 
### Last Days in the Desert

Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. You can download Lorraine's many other Smashwords editions from her author's page at: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LoRay.

Chapter One

Chattering chaos sliced through hot desert air. With a thunderous clatter that shook the treetops and hammered the ground, a police helicopter ripped the darkening sky, banked right, spun about, climbed and tore away.

"Andrew Victor Kevin," said the pilot into his headset. "Negative on St. Mary's. Twenty-five twenty."

The searchlight operator swept his light over the charred archaeological remains of pithouses on the banks of the Santa Cruz River, illuminating the new neon of the old downtown and lighting up the slashing scars of the railroad tracks, which led west to Los Angeles and east to El Paso.

"Copy. Stadium and Highland," said the pilot. "Twenty twenty-three."

A scalding wind whipped outside the closed cockpit. Like monstrous mantises in their smoky helmet visors and olive green jumpsuits, the pilots inside pursued an elusive trail of shattered glass and abandoned cars that led them to the western edge of the city. Behind them, the lights of the valley sparkled and the last glow from a rather splashy and splendid desert sunset transformed the largest mountain range into a gray wooly mammoth, buckled to its knees by the scorching daytime temperatures. In contrast to this crumpled beast, a smaller range of sharp volcanic peaks directly ahead of them stretched upward like lopsided taffy chimneys in silhouette against the setting sun. When the pilot had buzzed over these jagged mountains, he peeled the copter off sharply, zooming back toward town. The steady blink of the light at the copter's tail crossed the western half of the city like a traveling star.

The copter bore down ferociously on a neighborhood south of the university where the searchlight operator zipped bright cones of light over one wide avenue a few blocks from the football stadium.

On curbs outside the hundred year old adobe bungalows, ghostly piles of rubbish cooled in the blessed dark. Today marked the semester's end and those undergrads who hadn't flunked a course in their major were fleeing Arizona, jettisoning their bulkier objects in their eagerness to escape another triple-digit summer. The light zigged and revealed two rusty commingling bikes pitched into a creosote bush. It zagged and stage-lit an upturned couch, already an object of interest for voracious bombing beetles and fluttery chagrined moths. A chair with a broken leg froze in the act of running away from an offensive fire hydrant, and heaps of weather-damaged equipales, the leather chairs from Mexico, sprawled in abject misery like the smashed drums of a lunatic band.

Without warning, the copter came upon something which was more interesting and more peculiar. Enormous red turrets and comically swollen blue castle walls sprouted from the gravel lawn of a small front yard. A crowd of bare legs, bare torsos, and the sweet uplifted faces of a hundred bright young things milled around a balloon-jumping castle, the kind you usually saw outside a kid's birthday party surrounded by anxious parents. This castle, however, was surrounded by young people slurping beer from transparent plastic cups and smoking funny-looking cigarettes. The crowd lifted their arms and screamed at the helicopter.

BOOM! A bottle rocket shot upward and spiraled down. Seismic music shook the street.

"Heyah," said the searchlight operator, "Par-r-r-r-t-a-a-ay." He held the light on the crowd as the copter swept around. The crazy shadow of the balloon castle swiped the parked cars, the walls of the tiny neighboring houses and the moving shapes of the drunken, raucous crowd.

"I'll come back in for another look," said the pilot.

Pretending to leave the party, the pilot soared far to the north of the black bowl of the football stadium, above the huge stadium screen, then zinged back to where he had just been. Once the pilot had brought them back to a spot nearly above the party, the searchlight operator checked the perimeter of the castle.

Gotterdammerung in every damn direction. The jumping castle heaved and bulged, swayed and rocked, and spewed out two young men wrestling each other and a squirrelly-looking gentleman shaking maracas who wore boxer shorts and an extremely long chartreuse poncho. A line of coeds doing the conga (some with only their bras on as tops and others with their tops and bras pulled up) was next to fly out the jumping castle. Bobbling merrily, the half-clothed girls snaked across the dusty parkway and onto the street.

"It's Crazy Town down there," said the searchlight operator wistfully. "A wild night. They rented a great big jumping castle. Lots of kids," he said, looking again. "They're spilling out all over the street. Woo-hee, we gots us some drunken people."

"Any sign of a squad car?" asked the pilot.

"Negative. Not at the moment."

"There's gonna be vomit all over that castle," the pilot said.

"Oh yeah, I believe that's a forgone conclusion. They'll be hosing that thing out thoroughly for hours tomorrow."

The pilot chuckled as the helicopter completed another circle above the castle.

"Naked co-eds at ten o'clock," said the searchlight operator happily into his headset.

"Gottcha. I'm right on 'em...that is, er, right on it," replied the grinning pilot. This time the copter flew in a great ellipse and swooped closer.

"A squad car will be around soon enough," said the pilot.

"Sweet mercy," said the man at the searchlight.

The copter swung in a tighter circle.

"Oh glory," he exclaimed.

"Any underage?" asked the pilot, sounding hopeful, but before he could finish the question someone spoke to him in his headset. "Copy," he said, grimly acknowledging his orders. "North Stone south of River. We're outta here."

"Goodbye partygirls," said the man at the searchlight, "have yourself some fun while you can. Some of us jerks can't stick around and partay along with you, and that's a real sad fact."

As the stunned crowd stood gazing upward at the copter like so many blind bunnies, a skinny man standing between two parked cars saw his chance and scurried out, across the sidewalk and around the bulging walls of the balloon castle. He was carrying two gray plastic pails, and he scooted up against the side of the house quickly. There he slipped unnoticed behind a wide golden cypress.

The man with the maracas and the chartreuse poncho walked determinedly to the middle of the street and shook his maracas skyward at the copter as though he willed the police to leave them alone.

"Depart you force of evil, you dark destroyer of fun and madness," he shouted. "Depart in peace!"

The throng flung up their naked arms and roared as the noisy copter complied and zoomed away.

Chapter Two

Someone cranked up the throbbing hip-hop.

"Hey, hey, throwin' it dooowwn," sang and enormous man who was sitting on the front steps of the house with the balloon castle. "Throwin' it dooowwntoooowwn in this ciiiitty! Ciiitty of fantastic tiiittiiiies!" He suddenly stopped, belched and looked astonished. He leaned over, almost toppled sideways, and then vomited into the base of the cypress tree beside him. "I'm okay. I'm okay. Perfectly fine," he reassured absolutely no one when he reemerged. He sat up shakily and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Laughing couples jammed inside the jumping castle. The overflow crowd on the gravel lawn slipped into position and began grinding their pelvises together. Some of them formed themselves into another drunken conga line and wound out to the street and up a neighbor's drive. The line crashed through an oleander hedge and two unsteady dancers fell to the base of the hedge and didn't emerge when the line bounced mindlessly away without them.

On the dimly-lit front porch of the old bungalow, a silvery beer keg suffered vicious kicks from a pack of young men. Their kicks sent the empty keg tumbling over the porch edge onto a bed of verbena. None of the men bothered to retrieve the old keg; they were desperately priming a newly tapped one. Had anyone bothered to bring up the empty they might have thought it strange to see a skinny man with two plastic pails emerging from behind one of the golden cypresses that flanked the front porch. The man scurried away toward the backyard.

"So what's your plan anyway?" said one young man to another.

The other man looked around him and blinked. "Plan?" he managed to blurt finally.

"For a job!" The young man who asked downed a big gulp from a trim rum bottle. He wore long Madras shorts and no shirt.

"Oh, you mean that. Well, I don't have a plan. I have an interview."

"Whoa, that's all right. An interview, huh?"

"It's in Huntington Beach. Tuesday."

"Oh yeah, bitchin. Sounds good. Can I drive over with you? I wanna spend some time with a friend of mine in LA."

"Um, no, you can't. I'm taking my sister back to my parents' place and there's no room for you in my car with all her stuff."

"Oh, thanks. When are you going, anyway?"

"Sunday, the day after tomorrow, but you can't go."

"I couldn't have gone."

"No, you couldn't have. I don't have room for you, like I said."

"I have to be back before then."

"I'm trying to tell that you couldn't have gone with me, dude."

"For what position?"

"Huh?"

"For what position are you trying for? For what?"

"Um, like a lifeguard on the beach."

The interrogator stared. "Shit, no! Lifeguard? Jeez, are you kidding me! What, you like majored in finance?"

"Yeah, thanks for reminding me. Nothing's gonna come of the lifeguard job though," said the young man to the other.

"Looser lifeguard," mocked his buddy, tilting back his bottle.

"I'm not even going to get that lousy job," said the other young man sadly. "I don't think I'll pass the open ocean swim."

"Yeah, dude, yeah!" yelled another partygoer who was on the porch of the old house and whose attention was riveted on the spout of the new keg. The well-wisher pumped his fist repeatedly. A bubbly amber froth dribbled from the mouth of the long, black spout; three hands held it out and let the foam plop onto the verbena bed. Urgently, the waiting men pressed forward transparent plastic cups. And a dog bowl showed up.

"What? What?" the man holding the bowl said when others protested.

"I'm telling you, dogs love beer! I'm taking it next door!"

The enormous man who'd vomited got up and filled his cup. He returned to the steps. "Throwin it down," he sang.

"Will you please shut the fuck up?" asked one of the men at the keg.

"Okay," said the big man amiably.

The screen door banged open. A buff, bandy-legged man wearing only a cowboy hat and loose red jams with the large white letters U of A emblazoned on the seat, staggered past the keg and across the porch, cradling carefully a mottled watermelon. Halfway across the porch, he stopped to lift the brim his cowboy hat and sip from the straw, which was sticking out of his melon. His head was long and the front flattened as though he'd been struck with a shovel and his features pushed to the four corners of his face; it could almost have been a monkey's face, except for the pale blue eyes. He had just worked the straw away from his lips when a man with a syringe dashed out the screen door, jabbed the melon, depressed the syringe's plunger and rushed back inside without a word.

"Thank you," said the watermelon dude, tipping his hat at his luck, long after the melon had been stabbed. "I thank you very much for your assistance. Very much appreciated, kind sir. Uh huh."

Staggering toward the porch steps, the watermelon dude brushed against a thin, intense female who wore her blonde hair in a ponytail. Stacie Folger was one of the three hostesses of the party. The other two were Tiffany Gomez and Yadira Armenta. Stacie addressed a circle of drunken men. "Like I ran three miles today. That's probably like the most I've run in like three days because my ankles are killing me from dancing in heels. I usually run with this dude who lives like on north Park and something and I meet up with him north of Speedway. But I..."

"Yam bags on her eyes," the watermelon dude croaked confidentially as he teetered past her audience.

"I'm sorry, what was that?" Stacie asked, turning her head angrily so that her ponytail slashed the air behind her head. She squinted her eyes at the watermelon dude.

"Te he he," he sniggered drunkenly. He drifted down the front steps in a frightening fashion with his watermelon, but somehow managed not to fall, or drop the melon, and he only trampled the vomiting man slightly.

"De-hay," protested the vomiter.

"What did you just say?" Stacie asked the watermelon dude. She followed him down the steps to the front yard near the castle. "Come back here. I think I heard you, and you really make my blood boil. You are such a tool."

At her back, some of her audience drifted away sheepishly.

The watermelon dude, snickering loudly, tripped away toward the crazy balloon castle. He swayed and rocked and waggled his head; he nodded and bobbed and teetered about, wambling his whole body to the beat of the music. At one point, he joined a dancing couple, and, tucking the melon under one arm, he casually lifted the skirt of the girl to inspect her G-string underwear.

"What did you say?" Stacie yelled at him. "I asked you what you said!"

Without turning back, he waved a dismissive hand at her.

"Come back here!" she shouted, crossing her arms over her chest. "Jeez, you are such a tool. I don't know why Yadira invited you. I don't have time for your shit." By the end her tirade, all of the circle of men had drifted away. "And the holes in the wall aren't funny. You cost us our deposit, you idiot. You ruined our wall and we're leaving in a day. What are we supposed to do? How are we gonna get our deposit? We have to have the money!"

She stomped back up the steps of the house and discovered that all of her audience had gone inside. A fuming Stacie started to follow them, but then she stopped for one more scowl in the direction of the man who had insulted her.

He dithered around the wild castle unaware or unconcerned that his hostess' furious gaze bore into him. He was watching a man in a great tipsy sombrero who had begun jumping in the castle. "Woo-hoo! Arriba, arriba!" the man hollered, nearly bursting the net ceiling with each bound. The jumping man whipped the hat off his head and walloped his thigh then waved it across at the star-strewn sky. "Woo-hoo," he hollered. "Soy grad! Arriba, arriba!"

Full of admiration for absolute abandon of the wild jumper, the grinning watermelon dude gave the man a thumbs-up and rounded the cypress tree.

Just then, he caught up with the skinny man who now had another pair of plastic pails that he was bringing around the side of the house.

The two bashed together.

"Dude," was the watermelon dude's protest after he'd staggered backward slightly and secured his melon. He pulled himself up to his full height, glanced down at the pails, set his shoulders back, and drew on his straw thoughtfully while studying the pails' contents. When he pulled his mouth away from the straw, vodka and watermelon dribbled down the stubble on his chin. "Dude, are those guys real?" he asked in a dubious, drunken slur.

"Shit," hissed the skinny man, trying to glide away, "five-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine, you know?"

"Um, are those guys real?" repeated the watermelon dude, blocking the skinny man's retreat.

"Yeah, now keep it quiet. People want this shit. I don't want them jacked, understand?"

"Viva La Management Societal! Arriba, arriba!" shouted the man in the castle, bouncing upward repeatedly.

"Whaddidyasay?"

"Yeah. They're real. Now be cool," continued the skinny man, "Okay?" He juggled the pails and pressed one finger to his lips.

"Oh, um, sure. Gotcha. Coooooool."

The skinny man tore away around the side of the house, the watermelon dude slurping out of his straw and stumbling behind him. "Dude," the watermelon dude called loudly. They passed beside a fat Chinaberry tree and an old neglected bed of irises which the watermelon dude trampled awkwardly with his flip-flops.

A splintery picket fence squawked open and the skinny man with the pails slipped through ahead of his pursuer.

"Dude," called the watermelon dude again. "Are you leaving them here? Why are you leaving them here?"

The man with the pails swung around, holding the gate open. Behind him, blue smoke drifted ethereally above coveys of dope-smoking dancers. The dirt yard in the rear of the house was dark and small, made even smaller by the looming spear of a forty foot tall cypress tree and the shaggy presence of a grapefruit tree and a large, dying Palo Verde. A rickety corrugated tin shed, which had been built in the 1920s, appeared ready to collapse under the strain of two skinny men leaning against it. "Yeah," answered the skinny man, whispering pointedly, "Can't take them out of state with me. Border inspection, you know. I'm leaving tonight, for a job in Utah. No drugs allowed. Five-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine, you know? Smoke it. I'm leaving a note with all the how-to's for Tiffany Gomez. She lives here. She's going to get them from me. It's a graduation present. Bitchin', huh?"

The man with the watermelon remembered vaguely that there was a reason why this was not smart, but what the reason was escaped him as his mind was saturated with dope, laughing gas and vodka, and he wasn't terribly bright to begin with.

