacks made of cardboard. They're probably all pickpockets. Mark my words! This is one of the worst years for winos and in the summer, no less. And those seedy men at The Green Door; I don't know why they haven't closed down that scandalous place, showing smut movies all the live long day, smut peddling; it's enough to try the patience of Job. Probably Jesus, too. Maybe put them both together and both of them will be fit to be tied; I'm not too sure about that. Goodness. Surely Margaret and Meredith haven't been walking around as big as you please looking for trouble with tramps and smut peddlers! Haven't I taught Meredith better than that?"

At seven, I knew she hadn't taught me a gall-darn thing about winos (say, hadn't I approached two of them once earlier that year, and in a place nearby, downtown, where one of them had told Jack to shut up in Spanish?) but I shut up about that.

The vertical portion of the marquee of the Fox towered above our car into the cerulean Arizona sky of the past, a sky bright with possibilities. White lettering climbed a red bar with an F and then an O and finally an X. The Fox had a ticket kiosk in a sea of shiny mustard tile, which now was overwhelmed by teens, screaming, singing, holding hands and dancing. Teens in tight Levi's jumped and shouted in front of the doors, hair flying in the wind, sunlight everywhere, clouds rolling in a late summer sky, and sunrays glinting off the glasses of pimply boys and girls.

The word Tucson topped the three lighted sections of the marquee which explained that _A Hard Day's Night_ showed continuously at the theater. We drove one block down, past the Meyer White House Department store and French's Restaurant, and made a right turn again. Apparently Mother intended to make one more sweep around the back streets behind the theater and up to the place where the policeman had been which lay near our agreed-upon rendezvous with Meredith and Margaret.

Two tight-skirted girls tottered past our car, screaming and clutching each other. Mother strained herself backward to peer in the shadows at other forms lurking, hips in pleated cotton, pancake makeup as thick as Feb desert dust. These flipped-hair girls resembled Meredith and Margaret, but were not. Mother sighed in a peeved and weary fashion once she realized it was not them. "I know I told her to come out with Margaret the instant the show ended and stand at the corner back there where we met the policeman and not to move a muscle. I made myself as clear as a bell. And we were there waiting in the car, and where was she? Those little fools. This just might be the last time she pulls a stunt like this."

I knew that to be false.

"I never thought the crowds would be so bad down here. How long did it take us to get two measly blocks? Oh Lord. The streets are overflowing with these kooky kids clattering around like a bunch of overdressed gypsies. Just look at the girls running everywhere. Kissing record albums. Things written on their faces with pens. False eyelashes, lipstick, tight sweaters. That's about the lot of them. I hope you never become like them, kid. Well, I'm coming close to running them over if they keep dashing around the car this way and that. They haven't any sense around the cars!"

In the river of teens something odd surfaced. Two shabby fellows passing by. With bedrolls. Smiling in the general direction of me. Then they waved and I waved back. These were a pair of the scary winos about whom mother had been complaining. I always noticed shabby fellows, winos I suppose, passing through Southern Arizona. Brown, tough fellows with pale blue or caramel-colored eyes bleached by too much sunlight, too darn much freedom. Grinning, sad, desperate men with beards and attitudes and the stink of alcohol on their breath and bodies. Yes, I'd walked toward a pair of them. And I'd been mad at them then. One of them made—yes, a kissy face at me! Memory will retrieve such hideous things as ancient winos who make kissy faces.

"Mom, I'm so afraid." I gulped an enormous sob while admitting this. "These big kids are really, really scaring me. I don't think I can—"

"Well, by cracky," Mother began, "what do you mean?"

"Even if we see her, I don't wanna go get her," I whined.

"Well, what do you think we're gonna do, Little Miss? Are we gonna stop the story in its tracks here? Are we gonna leave them hanging out in midair, lost downtown like two potatoes that fell off a truck? Does everything come to a halt because you're afraid? Or are we gonna get your sister and Margaret and bring them out of here and back home? We jolly well are, kid. We've got to get them out of here! An hour in the car! That's how long we've been searching. And the police aren't even interested."

She studied a few more outrageous teens.

"But what's that compared with poor Mrs. Kirkup," she continued, "sitting at home alone in a wheelchair from Rheumatoid Arthritis and she's watching out her front window anxiously for her only child, her girl Margaret, wringing her arthritic hands...I say, and now am I going to go back there and tell her she has lost her Margaret to a band of trashy Mop Tops, foreigners from England, because my little girl can't bear to walk past screaming and shouting teenagers? Well, I tell you it isn't happening. Not on my watch. Mrs. Kirkup took Meredith to pick apples half way to New Mexico, to Wilcox, by cracky, with my blessings and she didn't lose her! And here I am having to be behind the wheel of this gall-darn car because we can't get a gall-darn parking space to beat the band. I'm not gonna listen to that nonsense from you about being afraid of a bunch of silly teenage girls. You've got to overcome this, kid. Your fear is nothing but stuff and nonsense. A bunch of silly young girls running around and screaming for the effect of screaming doesn't mean a thing; I tell you it doesn't mean a gall-darn thing in the scope of human history. To listen to you you'd think they wanted to scalp us. Now...now, pay attention to me and pay attention well. You're gonna get out of this car when we see her and you're gonna do what I say or we aren't getting her out of here for hours and I do not intend to spend my entire Saturday afternoon downtown gallivanting around after a bunch of moony teenagers. When we see them I want you to march right out that door and go get them for me. You're gonna march right past those big girls and you aren't gonna let them bother you, not one iota. I'm trusting you to find Meredith and Margaret and tell them they can't stay for another of these gall-darned shows!"

"Mom!" I yelped, "I think I see her. Back there. She's standing with Margaret near the end of the line."

Mother braked, the seatback slapped me, and I hit the dash once again.

"What in tarnation!" Mother spun around. "In that darn line? The line to the darn movie?"

I pushed the seat off me. "I don't know. It's just a line."

Though I told Mother that I didn't know what line it was, I knew she stood in the line to the movie. And when I searched again there indeed was Meredith—or the strange Meredith she had suddenly become—as big as she pleased in the movie line, her brown hair rolled the night before on orange juice cans producing a tremendous smooth brown flip, (but the bobby pins always left an odd dent), wearing the same old cat's eye glasses, but with a blue bow now pinning back her greasy bangs. She wore a pleated orange gingham skirt and a white blouse and she crooned a Beatles song with the rest of the line.

Margaret stood beside her, dressed as a twin, but she sported a blonde flip and appeared remarkably pale. She wore a blue gingham skirt and a white blouse. A blue plastic headband bit furrows into the front of her hair.

There they were in line together for the third time. They had called from a phone booth and begged to see _A Hard Day's Night_ a second time, but they now stood in the line for a glorious third viewing.

"What! She thinks she's going to that darn movie AGAIN? Well, she has another think coming," Mother said.

"Are we going around the block again?" I asked.

"No. Get out right now and tell her to come to the car. Tell her she mustn't go to the movie again."

"Mom, I can't." I sagged.

"I said get out there and run back and tell your sister what is what," Mother insisted. "Don't dawdle."

"Mom, I don't want to."

"Get out. Get right out and get your sister." Mother reached over across my body and unlatched my door. The massive door swung open slightly. "Do what I say. Tell Meredith and Margaret they do not have permission to sit through that Beatles movie again. Tell Meredith I'm very disappointed with her and she should march herself over here to this corner where the car is. And I mean pronto. Go on!"

I got out half-heartedly and mother, who leaned over across the seat, pulled the door shut when I left.

I crossed the river. I floated across with the horde of teen kooks.

"Paul! Paulo!"

"I love Jorge!"

"El Ringo. Lo Mejor!"

Kissing a record album held to her face, a young girl skipped and crashed into me. "Hey, what?" she said, barely acknowledging my existence. I spun around from the collision.

I had barely recovered when someone else collided with me. "It's all over," said a father pounding past me on the sidewalk with a young girl in a position which resembled a head lock. One of her flailing arms had struck my head. "You aren't going to stick around adoring those English idiots. John, George and Bingo!"

"Dad!" cried the girl in disgust. "It's Ringo. Ringo. Why can't you say his name right?"

"Ringo or Bingo, it's all the same to me."

"You don't understand. I love him more than anything. Anything ever."

And they were gone, with the girl's declaration remaining in my mind, her love which remained so pure for Ringo.

I stepped up onto the curb and moved through the sidewalk mob tentatively. People swished past me on all sides, running, walking fast. The singing continued coming from different parts of the street and a line of girls who held hands collapsed against an adobe wall, shouting as a rabble of voices to the desert sky and brilliant sun, arms uplifted. "We love them! Oh, leave us alone! Let us be! We just want to be able to love them in peace forever. Just leave us alone."

"Oh, they're so beautiful," wailed one girl. After saying this she slumped against a tile wall. "It's not fair. They were made too, too beautiful."

To find Meredith and get her back I knew I would have to approach the long movie line formed of tough teens. Their red lips, sullen faces, high heels, and sharp breasts created a wall of teen terror for me. Among these monsters, I had to locate my big sister. But it is fit and proper that the writer face the angry coldness of the young adult, if she ever wishes to write something about the world. So down the line, enduring their glares and wry smiles at me, moving before them with my gapped front teeth and my perpetually mussed hair, I walked quickly, gawking at each scary teen to see them thoroughly. I struggled to find Meredith amidst this gang of pirate cutthroats.

"Meredith," I yelped when I finally reached her, "Mom is waiting in the car. She says you can't stay here any longer. You both have to come to the car." I yelled this and though my mouth opened and I felt my vocal cords tighten in order to make sounds, I could hear nothing I said.

"We love you Beatles, Oh yes we do!" screamed the teens around me. "When you're not with us we're blue! Beatles forever!" Squeals and shouts echoed off the old adobe and brick buildings in every direction. This epitomized the hubbub of the time, the hysteria that a writer needs to witness, and the spot where they need to situate themselves.

"Oh, hi, kid." I could see that Meredith said this, but I barely heard a murmur. "What does Mom want?" She recognized me as the perpetual parental spokesman.

"She says you can't stay here any longer. You and Margaret need to come back with me to the car or Mom is going to be really, really mad." My voice yelled this. The veins in my neck popped; my throat hurt to roar at them like that.

On the far side of Meredith I noticed a frightening teenage girl with blonde hair teased into a tower. Reading my lips, perhaps, she stared at me and smirked. Another teen frowned after I had shouted at Meredith. She turned her back to me and took a long drag on a cigarette which she then held secretly to the side of her poodle skirt.

"We're staying," Meredith explained curtly. "We're already in line for the next show."

This stopped me. Though I knew I would have to go on, Meredith's strength impressed me. "Well, Mom says you can't. You can't be in line anymore. You gotta stop it."

"Go back and tell her we're in the line for the three thirty show," Meredith ordered. "We still have enough money, but we can use more for popcorn." She added this popcorn remark fiercely as though Mother should have thought beforehand of them staying for three shows and running out of snack bar money.

Gulping at the immensity of the task ahead, I went on arguing with her at full volume. "You can't be in line anymore. She told me that. You can't see that Beatles movie anymore."

"What?" She assumed an obnoxious stance with her hand on her hip and shot me an evil squint. "What are you even talking about?"

Why did I have to be the bearer of this unwelcomed news? I tried so hard to stay in Meredith's good graces, an effort which had been failing with a regularity that frightened me ever since Meredith received that girdle (a segmented monstrosity a bit like an albino trilobite wrapped in a flat box with tissue paper and attached snaps for nylons) for her twelve birthday, and it went to her head and six months later turned her into someone who regularly used Dippity-Doo to set her hair on orange juice cans and had left her little sister behind. Why did I have to be the one to confront an angry teenager with a stern message from her mother?

"You can't see the movie anymore!" I hollered. "You gotta stop seeing it. Mom's saying that."

"Oh, all right," said Meredith in a huff. "Come on, Margaret. We aren't going to be allowed to do the one thing we really, really want. This is so like my family. I can't even stand the way I'm treated anymore."

For a moment, relief swept across Margaret's face; she must have been ready to go home after two viewings of _A Hard Day's Night_ ; the afternoon had probably been taxing for her. Nodding in assent with Meredith's decision, she clutched her purse a little closer and followed Meredith like a dull, ghostly apprentice with a hunch. For a few years she had worn a back brace, which hadn't completely cured her bent spine. She was meek and apathetically kind in every situation, no matter how degrading. She had turned her will over to Meredith, but I sensed her discomfort.

They walked away quickly, Meredith in a rage and Margaret faking it, through the crowd ahead of me and toward our olive green Chevy. I wanted to call out for their help saying, "Save me from these strange crazy teens," but I knew Meredith and Margaret (crazy teens themselves) weren't going to help me, and they weren't going to be good company once I reached the car. Times had changed, and I had fallen severely out of favor.

Weaving and bobbing through the wild Beatles fans, I tried to keep up, but couldn't. I smashed into two tall boys who shouted about the Beatles and they laughed at me ruthlessly.

When I reached the car, Meredith and Margaret were already in the back seat, glaring at me with a cold appraisal, with an evil assessment, as though I were the one who had made them come back from their interlude with celebrity love.

Meredith leaned forward toward the back of my seat and whispered, "Atray inkfay."

Pig Latin. Not something I could understand easily. It took me five minutes to guess what she had said, and I doubted myself even then. I felt a tear dribble down my cheek once I figured it out for sure.

It's the rat fink writer's job to witness the hysteria of the times, to be knocked off their feet by the joyous celebrations, to record the chanting, to document the wildness, to see the wind rip into the latest and greatest of human hairdos. The writer has to be alone, examining the line of hostile teens, and alone in the midst of social upheaval, change, and anger. The writer needs to feel the throb of the multitude and the shoving movement into tomorrow. Though you cannot hear in the hubbub of the times, you may hear again just what you need to hear many years later in the silence of backward contemplation.

CHAPTER TWO

As we approached the entrance of the Western Asthma Clinic and Old Folks Home one Saturday morning a year after the Beatles incident, I remember seeing ahead the green girth of a saguaro cactus rising from a triangle of gravel like the stretched pelt of a reptile or a green rocket. The cactus had been transplanted in the shadow of the long low building. Up and down the hide on the accordion pleats, the gray cactus needles caught the sun and resembled frayed seams poking out of a giant sewn toy. Its two mammoth arms joined the great central stalk with slight swellings that warped these needles in a fashion that pleased me. Above the stagey saguaro limbs, pink-tipped clouds liberally dolloped a turquoise sky. The clouds nearer the sun basked in golden rays cascading Ping-Pong fashion.

A Gila woodpecker poked its head out of its nest in the saguaro, and in the morning light it spun its head around in comical wonder and crazy appraisal of the sky with its fat clouds and teased wispy edges and the cool wind rattling the tops of a nearby mesquite tree.

"Madness, mad, mad," it squawked.

A bean from the mesquite fell languidly from a high branch to the elbow of a lower limb and clung there. "Well, so, so," the bean lisped back.

We walked past the saguaro and mother opened the wood and glass door that led into the clinic, releasing a somber blast of stale air into my face.

"Goodness, they make these clinic doors heavy. Substantial, that's the word. Get in there, you kids, and don't you dare dilly dally."

"What an attractive lobby," she gushed when we entered. She pushed her sunglasses onto her head. I cringed to think someone had heard her; she sometimes spoke too loudly. She let us pass in before her and spoke to us in the same bold voice that concealed her insecurity. "I believe this is one of the finest asthma clinics in the southwest. You and Jack are very lucky that they agreed to take us."

"And our money," said Jack slyly. He wisecracked at Mother constantly.

Twenty feet from the door, a shiny white phone on a reception desk rang quietly and while we listened to the insistent ring I saw us standing awkwardly in the reflected world of a large gilt-framed mirror. The receptionist kept a letter organizer in the form of a stretched-out dachshund with a spiraling brass wire as its body, a body that held the many letters the clinic received; each envelope had a long careful tear along its spine. Mother stood in front of the desk, waiting for someone to arrive. Eventually the phone stopped ringing and she interpreted that as a sign and led us, with a shrug, around the desk and across the thick carpet directly toward the hall that we had used the prior week.

We approached an enormous oil painting in another gilded frame. It took up an entire wall and Mother paused in front of it. "Apollo and Dionysus," Mother announced. "They are two Greek gods drinking wine together. Ordinarily I wouldn't approve of drinking in daylight, however this is topnotch art. The drinking of the two gods is a symbol of two different forces in the arts: chaos and order. Here they are getting along well together. Thus the artist, whatever his name, teaches us that superior art uses chaos and order wisely. By cracky, this is certainly very high-class art. A fine example of classical oil painting of the higher sort, the higher class. Gee, I wish I'd studied more for that art history class I took my senior year in college. I'd give anything to be able to list artistic movements with the snap of a finger. Instead of meeting your father that night at the Rio Rico Bar, I should have studied. If I had, I could tell you all kinds of marvelous things about this painting. Art interpretation—that interested me. Let that be a lesson to you. Study harder than your mother did. Though I don't approve of drinking, these gods are of a superior breeding. Of course, you would expect that given that the owner of this clinic is a very wealthy woman. She would pick classical art even if it does happen to be gods imbibing alcoholic beverages."

"Gods get away with a lot of junk," said Jack snidely.

Mother pulled her spine up. "Maybe what you need to do is wash your mouth out with a bar of soap," Mother retorted. "Just keep acting up. See what it gets you."

I noticed my Indiana mother said "wash" as though it were written "worsh," and that was another thing about her speech that often made me cringe.

Now," said Mother sharply, "be sure to follow all the directions from your teacher, you two." We approached the door to the room where the class had been held the prior week. "This asthma class is important for you, Jack. We've got to pay attention to get the full effect in terms of a cure for you and to strengthen your lungs. You've got the weakest lungs, says Dr. Kimberling, which he has ever seen—they could hardly even be called lungs on a good day—and I don't know what we can do besides this, so it has to work."

Jack began heaving his chest and breathing raggedly for the dramatic effect.

"I don't want to see this asthma condition limiting your ability to do things in the future. Teddy Roosevelt, one of our presidents, and I happen to think one of the greatest of the whole kit and caboodle (but I can never remember what number president he occupied and I have been asked that many times when I worked in the library in Indiana) and he had the same condition and cured it with exercise and activity out here in the West at a ranch, oh, a fabulous place in Wyoming or some such state, so you may be able to also. But nothing will get cured if you don't pay attention to the classes. Last time I caught you," she pointed an index finger at me and shook it, "not listening and being silly, kid."

Mother opened the door of the hall where our lessons took place. The lights were off; only the morning sunlight reflected off the waxed parquet floor. We were the first people there, and Mother walked us across the barren room, down a line of empty tan metal folding chairs set out for the parents of the pupils. Each chair had a brown paper bag on it. Those were for a breathing exercise where we puffed the bag up to practice exhaling better. Mother picked a spot as far away from the door as possible in a corner of the room.

"Nobody else is here. I think we're way too early," I said wisely. Within the last year since the Beatles fiasco, I knew definitely that I had lost the good opinion of Meredith. Though I'd fought valiantly to get back in her graces, through various ingratiating acts and self-deprecating comments such as "I'm a kook," she found many errors in my nutty thinking and actions, and as a consequence rejected me more. This rejection had matured me and also given me courage, but only courage against Mother. Rather than correct Meredith I'd become good at noticing Mother's mistakes and pointing them out if only briefly and always saying "we" as though all of us had jointly made whatever mistake I thought she'd made. Thus the comment that "we" were way too early.

"Not at all," Mother replied, "arriving early shows the clinic owners that we value their lessons. Also, the way I see it, arriving early shows we're a special kind of person who takes care to arrive promptly and attends to their business in a professional manner. You would do well to remember this. Notice that we haven't arrived with the mob of common people—such a humiliating experience. We don't want to be mistaken for common people who can't plan anything. They'll be cramming in at the last minute, demonstrating their lack of dignity, and planning. Never cram into a place at the last minute. All in a rush. That puts you at a disadvantage and sets you off balance for the whole activity. You'll want to start an activity in a dignified manner, showing your knowledge. People make snap judgments about others and you'll want to be among the better class of people. Not the riff-raff. But today because we came early and sat quietly in dignity we show that we are a superior class of people."

"Or that we're nuts," said Jack, becoming quicker and wittier with his humorous asides, also directed at Mother's supercilious nature. Most of her attempts to prove breeding went terribly wrong and served to humiliate her more; Jack saw through her pretend superiority to the ridiculousness of her prescriptions and warnings.

This crack however brought a long, stony silence. Mother unclasp her purse, selected a handkerchief and blew her nose. Only after she had finished did she speak. "I don't understand your thinking. I can't always follow the remarks of smarty-pants little boys with asthma who think they're being cute when they ridicule their mothers. And both of you put the bags down right now."

With this correction of us, Mother gathered her forces and redirected her criticism to my behavior at the prior week's lesson. "And you, my fine lady, sitting there so prim and proper on your chair today were dancing and acting ridiculous during instruction last week and none of the other children did one ounce of that, no siree Bob. Not one of them, and I checked all around the room carefully to see if anyone else made a silly gazabo of themselves with their brown paper bag, and no one did! Now don't get the idea that you can fool around like a gazabo again today or we might just be asked to leave the premises. I don't want you to get the idea that these lessons are for you, either. No, my little lady, this is all for Jack and you are only coming along to keep him company."

I came to run across the room with the asthmatic kids.

"Don't get the idea that you are the center of attention. No nonsense from you today, kid. Dancing around like a loon without a care in the world was not what I brought you here for. No squirming and picking at the bottom of your pants, either, like you're doing right now. That's not what I brought you here for. It certainly isn't. And not what I paid good money for. Money doesn't grow on trees, you know; this is a privilege. Your father is risking his eyesight working as an engineer on plans night and day so that you can attend this asthma clinic and dance around like a loon. This is a special opportunity for both of you to have fun with the kids here. Um, I'm fairly certain there are superior families enrolled in the class with you, by the way. The children with the same asthma condition. The same that Jack has. Yes, I am remembering signs that several of these kids you played with last week were the children of topnotch families. By signs I mean the make of their dresses and the cut of certain jackets indicated hand-made clothing with delicate stitching which, yes, tells me something about the quality of the parents and these in your group are the children of prominent people, though I couldn't quite catch the names and match them up to the faces of the various children, but I may be able to this week, with luck. I think a few of them are related to, oh, some of the better people of the state. This is quite an opportunity for you. As long as neither of you embarrass me. Last week was tremendous fun, wasn't it? A bunch of good fun for both of you."

Neither Jack nor I responded. We hadn't enjoyed the scene that prior Saturday of sickly asthmatic kids with dark-rimmed, deep set eyes and barking coughs and wheezes, most of them were real namby-pamby types who clung to their mothers and fathers or ran about huffing and puffing in agony. We would have preferred walking to our own park, where Jack ran about with a few wheezes, certainly, but no real collapse. We also hadn't enjoyed the barking orders of the lady who ran the clinic and gave breathing instructions.

Mother processed our sullen silence correctly, sensing that we had hated the first asthma class, despised the other sickly kids, detested our demanding teacher, resented the waste of our free time, and wished never to return again.

"I want you to get it out of your head that the clinic last week wasn't fun. You were both very morose after last week's lesson, very disagreeable. By cracky, this is typical of both of you. I don't think two more ungrateful children could be found by special order. When your mother goes out of her way to enroll you in a special course that might fix your problems, well, I don't think it's too much to ask you to act as though you like it. I suppose that's just too great of a burden for the two of you. I guess my children are just too good for help. Goodness me. I'll tell you I don't like that kind of pouting when you're being given a chance to improve yourself and mix with your betters. What wouldn't I have given for the opportunities you've had? You two are spoiling your chances with people of higher positions. I've just about had it with your negative attitudes toward efforts to improve yourselves. I want both of you to get down off your high horses and rub elbows with the boys and girls who are trying to learn correct breathing techniques. I'm telling you this for your own good. It's not like I need to make friends with people of better society. It's not like I have asthma. Why, I passed every athletic test in the Women Marines and went on to college with awfully fine girls and heavens, you know, I discovered that many of them were the daughters of what you might call cowboy princes. I think I might have told you about the fabulous ranches out in the wilds of Arizona and how those wealthy families lived, those cowboy princes? Why those ranches were bigger than most counties on the East Coast. And golly—the cattle, um, that was something...and I can tell you the families spared no expense on the clothing..."

"For the cattle?" said Jack with a smirk on his face. Our mother had a very unfortunate way of migrating too quickly from one topic to another. We would often see bewilderment on the faces of people that had to listen to her long narratives. They interrupted her frequently with cautious, clarifying questions.

Mother, who had reached the kind of verbal groove she would often be in where nothing could stop her, ignored him and blustered right over his words. However she glanced away from his grinning face and I saw her eyes water. "Sending away to, oh, I suppose, Boston or Chicago, the better cities. Why, the fact is that I ranked as a pauper in comparison, not that I compared myself to them because I always had a feeling of my own superiority, or I should say, self-worth which came from childhood years of careful Bible studies and many young years spent living on a farm in Indiana. I had a strong sense of who I was and never had to compare myself with others. I mimicked a chick. They come out of their shell and run, run, run. Pretty quickly, anyways. A chick knows what its place in life is, by cracky. Anyways, I want you two doing exactly what your teacher says today."

A chick in its shell? A monster chick? That reminds me of something from my childhood. A stubborn imaginary companion of mine...