"Oh cooooool. Tiffany? Gomez? That's not her name, I don't think. The one who invited me. Tonight. To this party. I don't know her name. She invited me. Some sorta Mexican chick...chick. We had some classes together, she said. Good party, though. Shit, I'd help you but I've got this melon." He looked around for a place to stow it. In turning around, he lost track of where the man he'd been talking to stood. He spun around again and again stopping at various positions and not finding the skinny man with the pail in front of him.

The skinny man peered suspiciously around the yard at the dancers and once he was assured that no one watching, he hiked up two steps to a narrow French door. "It's okay, dude, really. I can manage. I don't want these special guys of mine to be jacked. You've got to be cool about it. Keep it secret. Remember, it's a surprise for Tiffany. You gotta be cool."

"Coooool," repeated the spinning watermelon dude, still not locating the speaker.

"These guys are wicked valuable," added the man with the pail, "Fantastic stuff. Made by Mother Nature for the benefit of man. Smoke it. Five-methoxy-dimethyltryamine. Remember!"

"Fuck yeah!" said the watermelon dude as he spun around crazily looking for his new friend who knew the long names of drugs. It might be good to know someone like that, if only he could locate him again.

After checking once more for observers, and watching the watermelon dude spin around in confusion, the skinny man carefully transferred the pails to one arm and twisted the backdoor knob. He used his right shoulder to give the door a slight shove and sidled in.

While he was inside, the room remained dark. Moments later, he emerged, unburdened and grinning.

Chapter Three

Where, oh where, could he sit and savor his rigged melon?

The watermelon dude shuffled about the dark smoky yard restlessly vacillating between a seat on an old rusty lawn skimmer next to a rabbit-like man who was nibbling on a tiny withered peyote bud, and the vague outline of something against a farther fence, which, after a great deal of blank staring, he identified as a weather-beaten chaise lounge draped with a towel. He loved sleeping on chaise lounges in the backyards of party houses, and he had fallen asleep on many of them in his time spent as an undergraduate in the desert. He had spent nights studying the moon in its various phases and listening to the creatures that were out in the desert, and, with a well-rigged melon to keep you company, a man could be very happy all night on a chaise lounge in the desert. In fact the watermelon dude thought a chaise lounge in the desert was almost a throne when you woke up in the morning, hearing the calling doves, feeling the desert sun warm your face and knowing you had slept safely out-of-doors in the cool, night air.

He'd only just begun to scuff toward the hazy yellow glow of the private lounge, when the side yard gate grated open again. Hearing that, the watermelon dude swung around and was nearly bowled-over by the effort.

He squinted and saw the figure of the skinny man as he reappeared holding two more pails. "Hey man, more?" shouted the drunk, sending the man with the pails diving into the oleander hedge, "Awesome!"

The watermelon dude wambled away. Heedless of the effect his shouts had had, he meandered toward his seat.

"Chaise lounge, hmmm, nice. Gonna stay there all the fuckin night. Yeah, wonderful out here. Nice yard. Private like. Looking for a place to sit. Nitrous oxide, sweet air, wheeeee. All night out here, maybe. Better with a chick, though."

"Awesome!" he called to the two men leaning against the rusty shed. They responded by turning their backs so they faced the other direction.

"Awesome," muttered the watermelon dude quietly to himself. He sucked on the straw again and began nodding his head to the music while stumbling forward.

Once he had reached the chaise lounge, he lifted his prized melon up to the starry heavens, and, executing a wobbly scissors kick, toppled onto the lovely, waiting bed which he had chosen.

"Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaa," was the extremely loud thing that he screamed next at the top of his lungs.

What he had failed to realize was that one hot, blowy afternoon, five days earlier, the striped yellow towel had sailed from a neighbor's clothesline and landed where it now was, atop a dense patch of cholla cacti. Being somewhat lower in some areas under the towel, and higher in others, the patch of cactus with the towel floating on top of it still did not remotely resemble a chaise lounge, unless you have been smoking weed, inhaling laughing gas and sucking on a straw inserted into a watermelon rigged with way too much vodka.

Clutches of dope-smoking dancers stopped and stared open-mouthed at the dark figure of the shrieking man who now squatted atop an enormous bed of cholla cacti.

"Why does he do that?" asked one of the men, who were leaning against the shed, of his companion.

His friend shrugged. "Quien sabe," he said. "The gym rat doesn't know what he's doing."

"Why did you do that? You stupid or something, dude?" asked one of the men who was dancing in the dark yard.

"Shit, oh shit, oh, fuck this!" shouted the agonized watermelon dude meanwhile. He dropped his melon and the beautifully mottled sphere plopped into the cactus patch, breaking open to reveal the vodka-stoked red mush.

"He dropped his rigged melon," said one of the dancers drowsily, squinting in that direction. "He broke it."

"Whatdidhe dudethatfor?" someone asked in a slow haze that barely resembled human speech.

"He's a stupid shit," said someone nearby, "That's why for he did it. Hmmm?"

"Yeeeaaahh," added someone.

"Ohhhhh," the watermelon dude shouted. "Shit! Oh God, help me. Somebody get me outta here. Oh hell, oh. Hell, oh frickin' fuckin' shit. I landed in a fuckin' cactus. Somebody help me. Suck this. Suck it, suck it." Puffing out his cheeks and blowing, he tried to control his increasing panic as he stepped around in the patch, getting more cactus in him. His painfully perforated bottom was suspended above the trampled joints of yellowish green cacti. Cholla hung everywhere on his legs, arms and torso, the sharp barbs jabbing into his skin. Looks on his face registered stupid shock and disbelieve and a hand, held shakily up, displayed a most unusual sixth digit, a joint of cholla jammed between his thumb and forefinger.

"Ahhhhh," he screamed again, seeing the joint of cactus stuck on his hand.

"There he goes again," said one of the guys at the shed. "Hey, why don't you get out of the cactus bed, huh stupid?"

"Hurts. Hurts. Aaggggggg," the watermelon dude screamed.

"Then step out of there, man," said one of the guys standing at the shed as though he were speaking to a three-year-old. "Step yourself out of there. Shit, you gym rats are stupid. Don't stand there."

The watermelon dude struggled out of the bed of cactus. Blinking back tears and cursing, the persistent cholla clinging off his tanned and ripped body like odd ornaments, his petrified and bow-legged form hobbled forward in the dark yard.

"Help me," he yelped. "Somebody?"

Simultaneously, two young ladies recalled the same parochial second-grade color-it-yourself version of the pincushion saint, St. Sebastian, skewered by arrows. They provided aid; one supporting an elbow, the other gently removing his hat and swatting at the joints on his bare back and legs.

"Hey, you are putting that cactus shit all over the place," pointed out one of the men at the shed.

"Shit, this hurts and I dropped my melon," the watermelon dude gasped at his nurses.

"Ahhh," said one of them.

"I don't get why you did that, baby," the other solicitous lady asked. "I don't get why you sat in there."

"I thought it was a chaise lounge," he said lamely.

"Chaise lounge? Shit, you've had too much of that sweet air," said the other.

They held onto his arms as best as they could and guided him to the kitchen door of the bungalow. The watermelon dude, whose real name was T.J. Graham, tottered on, making slow progress toward the lighted doorway where a nervous man standing in the threshold with an elaborate Swiss knife happily volunteered the use of his tweezers.

"I'll help you get them out," he said.

And in all the excitement no one noticed the man with two more pails when he slipped sneakily out of the oleander hedge and into the back room of the old house. One last time.

Chapter Four

The town was a chafing dish set on high. Downtown, five or six squat high-rises caught the late afternoon sun and flamed in a yellow and crimson conflagration. It was early May in the low desert and anything that hadn't died was withering fast. With their impenetrably black sunglasses, stewed red cheeks and cracked lips, people in the town had a charred appearance. Ordinarily, where a blue sky hung, a wrung out and worn gray dome clamped down, mute and desolate, and without the tiniest filmy wisp of a flimsy cloud or a puff of water vapor. In the heat, the high worlds of the mountains, normally cool and inviting, displayed a hazy pallor that saddened.

Like the rest of the town, the street where the graduation party had been the night before had an element of ensuing death about it. The couch, equipales and bicycles had not been claimed. Heat waves shimmered off the asphalt when a shiny black Jeep careened around the corner and powered up the broiling street. It swung a tight U-turn in front of the old bungalow, the one where the party had been the night before, and crashed the curb, neatly sideswiping several brimming garbage cans, which tumbled over, shooting garbage from the party onto the gravel lawn.

An enormous, jumbo-sized flour tortilla veiled the figure of a girl in the passenger seat. As the Jeep came to an abrupt halt, the huge tortilla swung forward and back in front of the girl's face.

Stacie, who was the driver, the tortilla veiled girl, who was her roommate, Yadira, and Tiffany, the third roommate, fell about laughing inside the Jeep. Three other girls were packed tightly in the back with Tiffany. "Nicely done, Stace," said Tiffany from the backseat. Tiffany was larger than Stacie, and she wore more makeup, thick eyeliner and heavy mascara, which obscured her brown eyes. She had long black hair that was curled and she always hung a large silver heart necklace above her ample cleavage.

"Amazing driving, Stacie," said another friend.

"Home Sweet," said Stacie. "For twenty-four hours. I'm going to miss the old homestead. The high hacienda..." She looked at the little white adobe with its pair of cypresses guarding the front porch. She'd lived there with Tiffany and Yadira for two years.

"Will you please get out and hurry it? The heat happens to be roasting my rump at this momento and it is most unpleasant! I gots a thong on. Have pity, girl," said Tiffany from the back.

"Oooo," said someone jokingly. "A thong, what have we been doing, madam?"

The crowded girls in the backseat stood up and tumbled forward and some of them began to try to clamber over the center console to the front seats but the barest brush of the scalding seatbelt buckle against the flesh on the back of one girl's hand promptly scalded it.

"Sheesh, this car is on fire!" she cried. She pitched the hunk of molten metal down only to have it plop on the skin of another girl's thigh. That girl jumped and knocked Tiffany over.

"Watch it!" exclaimed Tiffany, falling sideways.

The burnt girl screamed in laughter and the injured girl squirmed out from under the belt buckle, but this movement put Tiffany's bare shoulder blade in contact with the scorching black window trim. She yelped, twirled, and felt the delicate skin near her underarm grill on the metal clasp of her purse.

"My arm, oh God." Her elbows shot up like a chicken and she whacked her funny bone on the back of the front seat.

"Get out, will you, Stace or Yadira? Move it. We're roasting back here," shouted Tiffany. Everyone in the back of the car was screaming for the people in front to hurry up and get out.

"Okay, okay, hold on," said Stacie. "I am so hung over. Why did you make me drive?"

"Ah, dah...the kegs and the tank could only fit in your Jeep. We tried the other cars. Don't you remember?" said Tiffany. They had gone on a mission to pick up Yadira and to return the laughing gas to the dental assistant who had access to it, but needed the canister back the next morning, and to return the empty beer kegs, which they had taken to the liquor store for their deposit.

"Oh, yeah," said Stacie.

Wincing, keeping all flesh well away from the anything inside the car that didn't have sheepskin on it, Stacie rooted around on the floorboards of the Jeep for the bags of fast food and a pile of paper napkins inside. "These things really work," she said. "Like a potholder." Using the thick folds of napkins as a hot pad, she carefully pulled the door handle. Once it was open she worked her body out, held the door for the ones in back, all of whom jumped free, spun around, and hopped away from the broiling door as Stacie let it fall with a loud clomp. The flap of a frightened bird sounded loudly on the deserted street.

"Nice work, Stace," repeated one of the group of girls who began picking up the garbage. Another was helping the tortilla-veiled Yadira out of the car, using the napkins. They then led Yadira slowly up toward her house. Two girls with bags of take-out food followed at the rear. Reaching down to the gravel, Stacie snatched up an advertising flyer by its rubber band and swung it up. Holding it in front of her like a guitar, she plinked the taunt band. "Nah nah nah nah, ne ne ne, goooood-bye," she twanged. "Whoops," Stacie shrieked. She had tripped and nearly fallen on the raw holes left by the guide ropes that had held the jumping castle down. Everyone screamed with laughter as she recovered herself awkwardly.

They smelled a slushy mass of old tequila, vodka and vomit which had pooled in the verbena bed. And a single chunk of mud from under a beer keg sat sadly on the gravel. It was already nearly baked to a hot rock. "Okay, which one of you did that?" asked Stacie, pointing toward the vomit pit.

"Teacher, I did it all by myself," said Tiffany in an infantile voice. She held her hand up meekly.

The porch light glowed a sickly, buttery yellow. Stifling volcanic air hit them when the door opened and girls tumbled through. The house stunk of old beer and something faintly like a dirty aquarium. When they came in, they were temporarily blinded, the usual effect from the intense summer sun.

The heat in the little living room was like being smothered in a flannel blanket wrapped in a muffler with your mouth stuffed with cotton wadding. A weak gasp of cool air floated forward from a distant, high-ceiled bathroom at the east side of the house.

Several of the girls gasped when they looked at the living room wall.

"It's worse than I thought when I first saw it," said Stacie.

"Those holes are fucking huge," said another girl. "Did we happen to buy at least two pails of that filler stuff?"

"One. We screwed up," said Tiffany. "We're gonna need two, at least. I don't think I was thinking straight this morning."

Slowly, Yadira Armenta lifted the tortilla off her face. She had straight, shoulder length thin brown hair. Her hazel eyes were slightly too close together and they were separated by a narrow bony bridge of her nose. Her body was thin with shoulders that hunched forward slightly. When she spoke her voice betrayed a nasal, Midwestern twang. Without sunglasses and out from under the tortilla shade, her eyes were the last to adjust to the dark in the living room of the little bungalow.

"Is this your burrito?" asked Stacie to her roommate, "Avocado and rice with cheese?" Stacie was opening a big bag and divvying out the burritos, napkins, and salsa.

"I don't think I can eat it," said Yadira. She flopped on the wooden floor and put the tortilla that had been atop her head on top of the foiled-wrapped parcel that Stacie doled out. The other girls joined her. Stacie handed them their burritos.

"Those fucking holes," Yadira exclaimed. "I thought I was wasted and imagined those holes."

"They're huge," said Tiffany. "You were completely messed up, Yadira. I shouldn't have left you there with T.J. when you were so messed up. I shouldn't have done that. That was so fucked up of me."

"No, it wasn't. It's okay. I wanted to be there with him." Sadly Yadira opened the foil of the burrito and poked the warm, wrapped beans.

"I don't know why you wanted that," said Stacie, rolling her eyes at the thought of the disgusting T.J. She wasn't over the yam bags crack from the night before.

"I wanted to be with him. His apartment was awesome, I think." She sniffed loudly, "I can't really remember what happened after you guys took us there. He was awesome, too." She sniffed and put her hands to her head. "Does anyone have any more weed? I have to do something to get better."

"You were so messed up last night. Damn, girl, I think you still are," said Mona Freeman, one of the mutual friends who was joining them for a few last hours together. "But you finally were with your crush. Think of that and be happy. Finally you hooked up with your crush."

"That's why she needs her weed," said Stacie drolly.

"All my weed is gone. I think somebody jacked it," said Tiffany.

"You like smoked it, stupid," said Stacie.

"We were so messed up," said Mona.

"That needs a correction, yes, I AM so messed up," Yadira said. "I thought I dreamed that hole in the wall happened. And T.J. did that? Why did he try to climb our wall? I mean, why did he do that stupid thing?"

The girls, who were slowly eating their burritos together on the floor, now simultaneously studied the wall. Up the old white plaster, three large holes gaped. Caverns of loosened adobe soil, once in the shape of bricks, showed in each hole. Where the historical energy of the sun's past had held the mud together and molded it into a rectangle, the installation of rock climbing pitons had dug out three chunks. At the base of the wall where their couch had been for three years (they'd sold it), the streaming cataract of destroyed adobe sand had formed a reddish orange pyramid exceeding the volume necessary to bury a small dog.

"I know what happened," Tiffany said. "I was right here. First some asshole gave him a suck on the nitrous oxide and you know that makes some people think they can do all this crazy shit and then a guy had these three fucking doohickeys that you use to climb like fucking Alpine rocks or something, that you can put into a brick wall or something, and T.J. said he was sure he could climb our wall if he could put those in the wall and he would go all the way to the ceiling. He said he put some of them up in another adobe house and he climbed those ones. He just stuck them in there, some chick gave him one of her shoes, those big tall things with big heels, and he acted like he was a pro at it or something. He hammered them in and people were screaming at him not to do it, but he didn't give a shit about what all the people were telling him like he was going to ruin the wall and he was probably going to fall. But he did climb it, actually. It was pretty impressive. Everybody was cheering. You were there Yadira. Okay, I was pissed, but he climbed using those ring things and ropes and then this other guy hung onto T.J.'s legs and he fell off the top piton thingy, I think it was called, and the other ones came out of the adobe, too. And the wall started falling apart. Kinda like it is."

"Oh, God, I wish I'd been sober through even some of the night, a little bit of the fucking night, when I was with my T.J. This morning I woke up with T.J. in my arms and it was like a dream come true, but I don't remember anything, nothing," cried Yadira.

"You're kidding," said Stacie, munching her burrito in shock. "After all the work we did to get him to the party and you in the bed of your big crush and you like don't remember any of it?"

"I was in his arms. I woke up in his big arms." Yadira broke down. "You can't understand how I feel right now."

"Don't cry," said Tiffany. "He's not even worth it at all." Tiffany slid next to Yadira and hugged her.

"He is," Yadira protested.

"Look what he did to your wall, girl. Dude, he was so cold to you," said Tiffany.

"No, he wasn't. He wasn't. He wasn't cold. He was stuck with a cactus, that's all."

"That part happened later. He climbed the wall before he fell in the cactus," someone pointed out.

"He was messed up," Yadira said, ignoring that, "with nitrous oxide and the vodka and watermelon and he couldn't remember anything, because of the pain of all the cactuses in him everywhere. We should have taken him to the hospital."

"You told us not to!" cried Stacie. "You begged us not to. We wanted to take him."

"That's right. I was there," said Mona.

"You did tell us not to take him," mumbled a girl named Morgan with her mouth full.

"I think he was cold," said Tiffany.

"I agree," said Morgan.

"Yadira, face it, he fucking ruined your wall," said Tiffany.

"Yeah, that's true, Yadira," said Mona with her mouth full.

"Shut up. Shut up, all of you. I wish I'd even seen that, him climbing my wall and wrecking it and costing me a bunch of money. You know I'll pay for it if we lose our deposit and I have to wash dishes in Chicago. I'll work at the ballpark with my little sister and I'll work and I'll work every night," said Yadira. "My little T.J. I've loved him for four years. He was my crush and he was climbing my wall. MY wall at MY house. I'm not ever going to get to see him anymore. I feel like I'm gonna be sick, by the way."

"Take a bite of your burrito," someone suggested.

"I can't," said Yadira.

"Just a teensy one," someone urged.

"Okay," Yadira agreed, nibbling carefully. She chewed quietly for a moment. "Why the fuck am I moving back to Chicago?" she said, bursting out with more loud confessions again. "Does anyone here know? To live with my fucking parents? Am I clueless, or what?" said Yadira after she swallowed.

"Or what," someone said.

"T.J. didn't even know how I knew him from when he woke up. He didn't know who I was. We were in Yuma Hall together in our freshman year and he was right down the hall from me and we shared the same major and all those communication classes. We had a bunch of them together."

"Huh? Really? You never told me that," said Tiffany.

"Yeah, didn't I? Well, we were. We were in so many classes together. I was in Communication 101 and Communication 102 and then I felt so lucky when he was in Communication 245 with me. I was so happy that year. It was like a fucking miracle for me. And I always said 'hi' to him. We even did some projects together and I pulled his butt out a sling a bunch of times when he didn't do his papers and his projects and things and he didn't even remember me, not at all."

The girls were silent at this shocking, embarrassing information. What could they possibly say to console her?

"You're telling us that we got you in bed with your honey, finally, and he like didn't know who you were?" asked Stacie.

"That's fucking right," said Yadira, lashing out. "So laugh all you want to."

"We don't want to laugh," said Tiffany, stifling a laugh. "But you're saying you don't remember anything that happened when you were with him?"

"Right," said Yadira snappishly. "I just remember a few things. I remember waking up. Ah, hell, I need more weed."

"Where are those beers?" asked Stacie. "Text Itzel. Or Maribel."

"He called me Jaydee. How the fuck is Jaydee even a name? Who is that shitty broad, Jaydee? Who's she anyway?" whined Yadira, getting worked up again.

"I don't know any chick named Jaydee. I know a Kaydee in high school," said Tiffany.

"Me neither," said Mona.

"I do not know a Jaydee," said Stacie. "I've never even like heard that name until now. Believe me."

Nobody confessed to knowing anyone in their entire life named Jaydee. They swore oaths that if they did know someone named Jaydee they would inform Yadira and they promised to ask around to see if anyone they knew remembered a Jaydee girl who might have been hanging around at their party.

"Listen, Yadira. Some other guy actually brought the wall down. It wasn't T.J., technically speaking. It wasn't actually him. Okay, you got that? And we're gonna fix that wall anyway," said Mona.

"Oh, that makes me feel a little better, since I invited him here. And you need that money for New York, Tiff. And Stacie needs it for Santa Rosita, for California. And I need it, I need it for going back to Chicago. To live with my parents. To work at the ballpark with my sixteen- year-old sister. Me, a communications major. Oh, boy, I am so wasted. Why didn't you guys stop me before I did all that weed and shit?"

"It's not so bad really, Yadira," said Tiffany, optimistically, "don't feel too bad. We haven't lost the security deposit yet or been like sued or anything. I think we can all team up and fix it. I've got this filler, this plaster—they said it was the right type at the hardware store—fast drying and everything—and we'll just try to patch it until it doesn't show. Mr. Holmes is never going to know the difference once we get paint on the spot, okay, so don't worry about it. Besides, he is a really nice guy, Mr. Holmes. Even if he figures out that we patched those spots he won't get mad. I know him. He's a push-over. Remember we broke that part of the heater?"

"Yeah, that's true. He like forgave us," said Stacie.

"And when somebody we didn't even know kicked in the door panel? He wasn't mad. I just told him how much we loved the house and how happy we were living here and all and he forgave us," said Tiffany.

"And the dog," someone added.

"Oh yeah, you guys rescued that little doggie and he totally didn't get mad about it. Even when it bit him in the backyard."

"Yeah, he's a real idiot," said Mona.

"Oh no, he's a nice old guy," said Tiffany.

"Better than my creepy landlord," said Mona.

"He really stole your underwear out of the dryer?" asked Tiffany.

"Really. I think so. I'm moving next month, just in case," Mona assured them.

Tiffany stood up and walked over to the wall until she stood under the hole. She tried to show the girls who were all looking at her that the biggest hole was less than the span of her palm, but the moment she was close to the holes and barely touched the plaster at the side of one, a large section of plaster let loose on her head.

"Ay, oh God," she shouted. She jumped back, screaming, and the other girls screeched, too.

A great plume of choking pink dust rose in the room. Dissolved adobe spewed out. Falling, falling, the brown soil rained.

All the girls collapsed in a mass of laughing, giggling and screeching. They protected their burritos from the dust. Tiffany held her arms up for an instant and then jumped away as another large mass of adobe fell.

When the dust cleared, two of the holes were twice their original sizes.

"You are doing a good job on the wall, by the way," said Stacie, giving the thumbs-up sign, "a really bitching job of it, Tiff."

"Surprise!" shouted another group of girlfriends, shoving open the front door. "We came to help you pack. This is it! The Big Goodbye Wasted Burrito Party starts now! Is everybody ready?"

"Cervazas, ayeeee! Do you want them, girls," screamed a little blonde.

"What the fuck is that huge hole in your wall doing?" asked a large girl with extremely thin, pierced eyebrows.

Chapter Five

"Listen," said the large girl, whose name was Itzel. She was talking loudly and tugging down the cut and unraveling hem of her black denim miniskirt. "We're gonna fix this here wall today. This is a disgrace. All of us girls are gonna fix Stace and Yadira and Tiff's wall right now for them. We're gonna eat and then fix this goddamn wall. I'm gonna organize us, okay? My dad usta plaster for a living and I know what to do in a case like this, but this is a big disgrace, man."

"Oh, wow, maybe we can get him—" began Yadira.

"No, we can't. He taught me everything we need to know and we can do this ourselves," she interrupted. "I know what to do for a big wrecked adobe wall like this and now I'm gonna organize us, okay? So do you have the stuff to fill it with? And do you got the trowels that we need?"

"Sure, sure," said everyone, amiably enough, holding up trowels and the pail of filler.

"Okay, so we have the supplies to get started. That's important. Now, first I have to think about how we're gonna do it given the type of wall and the damage and everything."

Everyone nodded.

She sank down on the floor, stretched out and shut her eyes. Within fifteen seconds, she was sound asleep.

At first, the other girls were too shocked by her behavior and too afraid of her to say anything. They sat looking at each other, making big eyes in her direction, and snickering. Thinking that she would wake up any minute, they remained silent, but eventually they gave up on her and began talking among themselves.

Yadira was lying on the floor near Itzel, stretched out on her side, watching her friends, some of whom were now up on their feet shoving white filler into the holes in the adobe wall using wide trowels. After they had put an insufficient quantity of the filler into one hole, they stepped back confidently and admired their handiwork.

"It's kinda going in too far," said a critic from the floor. "You need to fill it to go out some cuz it's gonna shrink."

"That's just your angle," said one of the workers who was standing. "It just looks that way cuz you're down low."

"No, she's right. It's really going in like," said Stacie. "You gotta put some more stuff in."

"You won't notice that if I put some texture on it," said one girl. She grabbed a triangular trowel and tried to add bumps, but she gouged a hunk out of the patch instead. "Oh shit," she said, laughing at the damage.

"Oh, that looks great," said Tiffany sarcastically. "Now I gotta fix what you screwed up!"

With some more work, they had filled that hole badly enough. They were going to have to wait an hour before painting the badly done patch, though. While waiting, they got a chair and tackled the higher hole. Some of them were too hung over and too drunk to stand on the chair for long and they took turns at the job.

"You guys are such friends," said Yadira, admiring their work. "You're saving us our deposit and butts. Maybe we would have been sued in small claims. Go on, Stace, tell me about the thorns in my T.J. Tell me about how it was when T.J. came into the house with all the cactus thorns in him." She spoke forlornly, addressing Stacie, especially, "I wanna hear all about him and what happened to him last night. How did he get in the cactus? Who pushed him in?"

"He fell in on his own," said Stacie coldly. "And you know I don't want to talk about him. You should have heard what he said to me. I really can't stand that jerk. I'm glad you hooked up with him, cuz he's like been your crush for years, but personally, I can't stand him."

"I'll tell you about him," said Mona, struggling out of her position lying on the floor with a beer propped on her stomach. "There were all these thorns. Thorn, after thorn, after thorn." Each time she said the word 'thorn' she managed to elongate the sound, taking the th and making it sound most decidedly prickly and dangerous and one felt that the thorn was being plucked out of someone as she said the word. "I don't think I've ever seen anyone with so many pieces of cactus stuck in so many different places. He had them all over his body, on his back and his legs, even his feet, believe me, it was amazingly awful to see it. I have never seen anyone with so many pieces of cactus stuck into him." With this, every girl agreed. There were five of them still eating burritos and drinking beers, and three plastering the wall and drinking beers, and three lying on the floor smoking weed, and Itzel sleeping. Itzel was snoring now with her lips pursed.

"He had so many pieces of cactus in him. And everyone was saying let's take him to the hospital but he wouldn't go," Mona explained.

"That was really fucking brave of him," Yadira observed.

"Yadira, why are you saying he was brave? He was completely out of it. The guy was so wasted it wasn't funny. And it was you, Yadira, that begged us not to take him," said Tiffany, "it's not like he really wanted to be strong or something."

"Hey, shut up about that, Tiff," said Yadira aggressively. She wasn't sure herself why she was attacking Tiffany or defending her memory of T.J., which was already fading in light of the realization that he did not actually know who she was. It wasn't as though she was a woman scorned, though. T.J. never scorned any woman; they all excited him equally. It was beginning to sink in through her drug-hazed brain that her interest in T.J. had evaporated. She was becoming more philosophical about it, even seeing a tinge of humor about the fact that she had slept with someone who thought her name was Kaydee or Jaydee or something. Yadira took it as a good sign that she was beginning to forget what her name was supposed to have been.

"So they took him to the bathroom and started working on him. God, he has a lovely body. He is so trim like," said Mona, "and his abs are amazing. Everyone was drooling over his bod."

"No, no, no," whimpered Yadira, "I can't take this. I was so wasted. I don't remember anything about what happened with my crush. My four-year-long crush. And it's all over!" At this, Yadira groaned long and mournfully.

"You slept with him," they all exclaimed.

"I don't remember any of it! And neither does he," Yadira cried.

"So what. That happens to me all the time," said Tiffany.

"Shit," Yadira cried.

"Bad stuff like happens to good people," said Stacie.

"Don't torment her. Don't," said Mona.

"There were cactus pieces hanging on him and he was moaning and groaning. Poor baby, all the girls said. You poor, poor baby. Somebody was speaking to him in Spanish saying poor, poor baby over and over again and again. That's what they were saying in Spanish to him," said Tiffany.

"Maybe that was that Jaydee bitch?" Yadira suggested.

"I don't think so. They weren't any Jaydees there," Stacie explained.

"No, I knew them all. There were not any Jaydees," said Mona.

"Who were they?" asked Yadira.

"Well, I knew them," said Mona cautiously, "but not like I really knew them with their names attached or anything."

"Uh huh," said Yadira narrowing her eyes at Mona. She sat for a moment trying to focus on the way her friend was evading her question, but with her brain so hung over she couldn't keep her mind on one topic for long. "Ohhhhh," Yadira let out a long tortured cry suddenly. "Why couldn't I have been there?"

"You WERE there," everyone shouted back at her at once. They began laughing at her.

Hearing them shouting, Itzel opened her eyes for a moment. She looked blankly around the room.

"No, I wasn't," said Yadira firmly.

"Yeah, girl, you fucking were," said someone. "I saw you, and so did everyone else who's sitting here on your floor."

"Well, why couldn't I have been sober," Yadira protested. "Why couldn't I have been able to remember me being there to help him?"

Itzel awakened further when she noticed the girls repairing the adobe wall.