We nodded sullenly in agreement with her orders. We knew better than to try to argue with her once her eyes had watered; she would usually lash out and take away TV or playing with friends if we continued making fun of her.

At that moment a lady with a large gray bun like a bunny hugging the back of her head opened the door and squinted across the distance of the unlit hall at the three of us. She registered surprise. "What're you doing in here?" she called.

"Isn't this the asthma clinic today?" Mother yelped back fearfully, clutching her purse to her chest.

"Why yes, it is, I mean it will be later, but not," she consulted her wristwatch, "for nearly an hour. This room really should be kept locked." She had a pinched expression on her face when she peered at us. Clearly she thought the room should be locked so that nuts like us didn't sit there for an hour.

"We'll wait. It isn't a problem for us." Mother smiled a smile that she probably thought implied her superior breeding, but which actually came across as timid.

"Don't come this early again," the lady warned. "We don't want people sitting in here so early."

She spun around and the door closed. Mother took it all in, the harsh correction of her mistake. Jack and I resisted the temptation to mock her for the scolding she'd received. "My goodness, she snapped at us," Mother said eventually, a little sadly. "Someday they will find that a sharp woman like her interacting with the public will reduce their business. I can see that she doesn't understand that the owner wants to build the business up among people of character and money. The owners won't be able to do that with this snappy lady speaking rudely to people who are only waiting in rooms. Quietly. After all, we didn't pay good money to be spoken to in a rude manner. And I have already recommended this place to several other people with asthmatic children. But I'm a big person; I can see that the owners aren't aware of her bad attitude. They are a higher class of people. I suppose they don't realize that she is rubbing people the wrong way."

As we sat silently for a few more minutes she considered her opinion of the clinic itself. "Well, they have a very interesting theory of how to cure asthma, the people who run this clinic, and their theory, which is based on research on the part of the owners, but oh, I don't know exactly what the research entails. I wonder if their research actually involved medical journals or experimental results. They don't describe the source of their inspiration and I'll have to think about it. Is it on the up and up? This wrapping of your chest and the cocktail mixer, well, you have to admit that's a bit odd. I would have to call it peculiar. When I first learned about it, I was dubious. I don't know that it will work, but it's worth a try at this stage for your sake, Jack. Asthma is taking away your ability to function well on school days and you missed so darn many days of school. Your teacher is getting mad at me. And we might just get you somewhat better in the process. At least you are out with other children socializing and I believe a few of the families that were here were the better, high-class families. Asthma may run in the finer families. In that way we are a little close to them, the better families, these weaknesses of the families being something like...well, like the Russian royal line of Romanovs or whoever they were and their faulty blood, you know. Their blood not clotting. And about this clinic...well, I believe their theory of how to cure asthma has some interesting ideas in it and so I bought the rubber material to wrap Jack's chest, dental dams, and the battery-powered cocktail mixer tickler. And you'll do the tickling, kid. You could look at this another way and say that the whole thing is the work of a charlatan. Well, I will acknowledge that there is an element of wishful thinking in this and I don't want to say it's going to work. How would I know that? I just have reason to believe that the wrapping might actually cause his diaphragm muscles to strengthen rather quickly. I'm not sure about the cocktail mixer tickling theory. Goodness, that just might be a little bit too odd to work, or just odd enough to work. I can't take many more days of writing notes about why Jack is missing school. We need him to get well enough to get to school more."

I suffered through an eternity listening to these remarks of Mother's about the Russian blood not clotting and cocktail mixers before other children arrived that Saturday morning, but eventually the room filled with pale, sickly kids whose chests sunk, whose eyes were dark rimmed and tearful. All of them were sicker than Jack. They were children our age who we despised. Many of them clung to their mothers, crying and rubbing against their sides, clutching frantically to be held. Others just wept or stared morosely from their chair. And then the trainer arrived, in white pedal pushers and tennis shoes, and we remembered that we were not enamored of her either. Her hectoring style reminded us too much of our Woman Marine mother.

The owner stepped in the door behind the trainer and lectured us briefly with the clinic's ideas of how to cure asthma, which we had heard the week before. It involved a whole body approach of active participation in movement and various hot compresses, touch and breathing. "There is nothing better for the asthmatic child than a roomful of non-asthmatic children to run and play with. Yes, parents, asthma must not hold your children back from normal activities with other children. Do not dread occasions when your child can be dashing about. The lungs can be trained out of the asthma condition." With this, she left us in the hands of the trainer.

"I don't want to run, mommy," wailed a pale boy near us. "I don't."

I tried to shoot a glance of hatred and disapproval at him. I sincerely hoped my tanned legs and arms were alarming him, making him worry that I might randomly decide to pummel him, something I wanted desperately to do. I wondered if he might be one of those despicable Easterners infecting Arizona.

"Boys and Girls. Well, well. Isn't this wonderful?" said our tormentor. "What a group we have here today. You folks, over near the windows, please join us. Will someone make sure he joins us? My goodness. Well. Let's not have these tears. I can hear crying. Will a mother get him to stop? If possible. Goodness. Let's come together now, shall we? Now gather around. That's right. A good Saturday morning to one and all. Well, we have gathered together again to have fun together and learn about asthma and what we can do to BREATHE easier every day. Have you been doing your paper bag exercises since we met? You have? Well, excellent. On your seat you should have found a bag and I want us all to practice together. We're going to blow as hard as we can into these paper bags and exhale all our spent air, pushing it out." So we dutifully joined her and blew into the bag.

Jack smiled impishly. He filled his paper bag at his mouth and then snuck it to his side. He brought his other hand over quickly.

Bam! The sound of him popping his bag echoed tremendously in the hall.

"What was that?" shouted our instructor. "Why, it must have been a car backfiring in the road."

Several mothers scurried over to gape out the window; Mother, I thought, glared in our direction.

The instructor fretted for a moment and then retraced her thoughts. "These paper bag exercises will strengthen your diaphragm and do you remember how to find your third vertebra from the top and press it? Let's all do that. That's right. You must put your hand on your neck and wiggle it down slowly until you feel the portion, the part, which rises and falls when you touch and count three down of those bumps. Three, boys and girls. Now press that bump for me. Good job."

I rubbed my neck and wiggled my bottom stupidly.

"Good job, boys and girls. At home are you using warm water compresses on your noses? You are? And wrapping your chest with rubber just the way you are told to on the sheet of instructions? Well, if you do, you will strengthen the diaphragm every day to get over your asthma and the exercises I gave you will help. Who got the dental dam material and wrapped yourself every day? Let's raise our hands. Raise them high so I can see them. Very good. I see that a lot of you are doing your home exercises. This week I want you to continue that and be sure you are following the instructions on the sheet I gave you and I'm sure our mothers will help. The wrapping has to be tight, don't forget. We'll practice with the bags again later today. Let's give them to our mothers. Now, come back, yes, as I've told you, you may be coping with asthma, but I believe exercise can still be a part of your life. The benefits of exercise even to the asthmatic are well known and I'm here to teach you to enjoy exercise and breathing. Let's all line up against the windows on the far side of the room. Every last one of you. Come on now. We can all get up. That's it. Leave our mothers. Everybody line up together. Now will you get ready? I see people getting ready. Very good. Can you get set? Do you have that? All right, there's only one thing left. Let's go!"

In that past morning I must be running gloriously across the room, legs lifting, heart pumping, arms held close to my side and joy on my face when I realize that Jack and I are beating all the sick kids at running and when I fling myself against the wall, with the asthma suffering kids behind me, me running faster and better than all the asthmatic kids into the morning light across the parquet floor, sunlight streaming down at a shallow angle.

"Now see all of you go!" shouted the asthma clinic lady. "It's wonderful. Wonderful, children, keep going. That's the way to do it."

Jack and I'd reached the other side of the room well before the other kids had. Usually I failed at running, so this thrilling development pleased me. I couldn't help but celebrate the moment by dancing around, jumping and jiving in a ridiculous wiggle. I raised my arms above my head and clapped for myself. I smiled at these sickly kids coming toward me and I twisted my hips and flopped my legs around. Just when I was happiest, I saw Mother studying me in an unflattering fashion. She shook her head to make me aware of her disapproval of the celebrating I did. Her lips pursed tightly and she clutched her hands at the side of her skirt. I celebrated beating asthmatic kids of prominent families. This was one too many faux pas.

I dropped my hands to my side and the rest of the kids stumbled to the finish. Jack was rather angry with the others, whom he loathed. The teacher told us now how to control any asthma that struck. She had us testing ourselves for signs of asthma.

I might have been there for an asthma clinic, I might have been there for no reason at all, but I might have to remember it. The writer might be wrapping her brother's chest with stretchy gray rubber dental dam (about ten inches wide) and teasing his diaphragm with a camel hair brush mounted on a battery-powered cocktail mixer for several days running to cure his asthma. The writer might do this steadily with no result, except for the production of a useless memory.

With the flood of images from that day, a strange sight emerges, still fresh in my mind, of a young man whose name was Smitty sitting in the corner of that hall, and surely he came in and wasn't always there in the liquid sunlight of a Saturday desert morning. But suddenly the door through which we'd entered stood open and a man sat on a tan metal folding chair surrounded by a lot of teenagers, male and female. These characters sitting in the corner of the grand room that day were the adopted son of the owners and his covey of young men and women admirers.

I could best describe Smitty as a degenerate Elvis, incredibly short with coal black hair and a weird widow's peak. He wore pancake foundation and drew a fake mole on his cheek with an eyebrow pencil. Smitty had a smile that petrified and shiny black hair. His male minions that surrounded him wore almost the same clothes he did, all black T-shirts and jeans. The girls around him had tight skirts, low tops, and spiky high heels. Rumors about Smitty floated about the clinic, and one such rumor claimed he lived on his parents' property.

Smitty got a kick out of watching us asthmatic kids, perhaps a sick relish. The girls joked with him, gawked over at us (several of us were wrapping chests with that rubber material and turning on the cocktail mixers to tickle the stomachs of a few victims) as though we were actually the subject of their jokes. They danced before him, he watching us through them quietly as his adopted mother's employee talked to us about asthma. He had a sad, bored expression on his face as though he knew everything the lady said was false.

Mother speculated to Jack and me about this Smitty character on the way home that day. "There he was, that strange kid. Wasn't he an enigma? Did you see him? By cracky, this is the second time he's been there. Sitting in the corner of the room. Why, I believe that he might be an illegitimate child of the lady who runs the place or her sister or a nurse, but don't quote me on that. Well, what an interesting character he is. Very charismatic."

She drove on silently for a few minutes, mulling him over in her mind. "Charismatic. That's what he is. He could be someone very famous in the future. Mark my words. Possibly a star, oh, actor, singer, or a general entertainer. It's difficult to predict. Very strange, though. He is one step from being a star, or maybe a culprit. I don't know which, frankly. I could believe either of him. He is one of those people on the cusp of greatness, though. I don't think he is actually bad. My instincts tell me he is going to be a very great and good person. All those teenaged kids gathered around him to hear what he had to say, but I never heard him say anything. Did you? I don't think he said a thing, just nodded. And his Mother came in and spoke to him once, harshly. Did you see her? She wore that hand-tailored suit. Wonderful clothes. Cut so beautifully. Such a sense of elegance. There were boys and girls there. That's what I saw."

She drove silently for more miles as the saguaros began to disappear and we were on the outskirts of town where grocery store strip malls with names like El Gigante, Rancho Village and Cow Town Merchants began to sprout up in the thick desert scrub. "He's a strange character, in my book. What makes him tick? What's under all that pancake makeup; that's what I'd like to know? By cracky, that is one odd boy. I suppose they think that too. The adopted parents, I mean, I tell you there's a mystery somewhere in there if you could only find it. A mystery that would make a good story. Oh, I don't believe stories have to have evil in them to be worthwhile, why, I like a good honest story about honesty, also. Take _Little Women_. Now, there's a good story with a lot of wholesome excitement in it. For example, the way they have fun in the simple, old fashioned manner with cooking and sewing. You kids don't know a thing about good simple fun on a farm. That _Little Women_ story is completely wholesome. But a gruesome story might just interest me. I'm not excluding it. Saying that it is sensational is not a sin, exactly. I like that Lugar story about the fellow in Indiana who we used to know."

"The mean guy? The one who scared you?" I asked.

She ignored me. "There are so many wonderful Indiana stories, come to think of it. You ought to think about them a little bit. I think you could get very interested in them if you tried. They have a lot of intrigue to them. A lot of them are stories about good people, and some are about bad people. Lugar was a bad fellow, but you could get people interested in him pretty easily. That's what I mean about him. People like to know a little bit about something or somebody evil. So you could tell about his little wife and how he beat her and she worked in the restaurant and everybody knew what was going on and they shipped him off to the penitentiary eventually. Well, a lot happened in between his wife and the penitentiary. You'd have to fill that in somehow with your own ideas of what happened. I'm not certain of all of it, but it was pretty bad. I can say that. My mother employed Mrs. Lugar because she would have starved to death without help from someone because that Lugar was a no good provider, that's for sure. He wasn't good at much of anything except hitting women and probably drinking rot gut by the case full. He came into the store hunting for her and that was a scary time for us all. He meant business. Mother stood up to him and said, 'don't you lurk around here with your hang dog ways.' But he didn't have any business, such as a job, I mean, and it was a fine day when he got taken away to jail. Well, that's Indiana for you. That's a story such as you'll find in most central Indiana small towns. But I can see my stories don't interest either of you. You have to get down off your high horses someday. Maybe you'd rather hear about the white button that popped off the blouse of one of the kitchen workers in the restaurant in Indiana and fell into the mashed potatoes?"

"The kitchen worker fell into the mashed potatoes?" said Jack, snorting quietly.

"Only they couldn't find it no matter how hard they explored; they spread the potatoes out on plates and everybody in the kitchen helped, but no... they couldn't see a thing of that button and it wasn't on the floor. Well, they couldn't throw the whole pot of mashed potatoes away because there wasn't time to cook more and mashed potatoes were on every plate at the restaurant, lunch and dinner, and people in Indiana expected their potatoes. Then your grandmother said, 'serve it anyway. We can offer to give the person who finds the button a free meal.' "

"I don't think that would make a very good story," I said, popping off in my new, impudent style. "There isn't any story. A lost button isn't of much interest to people. If there were a lost person or—a lost soul, it would be better."

Mother studied me in an unflattering way for several difficult minutes. By adding the soul comment, I hoped I'd cut her off at the pass with a little religion ladled in and maybe end her criticism of my criticism, though I didn't hold out much hope of that.

She drove on stoically. Finally, she had made up her mind about how to put me in my place. "I wish you would get down off that high horse of yours someday. If you did, you'd find you could do something worthwhile. Probably with an Indiana story. A good wholesome Indiana story. You have very peculiar ideas of what makes a story interesting. Very peculiar, indeed. I don't think you'll find yourself successful with those peculiar ideas, kid."

We drove on toward home. The '49 Chevy bottomed out a few times in muddy arroyos and Mother exclaimed about the oil pan and tire punctures. Eventually she worked her way back to the peculiar teens at the clinic.

"Now, I wonder if the mother makes that Smitty boy stay in the clinic so she can keep track of him. Letting him live in that little house on their property is mighty odd, if you ask me. Almost an odd Elvis character. I believe I saw Elvis once when we lived on Allen Road. I hung out clothes and this huge Cadillac with the strangest characters stopped by and asked where a certain street was. I believe Elvis rode in that car as big as you please. I saw in the papers that he gave a concert that weekend and it caused a sensation. Of course, this was when he first came up, so to speak."

At last we arrived home and pulled into the semi-circular gravel drive with its arc of stunted bottle brushes in front of our ranch-styled brick home.

"How was the asthma clinic, kid?" asked Meredith when I walked into our bedroom and flopped on my bed. Her talking to me left me thunderstruck; this was a temporary reprieve from her usual indifference or outright hatred.

"Oh, it was so dumb. Jack and I had to run around in this big room. It was full of these pale, sickly kids, mostly of them were older than Jack and me, and we could run faster than any of them. They were probably stupid Easterners or something from the way they acted. A lot of them were begging not to run and they sounded like they were from New York City when they talked. One of 'em wouldn't stop crying. He was boo-hooing. Gee whiz, it was awful. We beat them all easily," I said, manufacturing the correct level of disgust at the mention of the East Coast, and bragging about myself in the bargain.

But of all the peculiar things in all this peculiar world, Meredith, it appeared, had changed her opinion of Easterners without telling me!

"You shouldn't hate them simply because they're Easterners," said Meredith sternly.

This impacted me as nothing else had. "What? Didn't you used to? I thought you did."

"I don't think so. That was childish if I did. I don't think I ever really did."

I filled in the awkward moment, when I knew she refused to remember her own opinion (from only a few years earlier), with self-deprecation. Hatred of Easterners had been Meredith and Jack's cherished shibboleth. Now she didn't remember it!

"Maybe I'm a nut," I said, eagerly offering to be one if it would make me acceptable to her. "A little rotten nut."

"Sure you are. You're a very, very nutty little kid."

CHAPTER THREE

Can you dig it? The clue from _The Hound of the Baskerville_ that won the contest (come on down to the radio station for your prize!) was webbed fingers in the portrait of the Baskerville ancestor.

And while we were listening to radio contests, from far, far away, we began to vaguely discern manic howls and cackles. These came from the inimitable disc jockey of the west, the magical gentleman that made it good to listen to rock and roll and who put soul into the western night air. Screeching and growling and howling, he embodied the voice of cool.

The dinner dishes scrubbed, we rushed away; we secretly tried to receive his broadcast, for it was the best thing we'd ever heard. We found, when trying to tune into his show as it crossed the desert, that the voice travelled in and could be heard well, then faded out in masses of staccato static, which brought us to our desperate search again, for where it might be picked up we did not know. Bouncing off lonely desert mountains, off clouds unseen and mighty, his laugh, his cry, coming from the west to us. His voice on our transistors in the bedroom or the bathroom left us dancing and giggling, trying the boogaloo, the cool jerk, the twist. Trying all the dances to this music and picking which one worked best.

"That's the kinda loving makes a man looooooose his mind. You lookin' good. You so grooooovy, man. Just the way they told me you would. Mr. Clean. You wear your dresses tight. You wear foxy furs. Mommy got your mojo."

"Come with me. From Sunset Strip in the great West Coast. Soul."

"Let it all hang out!"

"Right on! Hit me with it, man! Get it on!"

"Right on! Get it on!"

The fantastic phenomena of the west spoke to us that way—of things we didn't comprehend. Sending us his coolness. We paid so little attention to the less than sensational aspects of his show that we thought he transmitted from somewhere near Mexico or from the little towns on the border between Mexico and California. Instead he broadcast from Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and he announced that fact several times every hour. This is an example of how the writer must take the mundane and stretch it into the fantastic. Without knowing how foolish it sounded, we had glamorized the unknown person, the crazy voice, and housed him in a cave. Ours was the obsession of thousands of young children and teens—to find him on the dial, night after night, to search gleefully for a connection to his world. Tuning in on the radio in the night and waiting for the well-known voice, crossing the lonely desert to us, and we felt the laughing voice in the night would be leading us to coolness, which we desperately desired. Introducing the songs (when would the one we wanted start?) our requests not reaching this unknown place where the man lived and spent his time cutting into the songs and singing along with his croaking voice, high pitched and crazy. We danced in the bathroom to his soulful songs. We kissed the mirror and laughed like we were gassed up on something.

"Peeeanut, Peeeanut Butter. Peeeanut, Peeeanut Butter." We imagined him and his coolness, providing us with the necessary mojo through osmosis just hearing his voice. Did he live in a cave beside a desert pool? We traded our knowledge of where on the dial we had encountered him and what music we heard him playing. We traded knowledge of what we thought might be cool, of what he laughed about and what he said was important and full of soul. We wanted the soul he offered. We wanted the coolness factor that he had. We were silent listening to him, none of us wanting to talk over the wonderful sound of his soulful voice, everyone eager to hear everything about dances, about being soulful and how we would let it all hang out some day.

What did he say about this musical group? What did he discuss? Was it concerts in LA that he discussed? Exactly how could we go to those? Exactly what was an LA? What time had it been, and what night exactly, if we could say if rain made it better to find his radio broadcast or wind or cold would we do so? When exactly was the best hour to listen? We wondered about other peoples' experiences and we tried to see how closely we could get a perfect signal from him. How we leant in, leant forward, to hear exactly what he said and we laughed when he joked, so funny we could get the meaning, be in with the in crowd on the latest and funniest thing that he had said. Even on the transistor that we clipped to the screen of our window, the space-age transistor, on that plastic monstrosity, we could hear the Wolfman occasionally as he broadcast in the desert night air.

Everybody dance and we will judge. Get up on the neighbor's high porch on a dark night. Turn on the light and get somebody's portable record player or their transistor and we will listen to the beat. There will be three dancing positions. You have to dance your best and the judges will mark you, scratching your grade in the gravel, for the best performance of the night.

You are really doing the Cool Jerk well, and imagine if you were at a cool club doing this dance in the night. Whaaaaaaaaaaaa! XERB1090. Moths flitted around the porch light and Mexican free-tailed bats swooshed in the summer sky.

For the talent show that Meredith hoped to win, she and Charlaine Gomez, the oldest girl of four children who lived next door, practiced "Speedy Gonzalez," the Pat Boone version. Performed in the night with the 45 on the record player over and over again. The lady with her silly la la la's. The request that he please come home. The silly moves of their feet. Peasant white tops and trousers. Straw hats. Slap a trowel or two of mud on the adobe, Speedy. The serapes and the dance moves, goofy running and silly hat flips, wearing huaraches and drinking. Stumbling home.

Then after the judgment of the act by those of us gathered around in the dark, watching the moths around the porch lights, the stars and moon in the desert sky, the cool concrete feeling of the high porch, someone putting the 45 on one more time, needle scratching and dropping, and watching the red lights blink, halfway up the mountain.

"What are those?" a nervous little kid asks, pointing to the flashing red lights. He must have been one of those Donaldson kids whose faces all resembled each other.

"Those lights?" Charlaine asked. "Those ones are the runway lights for the airplane that Dracula uses to get from place to place. From his castle up there in the mountains. He flies all over the flipping world biting people and turning them into flipping vampires. You see the lights at night because that's when he's out doing his business. Slurp, slurp and all that right at the juggler vein in your neck."

This kid squirmed and clutched his neck.

"Dracula is a bat. He can change into a bat. Haven't you seen the movies on Chiller? What does he need with an airplane?" said Meredith, sensibly. "Those lights are blood red because they are marking the lost ruby mine of the conquistadores. Only people with special vision can see them, by the way. We oughtta go up there some day and find all the rubies and crap up there."

"Like sand rubies?" I asked.

"No, like real rubies, silly," Meredith said.

"Riches," said Jack, "pouring through my fingers!"

Slowly time oozed toward the dance dates, first the summer dances, then those of the fall and the winter, 1966. The CYO, Catholic Youth Organization, held its dance in the parish hall at St. Ambrose's one night and I sat in the car again with Mother when we arrived to pick up Meredith and Charlaine. The parish hall loomed in the dark, one of three long and low brick buildings with interconnecting lawns, splattered with desert plants, beneath a sky strewn with stars, the far mountains on the horizon slightly darker than the sky, and the light clouds here and there bothering the stars. Against the dark blue sky the eerie presence of the cactus, low on the horizon.

A Hispanic priest in black robes with a coat on walked between buildings when the last song echoed in the hall, his inky robes floating him in the night, his unseen heels clicking the concrete. He smiled at the line of waiting parents in their cars. A door opened and a warm flood of light cast across a small square of grass briefly as he went in, probably to his home. The dance must be over when the chaperones were leaving.

"I hope Meredith and Charlaine understand that it's time to come home at the end of this dog gone dance and that means no dilly dallying from them. I don't want to be hanging around out here in the blasted cold and us in the car bundled up in coats even with the heater on medium, but this car's heater can't keep off the cold tonight. That's a chilly wind blowing from the northwest. I'm an Indiana girl and I certainly do know chilly, and it's not like I want to sit here waiting and waiting in the darn night for foolish teenagers to say goodbye to each other nine hundred different ways. Why do they wear such short skirts? Goodness me. Why, her coat is longer than her skimpy dress. The last dance. Did I hear them say that just now? Sounded like it, didn't it? I certainly hope so. Are you listening at all? Don't fall asleep, kid. They'll be here any minute. That's got to be the last darn dance just now. Are they clapping? No, dagnabbit, I still hear music. I wouldn't call this music, though, not in my book. Now that Nat King Cole—he makes music. But the whole industry is controlled by the mob and I will not give my money to them so that they can corrupt this country. Mobsters are infesting the record and radio business. Stay awake, kid. I might need you to go after Meredith. Was that a groan I heard?"

Lights in the building of the church appeared when the doors were propped open and more nuns and priests came out with the kids, laughing with kids who were more attached to the authority figures, and teens everywhere headed for their cars, hugging and kissing. Dancing and hollering at each other about private jokes, promises to call, tentative dates, and smiles all around about the weekend. The cars tore away to the main drag, cutting through the traffic without signals. The jams of cars idled in the night, far away sirens roaring down the desert streets, past palm and grass center dividers and the pink brick apartments, small homes with gravel fan drives and central palms. The roar of the tailpipes let lose in the night. Turning the main street into a drag strip for a while. People hollered between cars about where they were headed—Johnny's Fat Boy, Bob's Big Boy or the Burger House. Piled in the open back of a pickup truck, singing and hugging and screaming. What we saw in the headlights were the crazy antics of teenagers, cut by the light, sliced into torsos and arms, thrown about and acting stagey, singing, stomping, and whooping it up. Dust motes in the headlights. Roaring cars starting up. No room to maneuver the cars. St. Ambrose dance aftermath, night air and melee and with teens running in the cold January darkness, moonlit sidewalks and strange shadows. Why were their legs like spiders creeping against the gym? Groups huddling in short woolen coats were forming smoking circles by the trash cans, hiding the smoke behind their backs and did you stay until the last song, which was so significant and wonderful? Was it slow or fast? Thick plaid skirts, rolled at the waist to be shorter, dickey turtleneck sweaters under V-neck sweaters, Letterman jackets on girls, and fuzzy car coats.

The funny way the swarm stood around in the dark. The cold of the car and the way the headlight lit up parts of the bodies, arms, legs, and heads.

"Boy, oh boy, are these teens going nuts. I'd like the police to be here to arrest a few of them. That's what they need. If these kids had chores they'd be more tired out by ten o'clock at night and not be able to tear about town the way they are. Put em to work in the fields. Make em pick stuff. By cracky, is that truck legal to be making so darn much noise and shaking like Billie Be Darn? Here they are. Flopsy and Mopsy."

"Hi," said Meredith, coming in. She wore Shalimar perfume and it came in with her, faded but still sickly sweet.

"Hi," said Charlaine, too. Charlaine had a large, square face and a chubby body. She wore short woolen coats in the winter and she kept her black hair trimmed so that it brushed her coat collar on either side of her thick, creased neck. Her enormous eyes and large, plastic features made her a bit like a Diego Rivera painting, come to life, with eyes that rolled in exasperation or humor and ridged teeth that shone in the car lights when she laughed. She had a better complexion than Meredith and her pharmacist father made certain she had nicer clothes than anyone else in the neighborhood.

In the back seat on the way home Meredith and Charlaine muffled their voices, so that Mother while driving through the racing cars and shouting teens couldn't hear, but I who wasn't distracted, could grab little bits of it and know what happened.

"... line dance and wasn't there about a hundred couples in the line? We were swooshing under the arms at the end, man, that was bitchin when we went under, wow," said Meredith. "That was so bitchin. I want to do it again. The next dance is next month?"

"Yeah. It is."

"Boy oh boy, these kids," said Mother, "they think they can drive, but I could tell them different. What do they think, cutting through lanes like that and the girls flopping around in the back of an open pickup? Are they asking to get run over? I tell you, there is a general lack of sense evident here. Boy, oh boy, if their parents only knew how crazy they are acting. What are you girls whispering about back there?"

"Oh nothing," replied Charlaine

"Was that song for the line dance 'Hang on Sloopy?' That song is so bitchin. Do you remember what that song was?"

"Yeah, I think it was. That was the first line dance. So you like 'Hang on Sloopy?' Maybe I'll buy it for you on your birthday. My dad has it at the pharmacy. But there were a bunch of line dances," said Charlaine. "You missed one of them when you went to the bathroom and didn't come back."

"I was talking with Butch, afterwards in the hall. That's why I didn't come." Meredith offered as a good excuse for missing one of the line dances. Everyone considered him very attractive. "I talked to him for a long time."

"The big dick guy? He's bitchin', but he has a girlfriend, you know."

"I don't care. The conversation was super deep, anyway."

"Whispering is impolite, girls. What are they whispering about, kid? You listen in and tell me. See that foolish kid hanging out of the car window? He'll catch his death. Of pneumonia. I bet his mother wouldn't approve of that. No siree Bob. What does he mean by acting like that, the silly goose? I know a cold wind when I feel one. This one is bringing a bad winter storm, let me tell you. You can't fool an Indiana girl from the farm. About the weather."

"And I talked with Herb, you know. And he's growing a moustache," whispered Charlaine with a wink.

"Oh yeah?" replied Meredith.

"And you know what that means," Charlaine said lewdly. "Down below quarters."

"Sure," said Meredith.

"I can feel it in his pants. He wants me to. During the slow dance. He wears tight jeans all the time."

Meredith laughed and I laughed, too. "What are you girls giggling about?" Mother asked.

I got the jokes now, getting where they were going, sure. I could get it. I could dig it, actually.

That's where I was again and again, when things were still somewhat innocence for everyone, searching the night for my sister and our next door neighbor with the confusion of music and young people and I just gazing out the window for her to come to the car from another CYO dance. The sounds of kids laughing and talking in the desert night, not too cold, but you need your coat, sure. Several horns honking. Hot rods racing by and older kids with cars heading out to the places they are going to goof around at, the diners and drive-in burger joints, out in the desert where they know to go. The falls at night. Tanque Verde Falls. Hide the car from the rangers. I wasn't going to be there. I was only going to see it second-hand and hear about later from Meredith. A discussion late at night of the various things you should know about the slow-dance, dreadful though it loomed, where to put your hands if a male, if a female, what to do if you sneeze. The way he might touch your bra. How you should go about getting your girdle off in the back seat of a car.

CHAPTER FOUR

First, before Mr. Wayne and our attempt to give him LSD, which was one of my long-lost hooks to this story, there had to be simple movements forward, the thrust into teenager years, accomplished by the day at the Beatles movie, the sighting of Smitty and his gang, the nights at CYO dances, and the worship of radios and long playing recordings. Further acts of growing up, swift rebellions and triumphs followed. Meredith, Jack and I undertook a series of disastrous missteps: drug doses, failed friendships, and local catastrophes containing essential and epic teen elements.

Before dinner Mother always read the afternoon newspaper. This would be in the hour before our father arrived from the architectural firm where he worked, before he drove the green station wagon partway around the fan of gravel and parked. One afternoon she sat in the living room (hadn't I _seen_ something important once out of that window, something marvelous twirling in that gravel when I once played with blocks?) and I lay on the rug, now a yellow shag carpet instead of the gray flat wool carpet I had known as a child, reading the newspaper's black and white comic page slowly. That day she snapped and fluffed the front page section about aggressively while in the kitchen the pot roast stewed in the pressure cooker, the sizzling sound of the valve letting off steam, ready to blow, if something interesting appeared to really make the pot boil.

The _Citizen's_ headline stood several inches tall and it read: Teens Viewed Body. Mother studied the accompanying article carefully, the way a competent librarian would, memorizing information. "Well, by cracky, kid," she said to me finally as I struggled to make sense of the comic strip Prince Valiant, which now contained a crocodile when I thought the last time I read it the action took place in England and I wondered what had happened at Camelot recently in the strip, "this is incredible. What an article. Good thing I saw through him right away when he was there at the asthma clinic with you kids. Boy, what a tough character he was. I sensed it right away. I have a sixth sense for evil, you know. It's something that runs in the family. The Indiana family. I knew at a glance that he was up to no good. Sure, he didn't fool me. All those people thinking he was something special. Fascinated by him. Well, I tell you, he was something all right. Something evil. I could tell at a glance that that kid was up to no good. Imagine people thinking he was doing anything but pure evil. You can't fool an Indiana girl from the farm. In Central Indiana we've really seen pure evil. A pretty face won't fool us and an interesting manner won't make up for pure evil housed in their heart. What in tarnation were those kids thinking? That's what I'd like to know."

I glanced up from my confusion at the action in the Brenda Starr comic. What was up with Basil St. John and his black eye patch? Why had the circus fat lady phoned Brenda? Though I had heard Mother's words, nothing she said made much sense. I wasn't sure who Mother was talking about. I thought I might give up on what she said and try Steve Canyon, though I had never had much luck understanding that comic either.

"Murdering that girl. Dagnabbit. Luring her out of the house for the sole purpose of murder. Do you remember him, kid? At the asthma clinic? He was there as big, or as little, as you please, actually (because he was so short) sitting against the wall, oh, I don't know that we saw him every time we were there. Maybe only twice, but he was hard to ignore. The girls hung onto him. He clomped around in boots. Smitty, they called him. Crazy blue eyes and a mole he drew on his face. About the size of a quarter. Very weird to have put a thing as large as that on his face."

She snapped the paper again. "By cracky, I never. That Smittendorf boy. It was him that murdered the girl and buried her in the desert. Found the body last Saturday, do you remember him? And then two others. Golly. Told someone about it and showed them the body as it was, half-buried in the desert. Holy Toledo. There they were, going out to see a dead body and not telling a soul about it. What went on in their minds? Those darn kids. I blame the music. That rock and roll is corrupting them into a complete disregard of the norms of society. That's what the Mafia wants. They control the recording industry and that's what they want. A complete breakdown of morals. Nothing regulating human behavior. Then they can make their money off of people's foolishness. Sure, they have the young in their grips. You can't break all the molds in a society. Don't want to wear girdles, huh? Don't want to be restricted? Well, those kids were down-right evil. What a story and the thing is we had been seeing him on and off the entire year at his parents' asthma clinic. He was that peculiar kid with the big mole on his face and the gang of kids gathered around him like a security blanket. His poor parents, or I should say adopted parents. There's a story there. What in the world must they be thinking? I'll be doggone if it wasn't him there all those times. Smitty. Sure, looking at his pictures, I'm certain it was him, even with the pack around him I got a good enough look at those blue eyes of his. Wow, what a story. This is putting us on the map. Not that I wanted a thing like this to do it, no, there are hundreds of wholesome stories in Arizona and Tucson. Now we have to have everybody interested in this awful murder. But that Smitty kid went and did it. I tell you, I never liked the appearance of him. I knew there was something about him—sure—something suspiciously bad. Evil, that's what that kid was, kid. Sitting there like a horned toad on his anthill. He had no regard for others. You could see that right away. Couldn't say what it was that bugged me. And his parents were good people just from the Midwest from a good part of the Midwest as good and honest as you please. Just read about this murder stuff in the paper. Can you imagine it? There we were going to an asthma clinic and their adopted kid murdered young girls. And only half-burying them! In the desert. Oh, imagine it. It was you, kid, there at that asthma clinic with Jack only a few months ago. We did the whole course of treatments. You were running across the room as free as you could be and I'll be doggoned if it wasn't that adopted kid of theirs that had murdered all along. I knew something was a little bit off with him when I noticed the pancake makeup. What are those kids doing hanging around at the Drive-Ins and chatting about nothing all the live long day? That's what this article says happened to those kids. Why didn't they have tough chores at home? Why didn't they have a lick of sense? Why didn't their parents give them a lickin when they needed it? Why didn't they have a list of chores and a long enough one that they couldn't run out of chores? They could have picked weeds. Even if their parents were prominent doctors and everything they still should have had difficult chores to keep them at home, especially on weeknights and summers. Where were their parents to tell them to stop all that nonsense? Living in the foothills, that's where their parents were. Their parents are surgeons. Tsk, tsk, what a pity. What an absolute disgrace. The poor Smittendorf's, too. Though his parents were well off, he was an unsuitable person for them, I think. An adopted boy and all that. What must they think? Heavens. He had them all under a spell that's all there is to it, that was what was going on. Reading between the lines of the article. Wow. This is bad stuff."

"They're calling him the Pied Piper of Tucson. That is disgraceful. Us appearing in the news magazines. I'm going up the Star Drug to get a few of them tomorrow. Hope they don't sell out this afternoon. That kid has shamed the town with these murders and those teens, brother, they were a tough group. You wouldn't want them to get hold of you, kid. Oh, I suppose this sort of thing is as old as the hills. As old as the Pied Piper stealing the kids away and that's pretty doggone old."

The writer must follow the Pied Piper to see where he's taking the kids. The writer must stare into the eyes of death and love it and write it. The writer must be willing to steal corpses since it is such a part of the work, the very essence of a writer's mixed-up makeup, and the act of the taking and coveting, of madness spread on the page, the pinning of the deed, the mocking of the meaning, taking everything out of context and mixing it and merging it into fiction without mercy. Cutting into the gist of things and strangling the content, strangling the life out of the past, turning every emotion into text, robbing graves, looting the past, disinterring the dead, staring into their eyes without fear in order to write what the writer imagines they felt. Looking for monsters, waiting for them to come out, the way I did one day on a drive to find, yes, a dead saguaro cactus, that was it, that was what I had done all those years ago! The heart of the story held a strange curled animal, maybe vicious in the case of Smitty, or maybe there was nothing there staring back at you at all. And the truth always was that the emptiness might be as scary as the presence of something. Staring into the dead cactus in the back of the station wagon, I had waited for a vile thing to emerge. It never did, but the waiting nearly drove me mad, until I screamed silently when Jack saw me and said...sure, his favorite phrase, up jumped the devil. Like the chicken and the egg, the Itty Bitty Cocky Baby, always in a state of ripe readiness, always fruitful, the writer must be waiting to pounce on the morsel that makes the difference, the ideal hook, the telling detail. Like a murderer waiting to pounce, looking for an advantage with the reader, hoping for an opening into their emotional life, trying to take life off the surface of the earth and kill it on the pages of a book. Sneaking up on the unsuspecting reader, using cover to advance toward them and bring them the hook they want. Relishing the corpses you create and displaying them. Fixated on the dead time of the past, lifeless, terminal, preserved with all kinds of incorrect surrounding details, which the vain writer remembered wrong.

I ought to go back to describe the girls with Smitty and pretend that one of them that I saw at the clinic was the one he strangled, as Mother claimed. Which one would I pick as his victim? Which one would get lured out of her house one night and murdered? And how can this be construed to be a treasure of the desert?

Meredith sat up in a tree, legs dangling with no shoes on in early October, 1968, still warm nights in the desert, and smoking as big as you please after the sun has gone down and our desert street darkened, the sky full of stars and a moon scythe displayed. The drapes of the various windows showed the blue moving light of the living room televisions all the way up the street. The burning tip of Meredith's cigarette glowed like an insect eye, showed where she perched, where she sat. I couldn't address the smoking issue. She hid the cigarettes in the tree. And I in the doorway first called out, "Come in for _Laugh In_ , Meredith. Come in for a good laugh. Won't you? It just started and you haven't missed much. Come in now and you'll still get to see most of it. They have a bunch of really big stars on tonight and it's already funny. You don't want to miss it, do you?"

The moon scythe rose on the back of the Rincon Mountains. Mysterious trees and strange mounds spread up the street of palms and cacti and gravel front yards. "You go back in. It's all right. I'll come in soon. Don't miss the show because of me," Meredith said. "I'll be right in," she promised, falsely, I knew.

"But I don't want to watch it if you don't." I came away from the door, pulling it closed behind me and walking toward her across the gravel. The gravel stabbed the soles of my feet and pieces of it stuck so I had to stop and knock it off against the calf of my leg before I could go on.

I thought I heard her say "damn." That was about me, about me coming out. It's hard to hear a damn when you approach and keep on going, but I was game for punishment.

"But you know you like it," I persisted.

"Go back in," she repeated.

"Why don't you like it anymore?"

"I just want to see the stars come out, that's all."

"You can see that any night. _Laugh In_ is only on Mondays. You should come in. It's going to be funny. Don't you like the jokes?"

"Sure. I like them a lot. I just want to see the stars come out."

"Well," I shrugged down below her, "I tried."

Meredith in the center of the blood red gravel of our front yard up in the tree smoking as big as you please. I came out into the night, under the desert stars to beg her to come in and join us. But she didn't want to, and the time I spent begging could have better been spent on that show.

"Come on Meredith. You'll like the show tonight," I plead for the last time in a whiny voice. I knew my pleadings were useless. I knew that as the words came out of my mouth and yet nothing I could do would prevent them from coming. They were childish and peevish at times. I would badger her and beg her, but she had no more interest in television shows. I couldn't understand it at all. She had loved the _Mickey Mouse Club_ with Jack and I and also _My Three Sons_ , and _Man from Uncle_. Why was she so negative? And it wasn't as though she listened to the stereo. She only liked the radio, sometimes in her room.

I waited in the night, staring up at her silhouette against the watery gray western sky and hoping she would answer eventually. I could make out the whip-like form of an ocotillo and a bird chirruped from its meager black sticks. Another bird answered from a palm tree.

"Go back in. I'll be in in a minute or two. I want to see the stars, like I said." But she said this in a way that let me know that she didn't really plan to come in until much later. I didn't like her telling me what to do. I didn't like her implying that I liked life with our parents. If she was too good for the place, couldn't I be, too?

"What are you doing?" I asked stupidly. I moved my feet in the gravel. I kicked my toe into the white gravel and shot it across the red gravel. This was sacrilegious in our house. The red and white gravel had to stay apart. Our parents punished us by making us carefully separate the two.

"I want to see the stars come out. How many times do I have to tell you?"

"The show's gonna be very funny," I reminded her for about the tenth time. "You'll miss it again. The jokes are really funny."

Who didn't know what she was doing there? She was supposed to be communing with nature but even Gumm said later she smelled smoke on Meredith when she came in. The disappointment of the time came again, another nail in the coffin of innocence. The gradual step by step dissolution of the child Meredith by a person who bought into all the adult vices. That bothered me as I stood there beside the bent trunk of the Rus Lancia and the sad semicircle of bottle brushes in the white gravel. It was the unquestioning acceptance of the vices of older others, of alien natures, which I wanted her to fight against with the same vigor that she once fought the East. Being so strong, so assured, why couldn't she keep that attitude long enough for me to develop more of it in me?

"Anna has gone a little like her mother," said Gumm from her position on her chrome chair at the chrome kitchen table. "If you remember her. I think you saw Anna's mother several times over the years at my place. She went a little mad at the end."

"Oh? You mean senile?" said Mother. Her cooking distracted her: opening up the oven and forking and turning the roast a bit, fat snapping and popping at her and the spoonbread there beneath, browning slowly. "Yes, I knew that. We talked about it plenty. Anna was quite concerned. I remember the Pancho Villa story."

"That's right. Anna's mother always expected Pancho Villa to invade Arizona like he had New Mexico. She thought he was riding up from Nogales and preparing to slaughter us in our beds. It went on for thirty years and you couldn't convince her of anything different," Gumm said this to me, in case I hadn't remembered Anna and her mother, "Used to get down the suitcases and start packing them to flee north. Anna had to take the suitcases away completely because the mother kept on packing them every day round about two o'clock in the afternoon during the start of the Tea Time Movie. That was when she got the urge. You remember that, I'm sure. When she was alive?" Gumm explained this while eating our crackers and cheese that mother had made me fan out on a small plate and leave on the table before my grandmother arrived that Sunday.

"Oh, that's right. Anna told us about that several times over the years. I especially remember her one time when she appeared at the door in a bathrobe. The mother, I mean. What was her name?"

"Hannah."

"Hannah, that's it. A very old name. We went over to deliver that mail of theirs that came to your place when you were away. When you were up in Canada that one year. Calgary, wasn't it?"

"Yes, I took the bus with Bernice from church. Or was it Olga from the Lodge?"

"I believe it was Bernice, Leola."

"Well, anyway, Anna's mother appeared in her bathrobe at the door? That was an everyday occurrence along with taking the suitcases out of her closet and packing them before Villa showed up. Well, it seems that Anna has gone that way herself, if you can imagine such a crazy thing from a lady who used to be a principal of a school. They had to call the police to the school district office to remove her from the lobby two weeks ago."

"No kidding?"

"Not at all. There she sat like nobody's business in a chair in the lobby and refused to go home without her pension check. She sat there asking over and over again for her pension check to be brought for her. Demanding it. They explained it wasn't ready yet; it wouldn't come out for weeks and weeks, but she sat there as obstinate as could be and wouldn't go home without her check. And the craziest thing was that she had her slip on the top of her dress, like an old fashioned duster, and she wore a newspaper tied to her head with twine."

"We did see her like that last month, Leola."

"Oh yes, you did see her. Well, I think she thinks she's living those times, old times, again, poorer times. The police brought her home in a patrol car because she wouldn't tell the police where she lived so the school district had to find the address in their files. When they searched inside her purse they discovered there wasn't any identification in it at all! Just a little booklet about cancer. That was very odd, my goodness. Now what could she have done with those cards of hers? Her cousin said she had them the day before. We have a real mystery on our hands. I can't think where her identification is."

"Have you searched the house?"

"Sure, her cousin and I looked all over the house in every drawer and shelf through the whole house. Anna herself doesn't know what she did with her cards; she can't remember what cards are!"

"I'll be. Of all the things!"

"Yes, poor thing. She hardly knows what we're talking about. She asked us what cards we meant. We said your I.D. cards, Anna. Things like voter registration and that kind of thing? She said she never had any of those. Of all the crazy things. Why, she did know what I.D. cards were; she used to manage her ration cards wonderfully during the war. The poor little thing and to think she used to be considered a very intelligent woman."

"She's very well-known in education circles."

"I know it; that's what makes it so pathetic, poor thing. Of course, she did have those cards because I saw them the week before, and her cousin saw them the day before, though heaven only knows what she must have done with them. Buried them in the backyard? Your guess is as good as mine. Well, someone has to take care of her now and there isn't anyone else. I can go down if she can't be stopped any other way. We're all playing a game with her that's what it feels like. I've done sillier things, I suppose. I got her in the car last week and I said to her, "Why Anna you've no business to bother those people who have important jobs to do like that." After I said that she cried a little bit and I felt bad for saying that to her, poor thing. I didn't mean to pick on her, but somebody should try to make her stop pestering the school district. They do have jobs to do! She hasn't got the sense God gave a goose anymore. There's no other way to put it. And to think of the position she held. Well, now what are we going to do with her? I don't know."

"It'll all come out in the wash." This was Mother's favorite ridiculous platitude, but she always said "worsh" instead of "wash."

"Sure. It's up to her cousin. What do you suppose she did with all her cards? It's too peculiar for words. I told them at the Lodge and they sure did laugh a bit to think of what she might of done. And her saying she didn't know what cards we meant. I saw the patrol car go by and park in front of Anna's house and I was out of the house like a shot. Of course I thought she had fallen or something, had a stroke or a heart attack and I feared crossing the street, to think of what I might find out, and I never imagined that she would come out of the patrol car like that, just a teeny little thing in the squad car. Wearing a slip on top of her dress and her with a lot of handsome policemen. She would have died to think of it, if she could still think. Goodness, what a waste of police resources. I talked to the police on the sly and they wanted me to give my number to the school district so lo and behold they called me again the next day and I'll be darned if Anna hadn't pulled the whole stunt right over again. Well, they called me instead of the police. The school district secretary let me know that Anna was there and asked me to come down and get her so the police wouldn't have to. I could coax her into Lu Lu Belle for a ride back to her home. Oh golly. I just about spent myself trying to convince her that the check wasn't there and that she needed to come home."

"My goodness. You've had a tough couple of weeks." I could see that my mother was impressed with her mother-in-law's constancy, her sense of duty to someone who was ostensibly her better who was in trouble now. She reassessed her mother-in-law and found her to be more interesting and clearly Christian than she had thought. The fact that she agreed to take on Anna's troubles impressed my mother who was all about accepting life's burdens happily. She could see that Gumm put her religion into action and didn't just talk about doing things for others but actually did them without being asked directly. It was a ridiculous pairing in a way, the undereducated lady who had two children and a divorce but still couldn't spell correctly correctly, and the old maid school principal who was going mad, but somehow fate had thrown them together.

"They're calling about poor Anna now almost every day. I don't know what we're going to do about it. I have finally got her cousin on it, though, and she's trying to think of a solution for us. I sure hate to see Anna committed; that seems a pity, poor thing. Her cousin hasn't got a spare room for her, and she doesn't know of anyone who could be a caretaker. She and her husband may just have to move in with her for the time being. What are we going to do? And she's determined to go down to the district office every day now. Now they know they can call me whenever she shows up. Imagine, she was an educated lady. Why she was one of the earliest teachers of the Yaqui Indian. And they really appreciated her."

"She's very well known in educational fields, Leola."

"Yes, I'm not surprised. She might be called notorious now."

"Do you remember when she came for Thanksgiving? She told us about snow and how the Yaqui children didn't believe in it." Mother questioned me, directly, urgently, what did she have in mind? Making me acknowledge that I remembered these things for a reason? Wondering if I could remember Anna Henry?

"I don't know," I said, obstinately refusing to remember Anna, refusing to acknowledge that I might need to steal her away and put her here for you to see, part of the bread and circus act that you want, the lies and truth mixed for your consumption. How could this crazy woman be considered a treasure of the desert? Why should I be excited to remember her and use her madness for a display?

"Why, don't you remember seeing her last month? She had that newspaper tied to her head with twine. And she told us she worked with the people on _General Hospital_? On TV?" Gumm said this in genuine surprise to think that I didn't know that I had seen Miss Anna Henry.

"Oh, I remember that lady," I said vaguely, not wanting to disappoint anyone. But I didn't remember her at all, until later, until I needed her desperately. I had to acknowledge that my grandmother was probably nicer to Anna Henry than I will ever be with my earnest remembrance of her and her idiosyncrasies. At least my grandmother helped her out in her time of need, whereas I have only determined that she is someone I can use.

CHAPTER FIVE

"That Meredith is still up at the park, hanging around with those good for nothing kids up there, that gang of hairy fellows and droopy girls."

Mother was talking to Gumm at the same table a year later, 1969, I suppose. "I tell you, I don't like her hanging around with those hippie kids, and turning into one herself. They haven't got a clue about the way the world runs and lots of them are old enough to be living on their own, which is a bad mix with a teenage girl, let me tell you. I don't know what she sees in those kids with their peace beads and nonstop talk about the Vietnam War and Civil Rights and what they want to do about peace and love. Discussing protest actions. Agitating for change. It's the influence of that Paul character that Meredith is dating. I don't like him one iota."