"Did you spray the adobe with water first?" she asked, clearing her throat and blinking.

"No," said the girl with the filler can.

"Oh, shit, then it's all gonna fall out," she declared before she closed her eyes and fell asleep again.

"Do you think she's right?" asked Stacie in a whisper.

Tiffany shrugged. "Hope not."

Tiffany thought about the prior night for a moment. "What a nice back T. J.'s got," she said. "He's such a gym rat. Sheesh."

"Shut up. Just the fuck shut up about his back. I don't want to hear about him," said Yadira.

"Don't like torment her," said Stacie.

"Well, you have to admit he has good points," Tiff added.

"I don't have to," said Stacie, obstinately, to herself.

"I'm never gonna be with him again and he didn't ever know who I was and why I invited him. To my party and to sleep with him," whined Yadira.

"Let's get off this topic. You know what? I'm going to miss this town," said Stacie.

"Shit, yeah," everyone agreed.

"So, so real," someone said.

Stacie said, "I think it's like the border. I never lived so near the border. Shit, this place was crazy for four fucking years of the best craziness I'm ever going to know. I do not want to settle down and settle. I want it to go on and on."

"I want to get back there, to Chicago. But I don't, too, mostly," Yadira said. "I miss the fall. I miss stuff. I'm going to miss this place, too. Serapes and burritos. Drugs."

"I know what you mean," said Tiffany.

"That so, erp, so proud," said Mona.

"What do you mean?" someone asked.

"Some word like that—'proud'," said Mona.

Everyone laughed.

"I have never done so many shitting drugs as out here. In the desert," said Yadira, by way of explaining herself.

"We will never be able to do this many drugs again," said Stacie. "Other places aren't free enough. People can't be free there."

"Yeah. It's true. We could do what we wanted here. Nobody cared," Tiffany said.

Then one of the girls came out from using the bathroom, by way of the back bedroom.

She came out to tell them something was there, somethings, besides the pile of luggage, and those somethings were kind of weird, actually.

"I smelled a stink in your bedroom, Tiff. I went back there to see if you had vomited back there, too, and I found somebody left some weird shit in some pails for you."

Chapter Six

"Something does stink," exclaimed Mona, coming into Tiffany's bedroom and switching on the light.

"What is this?" asked Stacie, coming in behind Mona, and walking around a pile of luggage and boxes.

Seven large gray pails sat in the darkest corner of the room.

"Oh God!" exclaimed Tiffany. She'd crashed in the living room after the party and had not gone back to her bedroom for more than a few minutes since the party started the day before.

"Eauw," said Mona. "What is in there? What is this?"

"This is like horrible. That's what this is," said Stacie.

Across the bottom of each pail there was a layer of sawdust and on top of the sawdust a greenish-gray ooze spread in blobs, and only after they had studied the ooze for a while did they realize what they were looking at. A heap of toads merged together in a strange terrain of bumps and boils with eyes seeming to pop out unexpectedly.

"Toads. Some kind of like... toads. Who would do such a horrible thing like this to us?" asked Stacie.

Girls crowded around the pails. No matter how long you looked at the packed mass of toads in the bottom of the pails there was no way to sort out exactly where one toad began and the other ended, for the undulating surface of toad bodies stretched across the sawdust, not revealing their legs and feet, which were tucked under their bodies. The huge protruding eyes were watery and yellow and had strange pupils that were nearly closed, looking nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. The way some of the smaller toad bodies had been placed made the whole mass look like an expanse of toad skin, some commingled array of amphibian flesh, a toad slab, a cake sheet of bumpy toad spread over the pail bottom. Irregular, warty sacs clung to their necks. They were vapid, cold, languid and grotesque. Their blank expressions, their fatuity, their primordial morbidity, gave the impression of a sad, sickly swamp.

"What? What's the fucks?" Itzel was awake and joined them.

"There're toads in buckets in here," said Yadira.

"What the—. You know some messed up people," said Itzel. "You got the evil eye on you."

"Eyes. Plural. Tiff, there's a long note. It's got your name on it. It's pages and pages long. It's all scribbly," said Mona.

Tiffany snatched the note away. She held it up to her face and tried to read. Reading was painfully difficult in her drug-hangover state, and with the crazy handwriting, but she eventually managed to understand what was written. "Oh my God," she exclaimed. She read for a while longer. "Oh hell. This fucking druggie tool."

"What is it?" asked Stacie.

"He is such a tool. He never got anything I said straight any time we ever talked. I guess he thought I wanted his stupid toads to start a business selling drugs!" exclaimed Tiffany.

"Some dude thought you wanted to sell drugs? He thought you wanted these toads? He dumped these on you?" asked Mona.

"He's telling me how to set up the terrariums and how to make the drugs from these poor toads that he bought from some other messed up dude. That guy took the aquariums back, but he didn't want the toads," Tiffany said.

"Aye! Changos! Carumba!" said Itzel, "I gotta sleep." She wandered away to the living room again, tugging her skirt down drowsily.

"These poor things have been prisoners and the stuff off their backs has been harvested for people to smoke. They're Colorado River Toads. I never agreed to take his stupid toads. Did I agree to take this jerk's stupid toads for him?" Tiffany was fingering her heart necklace nervously.

"I dunno," said Stacie suspiciously, "did you?"

"No, I did not. I'm telling you, I don't remember that. Does anyone remember me saying I was going to take care of some dude's toads? I musta been really wasted. I don't think I was ever that wasted, though. This guy is a total tool. I think I remember him," Tiffany concluded.

"Why can't he take them back?" asked Mona.

"He left. To go to Utah," Tiffany explained, "He says so in here. I don't even have his number anymore. He left them with me as a gift because he thought they'd get confiscated at the border."

After a brief discussion, they decided to drag the toad pails out of the bedroom and keep them in the bathroom, which seemed cooler and moister and it had a fan to remove the smell. The bumpy warty flesh of the toads, spread at the bottom of the pails, contrasted sharply with the old pink and green tub and tile interior of the bathroom. A strange decal once pasted to a pink tile by the old lady who lived there showed the silhouette of a naked woman who arched her back and scrubbed herself with a bath brush. Now it looked as though she was trying to scrub herself clean from the nearness of the horrid, warty amphibian flesh.

"I'm pretty sure the guy who left these is that guy who hit on me at the party in Reddington Pass," said Stacie, when they had the pails moved.

"Yeah, him," said Tiffany. "That's the dude I'm thinking of. It was him. Skinny guy with a long brown ponytail?"

"Oh, he's a tool. I know him," said Mona.

"These are his toads?" asked Yadira.

"Yeah, he was so anti-environmental," said Tiffany.

"I know that tool. He was a business major nut trying to sell all this stuff off the back of toads. It was horrible," said Mona. "Anti-environment."

"Yeah, he would sell anything. He would sell his own mother. He had no respect for anything in the world. Nothing was sacred or anything. He didn't care. I hated that creepy guy," said Yadira.

"We have to get rid of them. We're going to have to put them outside, free them and everything," said Tiffany.

"Yes, erp, they have to be freed," said Mona.

"I don't feel bad smoking weed. It's like a frickin plant, man. Like lettuce or something. I can't get all upset about lettuce, but I'm not taking an animal prisoner and using it for dope," said Stacie.

"That is so messed up," agreed Mona.

"I know," said Yadira.

"We have to free them," called Itzel from the living room. "Freedom."

"That's right. Free them all," said Tiffany.

"Yeah, we give them their freedom. That should be the last thing we do together. We'll do it tonight. Together," said Stacie, getting a little emotional at the thought of this noble deed being the last thing she did with her roommates.

"That is really tight of us. This is like good karma stuff that you have to do to be tight with your sisters," said Tiffany. "Although these things really make me want to vomit. Oh, he says we have to use gloves to touch them."

"Okay, maybe we have some gloves around. Well, maybe I packed them already?" said Stacie.

"I know, we're gonna give these guys their freedom. We're gonna do it together. This is good karma. You're right," said Yadira.

"Does this mean we're going to have to touch them with gloves even? I don't know. It's gross, really. Do we have to touch them?" asked Mona.

"Well, maybe." Seeing the faces of the others, Tiffany added. "We can do it. We'll have gloves on and we can kinda tip the pails over and ease them out. We gotta make sure we don't hurt these guys."

"I don't like toads, but we can do it," said Yadira.

"While the wall gets fixed. Itzel!" she yelled at the big girl who had returned to the living room, "You're in charge of fixing up these walls, okay. Get another pail of filler if you need it, okay?" said Tiffany as they all walked to the living room.

"Yeah, fucking sure." Itzel hollered that back, and looked surprised to see them near her. She had sat down on the floor and showed no sign of moving.

"Itzel we're leaving you in charge of fixing the wall. The rest of us pack the stuff in the cars. But before we actually leave town we take care of these guys."

"What guys?" asked Maribel who was now preparing a hash pipe in the living room.

"Toads. Can't you keep up?" said Stacie.

"What toads? Did you say toads?"

"There are toads left in Tiffany's bedroom by some asshole who know her," Itzel explained.

"Wow, that's really weird."

"We know. We're going to get rid of the toads, together. Then we hit the road early tomorrow morning," said Stacie.

"This is so tight," said Tiffany. "We're gonna do what's right together."

Chapter Seven

Heat waves rose in ripples of watery deception. Smart animals burrowed far under rocks or rested under shade trees.

Was the hellish asphalt really liquefying under the girls' sandals, fusing the leather soles to the tar with every step? They carried boxes, bags and luggage to Tiffany's car in an endless train of drugged and drunken coeds.

Up the sidewalk toward her porch, Yadira noticed that even the concrete had that searing feeling after basking in the sun all day. The stored heat made walking a slightly painful proposition with thin leather sandals. Even in the shade of the porch, the soles of Yadira's feet continued to burn.

When she walked through the front door, a gaggle of stoned girls sloshed paint brushes carelessly over the two newly filled holes in the living room wall. Itzel had set up small speakers from a phone to play music as she examined the last, biggest hole. Several of the painters stopped to dance.

Yadira walked through the house. In the kitchen the tiny fake sun of the oven light streamed out (someone had cleaned the oven and was airing out the fumes) and it warmed a gigantic volcano of cold auburn coffee grounds piled in the trash. Jutting out at a hundred crazy angles, every kitchen cabinet door stood open; the kitchen was empty and two blackened basketry items, which were once Hohokam-styled hot plates, now hung high on the yellow enameled wall, reminded absolutely no one of the ancient, inefficient housewife who'd lived in the house for seventy years.

Yadira had finished packing her own car and so she continued wandering slowly through the house and finally out the back door into the dirt yard. She still felt hung over. Her head was throbbing above her left temple and she was having a hard time focusing enough to walk. She kept trying to clear her head by shaking it and eating food. Nothing made a bit of difference.

A spray of water from a garden hose slung itself in a heavenly arc over the sky. Stacie was using the hose to make a wet patch at the back of the old shed in the yard of the rental house. They were going to leave the toads there. They had talked it out and that seemed the best solution.

Yadira leaned on the old tin shed and watched the water flying through the air. In the main, Yadira's desperate longing for the hottie T.J. had increased exponentially as the date for her departure from the desert neared. Depressed as she was to have slept with him and to have discovered that he was unable to recognize her, she now realized that his presence in her Home Sweet Home (soon not to be) had thrilled her because she had been waiting three years for him to show up at one of her parties. How ironic it was that he'd fulfilled her wish and thought someone named Jaydee (or was it Kaydee? Yadira could no longer remember what name he had said) had invited him. It was over, her crush on T.J. was kaput.

And what of her love, her crush, at that moment? What if she would have looked him up at that very instant? She would have found T.J. still at home and very much willing to hook up with anyone who was available for the upcoming night. He could not remember the night before, could not recall hooking up with Yadira, though he vaguely knew he had fallen into cactus somewhere in an unknown backyard in the city, and he was still trying to get the smaller, irritating thorns out of his fingers and legs. He planned to go out at about eleven that night to the bar with the giant Easter Island head and see if some of his friends could explain what had happened to him the prior evening, though he was bound to be disappointed because they would remember even less than he did. Everything he learned in communication classes he was quickly forgetting, but that wasn't tragic. His father had announced after the graduation ceremony on the day of Yadira's party that he had bought his son a condo in Happy Valley, north of Phoenix. He could live there and do fuck-all.

And what of the girl with the garden hose, what of Stacie's love life? Who did she think about as she sprayed water on the ground?

It was strange, but she also loved in vain. Her love was a man named Walter Culpepper Boone.

Walt Boone, newly appointed Columbia Professor of Anthropology, had already emptied the tiny room he rented near the university, the one that Stacie had visited (for a hook-up) several times in her last months at school. He had hurriedly packed his bags. Joking with the colleague who was driving him to the airport about the desperately ridiculous undergraduate with lovely thighs who was in love with him, he was not leaving any forwarding address, and he was shutting off his cell phone.

While a post-doc in the desert, Walt had chomped peyote buds with the best of them, frequent strip joints, and gotten drunk in cowboy clubs. He had slept with undergraduates, including Stacie, and used drugs at wild parties. In a large, lonely rock mansion in the desert, he especially enjoyed a sport called coliseums, which involved battles in great glass jars between vinegaroons and tarantulas, palo verde beetles and scorpions. He was one of a group of wild intellectuals, many of whom returned to mundane unspoken existences on the East Coast. While in Arizona, Walt never vaguely hinted of, never even referred to, the really extraordinarily ordinary life he was going back to. He would reenter this boring life the moment he flew out of the desert. His fiancée, planning their wedding on Cape Cod, was having difficulty choosing the wine charms for her goblets without Walter. She was oblivious to the fact that her husband-to-be had recently cheered at the spectacle of insects battling in glass jars.

Stacie had lied to her friends and told them she was going to New York to live with her aunt and uncle. Actually, she was going to New York to throw herself at Walter Culpepper Boone. Tracking him down through mutual friends, she would arrive outside his brownstone exactly a week from the day of the graduation. She would crouch behind a stubby rhododendron at the corner of a nearby wall only to see him walking away in his stupid suit from the home which she quickly discovered he shared with his beautiful and well pulled together wife-to-be. Thus Stacie's fling with Walter was destined to be a colossal flop, bigger than Yadira's crush on T.J, which at least was over. Stacie would stay on in New York with her aunt and uncle until she got her own place. It would take her three years to get over the loss of Mr. Boone.

Yadira left Stacie spraying the ground and walked in the blinding light of the setting sun to Tiffany's bedroom window. On the other side of the open window, Tiffany was staring wistfully at the neglected bed of irises outside her room.

"Hey, girl, what you so deep in thought about?" Yadira asked Tiffany.

"This and that," said Tiffany, but that mild statement of hers was a lie, because one thing and one thing only was on her mind. Her terrible love life.

Tiffany had agreed to leave town early the next morning with Robert, her boyfriend, the one she had decided to keep—God only knew why. By the summer's end, Robert would be enrolled in grad school at UC Santa Rosita and she would be enrolled too. And she didn't actually know how that had happened. Somehow she'd agreed to study the Economics of Tide Pool Environments. And all this was so Robert could go to law school and still surf.