"I didn't like those friends of hers," my grandmother interrupted, "that came over here for her sixteen birthday party? Those two girls who chased her around and gave her...what was it called when they slapped her stomach?"

"A pinkie. A birthday pinkie for her sweet sixteen. That was Charlaine Gomez and Phyllis Hill."

"Yes. They banged into the shower and broke your shower door, didn't they?"

"Knocked it off the track."

"Well, that wasn't nice. Practically broke your shower door. Screaming and yelling. Running and around the house and out the front door. That was no kind of birthday celebration that I had ever heard of. Not in Michigan when I was a girl."

"Yes, well, Paul is worse. He has too much say in what she thinks. It's no good to turn over yourself, heart and soul to someone the way Meredith has. He controls everything she thinks now. He's got her convinced of all sorts of things that are contrary to her own interest. This grape boycott, for example. What is that? I don't know about grapes being an important issue. Well, maybe that Cesar Chavez has something in what he's saying about the migrant workers; I'll grant him that. What are migrant workers? Who are they? Why, they're a bunch of poor traveling unskilled workers from God only knows where, and they also are about one teeny step away from being hobos. The poor which we shall always have. But what do a lot of high school kids know about grapes and workers? About migrant workers. Pesticides, why we used a lot of them on the farm. I know it's hard on the poor workers, but I say that these kids don't really care about those workers. It's a lot of nonsense. Peace and love. Stop the war. I certainly am no fan of the war in Vietnam, let me tell you. That war is a waste of men and materials and we aren't going to get a gall darn thing out of the whole rigmarole. But protesting nonstop, well, that's all well and good, but when are you buckling down and doing your chores around the house? I could use someone to set the table and unload the dishwasher, for example. That's the kind of workmanship I need, by cracky. These kids don't know anything about labor. Why they couldn't do a day's labor if they had to save their life. How about cooking the pot roast? What's wrong with mowing the lawn or drying the dishes? Housework, that's the labor I'm worried about every gall darn day. I gotta get a master degree in library science and take Mrs. Saltus' cataloguing class this next semester. That's the labor that interests me. Everybody walks out on their chores around this house and there's certainly plenty to do here that doesn't involve protests. Look at the time! Your sister knows she needs to get back here. I'm about to serve dinner. Dinner can't be held. A roast is done when it's done and you can't hold it any more than you can spoonbread. That girl has less than an hour to get back here. She promised to be back half an hour ago. By cracky."

"Are we having spoonbread, June? I like your spoonbread," said our grandmother, trying to kiss up to her daughter-in-law and calm the rampage she was hearing.

"Yes, we are," said Mother shortly, taking heed of none of the buttering up. "I made it this afternoon. It's at the back of the oven behind the baked apples so you can't see it, Leola."

"Well, I can smell it. June's spoonbread smells mighty good," she said that to me and stared at me a long time as though she wasn't sure who I was and what I was doing in her son's house sitting across from her at the kitchen table.

Mother's weary face turned toward the front of the house at the sound of the wooden door sliding over the shag carpet. "There. There she is. Finally."

I glanced into the living room where the front door yawned open. A strange angled vision of the twilight desert cool in the November sky, 1969, invaded the dark living room, a slice of sofa, low slung chair and Danish Modern coffee table with colorful candlesticks. Meredith slipped in and the door swished closed behind her. The living room was dark, but Meredith passed two lamps without turning them on. She traveled toward the bathroom that we kids used, past Jack's bedroom where he was making a model of a Hawker Hurricane at his blue pine desk.

There was something horribly odd about the way she walked through the house that night. Though I knew she wasn't drunk, she didn't move the way she had when she'd been stoned before either. This night, with shoulders hunched, she lurched in a kind of creeping stumble.

A light flicked on and I saw Meredith enter the bathroom with her spread hand staying too long, too high on the flowery wallpaper, and I knew something was really wrong with her. As quickly as I could, without drawing the attention of my grandmother and mother, I left the kitchen and snuck to the bathroom door. I lurked in the dark outside, trying to listen for a clue about what had happened, trying to divert anyone who came that way, for I hoped that they hadn't also noticed that Meredith wasn't herself. I was as sure as I could be that something awful had occurred; the nature of it was uncertain.

"Hey, listen, come in," whispered Meredith in a broken, slushy voice. The light from the bathroom sliced me suddenly (and long hairs of my blonde bangs shone near my eyes) and I saw her beckon me to approach the partially open bathroom door. She must have heard me outside, I thought. I approached and she began to whisper urgently: "Come in. Don't let anyone see me, though. Hey, it's so cool, so groovy. I have something to tell you."

With that, she dragged me through the doorway and when I was inside I didn't smell grass on her, like I thought I was going to, like I had a hundred times before, but still she seemed drugged, crazed, as though she was on a kind of trip. Her hair was mussed and her skin pale and glistening. She rolled her eyes around in the sockets strangely. I was dumbfounded by her physical state and her disjointed speech. What could I make of the way she was acting? She'd had some unknown type of trip but I didn't know what. I didn't know what I could do safely and what would be unwise.

"It's so incredible," she said, sitting suddenly on the tiled bathroom counter beside the sink. "You won't believe it, but it's true. It happened this afternoon at the park. You won't understand me. I know you won't. But I have to tell someone. Listen, listen. I saw Jesus. It was him. Actually him. I mean it was so groovy. I couldn't believe it. There he was. Sitting in the Bermuda grass at our old park where we used to swing. And I met him. Can you dig it?"

"Meredith—"

Meredith spoke over my objections hurriedly and in a whisper. "It was incredible. You won't believe me. I know you can't see it. What happened was real. So real. I took acid and I saw him!"

Acid! LSD! Shit, I'd never suspected that; of all the drugs I'd heard of, only heroin would have been worse. The thought of her being on an acid trip with me as her companion terrified me. I wanted to get away and have an adult deal with her, but who could I tell safely without getting Meredith in serious trouble? What would they do?

This was truly appalling. How could she possibly consider trying such a drug? I frowned. "Jesus? You mean the real guy from the Bible? Or somebody just calling themselves Jesus for the day?"

"Jesus. The real, true and only one. The son of God one. Can you dig it? It's such a gas, man. I met him and talked to him. It was wonderful. You won't believe how kind he was to me. I don't know if you can dig it or not. I wish you could. It was so far out. I can hardly believe it myself. It was more than real—it was in another plane of reality. I'm just tripping to think that it happened here. To me. And Paul."

I thought as fast as I could, though it felt as though my brain was breaking open to try to work out all the possibilities of what might happen next or what Meredith might say or do and to think as quickly as possible what I might say to a person on LSD that would convince them not to tell others about their visions, but it had to be something that would not upset them. I was praying that Mom wouldn't call us for dinner right away, and I was trying to think how I could to get her to delay the dinner, without making her suspicious. With a little time I was sure I could get Meredith to calm down and not want to talk about her experiences. I was dreadfully upset that I might be about to put her into one of the "bad trips" which we were always hearing about. As glorious as it might appear in her mind, I had to make sure Meredith didn't tell anyone what she thought had happened to her in the park. Then I had to hope that later she wouldn't still believe she had encountered Jesus. I had to hope sense would come to her and that she would regain normalcy, whatever that was. If she talked about this again, I wanted her not to remember or believe her impressions when under acid.

"Sure. I think that's great," I replied almost quaking visually in fear. "I can dig it, man. It is so groovy. Listen, though. Just don't tell anyone else besides me, Meredith. About Jesus. You can tell me. All about it again. You can tell me everything again later tonight when we're in our bedroom. And I'll listen to you, to every bit and you can tell me all the details that you left out, but don't tell anyone else, because they won't be happy about it. I'm really interested and I'm really happy for you. I can't wait to hear it, but tell me. Don't tell anyone else." I tried to muster a lopsided grin. That was supposed to portray happiness, that grin that gripped painfully onto sanity.

I wished so much for childhood again; no matter how hard that had been, this was much worse. I wanted Meredith to be making up things about Indians and Freon in their blood. I wanted her to be telling strangers...what was it she had told them? It was there and not there, gone with time and something else that swept away that time and I didn't have access to it anymore. Something that she used to tell people when we met them, a big story or lie. You need big lies when you write. They call them hooks and if you don't have a hook you might as well write your stories in invisible ink. Sure, that was really true and I knew it. Only I didn't have access to the big lie of Meredith's and I didn't have time.

That, that something. Once years ago I was so proud of her for something, which I could no longer remember. What was the thing? What was it that I felt so proud of? I couldn't put my finger on it. It was elusive, as though it were flirting, coming near and flitting away. Something so close, but which I couldn't pin down. A lie. A big lie that she told, boldly, freely. You need big lies when you're a writer. Those are important to a writer. You don't have much of anything else but lies to work with. The truth hides in the lies. The truth is either too painful or you don't remember it properly, so you have to manufacture something. Something bigger and better. I know that now. And the big, best lies are the hooks and you have to know your big lies, the really big ones that can bring in the reader right from the beginning. The writer has to round up the reader with the big hooks, lasso them and pull them into the plot. Make them fret and worry and wonder. And the writer can't forget the big lies. If you get one, you have to remember it and you have to love the people who can give you the big hooks and the big lies. Meredith gave me one. That was a good enough reason to be loyal to her forever and never forget her, and to use her. She was the source of the big lie I needed to write in my style of writing that overflowed with lies. I had to forgive her for taking LSD and leaving me to figure out how to manage it. All that didn't matter, because she was the source of the good hook.

But now she wanted to tell me about LSD and her trip. Sure, I thought in resignation, tell me everything, every damn disgusting thing that no one knows about your LSD trip. Tell the writer; maybe she won't forget it, maybe she won't be able to forget it, maybe she'll need it for another story, maybe she'll need to use it as a lie, or a truth, to bend it and shape, to distort the bad acid trip and make it something it wasn't for a time in the future that wants to know what it was like to be in the times of every teen dropping acid like it was nothing. Tell me everything and don't tell anyone else, because I have to know the truth always and no one else does. They stay ignorant until I, burdened with the secrets around me, have to let it out in whatever form it has evolved into. God, I have to be left alone knowing it because that's my burden. I have assignments, things I must do that no one else has any knowledge about, ever. Secret missions, searching for, what was it...yes, I remember the desert's treasures! I promised the large out-of-breath lady in the car. Her name was...Peg—that that was it! I had promised her that I would be the girl who collected the desert's treasures. I had to hunt for the desert's treasures. What was I doing about that?

I was seeing the underbelly, the slit, and the dripping disgusting guts, the gears, the fears, and the tears. Damn it, show it all to me and I have to hold it and collect it. What was it I said, yes, I was the...the damn roundup, the stupid cowboy analogies coming from, somewhere, where, I wondered. I knew the cowboy thing was real, important, and mysterious. The strays, the stampede of images all the stupid ideas I had of how to relate writing to cowboy crap. All this mechanism around my writing, the defining stupidity of my place that I thought would open it to others.

Shit, shit.

The medicine cabinet. It opened with a tinny high pitched squeak, like a protest at being touched. I imagined for a moment that Meredith thought of taking more drugs, something to fix this trip, but, no, she only wanted to play with the mirrored door. Meredith opened and closed the cabinet so that she could see the mirror on the medicine cabinet front approach the other larger mirror on the adjacent wall. The closing created a crazy house effect in the wall mounted mirror. She giggled stupidly into the mirrored eternity.

"Wow. This is so cool."

I knew nothing about LSD trips, except for the dramatic way they were depicted on crime shows on TV in which people ran screaming into the night, threw glasses, giggled and leered during their trip. Psychedelic colors spilled out of spinning orbs and a vile man stumbled forward, laughing fiendishly. I hoped I wasn't about to have to deal with that. At least Meredith wouldn't be able to jump out of the window of a multi-story building. I was afraid she was in an active part of her LSD trip, the way she delighted in mirrors. I didn't know how you would deal with a LSD trip, for I was twelve years old. She sat on the counter and laughed into the mirrors at herself. Giggling and making googly eyes, sticking her tongue out. I sat on the toilet lid and watched in horror, in fascination, in disgust, in terror of what other people were going to do to her if they had any idea of what she had done.

Here was the sister who's knowledge of the world, whose bravery, was more inspirational than anything in the world. She was raw courage as a child, now she was damned stupidity.

Hell, hell, disintegration and hell. I felt that the gates of hell themselves should open wide and take me in.

"Jesus was grrreeeeattt to talk to. He understood everything. It was incredible. I wanted him to try the swings, but he said no."

Magical thinking, damn, everywhere this magical crap, denying the impossibility of the extraordinary.

I peeked out the door and could see our grandmother, seated at the kitchen table wiggling her foot, the one that she kept in an ace bandage under her nylons and telling how she was born in the prior century on a farm in Michigan, born premature, and fed with lamb broth and proud of it, telling that tale again, the long story of her own birth and lamb broth.

"Meredith, please, you've got to pull yourself together. You can't tell anyone but me about this. Listen, don't tell anyone at the dinner table. Think about what you're doing. You can't tell them. They won't understand and you'll get in big trouble. Listen to me."

"Don't keep saying 'listen to me.' But listen to me, yourself. I really saw Jesus. I'm telling you the truth about it. He was just there sitting in the grass in the park under a big tree. Right up the alley at our park. A small group of us got to see him. He called us to him one by one. We were all together taking acid and we turned and he was there under the tree. Can you see what I'm saying? Can you believe it? It's wonderful. When all these people all over the world are probably looking for him to come back to earth and here he was on our street in our old park where we played as kids. I talked to him for a while, not by myself, of course. He was so good and thoughtful. It was wonderful. I might have seen him anyway, without the LSD. LSD only helped me to see him for sure and be strong and brave enough to sit near him and talk to him, but he was real. He was so real."

"Sure. I'm sure he was."

"I really talked to him." She giggled and the giggles devolved into choking coughs and she hugged herself to stop. She rolled her eyes around to gape out of the corners and she appeared to see something significant in odd places around the room. Maybe she saw Jesus in the mirror, or in the multitude of reflections; I knew she didn't see me, or sense my horror at what she claimed.

I blinked a few times to take it all in, and then thought up as smooth an answer as I could summon. "I'm sure you did. We can talk about it later, but Meredith don't say anything about this at the dinner table. They're not going to understand." I told her this hurriedly, hoping I could intervene and curtail the disaster that might be if our father had any idea that Meredith had done LSD. He wouldn't hesitate to have her committed; he had said as much before and I wanted to make sure he had no idea that she had done what she'd done.

"I want to tell them, though. I want to tell all of them. It was so wonderful. They deserve to know, don't you think? It's something great I know about the world and I ought to tell the whole world. I want to tell everybody about what happened!"

I thought fast again. "No. Don't tell them. It would be too much greatness for them to understand. I know you want to, but you can't. They aren't going to understand, you see. I think this is something you'll have to keep to yourself for a while and of course I'll know. So you have told someone. It's very special."

When Mother called us to the table we listened to the story of our grandmother's birth in Michigan again, the broth that her father prepared after sacrificing a lamb, a broth which saved her life all those years earlier and which saved her life again for all of us at the dinner table for perhaps the hundredth time. Also, she received again the gift of small china dishes and thought they weren't for her until she discovered that they were. We'd heard that story before, too. With dessert she regaled us with her story about the horseradish business with her older brother and the crash of the buggy outside her house. Her complete story cycle.

But it was good to hear it again nearer to the time when I could write it and tell you the tales which I heard so many times before.

And no one guessed that Meredith had taken LSD.

CHAPTER SIX

Paul with his shoulder-length, greasy brown hair slumped on our living room sofa underneath the art print of Monet's work, showing a bushy hillside. A lamp hung on a brass chain in front of the Danish Modern coffee table and the bright modern candlesticks: blue, green, white. A sad fake rubber tree with wires exposed on its leaves held two small broken monkeys that my mother was fond of.

Paul balanced on his lap a fish tank with wood shavings in the bottom and used one hand to smooth his hair behind his ears. The tank held a small nervous white mouse. It trembled whenever Paul tried to pick it up.

"Hey, kid, pull the door shut," ordered Paul, talking brusquely to me about the pocket door between our living room and the kitchen.

I got up and lifted the bar that enabled me to yank the door out of its hidden compartment and it slid closed over the yellow shag rug. Before the door closed, Mother waved at me from the kitchen table; she organized her collection of Betty Crocker coupons, teeny bright green, red and yellow cardboard bricks, into a small metal box with a decal finger sign on it. Near the finger sign it said "Sock It To Me." Behind my back I heard Paul explaining his latest nutty scheme: "Listen, kids, I'm hearing and reading all about John Wayne, the big cowboy movie star sonuvabitch in the _Star_ , you know, and I thought, you kids oughta know, Meredith's brother and sister, that he is in Tucson right now, isn't that a bitchin thing and he comes here all the time, man. He's making a movie at Old Tucson with a big Hollywood sonuvabitch director. I don't know his name. I heard that from someone who works in a bar. He saw him at the Ox-Bow last night. Then after that he came down from Oracle Road and bar hopped all along Speedway. Listen, guys, he's in the bars in town tonight again, isn't that super bitchin? And I know which ones, approximately, from this source who knows it all, man, and all we, the four of us, have to do tonight is find him, te-he, find him where he is at tonight. I'm gonna call to get a description of his car. I'm calling the hotel. We gotta get out on the streets in the bars and find him. Then, then, the bitchin thing is this," he paused and used one of his nervous hands to fold his hair behind one long pale ear again. I noticed he had beautiful ears, like extraordinarily pale flowers, so delicate for a man, but I didn't have time to think anything more because he was still talking about this idea of his. And he went on, "get in there near to him at the bar and slip him some bitchin out-of-sight acid, some Orange Sunshine, in his drink somehow, kids. Maybe sugar cubes, maybe tablets. I don't know what I can get. He will have a tripping time with that stuff, shit, it will blow his commie-hating mind, and we can tell him all about the war in Vietnam and all the evil it is doing in America and to the kids getting killed and maimed in Vietnam, man, and if we do it right, man, we're gonna convince him to be against the war! Isn't that far out? Yeah? He's gonna see the truth of what we're doing. We gotta do this, kids. What if he came out against the war, man, wouldn't it be tripping if he did? What if we convinced him to come out and do an interview and say he opposed the war in Vietnam? Him with his commie-hating heart. I know we can do it. The four of us can do it! Tonight. We will do it. What do you say to my plan, man?"

"Amazing idea," said Jack. He sat, Ghandi-style, the way he always sat then, with his long scrawny legs folded under him on the carpet, bulbous knees sticking out from his legs, big jointed and with a certain madness in his eyes and laughter at the world. The quickness with which he agrees with Paul's insane and impractical idea for ending the Vietnam War astounded me. I knew he laughed secretly at Paul, but was too clever to reveal what he really thought. "But what bar is he going to be in? And who has the LSD?" Jack dropped his voice before he said the word LSD. We could still hear our mother in the kitchen.

"Don't worry about the acid, man. We can score plenty on the way. That's the first thing we'll do. But where he is—that's what we have to put our heads together to figure out, man. We've got to find him in order to give him a dose. Then stay with him and guide his thoughts during his trip and suggest ideas to him about why we have to get out of Vietnam. If we can turn him into an anti-war hippie we can turn the whole damn country. This is so big, man. It's incredible. It's so far out, man. We've got a lot of responsibility tonight. It's incredible what we're gonna do." His hand stirred the worried white mouse.

Far out. Incredible. Those might be the words. Impractical and idiotic might be words used also, but I didn't say them. I said nothing about my fears, about the horror I knew might be awaiting us if we followed Paul's strange obsession. We might very well be arrested for poisoning J. Wayne, if Paul's scheme actually went forward. And actually I was afraid that there was something personally horrifying that was going to happen if I went along with the scheme. But it would probably fail, as most of the others had. Two of his prior plans, ones he had let us in on, involved siphoning gas from airplanes at Davis-Monthan Air Base and disrupting police radio frequencies with what he called a "beam emitter." Nothing had come of those scary plans. I still felt an amazing level of horror and terror at what we were contemplating doing to America's most famous cowboy star.

If all you have in your past is a pat of yellow butter and you want to describe and remember this perfect, yellow, oily square, well, to be honest, remembering that is easier, pleasanter. Where's the horror and terror in a pat of butter? But when someone comes at you with the purpose of hurting you, remembering is not what you want to do. But the best stories have a morsel of terror still on the bone and the writer is tasked with gazing into dark places for the meat of the matter.

So with a great, enthusiastic lie to our parents about us going to see a movie together at the Buena Vista Theater, we piled into Meredith's Volkswagen Beetle. Years in the sun had faded the blue exterior paint and created a broad white haze of the bug, which had cracked in a crazy pattern near the chrome taillights. On the night she purchased the bug, which must have been a few months earlier, we'd sat inside it decorating the dashboard with contact paper flowers (of the flower power sort) which we carefully cut out. Jack enjoyed opening and closing the cover on the rear engine. Meredith wondered if she should keep the engine unlatched as people did in the desert in order to help the air cooled engine stay breezy. If you followed a beetle bug in town you could see the engine hatch swing open every time they pulled away from a stop.

The blue bubble spurted away merrily with us and I had brought a small notebook and pencil, convenient for writing ideas and poems. I wanted to write prose or a poem, perhaps a poem about a cloud above Finger Rock, like a donut, an image I ultimately contemplated, overworked, and finally destroyed on a metate, grinding away at my writing until my poem about the cloud became a puffy wet mass of lumpy paper which I tasted with my finger.

Meredith insisted that she drive. Jack and I sat in the back of the blue Volkswagen. Meredith's shifting was somewhat rudimentary so we stalled the car twice on Speedway, to the great chagrin of Jack who knew he could drive better. I liked to grip the straps that came out of the car panel, or rest my index finger in the dry cleaning hook (which reminded me of the kleptomaniac who had stolen Jack's sailor suit and our groceries from the old '49 Chevy once when I was teeny). Gripping the straps helped me when Meredith jerked the clutch.

Somewhere north and west of our home, we crunched down a long gravel driveway to the dilapidated adobe house where Paul disappeared to purchase the acid. We in the bug (awaiting his return, joking and listening to the radio, which played a long Morrison hit) said nothing about the insanity of what Paul planned. The sun set behind a row of Eucalyptus trees; they quivered in anticipation of darkness. I hoped Meredith would tell us her thoughts and dismiss the stupid plot, but she embraced it willingly, for all I could tell.

In the dirt yard of the house Paul entered, a Porky the Pig ceramic statue sat with a withered snaky cactus drooping out the sides of Porky's wheelbarrow. As the light faded the pig merged with the dirt until only the writhing cactus limbs could be seen. Then, bang, Paul walked out and light from the little house flooded the yard. Of course Paul had also bought acid for himself, a five strip of decorated blotting paper, the price of which he crowed about when he landed in the passenger seat.

The bug roared alive (I thought I could feel the hot engine under the seat) and Meredith backed us out, away from the little adobe quickly. Paul and Meredith settled on a plan to find John Wayne which involved starting at a certain bar on Speedway near an arroyo; while he had been inside Paul had called the contact who thought he knew where John Wayne would be. We would work our way westward from there.

Paul, Meredith and Jack disappeared jauntily into the first bar we stopped at, but I begged off, arguing that I could sit in the bug and contemplate the lovely night. I changed my seat to the front passenger seat, because the air moved better there. Actually planned to do writing in the last sunlight and the parking lot illumination, which had just switched on.

Then I find myself of the past sitting in that car with the little notebook and beginning the writing of a description of the mountains and the way the last light was held on the lip of the arroyo by the leaves of the mesquite and palo verde and by bountiful clouds on the horizon. Something nibbled at the edges of my mind about a herd of cattle, but I couldn't remember what that meant and what I was supposed to do with that image. I felt it was the hook to something. Or maybe I had planned another hook. I carefully began a poem about the serene cloud which hung over the prominent hoodoo Finger Rock like a doughnut, and I remembered that I had been in the backyard of Gumm's house and yes, Anna Henry had shown up and complained about her mother and Pancho Villa, and Father called that hoodoo Dracula's Castle, and I considered every word of that poem to such an extent that in the end the cloud poem felt leaden, dead like a burden. I wanted to rip it out of the notebook but resisted the temptation to do that. Instead I went on to prose. I worked on describing the last dazzle of light shining through the hazy trees lining the arroyo, the creepy witch nature of the mesquite trees and the fuzzy hazy smoke of the Palo Verde leaves.

Occasionally the bar door would open and laughter flooded out and made me check the round side view mirror of the Volkswagen to see who it was. I kept expecting it to be Meredith, Paul and Jack. I could have gone in; even at thirteen I easily passed for twenty-one and had tried beer at a place called the Ox-Bow.

What I didn't see in all my careful observation was someone who came out of that arroyo a little further down in the parking lot.

He wore a balaclava.

He had no visible face in that black woolen thing, a fact which terrified me. His face appeared so frightening, so suddenly vacant. And the scary balaclava came from the snow and cold region, from the East that we had been prejudiced against as kids.

He had on a green shirt and no pants. His erect penis showed in one hand and a screw driver with tape on the handle in the other.

He was panting, but not saying anything when the attack began.

He let go of his penis long enough to seize my wrist through the Volkswagen's partially open window. I crashed his wrist as hard as I could against the top of the beetle door frame, for I was hoping to break his hold. Shooting it up, crashing the screw driver around and away from me, I could feel the strength of a man used against me for the first time in my life. The muscles in his wrist rippled in a struggle to hold my hand while his other hand tried to open the Volkswagen latch. If he could get it unlocked, he would be in.