She'd flippantly filled out the application to the Tide Pool Program one bright fall morning, six months earlier. Nothing she was doing then seemed real or important and the only thing she could think of was the next night of drinking and getting through the courses she had and graduating with grades that weren't Fs at Christmas and going on to do the same thing in the spring. Really her thinking about the future, her projections into her future, were rudimentary. Why she was agreeing to live with Robert in Santa Rosita was beyond her. Robert was so excited to be able to surf while in graduate school. It seemed that was all he was thinking about, him being in graduate school and being able to surf. It was something he was obsessed with, but which he had only just discovered in the last year at school. Frankly, though she made fun of Robert's interest in surfing, she wished she had found out something real about her life goals in her last year in college. Instead she was letting herself be succumbed by someone else's goals, letting herself sink into the inevitability of everything. She ought to snap out of it and yet that seemed fundamentally impossible for her no matter how hard she thought about waking up and doing what she really wanted to do. It was simply too hard and took too much planning. Also, the uncertainty of what she was doing intrigued her. The lack of logical planning excited her. She was lulled into a sense of being controlled by forces outside herself, and she wasn't certain why that was happening. Somehow she had lost the assertive edge she used to have. Tiffany had the feeling that once Robert got her to Santa Rosita he would find someone else, or she would find someone else, and she would move out. She and Robert didn't have any kind of future together. He'd never introduced her to his family. He was barely letting her into his life. And yet she was agreeing to help him go to Law School and surf. She wondered if at the last minute she should go back to Corpus Cristi to live with her parents the way Yadira was returning to Chicago and Stacie was going to New York to live with her aunt and uncle. She would have changed her plans for anyone or anything that came along and asked her to. She realized this fact, and it made what she doing all the more stupid. However she was continuing on with The Plans.

When she wrote this essay about Tide Pool Economics she sat there at her desk in the room that looked out on the eastern side yard of the old bungalow and the old bed of irises (probably important plants for the old lady who had once lived there), and she quickly zipped out an utterly bizarre essay on the computer, without a single revision, without thinking. Unconsciously, her stupid grad school application essay, crammed as it was with strange unsubstantiated claims and jumbled ideas about tide pools, had been designed to sabotage her future.

What a shock it was to get the crisp ivory letter of acceptance from the UC Santa Rosita. Even more shocking was the fact that she found herself accepting the offer and monies, rather brightly and cheerfully on the phone while she was talking to some strange man with a creepy deep voice who was named Professor Clive Redtooth and who seemed awfully interested in her welfare, and asked if she was coming to Santa Rosita on her own, and why had she lied and said yes, all the while knowing perfectly well that the Economics of Tide Pool Environments sucked, but she was going on with that and moving to Santa Rosita with Robert, somehow expecting something good to coming out of a relationship with a person whose main interest was his surfboard.

So, now she was destined to study with the world famous madman Clive Montgomery Redtooth who had established quite a reputation as a specialist in tide pool environments. Everyone who was anyone in the new field of biological economics thought (erroneously, in fact) that Professor Redtooth was destined to win a Nobel Prize. Only Professor Redtooth could gaze intently into the pristine world of a tide pool and ignore its beautiful waving dark green weeds and voluptuous shells, its sweet tiny crabs and golden sands, and see instead the savage encroachment and competition of violent biological interests. The incessant struggle, the games of strategy, the convergence of the strategies to a stable point in a game thrilled his mad brain. He loved imposing the rigidity of graphs of encroaching seaweed and their overlapping zones of survival on the sweet, gem-like pools.

In fact, it was Tiffany's bizarre essay that impressed Professor Redtooth with the idea that she was an utterly brainless lunatic, and therefore she might be great in the sack. Also, a close look at her picture, which was part of her application, showed her to be achingly young and full-breasted, and he so hoped she wouldn't have a boyfriend in tow when she arrived in Santa Rosita. He stole her photo out of the applicant pool in violation of all principals and kept it in his desk drawer, staring at it and sighing in long intervals.

Chapter Eight

An hour later, all the hapless toads had been placed under an old mesquite tree behind the flimsy tin shed in the yard of the bungalow, but something was horribly, horribly wrong.

Though it was somewhat light, and the glow of the sun still remained in the western sky, Stacie and Yadira used Stacie's flashlight to skim ahead to the bottom of a dark hedge where they discovered a furry tail, a dirty paw, and a humongous orange tabby, lolling stupidly on its back.

They recognized the cat. An annoying six-year-old girl who lived next door had a simpering way of calling it constantly, "Mr. Biggs! Oh, Mr. Biggs!" and in order to escape her, the cat often crouched in their oleander hedge masquerading as a salmon loaf, sometimes with a light seasoning of dry twigs and moldy leaves stuck to its back. As silly as it looked upside down with its paws stuck in the air, certain fleeting peeks of the tip of the cat's pale pink tongue and a peculiar snip-snap of its needle-sharp teeth warned that any instant the ridiculous-looking fur blob could snap out of its daze and happily try to slaughter the nearest toad. The girls knew Mr. Biggs would have a good chance of dying if it licked the glands of the toads, and most cats did lick them before they tried to bite. Yadira, Stacie and Tiffany knew they had to try to save the cat's life, if only for the sake of the silly six-year-old.

"God damn you, you stinker," Yadira cried, dashing directly at Mr. Biggs, pumping her outstretched arms up and down and walloping her thighs with stinging slaps that wrenched her shoulder sockets and sent her lurching sideways. Both girls were wearing gloves, a necessary precaution when touching the toads. Weird whoops and goosey hisses poured out, along with the unconvincing obscenities.

But they'd left the toads under the mesquite's lowest, crisscrossed branches; Stacie couldn't get her hands on the cat and pitch it headlong over the hedge or against a sharp rock wall without groveling across the dark toad-covered mud. A single misstep and she'd squish one of them! So she stood outside the umbrella of the tree branches, leaping up and down, her ponytail jouncing jauntily.

After a shocked moment, during which Stacie's view of the cat was obscured by Yadira's flying elbows and bouncing butt, Stacie made a decision to help. She crept forward, still gripping the flashlight, searching relentlessly for the damn cat. When she finally located it, it was exactly where it had been, completely unfazed and unaware that anything was expected of it, perhaps dully hoping for an affectionate pat.

Stacie squatted and waddled as close to the cat as the low branches allowed. Placing the flashlight at her feet, she leaned forward and smacked her outstretched hands. Well satisfied with the cracking spank, she picked up the flashlight and aimed the beam where Mr. Biggs should not have been, just in time to see the peachy cat barely flick the last millimeter of his plump tail. Slamming the flashlight down angrily, Stacie clapped her hands again, so hard the second time that it left her palms tingling. A quick check with the flashlight showed Mr. Biggs as he twitched an ear.

Yadira dropped to her knees and dragged her fingers over the sticky mud. Gathering a handful of goo, she packed it together furiously and when the ball was very large and firm, she adopted a catcher's stance and flung it. The mud bomb sailed over the dumb cat and splattered against the tin siding of the shed. Not a muscle rippled on the furry physique of Mr. Biggs.

A frustrated Yadira raked the mud madly and bombarded the impassive cat, peppering it with flying mud gobs and dry grass tuffs and mesquite beans, all of which in her haste went wide of the mark.

"No," whispered Stacie, restraining her friend's arm, "waaaaaaaait. I'll get him."

Shuffling away quietly, Stacie rounded the mesquite and reconnoitered to the south. There the cat's right flank was exposed. Approaching gingerly from alongside a slouching picket fence, sneaking closer and closer, Stacie's stooped figure stole up on Mr. Biggs. Yadira watched her friend in silhouette against a streetlight as she appeared to wade knee-deep through the same cholla patch that her dear T.J. had so stupidly sat upon only the night before. It was only an optical illusion; Stacie was nowhere near the patch.

Stacie almost had the cat when, as she leaned down to make the grab, she rested her hand ever so slightly on the fence. The picket she touched was so blighted and rotted, so eaten away and undermined, that its wasted length could not withstand an ounce of weight. A crack, a great happy pop, sounded. Her hand broke the brittle picket, severing its backbone and bringing her full weight onto a horizontal board. After thirty years of desiccation in the Arizona sun, and having any remaining wood fibers eagerly devoured by half-starved termites, this board's honeycombed bones, waited to fulfill one mission before returning to the earth. To snap now was its fate. To snap with the loudest most definite snap imaginable was the perfection of its existence. So, perfectly and exactly it broke, dropping the whole length of the fence precipitously careening over and carrying the unfortunate Stacie toppling with it.

Down, down, down she plunged into that muddy hole where earlier she had concentrated the hose. Luckily, she didn't land directly on a toad's fragile frame, though one shuffled ahead of her sizeable splash.

"Stace!" Yadira called.

Stacie wallowed in the goop, pitching in farther and plumping down several times.

"Stace! Did you hurt yourself?"

Eventually, rolling onto her knees, Stacie dragged herself out of the brown ooze, shaking her head dazedly. She struggled to her feet and, wiping long brown mud smears on her thighs, began to curse. She expended a large number of obscenities at the offending fur ball, which disdained to even glance in her direction, though a mysterious transcendentalist masseuse who lived behind them and who no one had seen in months appeared in hair curlers at her window and tapped an angry warning at the screaming girl.

"I hope Mr. Holmes doesn't come back here for a while," said Yadira, referring to his probable reaction to the fence Stacie had just smashed. Mr. Holmes was sensitive about the junk at the back of his old home.

Feeling braced after her tirade, Stacie strode to a heap of rusting yard equipment that leaned against the side of the shed. "Let's get something to poke that stupid cat with."

"I am so wasted," said Yadira, joining her in the search.

Together they groped through the dark jumble for a suitable weapon. When a long shaft Yadira grabbed turned out to be attached to a heavy lawn mower, they began clawing desperately at anything upright. Then with a grate, a creak and several loud clanks, something twanged and parts of the pile slumped away. The pile hit the flimsy shed.

For a moment nothing happened, and then the entire shed shifted with a loud grating groan.

"Shit," cried Stacie, looking up in the night sky and seeing the shadowy bulk of the shed slumping sideways.

They froze in horror. When the shed finally stopped moving and groaning, it was still upright, barely. "Mr. Holmes is not gonna like that. He's gotta thing for that stupid shed," said Stacie.

A black spot scrambled away. They had left the flashlight somewhere on the ground, but they were certain they wouldn't have wanted to see what happened to the shed or what ran from them.

"Now I really hope Mr. Holmes doesn't look back here," said Stacie.

"It probably only looks like it's gonna fall over," added Yadira hopefully.

It took a moment for Stacie to work up the guts to put her hand in the pile again and immediately she touched a vintage rake, square-headed with widely spaced teeth. She drew it up and bandied the thing, wielding it like a sword, brandishing it upward and whisking it about. To and fro, up and down, wibble-wabble, it flew through the air toward the spot where the fat cat laid. Raising it high like some giant baby comb, she worked it through the branches. When it was above the cat, she dropped it.

The falling rake glanced off an unseen branch, changed course, slid down and hit the mud quite far from Mr. Biggs (and the toads) where it promptly broke into two short pieces. Mr. Biggs, believing he was about to be brushed, rolled obligingly onto his side and purred.

At this point the urge to pummel the cat overwhelmed Yadira's wasted sense. She scuttled forward, crab-like. Unfortunately several unyielding branches of the big mesquite tree were jabbing toward her. After only a few shuffling lunges she had neatly skewered herself. With an agonizing wail, she stumbled back, clasping her injured forehead.

"Goddamn, my head!" she yelled as she stepped in some of the pieces of cholla cactus which had been swatted off T.J. the night before.

Where nothing else had worked, Yadira's agonized shriek infuriated the cat.

The marauder yowled several long hideous howls of grave insult and murderous fury as it scuttled away, a few feet at first, and its big belly low to the ground. Rotating its head back at them, it snarled and hissed and zipped toward the low brick wall between their yard and the masseuse's.

"Get!" shouted Stacie, running happily after it. Yadira limped along. She had knocked the big piece of cactus off her foot, but she could feel the teeny glocoids.

"We saved you a visit to the vets," said Yadira. "The least you could do is leave us alone." Her logic was not operative on the single minded Mr. Biggs.

Having lured them to the wall, the cat circled around and scurried back to the toads. Stacie and Yadira were hampered in their attempt to follow him by the fact that all they could glimpse were running images of its creepy golden eyes and every few feet corroded lengths of iron pipe poked out of the soil from a long forgotten goldfish pond.

From Stacie's point of view the situation was deteriorating. She was muddy and disheveled; they had made a hash of rescuing the toads and all she could think of was having something to drink. Her hung-over head throbbed from the run-in with the fence and an impotent kick she managed every so often in the cat's direction made her aware that the bottom of her platform sandals were coated with big sloppy biscuits of unwieldy mud. The cat on the other hand had triumphed in so many backyard clashes with other cats that it wasn't about to be driven away from so marvelous a treat as an entire yard full of interesting, live lumps.

"We'll have to take them all back inside," cried an out-of-breath Stacie.

Yadira started to limp back to the house. "I'll get the pails," she said.

"Forget the pails. We don't have the energy. Let's just carry them with the gloves."

"I'm too wasted," agreed Yadira, "We have to get this done or I'm gonna collapse."

Returning the toads to the house meant waging a moving war. Nothing stopped the adamant cat. No amount of kicking or strange human sputtering could keep Mr. Biggs from trailing the toads as one by one they were carried back to the house and dumped into their pails.

At one point Tiffany joined them, remembering a bowl of cat food always left out for Mr. Biggs. She vaulted through the hedge and snatched a smelly handful.

"Here, puss, puss," she said unconvincingly.

Mr. Biggs gobbled the red, green, and yellow treats, crunching the dry food hastily with its creepy head held sideways. But as quickly as they threw the food down it gobbled it and began another skirmish, clawing their bare ankles and tripping them up.

With each journey, when they got to the back door, Mr. Biggs tried to push past them to get into the house. "Get, get. Get away," they screamed.

At last all the toads were in and they closed the door on Mr. Biggs who continued to yowl outside and batter the rear doors and windows.

They counted the toads. "Only seven! We're missing three!" Yadira said.

Itzel came into the bathroom. "So now you're losing them?" she said drily.

"The ones that crawled away—they're on their own," Stacie explained.

"Is that more karma shit?" asked Itzel.

Yadira closed the toilet top and collapsed onto it. Her chest was heaving. "I am so wasted. I have never done this much crap when I was so wasted."

Chapter Nine

"Is this—?" asked Stacie.

"It's right around here...the place I had in mind for them. I thought this was the street. Oh, I know. We're almost there," said Yadira happily. "It's right around this corner!"

"Is that damn cat still following us?" asked Tiffany.

"No, I think we lost him," said Stacie, glancing back. "Itzel scared him."

"He was trying so hard to kill himself with toad crap," said Yadira.

The line of three girls, Stacie, Tiffany, and Yadira, slackened their pace. They began to falter. "How can we...is it up here?" Someone lurched forward.

"You don't know which street?"

Heading east on Eighth, then turning on Stadium, the line of girls carried the toads in their plastic pails. Each pail had one large toad or several small toads in it. The handles of the rubbery basins bent ominously. The girls bore the pails under hunched shoulders, shuffling hurriedly, unable to look forward without straining their necks.