I fought him in a frenzy.

"Stop!"

"Help!"

"Stop!"

I should have shouted those words. I didn't shout, but spoke this in my head, and moved my arm quickly so that his arm cracked hard against the car frame again and he yelped and he couldn't help but decrease the force holding my wrist. This worked long enough for me to wrench my arm away and roll the window up. He couldn't get the door unlocked and couldn't get to me without breaking the window pane.

I saw him pull the screwdriver back, and he was ready to smash the window when someone stumbled innocently out of the bar.

This unknown someone came out for a smoke in the night air, directly toward us.

The black woolen face outside my window jerked toward the smoker. The slits where the eyes were seemed to register fear at the sight of the smoker approaching our car. In an instant he fled backwards and dropped down the lip of the arroyo. To disappear.

My heart pounded and I could hear the blood coursing in my head near my ears, throbbing and coursing unevenly. I wiped my mouth which drooled saliva.

I stayed in the front seat in terror that he would come back. I didn't know whether to risk getting out or sit where I was.

Suddenly, the bar door opened again and Jack, Meredith and Paul emerged. I unlocked the door, stepped outside, pulled the seat forward and collapsed into the back seat again.

When they arrived, all jolly together, and stepped back into the beetle, I yanked the front seatback into place. Pulling the seat that way reminded me of a time in my past when the seatback of the old '49 Chevy flopped forward on me all the time.

I gave them no hint of what had happened to me. I felt I wouldn't be believed and that it was too dreadful and too real to explain to a group of jolly people. I kept it to myself and pretended that nothing had happened.

From this bar we travelled several neon-lit blocks passing billboard after billboard and flickering sign after sign, past pizza parlors and dry cleaners, until we reached another bar, The Blue Note, which was deserted. Once we had scanned the three lone patrons we knew the bar didn't have John Wayne in it. Rather than drink there, we piled back into the beetle and took off for another place Paul knew, Jo-Jo's, which was packed, but didn't contain John Wayne either, and so that bar was followed in quick succession by The Gold Rush, Gus's, The Mustang, Bambi and Big Ben's. All without John Wayne in them.

I glanced at the giant screen of a drive-in movie as we drove to Bambi's and felt a memory flood over me of the Drive-In where I had seen a stampede of cows and Mother had expressed her fond wish to watch Robert Mitchum act in the cowboy drama. Something about it teased my brain with creativity and it gave me a chance to forget the attacker, if only for a few minutes. I thought about the stampede movie still when we reached The Embers later that night. I stepped out when Paul tipped his seat forward and I noticed a model shop that Jack and I used to walk to. The shop was a little house with the owner living in a low rambling structure built onto the back. One light burned in what must have been the kitchen and I could see the bald headed owner washing his dishes; steam from the hot water had fogged the bottom half of his kitchen window.

"Remember when you used to want that model plane near the front door?" I asked Jack.

"Sure. It sat above the door on a shelf. I used to hunt for it every time we went in there. I'd rather have an MG now."

The Embers, this dark bar we visited, proved easy for me to drink at and I tilted my beer eagerly, wishing to forget what had almost happened to me. The beer hit me quickly and I felt giddy and lightheaded.

At midnight we decided that we had no idea how to locate John Wayne and we drove the long route out somewhere far in the desert where there were no streetlights and few street signs to drop Paul at his Airstream trailer. We crossed an arroyo to get him there and Meredith told us she had driven the beetle onto a small boulder only a month earlier in Reddington Pass on her way to Tanque Verde Falls. Paul returned to his consuming passion—our mission that night.

"We probably only missed him by a few minutes," Paul claimed. "Man, acid would have done that sonuvabitch good. We would have blown his mind, man. Blown it good. He would have seen how groovy peace could be and given up on killing all the Vietcong. We could have changed the world tonight if things had gone a little differently. Of course, you could always say if things had gone differently the world would have changed."

We laughed at this.

"We lost our chance, though, man," Paul said, going on with the theme of our lost opportunity to stop the war in Vietnam, "I heard that he was at The Mustang just before us. We missed him by a hair. Nobody knew where he was going after that or we could have followed him. Damn it, we really missed a good chance to stop this war. Peace was close at hand. Man, fate was not our friend. But I don't want to give up on my idea. I think it was pretty good. Pretty groovy, man. I'm gonna try again tomorrow night if he's still in town. I wonder if I went over to the coast if I could find where he drinks there? Shit, I just remembered that I have buddies who will let me sleep on their couch in Huntington Beach. Or was that Ocean Beach? Shit, I don't remember. Where does John Wayne live anyway? Anybody think it's San Diego?"

I never saw Paul again.

The end of Meredith's relationship with Paul came in the middle of the night a week later.

Meredith, who lived at home that year in order to save rent, arrived home from her date with another man. After she had kissed the new boyfriend goodnight and locked the door, Paul rang the doorbell and pled and argued with her to convince her to return to him. Meredith refused all his begging, received an apology for the rude doorbell ring and closed the door. I could hear quite a bit of the conversation because the doorbell awakened me.

When Meredith groped her way down the dark hallway toward our bedroom, she blundered into Father who stood in the way waiting for her.

"Meredith, did you lock the door?"

"Yes," said Meredith impatiently. She opened our bedroom door and walked in. I began to wake more thoroughly.

Father's hand bumped along the door, scraping the wood with his nails and pushing it open. "Meredith, I need to talk to you! I need to talk right now about this situation."

"Oh, golly, sorry about the doorbell. Paul is just jealous of me being with anyone, but we've broken up—"

"That was terribly alarming for your mother and me."

"I'm really sorry. I mean, I'm not the one who did it, but he's my friend, so I'm sorry. Just forget about it. Go to bed," I heard her say wearily. "He's gone now. It didn't mean anything and he apologized."

"Meredith, what was that all about?"

"Paul was mad that I went out with someone else so he wanted to talk to me. I guess he followed me in a car, but when we came back here he was too late. I'd already come in, so, like an idiot, he rang our doorbell, because I went in before he came up to the door, that's all. Sorry about it. Sorry he woke you up."

"Meredith, I don't think you realize—"

"Let's talk about it tomorrow. I'm going to bed now."

"Do you realize he could have murdered us in our beds?"

Meredith contemplated that for a second. "Dad, who would be stupid enough to ring a doorbell before they murdered people in their beds? It woke everybody up. The murderer would be trying to kill a bunch of awake people."

"Meredith, I'm tired of your ridiculous attitude. Your mother and I are at our wit's end. Oh, God, I beg of you. Listen, please listen. I am on my knees on the floor of your bedroom at one a.m. begging you to end everything with this man. He will kill us in our beds. He will kill us!"

"Dad, get off the floor."

"Promise me you won't go out with him again."

"Dad, just get off the floor, please."

"I'm on my knees. I'm begging you, Meredith, to think of the family. Protect us. For God's sake, protect us. I pray that we aren't murdered at night while you are out. I have to pray for the family. Now I need my gun. I'll have to get it out and oil it. This situation is unsafe. You are making me think I need my gun when I hadn't thought that way since the Cuban missile crisis and that night I listened to the radio from Sonora."

Yes, I remembered that. He talked about getting his gun out and oiling it and he thought Stalin hadn't murdered Trotsky and he was coming to Tucson, or living in Tucson, and we would be caught in the crossfire. That was a lost story. A great scene from the American Southwest. I tried very hard to remember all of that comical story.

"For God's sake Dad. You are really overdramatizing this."

There he knelt on the floor of our bedroom, on the octagonal orange shag rug with orange fringe, in his briefs, barely visible in the dark room with slight moonlight, pleading with her. I pretended to be asleep but was hearing the whole insane half hour conversation that went nowhere and everywhere, the paranoia, the fear and hysteria of our father in his briefs. His voice, constrained and strange, discussing our impending murders by this jealous boyfriend.

"He wasn't even that mad, Dad."

"I don't want him to come here again." He spoke with a husky shaky voice full of emotion and anger. "I know when a man is capable of murder and he is."

"I don't think so. He won't ever do that again. Ringing the doorbell at one a.m. You can be sure of it. He even apologized. A bunch, actually. He was really sorry to have done that. He knows ringing the doorbell was a dumb idea. He just lost control of himself."

"Your mother is very concerned." When he said "your mother" his voice trembled with emotion again. He had a wobbly sound to everything he said as though he were speaking to us underwater.

"Well, go tell not to worry. It's all over now. Nothing happened and he went away." Meredith voice sounded matter-a-fact as though she were giving directions to the nearest gas station.

"Your mother and I have a right to peace in our own home."

"I agree. Go back to bed and tell her everything is okay."

When he returned to his bedroom and had spoken briefly to our mother, when he finally gave up his hysterical reaction to our midnight caller, Meredith changed into a T-shirt and got into her bed after crashing into the ironing board. She had ironed something at the last minute and hadn't put down the board and I'd come to bed in the dark myself at eleven. Sometimes she cleaned up after getting ready for a date, but a lot of times she left everything where it had been, all the outfits she tried on, and I refused to clean up her portion of the room on my own time. I sometimes moved the heap of dresses she had tried on from her bed onto the ironing board.

"Thank God that ordeal is over. Mom goaded him into that, telling us all that crap about him praying for the family. We know he doesn't go to church. He's not praying for anybody. Sheesh. I think he has got to be the most dramatic person on the face of this earth. I mean really, ding, dong, I'm gonna murder you," she said yawning. "Logic really escapes him. If Paul were going to murder us, he definitely wouldn't ring the doorbell first, would he? What kind of idiot would do that?"

"I guess not."

"So, you're upset, too?"

"Not at you. I wish I was asleep, that's all. The doorbell woke me up. I'm kinda aggravated because of that."

"I guess I'm horrible. I'm just a horrible person." My best guess from the way her voice sounded was that her face turned up toward the ceiling. A car went by and moved light quickly along the walls.

"No," I replied, "but maybe Paul is."

I couldn't think of what else to say, though she was logical I felt she was frightened of Paul herself. The whole thing gave me the creeps and I felt jumpy. There was no way having someone wake everyone in the house by ringing the doorbell at one in the morning was a good thing. The whole unseen scene of our father begging in the night in his underwear was so unbelievable it was taking hefty cables to suspend my disbelief.

"Well, that's the way it was moving west," I suddenly croaked.

"Why'd you say that?" asked Meredith.

"I dunno." I shrugged, but she couldn't see my shoulders in the dark.

"Why did you say that?"

"I dunno where it comes from."

"Well, I can tell you if you can't remember; it happens to be the last line in an old story of Dad's, dummy. He used to tell it all the time when we were little." Meredith sounded fed up with my blunders. Here Dad had just left the room and I had to remind her of one of his endearing stories; I suppose that was why she was so angry at me. I couldn't remember anything about the story. Not how it began or how it ended.

"Really? I wondered what it was from. It's sometimes flitting around in my brain, but I don't know what it means. How does the story go? I don't remember and I'd like to. I like to collect stories."

"Oh, it isn't a real story, silly. Nothing ever happens. You just improvise a bunch of modifying clauses about how wonderful the West is, descriptive clauses, with grass waving in the wind, covered wagons, antelope, little cottages, and then you end it with the line 'That's the way it was moving west.' He told it to us a lot. One night right before Easter he was drunk and he told it and he was vomiting up liquor in the toilet. Remember that? We were all on his bed and Mom folded up clothes? It went something like this, 'Across the fertile and golden prairies, trampled by the wheels of wagons, with the bounding graceful antelope and their grasses plenty, where the wide rivers bubble, stopping the great migrations, wagons loaded with cheerful people, people of varied nationalities, moving forward, following the Indians, watching the grasses, eaten by the buffalo, dark and hairy, and so on, until you say, 'that was the way it was moving west.'"

I didn't remember it well at all, but with time and effort, with effort and silence, I would. "Oh yeah. I do," I lied, "Yeah, I sort of do. Hey, Meredith. Ding, dong, I'm here to murder you!" I said this happily, ready to create a joke between us.

"Yeah, ding dong. Your murderer is here to murder you. Sure, ding dong."

CHAPTER SEVEN

An absurd sense of mission, of self-absorbed, busy-body employment on the part of the park worker who studied intently a piece of a broken sprinkler head and then swung into the seat of his oily mower, contrasted sharply with the deserted hard pack of a Hohokam village site and the nervous newness of the inductees into the summer tennis camp. The Hohokam village languished next to the tennis court in the corner of the park where Jack and I had arrived, too early as usual, on a summer morning with our new Pancho Gonzalez tennis rackets. A chorus of cicadas buzzed horridly in the early morning, in the Bermuda grass and trees. The crispy yellow wrappers, the exoskeleton of the larval cicadas, clung here and there as see-through horrors. Jack and I bounced our backs against the wire fence and tolerated placidly the strange lying saga our mother narrated which happened to relate Cowboy Princes to tennis rackets.

"Well, by cracky, I hope the two of you children recognize what is being offered and thank me later for arranging this fabulous opportunity for you to use those tennis rackets I bought you for Christmas at considerable expense and I hope you recognize that by learning tennis you will strengthen your body, especially the upper torso, and coordinate your eyes and hands, something the two of you really lack and which I would like to see improve before you leave home, and at the same time these rackets will allow you to associate yourself with the better people out in the countryside out at the big ranches which is always a good thing and my goodness several of the largest ranches in Southern Arizona also included tennis courts for the pleasure of the well-educated and intellectual class of people invited to the really large ranches, yes, I have seen them with these, my very own eyes. These ranches it would be hard for you to imagine because the scope and magnitude of them is simply unimaginable unless you've been invited out to one of them, out practically to the borders in all directions, all the way down to Mexico, unlimited potential, manifest destiny and all that, but with your attitudes I don't imagine either of you will ever have that happen, an invitation I mean to a great Arizona Ranch Homestead, no, I can't imagine either of you out at places like that with your betters. You are too sullen to associate with others, especially not your betters, you're both too quick to criticize, not like your cousins in Indiana, mind you, for they associate with anybody better. But I'm giving you this opportunity because you two should be good at tennis. Both of you have those brand new rackets with Pancho Gonzalez's signature on the handle and you know that he was very good at tennis, and, of course, you can claim to be a teensy part Hispanic, so one can imagine you have it in you to be good, too. You have been given a chance to rub elbows with a better class, if you choose to learn the tennis skills in this class which I have enrolled you in."

Jack listened to Mother's long tirade with mock patience and then drolly and deliberately misread the flyer taped to a pole, "Tennis clinic for people who do not want to learn tennis in five easy sessions. Heat stroke clinic free at nine a.m."

"Heat stroke clinic at nine a.m.?" Mother repeated in a contained fury at Jack's constant quips, "Very entertaining. Very humorous, indeed. A comic, huh? Heat stroke clinic. Stroke clinic, kid, that's what it says and none of your lollygagging smiles. This is why you aren't invited to any big ranches by your betters. Who wants to listen to that kind of sassy talk for a weekend? The kind of people who live on ranches don't trade sassy, jokey talk with each other. They have elevated conversations that are positive about beef prices and land prices and the arts, music and books. They uplift each other. They provide other important people with what they can of happiness. They bestow opportunities on those who are wise enough to see where the benefits arise. They have wonderful conversations."

"Sure they do, mom," Jack replied, laughingly. "They actually carry on long intellectual discussions about what's on _Hee-Haw_ that Saturday night and the performers at the Grand Old Opry. And they've all read _When a Man's a Man_."

That was a dirty dig, an evil crack, at a crazy bestselling western written by a nut who had tuberculosis and built his mansion on a hill not too far from our home.

"I'll have you know that the author of that book was a great American writer," said our prickly mother.

"Harold (Ding-A-Ling) Bell Wright? Mom, he was a hack. A crazy best-selling hack. Nobody has even heard of him nowadays. Christian novels aren't best sellers anymore," I said.

"By cracky, you kids," she said. "You have the most disturbed opinions. The lack of respect will not be helpful to you in the long run. I'll be back at eleven. And don't do anything stupid."

"I'll have had a heat stroke by nine so be sure and come back earlier," responded Jack to the Oldsmobile Cutlass as it chugged away. Mother wore enormous sunglasses and looked every bit the part of a scowling bug.

A meaty blonde man with very tan skin and smelly cologne arrived to teach us tennis. He greeted us with a short speech about the immense pleasures of tennis awaiting us once we would only learn the sport of kings, and then led us onto the concrete court. Already the summer sun broiled all the surfaces. We sat in the shade with our backs pressed against a wire fence and two stiff young men demonstrated various serving techniques; Jack and I didn't listen to anything they said nor did we glance at them much.

I whispered to Jack, "Gee, Jack, I just remembered something really interesting from a long time ago. Do you remember us telling people we owned some kind of dumb gigantic ranch? We used to tell people that, and I think I actually believed in it. It's hard to remember what we said very well."

"Shhh," warned an intense young woman tennis enthusiast beside me.

"Oh, go blow, will ya?" I muttered at her flabbergasted face. She had bulgy black seed eyes like a deer mouse.

"What about it? Don't you remember?" I asked.

Jack laughed at me. "Ah, no, silly. That came entirely out of Mother's imagination. She was the big ranch kook. We were playing cowboys plenty. Maybe you have that in mind. We used to have that wagon in the alley? The one that we bought a covered wagon top for?"

I thought for a moment, 'big ranch kook' didn't that mean something, too? What was the big ranch thing she used to say? But I had lost my train of thought and then decided to persist with my questions.

"I forgot covered wagons, but I mean, didn't we tell someone or a bunch of people that we had an enormous ranch?"

"No, you're nuts," said Jack. "We never did."

"But I'm sure we did. I'm sure of it. We told a bunch of people. At least I'm pretty sure we did," I said.

"You might have," said Jack wisely. "You did a lot of stupid goofy stuff. You were a nut."

"No, Jack, you're wrong; Meredith did," I said.

Jack contemplated the past for a moment. "Well, she lied a lot and made up stuff. I don't remember a ranch, though."

When Jack said "she lied a lot." Part of the scene came back to me. It had been so important years ago; we'd thought it was the most important thing that had happened to us, but now we'd completely forgotten it. "Jack! There was a ranch. We told a couple of weirdoes at the Saguaro Monument. Those people who tried to squeal against us to Mom and Dad for watching them take smutty pictures? They were very, very pale people."

"Oh yeah," said Jack slowly. "I do remember that. Were they making a smut film?" he said incredulously and excitedly. "Holy shit, I never knew it."

"Well, that might not be really true. They were sort of taking dirty photos. Fifties style smutty photos, I think. Risqué photos, maybe, tasteless photos," I said, pulling back steadily from my accusation. "Oh yeah, she pretended to mount the cactus and she was lifting and swirling her skirt around sticking her boobs out in an old squaw dress, wasn't it? Remember those dreadful squaw dress things that scratched us up as kids? Old ladies wore them and wanted us to hug them?"

"Squaw dresses. Yeah," said Jack, "Mom bought one of those. Once."

Squaw dresses. They had been significant, too. Clusters of old women with those things. Yes, some of them had vaguely wanted to....hug me... that was it! Someplace a long time ago ladies in squaw dresses had wanted to hug me and someone had...supported me in my shyness. That was it. I had short hair, too. A seal cut. And the supporter had been an old lady from the church. Sure, and Jack and I had once gone to a dress shop. The details of that visit were obscure, but there was a gun! The shop stood at the edge of town then and the lady that owned it had been one of Mom's friends who had been a librarian until she had a nervous breakdown. Mom had bought one of those hideous squaw dresses for herself. Left with it in a box beside me. It still hung in the closet and Mother kept trying to interest me in wearing it.

"Yeah, Mom bought a squaw dress," I said, remembering the shop.

"But I remember those people now. Jeez, I told them we had a chuckwagon. We thought they were coming after us and we had to climb that little mountain," Jack said.

"Yeah!"

"I had a big asthma attack that night."

"Sure you did. And we were opposed to the east."

"Meredith was. We agreed to be opposed, too. She told us all about how bad the east was."

"Isn't it weird that she's talking about moving there now?"

"No talking, please," said the tennis instructor to Jack and I. No talking, keep it to yourself and write it kid, write it before you forget it.

"Say, didn't someone we knew live in a house along here?" I asked Mother on the way to church confirmation class. I saw a neighbor's brick house, a ranch style brick, with a gravel front and three ocotillos, the whip-like plants that were barbed, planted in the center of the fan of the semicircular drive. We were just a few blocks east of our house when I said this.

She looked over at me sharply. "Well, I never. You mean to tell me you don't even remember the Campbells?" she said, somewhat incredulously. "I don't even know what to say to you."

"Well, who were they?" I protested her indignation. We passed Blaine's house and I did remember him, the kid who told us our dead turtle wasn't dead and took a quarter from us promising to deliver to us what no one could. How he'd gloated over us when we realized what a liar he was.

"Ralph Campbell was from Benton County, Indiana and his wife was from Ohio," Mother said as though those geographic locations were enough to explain everything I needed to know about the Campbells. She always acted that way about the Midwest as though membership in the "born in the Midwest club" was enough to make the person good in her eyes. Of course she had given birth to me in Arizona, so my goodness was always somewhat suspect.

"But I mean what did they do?" I asked. I was happy and optimist thinking that she had something to tell me; I suppose I waited hungrily for a juicy story about them. Inquiring for the barest sketch of a story, without doing it consciously. Groping around in the past even then for the treasures that Peg, though I couldn't remember her, had told me to collect.

"They gave us pomegranates from their trees on the side yard every autumn. And they had a son named Mikey. He was ill. You and Meredith and Jack played with him often so that he could have company. I brought you kids over there to give him companions. You mean to say you don't remember him at all? He had a fly swatter and you played with ping pong balls. He couldn't walk. His head grew very big."

"Well, now that you mention pomegranates and the fly swatter, I guess so. He used to shoot ping pong balls around the room and we chased them and tried to catch them. Did they, the Campbells, move away or something?"

"You really don't remember, do you?" Her accusation infuriated me slightly, but I let it pass without responding. "Mikey died. Ralph's wife left him and went back to Ohio. Ralph was living there for a few years and we even went to visit him. You really don't remember? He died from alcohol just three years ago?"

"Oh. I kinda remember something. You might have said something about those people. Something about what happened."

"Well, that was the something I said," said Mother sarcastically. "I tell you at times I think there isn't anything but holes in your head. Here I am telling you all about what is happening to other people and thinking that you're listening, but no, not at all. I don't know why I tell you anything, because you don't hear what I'm saying after you ask me. Anyway, I went to Ralph's funeral."

The writer has to endure the scrutiny of the Mother who doesn't approve of you not remembering the interesting things, the stories you will need to round up later that she is telling then, but afterwards when it's all explained, imperfectly again, the writer remembers again and remembers it better in a newer form, better than anyone else who was there, for that is my job, and the shame of not remembering is enough to drive the writer to drink, like Ralph, and to writing about Ralph, and Mikey and ping pongs and to reconstruct, imperfectly, the perfect conversation of Ralph and his wife with my mother as they picked pomegranates outside Mikey's room that day, years ago. The stories of banks, John F. Kennedy, and the weather back where the folks lived. Bless Mother for her interest in others; I took everything she offered and spit it back, imperfectly perfected.

"I keep seeing this one thing," Meredith said late one Sunday night during her last semester in town. She had decided to move to Boston as soon as she had received her B.A. in art. We were sitting at the chrome table in the kitchen in front of the open oven doors. I could see our warm yellow and orange reflections on the glass of the kitchen window (Mother hadn't completely drawn the drapes). As a small child hadn't I seen someone else, someone quite strange and creepy, there at the table with us in a reflection on the same glass? Who it was I couldn't remember, but I felt a disquieting shiver to think of it even vaguely. I kept imagining it to be a toad.

"What?" I asked.

"I see a scene... I keep seeing it, over and over, in my mind. It's from the rodeo time of year and it happened when I was three. I stood at a window in our home out on Allen Road, when we lived in a little adobe out there before you were born?"

"Yeah, I remember about us living on Allen Road."

"Well you didn't live there. It happened before you were born, but there I was looking at this fat lady on a horse. She rode toward our house on the dirt road with all those creosote bushes between us. I couldn't see her perfectly through the bushes. For a while she rode fine, then suddenly she couldn't control the horse and it started bucking, and she screamed. I remember all her clothes were like dude ranch clothes for rodeo, you know?" said Meredith.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, dude ranch stuff."

"You mean like that dumb puppet, Howdy Doody? Like his shirts?"

"No, not Howdy Doody. That clown wore cotton checked shirts. Hers was a lot fancier. A shiny cloth. Maybe it was a satin shirts with snaps and cactus embroidery on the pockets."

"Oh yeah, I know what you mean. Clown? I'm remembering something about that—"

"She had big embroidered flowers on her pants, too. I could see her fancy clothes. Anyway, I keep seeing her on a horse the way I saw her that day. She kept getting bucked, you see, and I was watching it. She screamed during the bucking part. Nobody else watched; we were living way out. And our house was far back from the road. I used to play with Kitty Clarke and she might have been standing with me."

"You saw it and couldn't forget it?"

"Yeah."

"And you were alone?"

"No, I just said I believe Kitty Clarke was with me. I don't think you listen very well to other people's stories."

"I do so. I always listen and that's a really good story. I like it. Did anyone come and rescue her?"

"I'm not sure. I think maybe they did."

"Do you remember an old lady who babysat us? She told us something about a clown story? It was a strange floor scrubber lady who told us a story with a clown in it? The clown killed everyone in a stagecoach?"

"What! No. I think you just made that up."

"I didn't. This lady babysat us. She...she worked at the Historical Society...that was it and Mom knew her. She scrubbed the floors down there. I remember that she didn't drive and Dad went to get her and boy, she was a real terror. She wanted to listen to rock and roll. Dad had just bought the Magnavox stereo, but we didn't have any rock and roll records."

"Mom and Dad hired a bunch of kooks to take care of us."

"The rodeo time was what made me think of it; you see it was on rodeo weekend that she came. You were saying something about rodeo times. And while we're at it do you remember that you told a lie to people?"

"Huh?"

"Well, one time you told people we had a big ranch."

"Oh gee, is that all, kid? I probably said worse things. How could that cause a problem?"

"Well, I don't know. I think it did though, for me."

"Sorry kid."

The confirmation class met in the donated home, the church annex, where Mother left me in the autumn through spring, ever Sunday night from four to five-thirty in 1971. I came home in the dark, to the food already cooked in the time I had spent, or wasted I felt, on the Bible studies necessary for confirmation. What a mass of uninteresting names and things I couldn't remember. The culmination of nonsense and irrelevancy. I could have done a thousand good deeds in the time I had spent on these confirmation lessons.

The uninteresting arguments of theological issues, the horridly boring comments on Biblical controversies that this visiting reverend and Reverend Shelton discussed above our heads, through us, around us, not including us at all and laughing while we studied sullenly, the tan folding chairs which filled our church and had now migrated to the annex. We sat in the living room of the house. A dusty white shag rug covered the linoleum floor. A sliding glass door without curtains showed our figures on the glass as the darkness spread in the backyard. Another fine Sunday afternoon spent with these decrepit men talking to each other in the presence of nine teenagers who were never allowed to talk. And these guys were so animated with each other and even discussed with us that they would go to dinner and eat lamb that night together, the details of the menu, who would have mint sauce and who horseradish. They had to discuss food in front of us who were eating our dinners late every Sunday and felt the loss acutely because none of us had made the choice to go to confirmation class on our own. We were all forced into the class, even those much more pliant than me. "There are aspects of the gospel which are meant to challenge in the same way that we discussed the challenge of the aspects of love and charity. In full acknowledgement of the gospels true meaning in our lives we are incessantly and obsessively looking for an out. Would anyone care to discuss this, with pertinent examples from the scripture, which we are studying tonight? Anyone willing at all to discuss the way we are all looking for an out?"

Yeah, I'm looking for an out, sir. An out from this confirmation class which I do not want to attend where I have to listen to these ridiculous arguments about the Bible from two ancient farts and I can't say anything at all about what I want to say because my mother wants me confirmed regardless and I better conform to get confirmed.

All of us in the class cast our eyes down, into the dusty corners of the room, to the labels on the back of the folding chairs, to the weird darkening backyard with its abandoned swing set, the patio walls thick with pyracanthus berries, and near the weird shaking Eucalyptus trees, a transplanted saguaro standing awkwardly in the yard, about as awkwardly as us in a confirmation class.

"Anyone with anything they've observed. Don't be shy." The two men almost laughing aloud at the young meek girls, who had nothing to say. Then, struck that the boys are not beating the girls, urging the boys at least to have something to say to better the hopeless, quiet girls, which they didn't either. We stared out morosely at the brick patio with its huge barbeque and discussed the aspects of the gospel that they liked. None of us asked much of anything and we dreaded being pumped for our opinions of anything that the Reverends talked about.

The next Sunday, my last Sunday at church, Shirley Shelton stood on the Bermuda lawn clutching her purse and fingering her clip-on earrings. The blankness of her astounded me again. I always was astonished by her, actually appalled. Where was she? Was she off with her Maker somewhere and the body here simply serving the only purpose of keeping me disturbed and pleasing her mother, the Reverend Shelton's wife?

"We will have a party thrown by the congregation when you have successfully interviewed with Reverend Shelton and we have you ready for the ceremony."

The absolute misery of the dark Sunday nights spent in the church annex in December and January. The sad clowns and dolls in a twilight bedroom where the church nursery is at times for those children who are tiny or sick. The dripping bleary nights of cold when we waited for our car to advance enough for us to get in out of the rain. To the annex, the strange donated house with its empty bedrooms and stripped aspect. A kitchen for no one. A barbeque without meaning. A perpetually still swing set. The meaningless entryway with its fake slate floor. The doorbell that will never be used again.

"You get confirmed tonight, isn't it?" Mrs. Shelton said stiffly. After all these years, can she afford me no morsel of goodwill or affection? I sat beside her mentally retarded daughter for a decade without a single complaint, well, only a complaint inside, which God has dutifully marked down and I have been found wanting, not wanting saliva dripped on my hand, not wanting to see her go into her house, not wanting to hear her wails up close and personal and not wanting to take responsibility for something that was clearly not my responsibility. Mrs. Shelton was in my opinion a representative of the religion I was getting confirmed in, and a very bad representation at that. She made me think being a Christian would be a contemptible thing. But why didn't I see that Reverend Shelton was much kinder. And why didn't I cut Mrs. Shelton any slack for the fact that she had Shirley, which must have made her question God's intentions toward her. No wonder she acted always as though she faced a hostile God.

"Yes, tonight"

"Well, you can sit with Shirley all through the worship today. You won't go off to Sunday School now that you'll be confirmed." Oh boy, I thought. Joy, rapture. I didn't have to leave and miss the sermon. Little did they know that I never wanted to hear another sermon. I planned to graduate from Sunday school and church in one fell swoop.

Mrs. Shelton left us like a dark menace. She never failed to make unpleasant remarks about the things that mattered most to people.

"And you don't have to come to church anymore at all, if you don't want to," said Mother, rather bitterly, knowing, I guess, what my decision was going to be. She waited to say this quietly after Mrs. Shelton departed.

"Well, I don't think I will, not for a bunch of weeks at least." I said this nicely enough, but crisply. Of course my plan was for this couple of weeks to last my entire life.

"Suit yourself, but I wish you'd come down off your high horse."

I didn't want to remain near Mother after church as she went again to see Molly C., but the dark, open church door worried me more than the distaste I felt visiting the church office. When we approached the Dutch door I could see that the denizen of the church office sat on a chair, more crippled than a decade earlier, more roly-poly, dressed in an old fashioned wool houndstooth suit, clip-on earrings, but the same lady with the same Midwest attitude. She had the same bowl of offerings which she was methodically snapping open and dumping. "Well, hi Juney," she said. "Is this your youngest girl?"

"Yes, it is. She has a little acne... She'll be confirmed tonight."

"Well, isn't that nice. I suppose we'll be seeing you in church every week from now on."

I'm ashamed to say I thought to myself, "The old fool thinks I'll be in church, but she'll be wrong about that." Smug was the way I'd describe my feelings inside. I didn't feel the least sad about what I thought. I didn't regret fooling Molly, nor feel nostalgia for all the times, the Sunday mornings, when I saw her in the little safe church office counting the offerings. I only felt aggressively angry that she had presumed that I would be at church, but what else could she have expected since I was allowing myself to be confirmed. Wouldn't it have been more honest to have fought harder against confirmation if I really hadn't wanted it? I didn't even have the moral strength to stand up for my ideals. I never argued my points. I simply let myself be run over by Mother and then internally laughed at the church lady who thought my confirmation was genuine.

I smiled blankly and didn't answer her. I felt Mother bristle next to me. Did she expect me to lie?

"And how are the folks?" Molly asked kindly. She was still breaking open the offering envelopes and piling up the bills. Coins clinked into the bowl and she reached for a new envelope every few seconds. Her hands were shakier than I had remembered and her skin more pale. She wrote notes in a ledger book about the offerings.

"I hate to say it but they are pleased as punch that Nixon was reelected. Not my older brother, he's the Democratic chairman of the town. And my mother was an adamant supporter of Kennedy."

"Oh, I think you told me that once. Well, well."

"Oh, it'll all come out in the wash."

I noticed again with chagrin and horror that Mother said "worsh" instead of "wash." I hated her nasal Midwest accent. Molly had a similar one. It was agony to have to stand there and listen to them mispronounce words.

"We visited in the summer. The kids all went to see that new Romeo and Juliet movie at a drive-in in Markle," Mother said.

"Isn't that nice. All the cousins together?"

"Even this one went. She wanted to. I think the boys only wanted to see the girl naked. But I support Shakespeare."

"And well you should, Juney, didn't you practically read them all you told me? Well, isn't that interesting. In central Indiana. How did you like it back there?" She spoke to me. I think it was the first and last time she ever said anything to me, though I had seen her all those times, though she had seen me taking care of Shirley and never said thank you at all. But why did I want a thank you from her now that I was leaving the church with its prim ladies, gobble necks and Mexican straw purses?

"It was great. I know a lot about Indiana now."

"She doesn't," said Mother snappily. "She wasn't friendly enough to her Indiana cousins. She thought she was too good for everything there. Superior. They know how to be friendly to others," she said this as though I pointedly didn't know how to be friendly. I should have been hurt, but I didn't let it get to me. I didn't want her to get a victory out of the situation. I was too happy to know that I would be confirmed and then never have to go to church again.

"Hey, man, did you shave your eyebrows off?" the sarcastic girl from confirmation class asked with a wise-ass expression on her face. We stood in the middle of the Bermuda Lawn and Shirley stood nearby. Sun at nearly noon, slight sweat on our brows, a dry wind stirring the chaff of dead Bermuda as the green grass was just coming in then. Blue sky disappearing with storm clouds coming, gray piling on the Rincon Mountains, the Catalina's black and even spring lightning strikes. The wind became more cutting to me and I could feel it lifting my skirt. The girl said this with a cruel smirk. She was staring at my eyebrows and laughing. I had plucked them too much, made them too thin. I hadn't realized how comical it looked. How absurd my face had become. I resembled a clown with skinny eyebrows.

A clown. That made me think of something funny from my childhood. A babysitter had once told us a crazy story about a clown in a stagecoach. Sure.

"No, of course not! Why do you ask that?" I answered defensively crossing my arms over my chest. She was the kind of girl who didn't have any breasts and made comments about your nipples showing and crap like that.

"Well, because it looks like it. It really does. Look at yourself."

"Well, I didn't shave them."

"Well, it looks like you did. Really."

"It does, doesn't it?" asked this cruel tormentor of the other girls.

Everyone agreed it did.

Here I was at church getting attacked about my eyebrows. The girls at school had said the same thing. Why did the kids at church have to be as nasty as the ones at school? Shouldn't religion have changed them? I guess that was too much to ask.

And Shirley? What about my long time "friend" at the church? My oldest companion, my weight, my burden, what did she actually think? Did she think anything about my ghastly missing eyebrows? The mistakes I was making couldn't have an impact on her, or could they? Could I sense disapproval in the way she gawked at me at times? Did she think I was too homely now, when I had been cute as a kid? But then she was always remote, though in my teenage state I was sure she was a little more remote than usual. Her little companion was getting big, growing up. It was time to relinquish my duties to her; I had outgrown my usefulness and I sensed forces in the wings ready to remove me if I didn't surrender.

Well, I was going anyway. I didn't want to stick around church forever and Shirley was just collateral damage. Not that she knew a thing about me.

The world? The real world, I mean. It's as dumb as Shirley. As unsentimental. As unfeeling. Full of blankness. Unresponsive to the agonies of anyone, Mrs. Shelton or me. Only the act of creativity breaks through the mute exterior of the cold, cold real world.

Did she think anything at all about anything? Did she ever peer around herself and wonder where I'd gone after that day and for all the years since? Did she ever ask about me? If so, I never thought of her then, or cared about her. My only thought was of the relief I had of never having to touch her saliva and listen to her atrocious wails throughout the sermon her father gave. I dismissed my companion for years so easily. I never thought of her again, until now, a few months ago. I'll admit there were strange pangs that day, but they were gone quickly. I'll never know if she missed me. I can't take the feeling sometimes of suffering I feel for her. What did I ever mean to her? Anything at all? Did my being with her achieve anything?

I had sat beside Shirley in church service (through the whole service for the last day in church) and stood beside her on the church Bermuda lawn, where the church would gather no more after services—the new church was done and the original church now was the annex and there stood the old annex of the house. That was why the yawning door scared me; it served as a door to the past, my past with Shirley that was now about to end. We were to have no more services in the original, plain church, but all activities would move to a new church. Our confirmation was the first to have the ceremony in the new building and that Sunday was the last service in the original building. That was the last time Molly would sit in that room breaking open the offerings and the last time in the old church, the concrete floor, tattered carpet, tan metal folding chairs, gone forever, a church service of my past, an impoverished memory, the barren cross only remained. The kitchen full of long dead elders laughing in a sunlight that left, on cold winter mornings in the early 1960s, time gone, those people I envied so because they didn't listen to sermons any more, had listened to their last sermon ten years prior and would never hear another on this blessed earth again. Or were they listening to one endless one somewhere else?

Now I wouldn't listen to sermons. I wouldn't listen to a sermon again in my whole damn life.

But a life without Shirley. As much as I looked forward to it, there was a gaping hole there which nothing would ever fill, although she was as much a nothing as a person could ever be.

Storm clouds gathered over the blue saddles in the mountains. I was impatient to get it over. Desperate to end my time at church, end it forever for me. This time with church I had endured for so long, this time with Shirley was so long in my memory I could barely see myself with patent leather shoes, anklets, a tiny purse and a short brittle fake velvet jacket and Shirley, Shirley at my side.

Was Shirley ever aware that I wasn't there when suddenly I left? The next week perhaps, was she a little unsettled and unhappy? A little whiney? Or did she howl and howl as only she was capable of and which I was there to stop her from doing. I hope she wailed for my sake. I hope she drown out her father's word. Though we had no friendship, really, but I want to think that she missed me.

Was she a treasure I had to collect?

Did they find another quiet little girl, oh so good and docile, uncomplaining and cheerful, to start the process over and last for another a decade? Was there anyone as docile as me? Did she think I and the other girl were one and the same? Did she know me to be a person? A person separate from her? Or was I? Had I long since absorbed her into me and become the weird mumbling muttering misfit that she embodied? Yes, I probably had, with my eyebrows over-plucked, my inadequate defenses, and fumbled opportunities to illustrate my coolness. I don't think she ever used my name, but her speech was so garbled...God...so difficult to hear maybe she had been saying my name all those years. Goddamn, what a thing to think of now. I never grieved at the time. Now I think of these terrible things with no way back.

CHAPTER EIGHT

"Oh it was so far out. So groovy. Man, I'm so glad I went today and so glad I got to be part of it," Meredith began. "I protested the war. We've got to stop it if we can. Protests can probably work. Everybody says that. Man, things are really exciting. We can make a difference. You know Jack is going to have to register for the draft next year and that's really pretty soon. It's going to be real for him."

"I'm going to write Senator Goldwater on Mom's typewriter," I bragged.

"Yeah, that's a good idea, write a letter to him, but I don't think that's going to do much. He's a hawk. We have to get out on the streets and make noise. We've got a personal reason to think about what is happening and do something about it, because it's Jack they're going to take. Too many young men like Jack are being drafted and killed. What's happening in Vietnam is shocking, not cool. We are abusing the people there just to benefit the Military Industrial Complex, man, it's not justified what we're doing. We have to be the voice of reason because the older people can't see the truth and they aren't paying the price for what is happening in Southeast Asia. Just because we know people going to college and they get deferments from the draft isn't really right because lots don't, even here in town. People I knew in high school who are older and they've already gone there and been killed or wounded. The protest was incredible. Bunches of people coming from all over. We were all together on it and we felt like we were really doing something to help the country. What a good time. When I got there a big group was already forming in the street. People had guitars and drums and the guitars were leading everyone in songs. We got a bigger group every minute, practically. There was plenty of weed, too, but we didn't make that too obvious because we didn't want to get arrested for pot when the main idea was to stop the damn war in Vietnam. We really discussed what the war meant and why we had to get out, out now, not five or ten years from now. Peace with honor; it isn't happening. Nixon is such a creep. People had really groovy ideas about how to get change rolling. Everybody is thinking of ideas for protests that might work, so you could think of some too. We've got to get through to the newspapers and radio and TV. Somebody gave us the actual numbers of dead and wounded from the war so far which was mind-blowing, man. McNamara is lying about this war, about what is happening to people and to war armaments; it's the arms industry that has the power; he is increasing the number of dead. I have a feeling that the arms industry is behind this whole thing and that isn't groovy. We have to fight the war machine that is built in this country. This machine is making sausage of young men, just grinding them up and spitting them out as cripples. They did that in World War One, made thousands of cripples and blinded people with gas. Now were the ones. We're dropping bombs that make the leaves fall off the trees so we can see the enemy. The Vietcong are going to win because the South Vietnamese don't even care about us being there. They want us out. They're killing this generation. Nobody in power has the right to kill a generation of the young. They think they died in World War II so we have to die too, but that kind of thinking is what needs to die. That's when we decided the numbers were big enough that we could block Park Avenue. We made that decision together and it felt great. We started walking slowly and the police formed a barricade. We really protested and blocked the whole intersection. Damn, the damn fuzz. The fuzz were everywhere down there. Their faces were so cold and angry. I didn't know they had hundreds of policemen to spare on one little protest, you know? They had out their batons but no one used them on us, thank goodness for that. There were guys with no legs and stuff with us. I didn't want them beaten up. It wasn't about me. They could beat me up; I didn't care. We shouting a lot but no one threw bottles or anything. We were peaceful and the whole thing was great. One guy burned his draft card and the fuzz rushed him like he had murdered someone. Nobody got into the protest who would bring it down to be violent. We can't fight violence of the war with violence. No bad souls. We were pure and everybody thought good thoughts about it all. Then the city brought in the police helicopter and buzzed us several times but we didn't back down. The war is going to be ended by people who won't back down no matter what. We're going to keep going. We can end this war. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon. Casualties like we're having aren't acceptable any more in a modern war. We just kept marching around and it was great. We were shouting "One, two, three, four, what do we want? No more war?" Everybody was together on it and it was so groovy. We just knew we all had to be arrested. That was the next thing that happened. I got arrested. I was held for a few hours and was released on my own recognizance. They arrested three hundred people. We went off in a bus."

"By cracky," Mother began, "you are just giving your father ammunition to go on with his idea of disowning you. And he visited with Harry Han who was his old schoolmate and is a lawyer now. He started the paperwork to disown you and he talked about getting you committed. Now you've been arrested? Well, I never. You've no more sense than a goose about what you're doing. All this protesting. What does it amount to in the end? Now you have an arrest record that will follow you around for the rest of your life. What do you say about that?"

"It's fine with me. All I ever wanted was to be an artist. Being arrested might be good for an artist."

"Good luck with that. A nurse is a better profession for a young woman. You don't want to be hanging around with nude models and people like that. Hangers on to artists. They're a bad lot, the whole bunch of them."

"Maybe so. Maybe so."

Meredith met me in our bedroom. I perused my record albums, studying their covers and planning a new beginning to another novel.

"Actually that protest was kinda strange. I think I'm done with Lance forever."

"Really?"

"All he wanted during the whole demonstration was to cop a feel. He was all happy that I wasn't wearing a bra because he could cop a feel. He didn't care about the significance of not wearing a bra. He didn't care about my freedom. He didn't care at all about me. He only cared about copping a feel, apparently."

"What? Are you kidding me?"

"No, I'm not. I just thought of it myself. While it was happening I wasn't processing it, but now I really am. I horrifies me that he was so insensitive. I mean there were a few really injured vets there, armless, legless, among us and it really felt creepy to have him fingering my boobs every few seconds. And he was giggling like he was crazy. We were there for a protest and he keeps copping a feel all over the place. What the hell? Is that all he wants to do besides going to war? He doesn't want to go to Vietnam so he can be here and cop a feel? I guess that's really all there is to it. I've had it with him. It's over. You know it's over with things like that. It's a feeling that comes over you when you're getting groped. He's feeling and you're feeling, too, you know. Copping a feel."

"He could do that in Vietnam." I pointed that out logically speaking.

"Sure." Meredith agreed.

"But he might die," I added.

"Yeah. That's the part he doesn't like," Meredith explained.

"I was arrested by Officer Commie. Really. The arresting officer was Officer Commie. I'm not making that up."

"What!"

"Officer Commie."

"Gee!"

"I couldn't make that up."

"No, you couldn't. No one would believe that."

Once I knew something about clouds, something so profound you would have paid quite a bit to know it. And it was something important that I really didn't want to forget. Something significant that had taken quite a bit of time and effort to discover. It had to do with a hook for a really good story that I lost track of in the morass of vaguely moribund memories.

So I remembered it had to do with cows and those cows were really great in that story. They were precious cows. Well, maybe it was an onyx cow or a skeleton cow I'd seen in Nogales on that rainy day when I almost went down the sewer. Sure, that was an interesting memory, and it could have inspired me to write about cows and clouds, because it rained so hard down there that day.

And, of course, a man attacked me once while I was studying the clouds vaguely not even remembering, searching in that blank way you have to be when writing is going to come to you, but doesn't. I was a little fool, and should have known better than to write at night when parked near an arroyo and I was alone with a window rolled down so I could loll my head partway out and be seen, God only knows, by the who who was really scary. Just when writing gets really good and you're totally into developing the story, you will find someone scary watching you or in that case actually come after you and you will be in the battle of your life.

He's a character of my story I really don't ever want to write, that man in the balaclava. He came in on his own and had his part. He didn't ask for permission to scare me half to death. I wasn't able to edit him out completely, only partially, before he had taken his place, before he inserted himself. I suppose his attack is a story that may have the germ of a good story in it, that may be a treasure of the desert, but I know for my own sanity that I must edit him out forever as much as possible. I don't want to tell his side of that story. It's way too real.

And at the same time that I was busy forgetting getting attacked I was also teaching myself the art of stenographic shorthand. I studied a smudged and dog-eared secretary's course book I borrowed from the library. Made the squiggles individually, linked them in a long squiggle, even worked to give my squiggles individual character. Filling the Big Chief notepad and smaller pads that fit in my pockets with my practice shorthand, line after line, and enjoying the effect of these strange squiggles on the paper and the mysterious part it place in my future, I imagined, when this great squiggled novel would arise like the mighty entity it was, to walk astraddle the continent, and maybe other continents where it would not be forgotten.

One day I practiced my shorthand by taking down an interesting conversation between my parents. It was about a new suit my mother had purchased for my father.

"All the architects wear them," she began. Our father had been protesting the new suit she had made him purchase. They were in their bedroom and I lurked in the hall with a pad and pencil.

"I know it's fashionable because those architects are always so gall-darn stylish. My goodness, they wear the nicest turtleneck sweaters, pure angora and nylon, and the most expensive slacks, almost hand-tailored. So I bought you the same Nehru collar suit. A leisure suit, they call it. It's the latest thing and you're gonna wear it, by cracky. That's what they're all wearing in New York City. If you're gonna go back there and to Minneapolis and Chicago, you're gonna wear what they wear and that's all there is to it. This is what's new! Architects always keep ahead of trends, not like you stick-in-the-mud engineers, by cracky."

"Architects are boobs."

"I wish you wouldn't say that word. You work with them. It's no use calling names in order to make yourself feel better."

"Nothing in this world makes me feel better."

"Oh, for heaven's sake. Sad Sack has come to live with us."

"That Bernie designed a high rise with seven stories of south facing windows. For Arizona. There isn't an air conditioning unit big enough to carry the load. And if there was, this cheapskate we're working for would never pay for it. I keep telling Bernie that and he doesn't listen. All he thinks about is aesthetics. Wait till the client complains that everyone is sweating non-stop. He won't even consider window treatments to cut heat transfer."

"What's going on?" I asked, tucking my pad and pencil in my back pocket quickly as they began to emerge from their room.

"Your father needs a leisure suit. He doesn't like the one I picked. This plaid is a little too bright, but I think the colors suit him."

"I am dressed like a cretin who vomited on himself," Father said sadly.

Later that day I started the ratty beginning of a novel about a young man who was associated with a banana ripening plant. I heard about the whole set-up from Dad in one of his lengthy engineering stories, probably a reaction to his frustration with Bernie, the architect, and he sat at his drafting table and went blundering about telling me unsystematically about the ripening chamber plans and the layout, the technical problems with materials of the pipes, the various temperature difficulties of this actual banana plant's equipment. "In went the bananas. Laid out on tables like they were going to be operated on. And the gas came in later, kid. It was an interesting set up they had there to deal with the gas from a catalytic generator and the venting. Ethylene gas is difficult at times to deal with and they had installed the pipes in a series, very interesting to see it. I went there in order to see what was going on. I was called in as a consulting engineer. What? Not insulting engineer, kid, but that is funny, consulting, consulting, kid. A great deal of gas needed to be stored in ideal conditions and it was a tough engineering feat, kid, and it's not easy to keep it going. And the dead tarantulas were on the floors. What? Where did the tarantulas come in? They came out of the banana bunches, you crazy kid. Aren't you even listening? Can't imagine it, can you? The gas was to ripen them quickly and then the bananas were shipped on to the east. We had this plant here. A sizable operation. Killed the tarantulas, too. They were on the floor, legs in the air." He showed me a flipped over hand with stiff fingers.