An anonymous-looking sun-burnt lady in the backseat of a bagged, primer-painted Honda leaned out the car window and looked up eagerly as the police copter ripped the darkening sky, banking slowly away in the direction of the rail lines. "Fancy cops," she muttered, ducking back inside. She sawed vigorously at a press-on nail. "You're scaring away the aliens!" she screamed. "This is the biggest little hick town in America. They'd arrest a fucking cactus for jaywalking."

She glared at the line of startled, muddy girls blundering across the crosswalk in front of her car.

"It's down here," Yadira said, once they had safely passed the Honda and the screaming woman. "It's a really good place for them."

"I hope so. I don't want to feel guilty any more about these toads," said Tiffany.

"It looked like the perfect place," said Stacie.

As Yadira had explained it, she had an idea of where to leave the toads, a place that was better than the backyard of the old house. She told Stacie and Tiffany that she remembered something she'd seen while trudging home from the university weeks earlier on a nearby street. Out of the corner of her eye, it being so hot, her eye caught a tiny glistening stream of water from a Jacuzzi that had been installed in a backyard. The Jacuzzi had a drain line that was running out a back gate. The stream from a hose flowed down the banks of an arroyo onto the sand bed of the arroyo making a little toad swimming pool. The arroyo bed and banks were also thick with shrubs and bushes. This was the ideal place for them to take the toads. She wondered herself why hadn't she thought of this great idea before when they tried to put the toads in the backyard. That had been a terrible idea, since there wasn't any way to make sure the soil stayed wet for a while and the cat didn't bother them and get killed, though they'd never liked Mr. Biggs very much, and even less now. This idea was much better because Colorado River Toads lived in the arroyos, as far as Yadira knew; she'd heard the horrible ruckus they made from the arroyos in town; it sounded like a lamb being slaughtered. And Tiffany and Stacie agreed that leaving the toads in an arroyo seemed correct. A dripping Jacuzzi would be the perfect thing to keep the soil moist. Tiffany thought if they put the toads in the moist sand it would be soft enough that the toads could hide themselves before the morning. Or if they wanted to hide in brush they could. There might be cats and dogs after them, but probably not before the toads would hide themselves. The toads could wait there until the summer rains and then emerge. Anyway, the toads themselves would know what to do, and the girls wouldn't have to worry too much about where they left them as long as there was enough cover, brush, and moist sand. They were quite sure of that.

When the girls neared the dripping Jacuzzi, a yellow Gremlin stood in their way. It was backed into the bare edge of the arroyo, parked so that it straddled the part of the arroyo bank at the rear of a house, right in the spot where Yadira thought they could climb down the dirt bank into the bed of the arroyo. The dripping Jacuzzi was only fifty feet farther from the street. The other bank was too steep and too thickly overgrown with thorny trees and cactus for them to make their way down.

"What's this?" asked Yadira when she saw the little car blocking their way down to the arroyo.

"Somebody's parked in the way," said Stacie.

The Gremlin was a wreck. Dented canyons at the car's rear were of sufficient depth to have housed miniature dioramas of canyon cliff dwellings. The car's side panels were unsparingly buttered with pinkish gobs of Bondo and had been spray painted various blue hues. Tape crisscrossed the rear brake light cover, holding it in place. At the back of the Gremlin a tiny pink trailer, the color of used chewing gum nosed into the arroyo like a thirsty dinosaur. In places the trailer had been patched with sections of cardboard or plywood. Odd cuts of cardboard, like cereal boxes and such, jammed the windows and lines of rust ran down from the window frames and door in such profusion that it seemed the trailer was bleeding from every orifice. There were dents and dings in the trailer side, and some furniture was strapped to the roof and back. Evidently the owners had been scrounging the neighborhood, taking the choice pieces of metal and the better furniture left out on the curbs when students abandoned their rentals for the summer.

A fire in a hibachi burned near a flat slab of river rock. The whole camp looked like a homey picture, if you had in mind a sort of beat-up home in a trailer and you didn't mind cooking your dinner outdoors near a weedy arroyo.

Outside the bulbous little trailer a man bent down to pry up a tin can lid squashed onto the earth. But the most astounding detail of his appearance awaited. When he struggled to bend over, spreading widely his legs, the action revealed that his pants seam was shredded and he wore no underwear. Across the solar system, the setting sun's rays zoomed in a stream of light particles. These traveling particles, these flecks or specks or dots, these photons, made their blazing entry. At the speed of light the discrete particles flew across all the solar system's great cold blackness, tore in their tiny tearing bits and penetrated the earth's atmosphere and all that distance coming to sunny, sunny Arizona and seemed to bear down especially and intensely, lighting up in all the dark world this one crevice. And that light stream burst forth, unclouded, palpable, conspicuous, and glaring with the mission of brightly illuminating a hideously hairy butt crack.

Light has its purpose, but who could have thought this was it?

"Crap," cried Stacie, falling back. Collectively they wished the sun could be switched off at that very moment and that pageant, spectacle and peep show made sultry and ash.

The figure turned, straightened up, and immediately strolled toward them, scratching his airy bottom. "Howdy."

"Holy—crap," began Yadira, who stood in front, with her eyes tearing. She veered away sharply.

Stacie stopped. "Shit. Shit," she said, checking her steps. "This is shitting spooky," she said under her breath.

The man grappled Stacie's arm and squeezed it tightly. "Hey, pretty giurl. You're welcome to join us." His dirty, bruised face with its fang-like teeth studied her closely. A broad smile spread on his face.

"Oh listen...," began Stacie.

"We're busy," said Tiffany, abruptly trying to pull her friend's arm away from the man's firm grasp.

The man grappled Stacie's arm strongly and turned her his way. He steered her to the camp.

"Why don't you sit down with us and try some scetee beans? Makes a good meal. Lot of people don't know them beans cook up soft and sweet. 'Specially with a can of Bud in them. That's my friend's secret." A toothless man in a Guatemalan hat toasted them with an empty beer can left beside a pot of boiling mesquite beans. "We've got a camp down here tonight and we're happy to share."

"Oh, thank you, but I don't think we're hungry," said Stacie.

"Sit youself down."

"No, we don't have time for this," said Yadira.

"You don't have time for this? What, college giurl, are you writing your dissertation today? I said sit down."

Stacie backed quickly trying to elude him and make a get-away and he put his hand on the bucket. Stacie fought to regain control of the pail.

"Sorry, we can't join you," Yadira called.

"Little smart-ass college bitches," grumbled the man.

"Yeah, sorry," Tiffany added.

At the trailer door a toothless woman jouncing a baby on her hip appeared and tossed a bundle out the door.

The lady stared at the muddy girls with pails. "What's in the pails, dears? Why are you wearing gloves? Were you gonna do some dumpin' down here?"

"Shut up, bitch," hissed the man.

"You donna tell me to shut up!" exploded the lady.

"I can tell you to shut up because when I fucking say something you do it, if you know what's good for you and the—"

"I won't take that shit from you!" The blowsy woman burst out of the trailer doorway. She nearly put another scar on the child who seemed already to have gotten the worst end of fate against the doorframe. As she and the baby came out, the trailer door slammed against the outer wall with so much power it nearly tore from the hinges.

She rushed the man. The smeary-faced baby clung to her, its panicky eyes as big as saucers.

The man dropped Stacie's arm and prepared to throttle the woman. He also began abusing her verbally.

As awful as it was, this domestic argument was the golden opportunity they had been praying for. The three girls dashed away in many directions as fast as they could with acceleration they never realized they were capable of while holding pails full of toads; a fucking retreat was their immediate overriding concern. They made off quickly and worked their escape up the street, the awkward pails, slapping against their thighs, hampering them. A glance over their shoulders showed the horrid man was wrestling with his wife.

"Those freaks," cried Yadira breathlessly outstripping her friends in an effort to be first well away from the camp, "They'll kill the baby. I'll call in an anonymous 911 when we get back to the house."

"God, did you see his pants?" asked Tiffany.

"I did and I wish I hadn't," said Stacie, huffing and puffing.

They reached the top of the street. Yadira led the way. She whirled around the corner pell-mell. They nearer a small strip of undeveloped land that stretched down toward another part of the arroyo.

Out of the back of a thick creosote bush a voice spoke.

"Whatcha got in them pails, girls?"

"Oh God," said Stacie, shrinking back.

Yadira wheeled around, her eyes bugging out. She shuffled her feet faster and faster. Up the cracked asphalt, toward a big pothole, she tried to run as fast as she could.

Suddenly, someone vaulted through the flimsy cover of the bush. It was a man who bounced out and in a split second he'd covered the ground between them and the edge of the road. They recognized him as the man stirring beer into the beans at the fire. He wore baggy camouflage pants and a black T-shirt. On his head he wore a Guatemalan hat and underneath it his hair was a fiery bush of reddish brown sticks.

"Oh God!" screamed the girls.

"Get away!" Yadira tried to swerve into the middle of the street.

"Lemme see whatcha got in them pails," he demanded.

"Please, go away!"

"Keep going. Shit!" cried Stacie.

"Whatcha got in them pails?" He grabbed Yadira roughly by the arm and wrenched her to a stop.

"Leave her alone. Let go of her arm," said Tiffany.

"Don't make me angry," he pleaded. "You don't want to make me angry."

"We don't want to! Just leave us alone and let us get out of here!" cried Stacie.

"Well, I just might and then again I just might not."

"Now, stop!" cried Yadira.

"Gemme those."

"No."

"Do I have to get rough? Lemme see." The man had wild eyes, which they could see better when he pushed his twiggy red hair aside.

"They're just toads. Believe me."

"Toads?"

"Somebody left them with us as a joke."

"You won't even want them," said Tiffany, standing far off.

"Shut up. I decide what I want."

"I just thought—"

"Did I ask you to think? Put 'em down."

Yadira put her pail down.

"Tilt it thisa way. Whoa, whatcha doing with toads?"

"Trying to get rid of them."

"Shut up. You talk." He waved at Stacie.

"We're trying to get rid of them. Someone left them in our house and we're leaving them in the arroyo."

"Yeah? Well, now they're mine. Put 'em down."

"Listen, we feel really responsible for these guys so don't hurt them—" Yadira began in a lecturing tone.

"Shut up. Put 'em down. Slide them over to me."

"All the pails," he ordered. "Now, what else you got?"

"Nothing."

"Where're your purses?"

"We just came out of the house for a second. We didn't bring our purses."

"Didn't bring your purses, huh?" For a moment he studied the pails, rubbing his face, bent over slightly to look in. His face showed amazement at the strange things he had acquired and he was wondering if there was going to be any real value in what he had just stolen because his knowledge of drugs was pretty sketchy and mostly involved its consumption, but he seemed to recall that there was some use of these toad things which he remembered, vaguely. Calculating and measuring and imagining the probable money he might make off of these amphibians and how did these girls end up with...

Stacie grabbed Yadira's arm. The length of their attacker's stupid thoughts had occupied his brain long enough to embolden the two girls. Another escape seemed possible.

They took off. Yadira ran without her pail, Stacie and Tiffany took theirs back.

"Shit!"

"Run, run as fast as you can!"

The thief awakened from counting his chickens to realize some of them were leaving. He began chasing them and was gaining on them, because they were slowed down by the awkward pails that kept banging their legs. But they lucked out when the man happened to glance back at the pail that was left on the street and he saw the other man from the camp creep out of the desert and approach it. Their pursuer swung around to defend what he'd stolen. He returned to his pail of toad in a manner that let Yadira, Stacie and Tiffany know that he and the other man were about to battle.

"That's mine," said the man in the Guatemalan hat, pulling a gun from his waist and pointing it at his friend.

Tiffany, Yadira and Stacie shuffled as fast as they could back to the house with the remaining toads.

Chapter Ten

"We'll call 911," said Tiffany, as soon as they rounded their block. "I'm going to report them for the way that baby was being treated. The police have got to go there and rescue that baby!"

"Watch out, Mr. Biggs," cried Stacie.

"Oh my god, now that stupid cat again," said Tiffany, scuffing forward hurriedly.

"Puss, puss, come here stupid," called Yadira. "Did we drop cat food out here somewhere?"

"Just shoo him," said Tiffany.

The cat began butting his head against the girls as they tried to mount the front porch steps with their pails of toads.

"Back off, will you?" said Stacie to the cat.

"Shoo, shoo, do you want to get sick and die? Do you?" asked Yadira.

"Mewy," said Mr. Biggs desperately.

"He doesn't know what he wants," said Tiffany with disgust.

"When you call, report the guys fighting," said Stacie. She had come in the living room ahead of Yadira and Tiffany and was holding the door. "Report that, too."

"I will. And the guys fighting. The gun. Everything. But I'm not giving my name or our location. We'll have to stay out of it," said Tiffany.

"I hope the police get the toads back," said Yadira, placing her pail on the living room floor.

"Poor things. Imagine having to live with those people," said Tiffany.

"And that poor baby," said Yadira.

"It was so fucking horrible," said Stacie.

"What happened?" asked one of the stoned wall repair crew. "Why do you still have the toads?"

"Oh, you have no idea. What happened to us was shit scary," said Yadira.

"These freaks," began Stacie, "were down near the arroyo in a camp with a trailer and they tried to grab us. They had this little baby—he was so cute—and they were fighting with each other. Screaming and yelling and pushing. This horrible man and the woman from the trailer."

"That sounds scary," said a girl who was painting the wall.

"Meeeep," said Mr. Biggs from the windowsill.

"And then another dude who was with them tried to rob us of the toads when we started running back," said Tiffany. She was dialing 911 and she walked away toward the back of the house.

"You're kidding?" asked Mona.

"He had a gun," said Yadira.

"They got one of the pails from us," added Stacie.

"Poor toads," Mona said.

"So you lost more of the toads?" Itzel said in disbelief. "This is like that murder mystery 'Ten Little Indians, and Then There Were None' and all that shit."

In the main, their efforts on behalf of the toads so far had failed miserably. Three toads had disappeared under their shed and were, perhaps, safe underground, though, in all honesty they had no way to know that those that had escaped were not harmed already. One pail of toads had been taken by the mugger. Ostensibly, Yadira, Stacie and Tiffany ought to have been thoroughly discouraged by their frightening experience with Mr. Biggs coupled with their life-threatening encounters at the arroyo with the horrible family and the final robbery. And, on the face of it, they were lucky to have survived what happened to them without a scrape or bruise. They ought to have been discouraged, but they felt buoyed by it all and more determined than ever to see that these remaining toads were brought to safety. Mushrooming disasters aside, they congratulated themselves on what they had done on behalf of the defenseless toads. The whole adventure roused their spirits and made them feel alive, for they had the dangerous notion that they were doing a spectacular job. Living their own lives with disregard for impinging nonsense of other things would have meant not trying to help the toads, but like many females they had formed an irrational karmic bound with objects thrust upon them by unknown forces, forces that were not benevolent.

They vowed to try again to return the toads to safety in the wild. Cheerfully, Yadira and Stacie lugged the large plastic pails out to Stacie's Jeep and slid them onto the floorboards wherever they could.

"If only one of us knew someone who was like a biology major and was totally cool or something," said Yadira plaintively.

They had to admit none of them had cultivated a friendship with any science majors.

"Oh snap! I know someone. Guys. I think I know what we can do," said Tiffany suddenly. She had joined them after making the 911 call and she'd heard Yadira's comment.

"What?" asked Stacie.

"I knew this professor once," Tiffany began.