Along with this there came the image of the aftermath of the pumping of a gas into the chamber full of bananas and the image of dead tarantulas littering the floor which frankly I stole from the memory of my father to deliver to you. All the dead tarantulas scattered about under the bananas resembled my precious shorthand. And were lifeless the way my writing was. Nothing happened in this novel. Nothing at all happened. What was the point of the lifeless prose? So there was supposed to be a deeply dissatisfied youth, the child of the owner of the banana ripening plant and his unhappiness was going to be so poignant, but I couldn't get to it. What was it he didn't like about his life? What was the source of his disinterest? Was it that his father made his living off bananas? Would that make a good living or a good novel? Was it a sensible statement at all? Did it even relate to life in the United States given that the product was not at all from the United States? I realized bananas did not represent America very well. Bananas might be a suitable image for a novel from a Central American country, yes, the proverbial banana republic. Damn, it wasn't good for any kind of serious novel and I so wanted my novel to be serious, above all things serious. Seriously serious. Who would write a goofy Great American Novel? It would be a disaster.

"Couched against a guava crate." That was the sentence describing the opening image of this deeply dissatisfied youth couching against a guava crate at the banana ripening plant. This plant was providing much of the nation with bananas. Why was a guava crate there? But where was the dignity or great symbolism that a great work of fiction would need? I couldn't see it in this. How could people get worked up, emotional and profoundly stirred, by an image of a banana ripening plant? How would my character get so deeply dissatisfied? Even if it provided a lot of the nation with bananas, wasn't that comical rather than tragic?

I fell into a despair that mimicked the despair I tried to create in my character, the heir of the banana ripening plant.

Why did the one product I had actually learned about have to be silly? No one could get too worked up about bananas and their ripening. Other authors had serious things to get worked up about. Death of a salesman. Ruined plantations. Folksy general stores. Why did I have to learn nonsense? Authors had war and peace, adultery, and murder. I had bananas—ripening.

"I want to write a novel about the desert," I explained late that summer when Meredith was at home and was about to graduate and leave for Boston. "I want to write about this place."

"Well, don't get all xenophobic and stuff. I really hate that square junk."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, focusing on the stuff here is what I mean and ignoring big issues. The really important places are back east. Take New York, or Boston. Those places are where more people live. You don't want to write anything hokey and little about the dumb cow towns of the west, do you? Talk about trivial. It's just not going to be important enough. If you want to write anything important, it has to be about the important parts of America."

"You mean nobody important and famous lives here? So stuff about it is hokey?"

"Exactly. I hate it when Dad thinks this place is important. When he makes a big deal out of this place. He has a hang-up about it. It isn't an important place, not at all," Meredith said with a snort. "There's lots of places. This is just one place. But it's not an important place. The history is obscure and stupid. It doesn't fit in with America. Mexican stuff fits in with Mexico. And Mom's right. The gunfight stuff is dumb. Real dumb. There isn't anything else worth writing about. Unless you mean Indian stuff, but that's tasteless too. You're not an Indian."

"Yeah, I wouldn't write Indian stuff ever."

"Please don't. Let them write their own stuff. Desert stuff just baffles people. They don't even care about this place, and that's okay because it isn't anything great."

"Sure. I guess you're right. I'm going to write stuff anyways. About Arizona."

"The word is 'anyway' not 'anyways.' Maybe I'll get around to reading it. I won't guarantee it. I don't think you'll be very good at writing, frankly. You don't write very smoothly and you haven't read half as many books as I have. The ones you read you don't really understand or you've misunderstood their real meaning. You mispronounce everything, too. You can't pronounce half the words you say. Frankly, you missed your calling, you know. Art was your calling, but you missed it. You've got talent in art, but not any in writing. I'm telling you the truth for your own sake, you know. There's no use in lying or pretending. You had another calling and your talent lies elsewhere."

"I like pretending. There is a use in it. I think. And I'm going to do writing anyway because it makes me pretty happy. Happy-ish. Sometimes it's frustrating and really hard. I know that now. I think it's kinda like a big, hard puzzle."

"If you were good at writing, believe me, it wouldn't be hard. It wouldn't be a puzzle. Everything would be easy. See if you were a genius you would never think it was hard."

"No, I don't think you're right. I think hard work is always hard. Writers have to work really hard. It isn't going to be easy to write anything good."

"If you were good at something it would be easy to do. See talent isn't really work. It's different. Hey, I have a funny incident you could write. There was this janitor on an elevator at the university and he said to me, 'Do you know about scene?' I answered 'what?' He repeated his question again and again getting all frustrated and then I realized he was actually asking 'Do you know about sin?' He was pronouncing the word 'sin' like 'scene.' You could probably write about that."

"Because I mispronounce words."

"Yeah."

"Oh, that's pretty funny. Mashers are pretty funny guys to write about."

"Well, anyway, suit yourself about taking up the quill, just don't expect a good result. You really missed your calling."

"Okay."

"When I'm back East I'll be living in the center of the art world. It's also the center of the writing world. Where all the publishers and editor and the readers are? Nobody out here reads much of anything that really matters. They just read junk. Like Harold Bell Wright and shit. Goofy books and hokum. You should move to the east coast. You'll never write anything successful about this place. Not really successful. It's doomed to be hokey and a failure. Big fish, little pond. Little fish, big pond."

"I wish you had told me you were moving. When are you going?"

"December. Right after I graduate. I'm staying with that lady from the Anthropology Department. Right after I graduate."

"Won't you be back at Christmas?"

"Well, maybe. But I don't see how I will, actually. I guess Mom and Dad will send me the price of the ticket and maybe I will. Don't get your hopes up."

CHAPTER NINE

"I'm learning so much about smelting," says the ancient man who cheerfully tip-tapped down the stairs in front of me, like a sailor on the shiny deck of a doomed ocean liner, and I wonder if he is the same doleful fellow who moaned to me earlier about his inability to ask for help from the librarians and was that all an act for my benefit or for his? "Am I interrupting your thoughts?" he asked.

"What?" I said, coming to suddenly and discovering that he might have been seeing me writing in my head. I had been remembering the babysitter who scrubbed floors at the Historical Society who Mother took pity on, though I couldn't remember what she looked like and only remembered her image reflected in the kitchen window when she opened the oven. Mother employed her as our babysitter and I remembered how she once wanted to hear "any of our rock and roll records," which we didn't own, and her disappointment with us had caused her to scare us with a stagey story about a stagecoach with a maniac clown inside it.

"You seem to be composing something. I wonder if I'm bothering you." The ancient asked this with a solicitous voice and a tilt to his head. He still went down the marble steps ahead of me, but glanced back.

"Well, no. But yes, I am composing something. That's nice that you're learning about smelting," I say, hoping vaguely to shut him off, not because I don't care but only because I'm too busy at this moment thinking of what I want to be doing in a future moment on a future piece of paper.

"Furnaces of molten life force," he says, waiting at the landing for me to catch up and peering down a hall toward a bright yellow window and the red eye of the sun streaming around the shaggy fronds of a palm and over a carpet in a librarian's lovely, cool lair. The librarian, seeing us peeking in at his oasis, slides across the rug in the wheeled luxury of his desk chair, stretching the phone cord, and slams the door closed.

"What?"

"Smelting. Burning through to beauty. The beauty of the earth, finally revealed."

"I want to reveal that, the beauty of the earth, stuff like that, by writing a novel about my life in the desert, like you said," I say, floundering in the act of revealing to a perfectly strange old man the deepest aspirations of my life in such a casual fashion in a hall, passing open doors and other patrons, passing homeward and filled with deepest despair at the failure of my great projects, the failure to capture beauty for anything more than a temporary, desperate moment. We take the worn marble steps slowly together; how can any library be more pathetic than this dirty, shabby Arizona place?

"Then you'll like furnaces," he says, reminding me of my cheerful self when I told him he could research in the library.

"I think I've been living in one here all my life."

"Hah! Good joke. Sure, we do. Live in one." His eyes are gleeful, burning bright and happy. Perhaps he is melted by the sun, perhaps he is one of those guys who have simply had too many of the photons from the sun pounding on the eggshell of his delicate head.

"I don't know where to begin," says the same old man who walked out with me yesterday, not speaking to me directly, but gazing at a waving strand of ivy wending its way toward the screen of the open window behind me; he speaks his words quickly and his voice makes a happy gravelly sound; he twiddles his thick fingers together in front of him, not exactly as though he is nervous, but conveying excited bewilderment; the wrinkles around his knuckles are like the dried slices that I have seen across the surface of certain Arizona salt playas.

"They'll help you," I say cheerfully. A flap of my hand in the direction of the counter indicates that I mean the librarians, a blue-eyed staring gentleman and a tall Mexican lady with hair so tightly bound in a bun that her penciled eyebrows are dragged upward.

"Is there any book up here which you know about which is about Tucson rattlesnakes?" I ask shrugging, grunting in the general direction of the woman at the desk when I believe the male librarian is comfortably trapped with a patron far across the room.

She takes a long, thoughtful breath and taps her pencil twice. "You need to know about local rattlesnakes? Not just a general description of rattlesnakes?"

"I'll help her," says the goggle-eyed librarian, coming up from nowhere and crisply taking over. "You help this gentleman."

I wonder if either of them see the sinking horror on my face.

"All right," says the woman librarian, casually switching patrons.

"Oh, it's all right," I suddenly exclaim, "Never mind. I won't need it after all. On second thought. It was just a whim."

"Oh, I don't know," moans the elderly gentleman, letting his voice trail off mournfully, and his watery brown eyes rove around the gray steel shelves as though they are looking for a place between the battered and blasted manuscripts where he might insert himself and hide.

"What's wrong?" I ask, thinking 'please, please, let me get back to my writing and why do I always get these needy strange people interrupting my writing when I'm at my most crucial moments.' He was about as welcomed as a sidewinder in the split pea soup.

"They seem too busy to help an old Dumbo like me. I didn't go to college." As he tells me this, his shoulders rise comically and his long white hair bends at the break of his vest in a ridiculous kind of Dutch-girl flip. The way Meredith rolled her hair on orange juice cans, when they didn't sell rollers that big.

"That doesn't matter, if you need help," I say encouragingly.

He seems dubious.

"They're here to help. That's their job. Try the lady, though, she's nicer. Go on." I urge him in a coaxing voice that I would much rather use on myself to tell myself to go on with my story.

"Okay."

He turns his body sideways in the chair, sending invisible puffs of moth ball scent in my direction, but doesn't attempt to rise for a few moments. He talks to himself during that time.

"I'll take anything you've got on smelting and the ghost town of Jericho, Arizona," declares the old coot, too loudly, to the woman librarian at the counter when he gets there. The head of a middle aged woman at my table turns up to smile at the long-haired gentleman who almost crows the word Jericho. She grins to herself. Is it the shrill way he called out 'Jericho', or is she seeing in him something or someone? She taps her pencil twice on the table, looks up at him again with misty sadness, seeing in his stance perhaps a baby she once had or a grandfather or father passing again before her eyes, and I wonder if she secretly eavesdropped when I bucked up the old man.

"Mining," says the librarian in a whisper. She drifts toward a shelf. "And I believe Jericho was a small mining community in the Perillico Mountains. If I'm thinking right."

"More than likely. I'm going to stick my nose into my grandfather's business. What do you think of me?" He follows her, walking on the outside balls of his feet.

She evades his unusual question. "He was a miner then?" she asks, retreating to the past rather than comment on the old man in front of her.

"Family gossip...that says something of the sort. But now I don't. I ought to believe. Various people."

My mistake came from sitting for days in a spot too close to the reference counter, but by the time I knew my mistake it was too late; if I had moved my seat, I might have changed what happened with the librarian, but I risked offending the dear old billy goat who would have thought I fled the scent of moth balls on him and the sweat which stinks up his suit. No matter that it would please me to move, no matter that it might eventually be a matter of life or death, I can't face the idea of giving anyone offense. Though I'd never met this stinky old man before and would never see him again, I couldn't possibly imagine hurting him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like a victim searching a mug book for a criminal's face, I flip the brittle pages in front of me carefully between my two favorite entries; Centruroide, Hadrurus; Hadrurus, Centruroide. But death for a baby, I assure you, assumes far too many shapes in the desert; other scorpion varieties, the description of which cram the worn pages with fine print, attract my attention and soon I'm considering half a dozen other possible antagonists, the loving way they carry their teeny babies on their back, their interesting eating habits.

The churning grind of the library clock gears draws the small hand slowly to four, and suddenly a memory of a certain rainy July afternoon takes me away from my book. I can hear Mother claiming–was she simply being capricious as she swiped our kitchen counter with a soapy dish cloth?—that the beast under my toes that day was not a scorpion after all, but a centipede!

I return to the librarian, lining up politely in front of his great goggling blue eyes and asking him–may God forgive my stupidity—for help. Like an absolute fool, I wonder if that lonely librarian, risking you will ultimately know what reaction, can find any rare books about scorpions. A sort of knowing triumph, a grand goad to his obsessive nature, shows in his great goggling eyes when he tells me to return to my seat and then, minutes later, manifests over my shoulder with a sweeping motion the enormous black, deteriorating folio "Scorpions and Their Habits: Species of the Western Americas." I go to work reading about the squiggling, circuitous path legs and stinger and antennae and imagine one of them, years earlier, hunting and hugging the ground, too busy to have noticed my foot.

Perhaps a request of the librarian will produce another book that tells me that the city of Tucson has twelve different varieties of rattlesnakes, spread about the different mountain ranges and each preferring certain arroyos and slopes. All of them are living in separate sections of the city, in districts well known to the professional herpetologist like the adrossiments of Paris, but when I get up to move I discover to my amazement that the tables in the small rare books room have emptied, of people, and of their barriers of books, except for myself and the white-haired nut who is lingering and laughing over a volume; I see the title which is "Mineral Wealth of Old Arizona" and with the ivy vines drifting through the open windows of the second floor sway in the breeze making toward the book with long fingers as though the ivy wanted to read and then in perspective I could see that the ivy made a gauzy film over the glimmering palm trees. A female librarian sets and straightens the sign "closed" on the counter and starts from the far corner of the room banging down window frames. The smelting man packs his papers into his briefcase, dons his suit jacket, picks up his helmet and saunters over to slip the smelting book on the library counter. Before I can zip my pen into its rubbery pencil case and gather my things, the male librarian glides between the tables, and slips his bottom onto the table close beside me.

I chose the LSD episode with Mr. Wayne for my beginning. I picked it, from all possible beginnings, because it enticed me by providing the writer's fondest desire, the elusive hook, which is necessary to attract people wanting to know why they ought to read what you write. If you don't have a hook, what you write might as well be jotted down in invisible ink.

It was my sister's boyfriend at the time—I was thirteen in 1970 when we tried to give Mr. Wayne LSD—who planned to dose the famous cowboy star with Timothy Leary's favorite stimulant. But calling what we did a plan is probably giving us too much credit. That dark desert night we lurched around from bar to bar following rumors. When the location of Mr. Wayne proved to be elusive, Meredith's boyfriend urged us to go on searching for hours because, in his tripped-out state, he knew if we could get Mr. Wayne high on acid we could stop the Vietnam War. We carried with us that night two things: the acid and a little white rat in a fishbowl. When I thought of it, remembered it and recognized its significance eight years later, age twenty-one, I salivated. I tell you real spit came into my mouth at the chance to tell that story. That's a sure sign to a storyteller of a rich prospect.

I had settled on this, decided most certainly on the LSD incident, and jotted notes from my memory and seeing how I might tell of the terror and the humor of it, when one of the special collections librarians eased his bottom, imprisoned in tight corduroy bellbottoms, onto the edge of the table beside me and began speaking.

"I'm married actually," he confided in a whisper, "and my name is Rex Almshouse."

Here it came, I said to myself, another goddamn masher right as I had an idea for the beginning of my novel! I was a homely woman, but that didn't matter to mashers.

Oh, perfect timing, universe. It was inevitable, though unique—I had never had a librarian bother me before.

Every time I got a good idea for a novel, a masher showed up. Why was it I could never work on a novel in public without a frightening encounter with a man? And this guy was about as lovable as a teddy bear cholla.

"I wondered what you would think about that. Well, I have to be honest; I worried about it," this man named Rex blurted. I glanced up from my paper where my pen had jotted the barest details of the Wayne exploit, and I have to admit I glanced up with an expression of horror and confusion as the married librarian gazed into my eyes and continued, out of the blue, with intent blue eyes, telling me more than I ever wanted to know about himself.

"Belinda and I married ten years ago in one of those desert canyons that used to be full of nudists down near the border with Mexico." He grimaced horribly, but who knew what that meant! Was it a hatred for Mexico? Or the awful image of himself nude now that made him grimace, and if so, on this we might be in agreement? "The wedding took place in a meadow full of wildflowers and she had other men that wished to marry her, believe me, she was the loveliest girl in the camp, by far the prettiest, but I was the most sympathetic to her need to stay on a strictly macrobiotic diet, which, by the way, would go a long way toward curing your acne and your greasy hair, but now my wife doesn't understand me," he complained, whispering at me in a sing-song voice, his head bobbing to an internal rhythm. "Then sometimes she understands me perfectly well," he added with a creepy little shrug, "but she still doesn't like me."

A pyramid of pencil lead dirtied the corner of the pocket of his cowboy shirt, and those eyes of his, which were so blue, grew impossibly large when he closed in on me. Cradling his own freckly elbows with his hands and rocking, he betrayed his excitement, which was a sickening sight to me, and his tongue busied itself moistening his cracked lips. He leaned his head over me, and his voice came out of lips buried in a tangle of brown beard. It was a voice full of constrained pleasure at the way I squirmed during his speech, which he hid from the other librarian, a stiff lady dressed in a sailor mini-dress, navy and white. His voice hinted of the tinge of sadness, or nostalgia, he felt for the time, then thoroughly extinguished, that existed before he had begun to tell me the facts of his marital status, when he supposed, erroneously, that I had been attracted to him. By his very voice he revealed the great desire to speak to me which overcame the blue feeling it gave him to admit to his marriage, to his adulterous interest in me, and yet he exuded happiness when explaining his circumstances in quick, nervous strokes. "I wonder what you think about that fact, about my being married. I've been wondering what you would think. I wondered if you were the type to judge me harshly or have a schoolgirl idea about morality and fidelity and monogamy that would make you unavailable."

Gadzooks! This man's speech ranked as one of the funniest one's I'd heard in a long time; worth putting in any novel, however I sadly would have to actually get rid of him first. Who would be foolish enough to marry Rex Almshouse, and then I recalled that almost any man can marry even if his face resembles a close-up of a wood tick. Oh, but that was rude of me to think. Who was I to think Rex was beneath me? I wearied of being the type of petulant, lofty person who scorned the stories that came to them. Maybe I should thank my lucky stars for people like Rex Almshouse. Maybe I should give myself over to them and at least hear out their stories?

"I probably haven't thought about those things much, monogamy, or anything, but everything is groovy, about what you're saying. Seize the day and everything and it's all pretty groovy, actually. I'm just here for writing, that's all," I explained, trying to be upbeat and cheerful and a little spacey as I found this put intense, intellectual men off-balance and might, in this case, delay his reaction long enough for me to time my exit. I felt myself slowly turning a bright scarlet. Already I eyed the library door and figuring out what I would have to sweep together in order to flee. "I got so involved in the process of remembering exactly some of the things that happened to me when I was a kid a few years ago, really funny stuff, ah, and bad stuff about a time that my older sister and my older brother and I tried to give John Wayne LSD, that I never even noticed you noticing me while I was writing. I guess you were. Noticing me, I mean. It's just that I never noticed you. Never noticed you back."

And while I conveyed that, I was thinking what an outrageous thing that was to confess to in a book, that is, when a really interesting character besides myself appears in my novel, and not counting John Wayne who isn't a character at all. What a telling thing, what an embarrassing thing, for the reader to know. Wasn't I, a would-be writer, supposed to notice everything and tell the reader, all about my surroundings and the characters near me? How could I be so incompetent that I would let him come bursting into my story when I hadn't noticed him in time before? Why should he even be in this thing when I had not expressly invited him? Wasn't that taking the plastic nature of art a bit too far for the artist to be held hostage and assailed by the subject, the unobserved subject? And what about the reader? Didn't they have rights in this matter, too? Should their reading be interrupted by just any old character who decided to worm his way in? By a masher, not an editor. Shouldn't I be able to tell the reader all about his ways instead of telling how horrifying he was? Shouldn't I be non-judgmental about his flaws and simply see them as interesting things that I could weave into an interesting story? If I edited him out before he had a chance to reach the paper wouldn't I be interfering with the creative process? If I paid attention to him and observed things about him I could use him in one of my stories. I fancied myself as a sort of modern Scheherazade with a thousand and one tales. Wouldn't one more about him be interesting? Yes, use him—that was the way a professional author had to use people who intruded into their writing.

But I felt honestly enthralled by his wife, the hippie woman in the wildflower-strewn canyon. Belinda, he called her. She promised to be a better character than the male masher. I knew an awfully lot of them, male mashers, that is. I abounded in them. I overflowed with them. I drown in them. I found it difficult to rid myself of all the male mashers who showed up wherever and whenever I started writing. Not that I was good looking or anything; witness the oily hair and pimples comment. Mashers just show up whenever a girl sits still, even if you're kind of ugly. I'd plopped on the lawn outside the main library once for ten minutes when a freaky mesmerizer had tried to recruit me into his cult of women.

I wondered if I could get information about Belinda out of him without irritating him; she sounded more interesting. He may have wrecked my new beginning, but I could still gain something beautiful from him.

"I'm sorry the library is closing," called the lady librarian then sweetly from across the room, thinking I gave her colleague a hard time about leaving. They were used to difficult people hanging around the libraries at closing time. Strange, stinky coots and such. My mother was a librarian and I knew all about that aspect of the library trade. This lady had categorized me into that group of abhorrent hangers-on. Her dark hair barely skimmed her shoulders and she had ratted it in the back and sprayed the outside with hairspray to form a mass of hair cupping the back of her head. She had intense green eyes and a thick charm bracelet on her left wrist. She liked being firm with people and using pale pink lipstick.

"We open tomorrow at nine," she added succinctly. "Why don't you come back then?"

"I will," I said loudly back to her. "I'm going now."

At least someone sane shared the room. Yes, I was going, all right. I started shoving my papers about that LSD incident into the back of my notebook and piling other notebooks into a stack. This was the last time I'd work in the Special Collections Room. Tomorrow I'd have to work in the Ag library with the Future Farmers of America surrounding me. I'd had experience with an Ag student in the stacks of the main library. This one particular Ag student happened to be another in the long series of mashers and he was the type who kept searching for me no matter where I sat. I'd moved all over the stacks to avoid him and finally I'd found the small, special collections room in the western wing. Hope he wasn't in the Ag library since he was an Ag student. Boy, what luck, another masher just when things were getting good for me. Would the Ag library have a buzzing telephone and murky light? Or chilly air conditioning? I knew there was going to be something bad about it. I knew this as certainly as the sun would rise in the east the next day and set in the west. You might say I was becoming a pessimist about the efficacy of my attempts to find a permanent writing spot and, while I was at it, a pessimist about any writing I would produce at any place, no matter how good the light and atmosphere was.

The male librarian, Mr. Charnel House or Mr. Usher or whatever his name was, jammed his left hand against his left thigh and squeezed the table edge until the skin at the edge of his palm and his knuckles turned white and he noticed me staring down at his knuckles and he wiggled his fingers in what, I was sure, he thought a delightful, welcoming twiddle-twaddle.

"I'm not..." I began lamely, and wondered with a great deal of fear shooting through me if I was going to be able to rid myself of this married librarian without angering him, for any man brave enough to begin his opening gambit to a young woman by casually discussing her skin conditions and describing the state of her hair as greasy was not likely to be an easy man to deal with, there being an unmistakable level of confidence which he had in his own impressions and ability to overcome the offense that he would generate on the part of the female. But the fact that he was married was so gruesome to me that frankly he could not have approached me as a headless corpse and been less desirable. And not allowing myself the least bit of sympathy for him, which was already creeping into my thoughts, that I might be feeling in case he might sense my empathy to all humans, regardless of their marital status and interpret it as an opening to him and all his baggage, including this marriage, and I supposed horribly, children, who could be my age!

"I'm not at all interested in you," I said plainly with an uncontrollable quaver in my voice, a rocking tremble in my hand as I stuffed my manuscript pages, pen and pencil into my notebook, knowing the instant when it came out of my mouth that to tell this human that I was not interested in him was a crazy thing for a writer to say, a destructive thing for a writer who should be interested in everyone they encounter, who ought to trust serendipity to provide the perfect plotting to the writer who was truly open to all experiences, and who ought to have sympathy for all her fellow human beings, no matter how irritatingly awful (or stinky) the individual might be, no matter how inappropriate their interest might be in the writer. A writer, I told myself, must be people-oriented and be listening to everyone surrounding them, and have enthusiasm for their triumphs and share their disappointments, even people with the absurd name of Rex Almshouse who interrupted my work and sat on the desk beside me and scared the hell out of me with his great goggling blue eyes, and who was not understood at home by his wife.

And yet, I told myself, this man was not a useful character because who in the whole wide world wanted to understand another man whose wife didn't understand him? But yet I told myself I ought to listen to them, any character who presented themselves, not because they contained the greatest story, the jewel, the temptation of the story to end all stories, but because I wanted to feel closer to them, to feel closer to life through hearing their agonies and triumphs.