"And?" said Yadira.

"He was really cool. He lives in Snob Hollow, near downtown."

"Yes?" said Stacie.

"He is all like nature loving and stuff. He would totally take the toads and contact someone about them. He would make sure they were put back in the wild, if that's the right thing to do and everything. I don't know why I didn't think of it before!"

"You think he'd take them?" asked Stacie.

"I know so. He was so cool," said Tiffany. "And if something goes wrong, he's living close to the Santa Cruz River so we can leave them in the dry river bed."

"Okay, where does he live?" asked Stacie.

"I don't really know the address, but I remember it had a tower and it was in Snob Hollow," Tiffany explained.

Professor Xavier Fernandez was a jovial university professor who liked the music of the Grateful Dead, and as Tiffany explained it, wouldn't it seem likely that he would be willing to take the toads off their hands at this short notice if she explained how she had acquired them and the predicament the toads were in? Wouldn't he, especially after he heard how they had tried to get rid of them and how some had been lost and another stolen, be willing to see them safely to an appropriate location? Or would he know an expert at the university who he could call in the morning?

She remembered this professor's large white adobe house with a cellar and some windows, which were quite narrow and maybe a silly stout tower beside the door. And she thought she remembered that the front door of his house had been painted a bright and peculiar greenish color and surely in all of Snob Hollow, which was a rather small area after all, there could not be many enormous white adobe homes with a tower beside the front door. All they had to do was find it, because his name and phone number she could not remember, but she had some vague notion of how to get there because he had a party one year and she had gone to it and only been half-stoned most of the time.

They admired the wall and told the wall crew that they were doing a great job.

"If they didn't wet the adobe, it's all going to fall out," warned Itzel as Stacie, Yadira and Tiffany left. "Third time's a charm," she added, referring to the two prior attempts to rid themselves of the toads.

Vague indeed was the notion Tiffany's addled brain held of where Professor Fernandez lived. She managed to lead them to Snob Hollow, the area of 19th century mansions and lawyer's offices (named as a joke on San Francisco's Nob Hill), but try as she would, she could not locate the white mansion she'd been in. Around and around they drove, aimlessly stopping and staring at the other large mansions which had once belonged to prominent lawyers and mining engineers. They studied each house looking for the one with a tower that Tiffany remembered.

As the minutes wore on, an increasingly frantic Tiffany ordered Stacie to tear up and down the dark streets examining the homes, looking for the one she'd been at.

Stacie was no help finding the house as her head was filled with jumbled thoughts of dear Walter who she was certain was waiting patiently for her at his apartment. Walter's flight to New York had in fact long since departed.

Grinding gears and stabbing the shift into angles where gears never were installed, Stacie tried to find a safe place to leave the remaining toads. All three of them were secretly reconsidering the idea of letting one of their irresponsible friends take care of the toads when an unusually magnificent mansion surrounded by a veritable jungle of cacti caught their eye. In the midst of the cacti a tiny trimmed lawn was well lit by ornate Victorian streetlights, immaculately restored.

"Stop! That's it," cried Tiffany excitedly.

"Which one?" asked Yadira.

"The big one over there. That's the house," Tiffany said.

"Are you sure?" asked Stacie.

"Absolutely. It's got the tower, everything," Tiffany said. "This is Professor Fernandez's place!"

"Okay then." Stacie looked for a parking spot.

"He's a great guy. I know he's gonna help us."

Stacie pulled the Jeep to the curb and sent Tiffany and Yadira hopping out of the Jeep to ring the doorbell. The two girls stepped across the lawn to the porch and Tiffany rang the bell eagerly.

"It's awesome. We found the house. I know he'll take them. He's a great guy."

"The house looks awfully dark," said Yadira, peering in at a crack in the curtain of a front window.

They waited in front of the door. There wasn't a sound from inside. Tiffany pressed the bell again.

"I don't think I hear anyone in there," said Yadira. She leaned her face against a stained glass window in the front door. They stood awhile longer.

"It's kinda dark," she whispered to Tiffany.

"I guess they aren't home," said Tiffany in resignation. "I can't believe this. We're having such bad luck. He really would have helped us."

"I guess so," said Yadira. "But we could still leave them here if we wrote a note."

"That's true," said Tiffany, brightening.

"We might put the toads over the fence so that they wouldn't be right on the porch."

"Let's make sure there's no dogs," said Tiffany.

The two girls walked to the fence and rattled it. They waited to see if a dog would come.

"Looks okay. Let's go get the toads and we'll be done," said Yadira in relief.

Just then Yadira and Stacie became aware of movement at the property next door. A man and woman were dressed for an evening at the symphony and the couple were watching them suspiciously. The woman held a phone to her ear and was looking nervous.

"They think we're robbing the place!" exclaimed Yadira.

They didn't want to have to explain to the police why they rattled the gate and they didn't want to be caught with the toads, as it would be difficult to explain how they had ended up with so many protected species. There was no choice; they had to get out of there.

They scurried down the driveway, feeling exposed by the Victorian street lights.

"Start the car," yelled Tiffany when they opened the Jeep door.

"Why? What happened?" Stacie asked.

"Just start the car," yelled Yadira. "Get us out of here!"

Stacie started the Jeep and they roared up the street.

"So what happened?" asked Stacie when they had turned the corner.

"Those people standing outside the house next door are probably calling the police. They saw us rattling the side gate and probably thought we wanted to break in. We were looking to see if he had any dogs. We were going to leave a note and put the toads safely over the gate."

"Please, please, couldn't we just leave the toads in the river?" begged Stacie.

"Yeah, okay," said Yadira a little sadly.

They got several blocks from the river itself when Stacie pulled to the side of the road at a dead end. She was looking for clues for where she was in the various, unreadable street signs.

"Oh, I should have turned left back there," she claimed.

Stacie gunned the Jeep and took the next corner at too fast a speed.

One of the toad pails toppled over as the Jeep rounded the corner.

Yadira looked on in horror as a large toad spilled out, struggled on its back for a moment, and then managed to flop forward enough to wedge itself under Stacie's seat.

"Stacie," Yadira yelled, "don't drive so fast. A pail fell over and a toad just got out and went under your seat."

"What the fuck?" exclaimed Stacie.

She yanked the wheel and sent the Jeep careening toward the sidewalk. When the Jeep stopped, Stacie shut off the engine so they could concentrate on the hidden toad.

"I'll get it," said Tiffany helpfully. They had brought gloves with them to handle the toads and Tiffany grabbed a pair from the dashboard.

Once the gloves were on, Tiffany reached carefully under Stacie seat. In a few seconds she had hold of the toad, but it wanted its freedom desperately. The toad had powerful hind legs and Tiffany struggled to hold it. As bad luck would have it, the toad Tiffany fought chose that moment to give the greatest lunge of its life. It slipped out of her hands. Stacie put on gloves, wriggled her hands down and reached after it. She rooted around frantically finding pennies and ball point pens and tampons, but no Colorado River Toad. Finally Tiffany's gloved hand touched something toad-like. She yanked and pulled and brought out a pop-eyed toad and with it her hand had caught a red wire that was now dangling.

She had pulled out the wire that powered the onboard computer which was located under Stacie's seat. Without that wire, her Jeep wouldn't start.

"I hope this..."

"I hope that wire didn't do anything," said Yadira from the backseat.

Stacie turned the key as Tiffany leaned over the back and plopped the toad in its pail. Silence.

The key clicked in the ignition again, but nothing happened. Stacie continued in her futile efforts to start the Jeep. "Now we've really done it."

"Oh no," moaned Yadira.

The three of them sat quietly in the Jeep for a moment to contemplate the magnitude of their idiocy.

"Come on. Each of us just get two pails. We can't be far from the river," said Tiffany.

"If we just manage to get the poor things somewhere, we can call for a ride," said Yadira.

"Yeah, I guess so," said Stacie, sighing at her bad luck. "I'll have to get the car towed into a shop tomorrow."

They walked quickly, each holding two pails this time, looking for a street that would lead to the dry Santa Cruz River.

Chapter Eleven

Stacie, Yadira and Tiffany brushed past a man and woman walking into an open-air restaurant. A dark fountain bubbled in the background.

"Excuse me," said Yadira, "can you tell me which way the river is?"

"Que?"

"The river."

"El rio esta norte. Cercano la montanas," he said, grabbing his date's arm and headed toward the maitre d'. The woman glanced back at them, at the scratches from the mesquite tree on Yadira's face, at their filthy legs, at their disheveled hair and at the strange pails they were carrying. She looking at them like they were possessed.

"You're talking about the wrong river," Yadira replied weakly.

Onward they scurried with their pails and with a determination that the river had to be close. Just a few blocks more and they would see it. After their experience with the homeless people they were very afraid to walk into the river bed, but they convinced themselves that they could do it because poor toads deserved to be helped.

Around Meyer Street they began to sense someone far behind them who was going along in a funny manner that seemed a lot like he was following them.

Dogged by the strange sensation of being tailed, Yadira shot a glance behind. "Is someone there?" she whispered.

Stacie spun around. "Who's there?" Her voice echoed down the street. The dark adobe houses on either side of the street had unlit windows. Some of the homes were boarded up.

"Come on, let's go faster. The river has got to be close," said Yadira.

In the dark, at about a block's distance south, the barely discernable figure of a larger-than-normal male child with squinty eyes, a smooth face and too much forehead appeared. He was trailing them with a smirk and a loping step. He yanked up his loose pants as he walked. Hippity hop, hippity hop, the strange, worrisome creature came closer, sauntering along. He craned his head curiously forward to see what the three big chicas carried in front of them.

At one point he hovered beneath an overhanging cactus, worked a lighter out of his front pant pocket and giving it a quick flick, got the yellow flame glowing. He lifted the lighter and held it to one cactus pad. He watched the skin boil and he didn't pull the lighter away until he had set the helpless cactus pad smoldering.

As he bore in on them, he snuck between cars.

"Don't let him see us looking," Yadira warned too late.

They rushed around the street corner.

When they had gone a ways down the street, Stacie looked backwards. "That creepy little boy...he's right behind us," whispered Stacie worriedly. Too late, they began shuffling forward faster.

"What's he doing?" asked Tiffany.

"It looks like he's trying to catch up with us!"

"What? Come on, let's get out of here!" said Yadira.

Jaunty was his walk from then on.

"Hey, what's in the fuckin' pans?" said the little boy, racing up behind them and stomping the heel of Tiffany's platform sandal. Her foot ripped out of the shoe and a very shocked Tiffany lurched forward horribly, tripped, and spun and with the pail tilting dangerously vertical. She imagined the toads spilling out on the pavement. With a wild panicky yelp she snapped the pail upright, gripping the toads tightly to her chest. Two hops sideways and she slammed into a low retaining wall of sharp volcanic rocks, fell over and sat hard on one sharp rock.

Stacie whirled upon the smirking boy, "Why, you awful little shit..."

He strutted up to Tiffany's forlorn shoe and kicked it; it banged against the hubcap of a parked car and dropped on its side in a large pool of motor oil in the gutter. The boy marched toward Stacie with a strutting cocky movement that spoke of his disdain for the two of them. "You, caca head," he addressed Stacie imperiously, poking a very stubby and dirty finger at her, "What do you have? You show me now!"

"Go home," Stacie ordered.

"Caca," he said smugly, crossing his arms at his chest and smirked at her in the most insulting of expressions with a curled lip and sneering, laughing eyes that defied her to do anything to him. His head bobbed about happily as he scowled at her. He had hair that was black and plastered to his head like Frankenstein's monster. His ears stuck out of his head farther than Yadira had ever seen. He tapped his foot around on the pavement and looked self-satisfied.

Suddenly, his crossed arms whipped out and he snatched Stacie's pail away from her in a clean move. He tried to wheel around and run away but before he could with an equally quick countermove Stacie wrenched the pail back.

"Caca!" he shouted.

By now Tiffany was standing up. She joined Stacie.

"Caca heads, I'm talking to you," he forced himself between them jostling Stacie toward the curb and grabbing the sides of the pail Yadira carried.

"Let go!" she shouted, pulling it up.

He immediately gave up on that and seeing an opportunity back where he's been, grabbed at the sides of Stacie's pail. "Get away!" Stacie hollered.

Tiffany took the opportunity to find her shoe and slip it on putting the pail on the car's roof. Immediately the car's alarm went off. It wailed and whined shrilly in their ears.

Stacie took off in a stumbling run. Tiffany jammed her foot in the oily shoe and followed. The little boy went with them, chasing them the whole way, snatching at the pails and kicking their shins and feet in a vicious, tormenting manner.

When they'd rounded the corner Yadira hollered, "I have a horrible side ache. Stop! Stop!"

"Now give me those," said the arrogant boy.

"Who lets you out at night?" said Tiffany.

Someone chirped the car alarm and shut it off.

"I'm no cat. I let myself out. And in. I gots a key," he proudly shook a metal chain strung around his neck.

"Well, go use it then," Yadira ordered.

"Not until you show me what's in the pails," he threatened.

"No," said Stacie.

"Show me!" he screeched. He grabbed at the pail again and began wrestling Yadira for control.

"Let go, you creepy little monster!" Yadira hissed.

The pail turned this way and that and tilted precariously and the side warped with the struggle. Stacie tried to put her pail down to help her friend but he immediately made a move as though he would take the abandoned pail, so Stacie and Tiffany had to stand by helplessly.

"I said, go home and leave us alone," Yadira said.

"Or we'll spank you," Stacie added ominously.

"Don't give me none of your caca, lady," he pointed at Stacie squinting ominously and wagging his head in a rakish attitude.

"Who taught you to talk like that?" Stacie asked.

"I taught me. Who cares and why don't you shut up, caca brain," he said with a hideous sneer.

"You're horrible," said Yadira.

"Caca. So, give me those pails. Now!"

"No," said Tiffany.

"I said now!"

Again he snatched violently at the sides of the pan that Yadira carried.

"Let go!" cried Yadira, battling with the young boy to regain control of the pail with the toad.

"Caca," he said, practically spitting it at her.

"Can't you say anything else?" asked Tiffany.

"Yeah, I can say—caca!"

A squad car rounded the corner. The three of them looked at it, but the little boy grimaced and began feeling his way backwards quickly. He put an arm out to touch the stone wall. Step by step, he retreated down the sidewalk while keeping his eyes on the approaching officers.

"Oh, oh. Popo. I'm in big caca. Bye, bye." He whirled around and ran, his shoes beating the pavement thud, thud, thudding away in the night.

Chapter Twelve

Moments after their persecutor beat it, a police cruiser arrived and began an active pursuit of the fleeing caca boy. Stacie, Tiffany and Yadira froze while the cruiser sped by, the blue light on its roof revolving slowly. The officers inside the cruiser gave the three of them a casual once-over, but continued in the direction of the fleeing boy and the report of a car alarm.

When they were certain the cruiser had rounded the corner, they lugged the toads to Cushing Street.

They had made up their minds.

"When we find the Santa Cruz River we're leaving these suckers," said Tiffany.

"Oh yeah," said Stacie.

From Cushing they trudged toward to Granada Street.

"If we make a right turn here, the river will only be a block farther," said Yadira.

As they reached Granada, the three long-suffering coeds distinguished flickering candlelight directly across the street.