But I did not respond to that calling, instead I let the terror of the moment spook me out of a positive response.

"I'm not interested in you, really. I want you to know how not interested in you I really am, really." I ended by shaking my head in what I thought would be the most damning display of my lack of interest. Nagging the back of my head, was the thought of that Belinda story. Damn, that dame sounded interesting. I'd probably lose that story as a stray. Belinda would remain in the canyon—a lost lamb, a lost soul.

His insolent face burned into me, gouging my consciousness with those eyes, boring into my soul with desperation and hunger. I didn't believe he believed me, that was the crazy thing about it. He didn't think that I could not be interested in him, as he was so interested in himself, and something about the fact that he didn't believe me was suddenly pleasing to my author's ego that wanted the art to be everything, to be more than me, to surpass and overwhelm me and to subtract me from the art, and I was able to enjoy the fact that he had no interest in me and never asked anything about who I was or what I was doing in the library. He assumed that my activities corresponded to his needs. I was his servant. And because I was a writer, I really was his servant.

"I'm not interested in you," I repeated, nonetheless, jumping to my feet and trying to project a mature voice, one which was more adamant and confident, though I suspected this would be a hopeless task, and pairing my words with an chopping hack of my left hand, as though a current of air agitated by any one of my puny arms could discourage him and serve to quickly cut off his claim. It was at that point that I realized that art was going to edit my life. Because I was making art, I would probably have to ignore a lot of men. Art possessed me, controlled me, and destroyed me as much as I destroyed it.

If the creative process possesses you there are things in life you can't do. Like make money. Art is a bit like God. It redirects your life, edits it, cuts it, distorts it or makes it come alive. Art prompts experience.

"I never meant to attract you," I added apologetically, assuming that the blame for his adulterous feelings toward me rested with me, with my unconscious actions, and feeling conscious of the effect of, a little sorry for, the abrupt nature of my chopping arm and the possibility that I might have hurt his feelings by making such a childish gesture. "I got lost in what I was doing which was writing, actually, working on my novel. Without even knowing I was lost, I suppose I was. It's a danger when you're thinking and writing and you have to do it in a public place. Probably that lady writer who wrote about the need for a place of her own to write in was right, you know, or at least on the right track. And the guy who put himself in a cork room. You see, I can't work too well any more at my home in my bedroom. My mother's always expecting me to get up and help her hang out another load of clothes. Important work, someone has to hang out clothes, but not every day. And I've tried working on a stool at the counter of a pie shop on Speedway, a charming place I had always wanted to visit, but the waitress kept expecting me to buy another slice of pie or another cup of coffee and I haven't got much money, so you see that didn't work out and neither did a very big red vinyl booth at a bowling alley in the middle of the afternoon because bowling people are awfully friendly, and noisy, gee whiz, you wouldn't believe it, so I was sitting in a fairly comfortable lounge chair for a long time which was located right beside the model of the battleship Arizona, which is up there on the third floor of the student union, but there was a lot of distracting foot traffic by that spot because there was a center for information about sexually transmitted diseases right in that hallway. Guess I've decided libraries are probably the best places for me to work for the time being, except the stacks here are rather spooky and lonely, and I really like this room, Special Collections, it's so peaceful and out of the way and the books are really helpful and I'm about to graduate anyway. I'm sorry to say I never really noticed you until now." I added this in a particularly merry voice, dispassionate and yet friendly, not judgmental, not discussing the issue of his marriage to Belinda in the far-away canyon, though I was really interested in her.

This, for him, iced the cake of anger and despair.

"Sure," he snorted at the end of my discussion of the various failed places I had chosen to write in and my explanation for why I stayed so often in the library where he worked, "I really believe you. That's why you keep coming here and asking about the strangest crap over and over every single goddamned afternoon until we close."

His face had a pinched unyielding expression of repressed fury and disbelieve, of angry contradiction, an opposition to every fact I might give him because of his overwhelming desire to see me as someone flirting with him. He discounted my heartfelt tale of writer's woe and anguish, preferring to imagine me as a young girl anguished over him. This was the story he wanted more than the real story I was telling him. His arms were crossed on his chest and he spit out these words, but suddenly this was done with little beams of fun coming out of his eyes toward me, beams of laughing disbelieve also, of superiority, manly superiority, the worst kind of dominance over art.

The implication that I had been secretly flirting with him, consciously or unconsciously, trying to tantalize him by requesting his assistance in what I realized must have been crazy research ideas (rodeos, scorpions, and J. Wayne) and that all the time I had been actually trying desperately to write beautiful things, remember beautiful images and times past, and really had been sweating out the difficulties of the creation of beauty in my attempt to master something profound, something intricate and rare, and put it on a page and give it to the desert southwest, to imagine that I have been attempting to attract a strange, married librarian with a past including time spent in a nudist camp when he won his nudist wife from other nudist men, and a wife that he wanted to cheat on with me blew my mind. The accusation of this married librarian, who I was beginning to think was actually dangerous to me, floored me, and astounded me with its audacity and self-love. I reeled for a moment. "This is a library," I said at length in a strangled voice, defiant in the face of his accusation, and as the daughter of a librarian, always thinking foolishly of all librarians as intelligent, reasonable people, "and a library is where people are supposed to go, are urged to go, to look up strange crap!"

He smirked at what was to him the utter ridiculousness of this defense. "Just see what happens next," he whispered ominously. "Obviously, I happen to know what you're thinking better than you do. I can read your mind."

"You can't know what I'm thinking! I don't even know what I'm thinking!"

"See what happens," he whispered again in a more urgent imperative.

Could I have made him up? I thought to myself angrily. Was he inserted in the midst of my story for added suspense? As a tricky tool to hang onto the fickle reader? But they must have left long before now. Of what use was he, this desperate librarian?

"This is the library—" I began loudly.

The lady, closing blinds, made her way along the windows and glanced over her shoulder. She took in the sight of the two of us together. "The library is closing," she called.

"—I'm supposed to look up stuff!" I finished whispering at him. I began stacking my notebooks (a Big Chief tablet from Sprouse-Reitz was my favorite at the time) on the crook of my arm.

"See what happens when you try and leave," he whispered back.

"Are you crazy?" I said.

"Do you want me to reveal the surprise in the Surprise Symphony?" His blue eyes got even wider and wilder when he said this to me in a voice which I suppose he thought sexy. I had had weird stuff like this said to me frequently. I charmed these types of psychotic mashers. Both his hands were cocked at the wrists and his open palms cradled his freckly elbows.

The truth dawned on me slowly, because, let's face it, I'm a little dense.

"It was you! You sent me that weird envelope! With the green plastic scorpion in it!"

He nodded, tugging his beard impishly. "Yes, didn't you like our little friend? I thought you'd like him. You kept asking for books about scorpions. I thought you'd like one of your very own, except plastic."

"I knew I should have moved my writing spot," I replied. "The minute I saw that green scorpion slide out of the envelope I knew I needed to move my writing spot and never come back again. For some goddamned stupid reason I convinced myself that it was someone on the bus who sent that scorpion. There was someone I had seen on the bus who also accosted me on a lawn right outside here, but I should have known better than to think he had found my address, because that man already had groupies and he couldn't have planned anything because his brain wasn't functioning right due to him being struck by lightning a whole bunch of times. Boy, stuff like this has happened to me so many times it's getting kind of ridiculous. I tell you, I'm sick and tired of being plagued by men like you. This is a big, big intrusion into my writing. Don't you understand I'm only getting this thing started! I'm about to graduate and I have to get this thing started before I graduate! And finally I'm doing something I think might be good enough for someone else to read and along comes someone like you to spoil it for me. I won't even be able to write for a couple of days after this you've left me so upset and everything. Can't you even think about anyone besides yourself? This isn't groovy."

"See what happens," was his impudent, chirping response and his eyes goggled a little more with the mocking shake of his head. "See what happens."

I began to understand why his wife didn't like him.

"You're the worst kind of character to run into," I protested in an outburst of outrage against my bad luck, "You're only here to ruin me, to drive me away from the best writing place, the nicest room, the best lit table with real growing ivy outside and it's the best that I've yet found at this university, but you're not going to succeed—"

"Just try to leave," he said, interrupting me, "Before you speak, you ought to think, at least half as carefully as you are pretending to think before you write. In a few seconds you and I are going to be the only people left here. Look! There goes the other librarian. Breezing right out the door. Then, when she's gone, we're in here alone."

The thought did not please me.

"Good-bye, Marnie!" he called happily, waving a merry adios to his co-worker who left with a large red bag slung across her upper torso and a rolled up magazine gripped tightly in one hand. She glanced at me without really seeing me and supposed, I suppose, that I was clearing up my Big Chief tablet and I would head out the door right behind her after her colleague had gotten firm with me.

"Guess what?" he said turning back to me. "I have a little knife."

A little knife! This was the scariest masher ever! And I hadn't had the sense to corral him into the opening chapter of my book. Wasn't he a better hook than giving LSD to cowboy star? A better hook than the pale people who photographed themselves with the barrel cactus?

Stuffing the last of my papers into my notebook, I stumbled around the tables wishing that I had found another library earlier for, of all the disturbances in all the places, this took the cake and it was positively the most awful interruption yet. Perhaps Monday the Ag library, a gray building that sat quietly close to the center of campus, which I blundered into once without even knowing there was an Ag library, would be a much better place to sit and write as long as no lonely, married Ag librarians decided to take a fancy to me. It was worth the chance, I decided. I must move there and remember, clearly, to never, ever return to the second floor special collections room. In fact, I wouldn't be able to approach the library at all!

Despite my rush toward the special collections room exit, he managed to squirt out between the tables and beat me to the door.

"You have to stop flirting with me here," muttered the madman.

"I'm only writing something!" I exclaimed.

"Hey, do you know which way I go outta here?" asked someone suddenly.

An old guy poked his head in the door and addressed his question to me.

I recognized him as the white-haired somebody who had been sitting at the table with me. One of the stinky guys who hung around asking the librarians odd questions. A stray character, that's what he was. It distressed me that another character came in who I had forgotten to observe correctly. The reader didn't get a chance to see him before he entered and didn't even learn his name. I have to put him in because he's the _deus ex machina_ man.

"Sure," I said. "I'll show you the way."

I sensed the disappointment of the librarian who would not forget what I was doing. He would not be dissuaded from his impression that I was quite madly in love with him. This, to him, was not the end of our story. Even as I got out the door with the elderly man and vowed, with sadness but relief, to never see that glorious room where I had thought so many good thoughts and remembered so many past things again. My writing spot!

Damn, I thought as I trotted out, wasn't it great, wasn't it simply fantastic that the nutty fellow returned to rescue me and by his coming back in the nick of time like that just when I was about to be really scared by that librarian I had avoided what would have been a really frightening, disturbing scene that I would never have wanted to relive, even on paper. I was thankful for the man saving me, and wondered if he had done it deliberately and if I ought to consider him my savior, my editor, or at least the savior of my sanity, the savior of my writing at that moment. He was as welcome as shade.

In my flight down the hall I peek behind and saw those great blue eyes studying me and he came compulsively forward a few steps and I knew that only the fact that the man was there kept him from pursuing me down the hall. Ought I tell the man what had just happened, or did he already know because there was something a little peculiar about the way he had hung around and the way he was now walking? He walked slowly so that I could catch up.

But another little pang throbbed for the lost story of Belinda, the hippie girl I'd abandoned to the wildflower canyon near Mexico, gone by the wayside forever it seemed. Nothing would help me tell her story but an out and out dirty low-down lie. It was a shame about losing her.

"Mashers," said the old man shaking his head, "are the worst people in the world."

He observed my quizzical glance.

"I thought he had his eye on you," he explained. "He's plum peculiar. I noticed he's been throwing hisself at all the undergraduates."

I decided not to tell the old coot about the knife. I guess I should have reported Mr. Carnal House and everything, but stuff like that happened to me all the time. And me with my acne!

"Thanks for coming back," I said.

"Oh, you're welcome."

"I think I've lost my romanticism about man/woman stuff," I explained, "but I'm still romantic about the world. The world is so intense, so groovy. Man, I've sure meet a lot of mashers recently, but now–I guess because you saved me—I'm not gonna think they are 'the worst people in the world.' I'm trying to be open to everyone. Mashers are just people, and, in their own groovy way they're characters, too."

"Girl, wake up! That's why you're getting all these dang mashers after you, kiddo. A girl can't be open to the world," the guy claimed. "The best thing is for a woman to be very, very closed. Take it from me. You want to close up like a clam."

"I think you're wrong. I'm not really a girl, I'm a writer. A writer has to be open, probably. Open to everyone. Nonjudgmental. I'm working on it. It's strange because I just remembered something when you said that about the worst people in the world."

"What?"

"I remembered that I used to think Easterners were the worst people in the world."

"Easterners? Who told you that?"

"My older sister believed it. Then she forgot it and she moved back East! And my brother left. I'm gonna leave and then no one's gonna write all the beautiful stuff about the desert that I know. I guess I have to resign myself to that fact. I had a couple of scary encounters a long time ago. It's hard to think it out. I wanted to write about that time, but I don't know where to start."

"Start with that. Start right there. It's bound to be interesting. Start with how you got the notion that Easterners were the worst people in the world."

We walked together out the front door of the library.

His form waned with wide opened eyes under a cowboy hat. I liked that old man who had gone before me down the stairs.

But also bitter envy and anger had its grip on me. How lucky young men were to be able to do something as simple as sit at a table in a library and write without worrying about a kook sneaking up on them and beginning to harass them, for there really were not many women who would bother a single man who wrote, although there were thousands of men who would not hesitate to insert themselves into the very life of a woman who dared appear in a library and concentrate on something other than her environment. In fact you had to continuously change places due to the harassing nature of young males, I had discovered that and I wasn't a particularly gorgeous female, and now, now, I had a married man, not young at all, possibly the father of young children, bothering me through no fault of my own. No, men did not have women approaching them, bothering them.

I am desperately, desperately unlucky, I told myself and instead of the pride that I used to feel, the pride in my childhood home, at my place in the sun, my unique vantage point on America, I wonder how I could ever have been more plagued. How anyone could have devised a more suitable torture than to have placed me out on this barren plain and given me so few opportunities to improve myself. How had most people been so lucky to have been born in great centers of knowledge, to be surrounded by works of art, to be born as men surrounded by moving masses of people, to not be saddled by or subject to the obsessions of married librarians, who drove them out of perfectly good writing locations into other ones which would prove less desirable for a thousand reasons. And how could I be so unlucky to be surrounded all my life by the hokey stories of Arizona, the gal-darn, side-shooting, side-show nature of the place. And going further, I wondered how people had the taste and skill to rise up out of places which were even less cultured than where I was from, and was that culture anyway? Didn't I have a lot of nerve complaining about my situation when other people had written in prisons and camps of hobos and such, probably on rickety tables in the dead of night when the clocks were ticking non-stop and I was only complaining about the endless series of false starts I had made and people who had interrupted my work, though I had always been able to start again.

A knife? Just when my writing showed promise, when I had found the best place to work, and had a good idea to begin my work, I became captive of a crazed librarian who knew my home address and had a knife. Torpedoed. That's what I was. My writing was as doomed as a nestling on the floor of the desert in June.

Life had a deplorable way of happening just when I needed to create my fake past life on paper. How was I supposed to work on the past life and its meaning when the current life threw characters like Rex Almshouse at me, huh? Threatening me with knifes and sending me green scorpions in the mail. Well, I'd been threatened by bad characters before. Plenty of times while writing. Writing is a frustrating and dangerous profession, like a trial in which you don't have a lawyer and you don't understand the proceedings or maybe a better analogy is a puzzle with a lot of crazy pieces and all of it together makes a picture that is never perfect and is always incomplete, imperfect, and transient. Nobody tells you that stuff. A dreadful compulsion dictates that I must piece together my adventure for you, green scorpions, mashers, and knives be damned.

So I decided to start right there on the Monday after the Special Collections fiasco when the stinky old guy had saved me. I had established a new writing spot: a table at the Ag library. The place was not deserted, which was cool in terms of scary mashers but the people there were not so cool for characters; imagine a room made thoroughly dull by the presence of grown up Future Farmers of America. Through the dusty Western windows and shelves and shelves of dark green and orange volumes of agricultural pests and prices, I could see the red roof of Old Main, the territorial revival casino, sunk six feet in the ground in the center of campus.

CHAPTER TEN

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

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

"Won't you go back a page, Dr. Porter?"

"You did speak!"

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

"Was this what you wanted?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I know I'm right, Dr. Porter. Tell me who she was."

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

"Killer?" I asked in terror.

"Ah, well..." he fudged.

"Maniac?" I pressed.

"No, not that."

"Arsonist then?"

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

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

"Hmm?"

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

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

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

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

"Steal?"

"Steal!"

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

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

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

"That's the year I lost my ghost herd," he said.

This struck me like nothing else ever before.

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

The librarian glared at me.

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

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

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

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

"Kept them?"

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

"Yes."

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

"How do I do that?"

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

"Maybe."

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

"So what happened was critical?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just then someone blasted an air horn.

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

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

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

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

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

"There he is!" shouted someone.

"Who?" asked another.

"The governor," someone replied.

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

CHAPTER ELEVEN

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

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

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

"I wish we could find an old beer bottle."

"Why, wouldn't a ketchup bottle be good enough?"

"I want a genuine old beer bottle."

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

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

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

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

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

Oh no was right.

What the hell was I doing leaving my desert?

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

Pink-laced edges on the billowy cumulonimbus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cloud.

But a cloud in the guise of a young steer!

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

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

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

THE END

Synopsis

One

(1)Beatles movie _A Hard Day's_ _Night_ is shown in downtown Tucson, 1964. Hysterical tirade from Mother who searches for Meredith who is with her friend Margaret Kirkup after being left downtown to see the movie and not appearing at the pickup point. 1949 Chevy seatback flops on me, vague remembrance of Rosenfield's Department store and sand painter, encounter with hobos downtown and remembers similar encounter as a younger child, the fuzz speaks to us, and all the fans running around are singing Beatle songs, Mother discusses Beatniks on beach in Venice, California, Beach Boys, and Rudolph Valentino, her library course and _One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding_. Meredith has become an unfriendly teenager shortly after been given her first girdle. Frightening encounter with teens. Meredith and Margaret finally found in a line trying to see the movie for the third time. After argument, Margaret and Meredith finally return to the car. Rat fink comment from Meredith in Pig Latin.

Two

(2)Asthma clinic therapy session for Jack. We see large painting of order and chaos drinking wine and Mother discusses it, the grandness of the clinic, Teddy Roosevelt's asthma and the seriousness of Jack's asthma condition, we arrive too early and enter an empty room, Mother warns us not to be silly again and to appreciate the opportunity to get well. Jack makes fun of Mother's rambling speech, we are chastised for arriving early. The asthma clinic's theory of binding and tickling discussed critically. A welcoming speech from the Saturday morning coach, namby-pamby kids with sunken chests, blowing into a paper bag, running with asthma kids and beating them, finding our vertebrae and massaging it. See Smitty sitting in the corner of the hall with his group of dangerous teenagers, Mother discusses her theory of Smitty and his attractiveness on the way home, discusses whether only scandalous writing sells and praises _Little_ _Women_ , tells the tale of Lugar and the button in the mashed potatoes tale as a good idea for a story (something lost). Meredith asks about asthma clinic and claims she never disliked people from the east.

Three

(3) Wolfman Jack who we tried to find on the radio dial, coming across the desert night sky, and the endless search for reception on the radio through static, and the practice of Speedy Gonzalez for Junior High Talent Show that Meredith and Charlaine are obsessed with, the night sky and red lights on the Skyline Country Club, children offer their theories of what the three red lights are from (4) Catholic Youth Organization dances where we pick up Meredith and Charlaine in the dusty dark and confusion of teenagers driving away wildly. Meredith and Charlaine discuss boys at the dance and line dance to the song "Hang on Sloopy" on the way home.

Four

(5)While reading daily black and white comic pages in the living room, remembering something I once saw twirling in the gravel out that same front window, Smitty murder discussed from newspaper accounts by Mother while she reads them aloud in snippets, her assertion that she always knew he was bad, F. Lee Bail coming to town to assist, remembering finding the dead saguaro and disinterring it, remembering the Itty Bitty Cocky Baby (6) Calling up to Meredith where she sits in a Rus Lancia tree. She is smoking, trying to get her to watch Laugh-In comedy show over and over with different pleadings, (7) Anna Henry discussed by Gumm, how she was brought home by the police after sitting at the school district lobby demanding her pay because she is now senile like her mother was years earlier and Gumm is taking her home from the district office when she arrives there every day, remembering first scene of nervous scarecrow Anna in the backyard and her story about Pancho Villa, quizzed about my memory, which I defend, though I really didn't remember her until I needed her

Five

(8) Meredith at park up the street with hippies and mother is talking to Gumm about how bad it is, complaining about Cesar Chavez grape boycott which high school is participating in. Gumm complains about pinkie scene at sixteenth birthday party of prior year. Meredith comes in and tells me that she has taken LSD and thinks she visited with Jesus at the park. How to keep her from telling everyone in the house and make her trip be okay without everyone knowing she was on acid.

Six

(9)Paul and LSD incident involving J. Wayne, Paul at our house with his white rat in a fishbowl, we drive out to get LSD with him, we go hunting for J. Wayne at bars first at the Ox-Bow and then south to Speedway, writing in Volkswagen front seat (poem about seeing donut-shaped cloud over Dracula's Castle in the backyard of Gumm's bungalow), and pivotal strange attack by man in balaclava suddenly fended off before people come back to the car. Long night of bars after that. See Drive-In screen and remember the cattle stampede before the Boy Scout Jamboree Remembers Jamboree. Model shop we walked to seen again. (10) Paul and Meredith break up, but at midnight Paul rings our doorbell after seeing her with another man, and Dad's breakdown in our room when he begs that she stop Paul before he murders us. (11) Meredith reminds me of Dad's humorous, plotless saga "That's the Way It Was Moving West." She tells it before we sleep.

Seven

(11) Tennis lessons at a park in mid-summer with Jack and we listen to Mother tell us about her dreams of what learning tennis would mean for us, meeting the best people in Arizona at the cowboy prince homes, and Jack pokes fun at a sign, we discuss the memory of the people photographing the barrel cactus, and Rancho Supremo, which Jack thinks is only Mother's story Cowboy Prince because he doesn't remember his version of it with the chuckwagon, Jack does remember finally the photographer and the big lie about the chuckwagon, how to get back the memories that are lost, Ralph Campbell and his home is vaguely remembered, but not well, and Mother is very angry that I don't remember it better, Meredith's rodeo memory of a woman on a bucking horse and seeing our reflection on the window with the oven door open reminds me of rodeo time and the year when we were babysat by the floor cleaner at the Historical Society who told us to get our rock and roll records out and who told us the frightening clown/stagecoach story (12) Confirmation classes at the church, the old church annex, ministers laugh at the silent girls, ministers discuss lamb nights and how the students salivated with the description by the old minister of his lamb roast dinner with a friend, (13) last Sunday in which Shirley is taken care of. Someone asks "have you shaved your eyebrows off." Last encounter with Molly Cameron. I wonder whether Shirley ever remembers me afterwards, but I never think of her again until I want to write her.

Eight

(14) Writing a letter against the war in Vietnam to Senator Goldwater, Meredith arrested at peace protest, she describes what happened, the draft card burning, the songs they sang, what the police did and it turns out that Officer Commie is the arresting officer, Mother reacts to the arrest. Current boyfriend, Lance, only wanted to feel her up during the protest so she drops him. (15) Father tells me the tales 1974, the one used is the banana ripening plant and the ethyl gas and tarantulas, the stenographic shorthand book from the library, the transcript I take of him getting a leisure suit and complaining about it and his work, the imagination, how I wrote it so dully and how the shorthand filled in the Big Chief tablet (16) tearing apart the cloud poem and ripping it apart on the metate at Gumm's porch quickly when no one is observing, 1974 (17) Meredith at college and "Do you know about sin?" guy on the elevator, Meredith argues with me about writing anything about the Southwest, which she thinks is hokey, she leaves for the East Coast, how I remembered that she was a hater of the east coast.

Nine

(18) College 1978. Old coot who asks for smelting books, and books about Jericho, the rare book librarian Rex Almshouse is enticed and tries to butt into my searches. (19)The married Rex the latest in a series of university mashers confesses his interest and says he sent me a green scorpion. He threatens to produce a knife when his advances are repelled. Old white haired coot who asks for smelting books rescues me from Rex. When walking out of the library, he advises that writing about why Meredith didn't like Easterners and thought they were the worst people in the world is a good idea to begin writing.

Ten

(20) Microfiche at U of A library, April 1979, and old Dr. Porter sits at the machine and scans old newspapers from the 1960s for information about what happened to his herd of phantom cattle and I see Beatles movie day in a photo and he tells of the horror of folklorists. He discovers that Ethyl Fusselman a folklorist was in town for the rodeo (21) Last rodeo parade attended with the governor dying and white oxen which breaks free from ox cart and crashes through window of Meyer's White House Department Store.

Eleven

(22) Journey out to the Arizona countryside, July 1979, and Mother tells story of the Cowboy Prince for the last sad time. Father says "That's the Way It Was Moving West." Desert run to hunt for bottles in a ghost town. Rusty rat trap found and it is going to Los Angeles. See one phantom cow in reflection in a hoof print and begins thinking opening scene of _A Phantom Herd_.

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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