"There, there, go there. The river is just beyond it," Stacie panted. "I know where we are!"

The source of the fabulous light seemed to be hundreds of candles burning yellowish and warm. A sharp, waxy smell drifted in the warm night breeze.

Seeking the source of the yellow glow, they crept like silly spies toward the outside of a thick adobe wall. Pockmarks abounded on the crumbly brown structure. A few steps more and they were brought up in front of an opening, which showed that all that was behind the wall was a large dirt lot shrine filled with hundreds of candles. They realized they were at the Wishing Shrine, La Tiradita, and the dry bed of the Santa Cruz River lay less than fifty feet beyond the back wall of the plaza.

Everywhere candles flickered so that the shrine shivered, fuliginous and sultry. In the light of the shrine the three girls with their pails could be seen, creeping by the open doorway, staring in at the vast greasy pools of wax on the soil around votive piles. On the walls various messages were pinned and statuettes of Christian saints crumbled like partly dismembered dolls. Charms showing silvery arms, legs and heads were pinned to silk banners, and the floor of the plaza was bare dirt with a kind of prickly pear which was shaped like cow's tongues licking up at the dark sky. Round rocks gathered in odd circles here and there, surrounding small wrought iron candelabras that stuck out of the bare earth with iron work that curled like blackened ferns. Taller candle stands huddled together at the back of the plaza where an iron cage held more candlesticks in front of a crumbling niche, which looked like a barbecue pit and was filled with glass bottle candles.

Unfortunately for the three girls, their dozy faces making a slow, open-mouthed tour past the oily candles and black iron curlicues of the entrance instantly attracted the attention of the shrine's resident madwoman. Her name was Delia Pantoja. After her job at Emilio's Dulceria and Piñata store (where she excelled at selling misshapen purple dinosaurs piñatas and gawky yellow birds piñatas to pothering young grandparents) she nearly always stopped at the shrine and devoured a Hamburger Wheel Deal, remaining at La Tiradita until eleven. Self-appointed tour guide and recorder of the century-old weird tales of the shrine, her gradual madness had long since estranged her from Mr. Pantoja, their five children, and most of their thirty grandchildren. Their disapproval did not concern her; they failed to recognize a calling when they saw it. Besides, the anguish of the wishful sinners delivered greater entertainment value than TV shows with all their shouting.

Her madness developed into a talent. Her disorderly mind ripened the weird, magnified the absurd, gathered and stewed the silly.

Her life's wish was to witness one of the shrine's strange occurrences so that she might tell a tale firsthand that would thrill her audience and make their hairs stand on end. Once when she was ten and lived in Nogales, Sonora she accompanied her five aunts on a journey to buy pan dulce. Suddenly shots rang out. Everyone scattered, and she noticed something strange. Beneath the trim on her anklet, red was spreading. Blood soaked her little white anklet. It was the defining moment in her life that forced the split between sanity and madness. That anklet, stained with her own bright red blood, thrilled her. The fact that she became the center of attention for fifty-four relatives didn't hurt either. When another aunt claimed to have said a prayer for her full recovery at the Wishing Shrine and when she moved north years later, she began to hang about the old shrine like its persecuting spirit. She had dinner among the frantic messages and prayers, reading each one with her lips moving and clapping her hands at certain comments about unfaithful husbands, wearing always her smeared powdery pink lipstick and a very obvious blonde wig. For clothing, she favored young looking styles, skinny jeans and clogs. She wore a black glossy tank top in the summer nights and a heavy pink sweater in the winter.

"Girls—come in, come in. You're just in time for a tour," said Delia happily.

"What did you say," Stacie asked, making the honest, but incredibly stupid, mistake of speaking to Delia. Delia was always waiting for people to walk by and say something. It didn't matter if they were talking to her or not. She always assumed that they were.

"Bueno," thundered the weird woman, grabbing Stacie's arm and pulling her in, "what you see here, what this is right here, is La Tiradita, the Wishing Shrine." Delia stumbled backward dramatically in her clogs with an overarching sweep of one arm that she feared had (and actually did) reveal the thick strap of her black bra. Dramatically, in a long and tedious recitation of mixed-up tales of mayhem and fervent prayers and glorious intercessions of the powers unknown in various tangled affairs of the heart, the walking, blabbering dead arose and were summoned to action in Delia's strange tales. She tinged her Decameron Tales with subtle southwestern elements: twisting ropes, burning ranches, smoking hot pistols and wild-eyed palominos. It was a muddled recital; she loped off most of the sense and maligned the heroes.

At one point she seized an imaginary ax, and with her legs straddling her cowering imaginary victim, she whacked away, energetically dealing fourteen imaginary blows. The walking ghouls, the love repaired, shots fired into a hysterical stormy night, devilish gamblers enflamed by sexy wives, loyal sons of women murdered in Mexico trailed their stepfathers to the wishing shrine in order to stab, stab, stab him fourteen times–once for each year the boy had searched for the mother's murderer. As for the various strangulation scenes, she enacted them also to horrible effect.

"The virgin could not escape the murderer's hands," screeched Delia. "Pleading as she would again and again, she could not get him to release his death hold upon her neck. And so he slowly, slowly took the life away from her. She saw darkness then."

Pools of candle grease trickled across the bone-dry earth, as did the bullshit. The stories were told rapid-fire and they made little sense anyway, but from the stories Stacie, Yadira and Tiffany did get the idea that the Catholic Church did not sanction this shrine.

As the interminable stories went on and on and Delia built on her magnificence and grandeur of her horror stories, Stacie, Tiffany and Yadira shifted their weight, glancing impatiently at each other, praying for an end to this unwanted spectral persecution, and at last Delia began to wonder what was in the pails. Delia's voice trailed off and she decided it was time to let the three girls experience the shrine in their own fashion, while she would try to figure out why they really were there with those mysterious pails.

The simple and direct question: 'What's in there, chicas?' was far too prying for a madwoman whose mind was crammed with the mysterious confused affairs of the afterlife. She snuck a glance at the pails when she stopped talking. Surely they contained bodily organs. Her mind swam in dreadful severed images: heads, pulsating hearts, oily swimming livers. Or more likely, had some witch sent them there with some part of their loved one's body: a lock of hair, toenail clippings, spit, or vomit?

She looked again at Tiffany's pail and caught a movement. Now it was becoming clear to her. Her darting glimpses down convinced her that something living lurked in the pails. Then the answer hit. Bueno, of course, the pails contained–unwanted babies. What were the three beautiful college girls planning to do with their precious ninos?

At that moment the two girls began to suspect Delia's suspicions about what they were doing there with those pails. Telling the old mad woman that they wished to absorb some of the scribbled messages of grief and longing tacked here and there, they moved away from her.

Were the girls planning to abandon the babies, wondered Delia? She would stick around and save them.

Whispering in a conference, the three discussed how to get away easily and leave the tale-telling madwoman. These sort of serendipitous failures plagued them. And they were so close to getting rid of the poor toads.

"This is a fascinating place," said Tiffany loudly.

The old lady nodded, but feigned disinterest in the girls. In fact she stood at a distance, but followed their every move. She was desperately trying to align her body so as to get a view of the contents of those strange pails again. Old Mrs. Pantoja squinted hard in their direction while her head seemed to be studying the wall in front of her. Something about those girls seemed odd. Their eyes were bloodshot and they acted drunk. The evilness and wickedness of college girls was well known to Delia. Stepping gingerly toward the pails, she made the sign of the cross and rolled back her eyes.

Mrs. Pantoja glanced over an edge of the pail.

She saw the hideous face—of a toad!

"Y Quala!" she screamed. "Caramba!" She fell back slightly and clutched her heart. "Ay, Chihuahua!"

The horrid faces and blinking eyes of the toads made her want to shriek. There was only one conclusion that she could make—those college girls in their ugliness had changed their babies into toads.

At the sound of her screams, Yadira, Stacie and Tiffany picked up their pails and ran. Mrs. Pantoja ran a few steps after them, but she tripped in her high clogs.

After a breathless and dangerous dash down the embankment, the three girls stood in the bed of the Santa Cruz River. Their frightening experiences that night had convinced them not to linger in any more dark places. They set the pails on the sand. Quickly slipping on gloves, they lifted the remaining toads out of their pails and left them in a low spot under a bush.

"Listen, it's the end of the road; we've got to dump you here," said Stacie, talking to the toads for the first time.

"I agree," said Tiffany.

"Goodbye, guys," said Yadira, crying a little. She used the pail edge to scoop some of the sand near them until it felt moist. "I guess they'll dig in there somehow," she added lamely.

The desert's benign stars twinkled down on them. A thin slice of moon had appeared in the eastern sky. In the slight moonlight, the barest suggestion of the mountains formed dark triangles in the sky and the sand of the river bed showed shadowy dimples out ahead. It was almost like a rippling sea, a sea of destiny.

"I almost hate to get rid of them," said Stacie.

"Yeah, poor guys, and girls," added Tiffany.

"We saved these dudes. We have to be proud of ourselves. We saved these little guys from imprisonment and death," said Yadira.

"It was horrible doing all this," Tiffany said.

"That caca boy," said Stacie.

"Wasn't he horrible?" said Yadira.

"These toads will come out again with the rains," said Stacie.

"And we'll be gone. We'll never be here again. Until the rains, guys," said Yadira sadly to the toads.

"Just hang out where you want to," said Tiffany, talking to the toads too. "Man, those were some ugly toads," she said to her friends.

They hugged each other and called Itzel who said the wall holes were finished, but something was terribly wrong with the shed in the backyard.

Yadira and Stacie pretended not to know anything about it having a lean.

Back at the old home a half an hour later, a passel of girls stood on the curb saying goodbye to the three of them. While Yadira, Stacie and Tiffany had tried to get rid of the toads, their friends had managed to plaster and paint the wall in the house so that it was really quite obvious that someone had stuck pitons in the adobe. The three girls were very happy with the effect of their friends' work and they were certain it would pass muster with Mr. Holmes, the fool, who was so kindly disposed to them in other fiascos and had, after all, agreed to let them have the graduation party with the jumping castle. One of the more obliging girls had even filled the holes in the gravel lawn.

Tiffany was the first to approach her car to leave. It was jammed with her stuff. The trunk had been left empty for Robert's things.

"Getting rid of those toads was so strange," said Stacie. "I can't believe all that happened with Mr. Biggs and the guy with the gun and the weird kid downtown."

"And then that horrible lady in the shrine," added Tiffany.

"Oh, she was really bent. At least—I think she was," said Yadira.

"I know what you mean. I was so wasted through the whole thing. I hope those people are gone from the arroyo. I'm not going driving out that way. I hope we did the right thing for the toads. They'll be happy in the river bed, won't they?" asked Tiffany.

"I think some of them got away," said Stacie. "At least I hope so."

Stacie and Yadira hugged Tiffany. She got in her car, crying.

"On my way!" cried Tiffany with tears streaming down her face. "Robert's gonna love Santa Rosita."

"What about you?" asked Yadira. With all the toad problems they hadn't discussed what was happening to Tiffany.

"I'm gonna love it, too," she said without much enthusiasm.

"I hope so," said Stacie, hugging her friend through the window.

"Sure," said Yadira. "Sure you are."

Tiffany started her car and backed it.

"I love you all," she screamed. "I'll never forget the desert and you bitches! This was the best time in my life and I know it, you know!"

"Love you!" they yelled back.

Yadira was next to leave as she was driving to Chicago and needed an early start. She had the back of her car filled with boxes and suitcases. On top of the pile, a laundry basket was turned over like a crude birdcage. She was taking a friend as far as Kansas, so someone would ride with her and keep her company.

"Yadira, take care," said Stacie, hugging her friend for the last time.

"You've got a place in Chicago," said Yadira.

"Sure, I know," said Stacie. "Your old bedroom with your little sister."

Stacie and Yadira broke down crying in the street. Dawn was just beginning over the eastern range. For now the desert floor was cool, but that wouldn't last more than two hours.

A sniffling Yadira got in with her friend. She started the car and backed it slowly. She took a last look at the old bungalow then drove out toward the freeway. Inside the car, they discussed where to stop for coffee.

Stacie had decided to stay with Mona until her Jeep could be repaired. Then she wanted to head to New York. She wasn't telling anyone about Walt. She would have to figure out where he lived.

Stacie closed the door firmly and used the key to lock it. She put the key in the porch mailbox as Mr. Holmes had requested.

When she banged the lid of the mailbox closed, all the plaster dropped from the three holes inside the house.

"What's wrong?" asked Mona, seeing Stacie frown.

"I thought I heard something inside," said Stacie. "Maybe I should check?"

"No, don't bother. It was probably Mr. Biggs jumping around the side yard," one of the wall crew reasoned.

"He's like the noisiest cat ever," Stacie said.

"We did a pretty damn good job," Itzel claimed.

"We? You slept through it, girl," said Maribel to Itzel as they stumbled down the dirt driveway together heading for Itzel's car.

"Screw you, I didn't," said Itzel, boldly walking to her car. "And you better hope I offer your silly ass a ride," she added.

Chapter Thirteen

Delia's Epilogue

"Bueno, ahora, I am not going to tell you flimsy, second-hand tales written down in educational pamphlets. You can obtain those any day from the Chamber of Commerce and the Arizona Historical Whatsoever, consulting their hours and fees first, of course! I have my pride. Recite the trite? Never! Tell you the same old stories so that you might question whether anyone living has truly experienced any of these horrors? No, this is not my way. I will not be like the local storyteller, who does he think he is anyway, singing in bad Spanish with his guitars, stealing the stories which I would tell and turning everything into howling coyotes and beautiful senoritas. They go gaga over the wishing shrine and attend mass in jeans! Disdain is all they receive from Yours Truly, your tour guide tonight, Delia Pantoja.

"Yes, doubting listener, you will say these are interesting old stories about the wishing shrine but where are the testimonials of a direct witness? Who is there who can tell you first hand of a tale that they were part of? The answer is me! Yes, you are very lucky that I am here tonight to tell you what happened only a few months ago in early May. I now have something to add to my tour. I could almost thank those witches. Yes, I'm a celebrity now. You have seen me on 'About Arizona' and in the article in the paper about local tour celebrities. That was a very informative article.

"Celebrity is a burden and many people are jealous of my successes but I keep pushing for the truth of La Tiradita. I live for La Tiradita and its great stories. It is my tour and I have now an addition to my stories that I had wanted for years. 'Why could I not witness something strange to tell,' I asked myself for many years? You may think these stories are only of the past, the centuries of long ago, when men rode horses and ladies wore big dresses. I know what you're thinking: history is snoring. But I am living proof that strange things are happening here at La Tiradita even now in the twenty-first century. Is there anything that I as your guide to this great monument can tell you from my own experience? No, you think not?

"Ah, ha! Wake up and smell the big fat chorizo burrito. You are so wrong. I shall bare my soul to you and tell what has happened to me as a person in this wishing shrine. The strange thing that happened to me will astound you, I know, but not as much as it astounded me when it happened. Little me, I said, why am I being challenged with this incident? I was stunned.

"This story that happened to me is not one of the happy miracles. But I think the stories are like people. They have different personalities and some of the stories are not happy ones to repeat. They have sadness in them and are difficult to tell without making the listener think that the shrine is a bad place, a place of evil. But this is far is from the truth.

"And I must confess it's difficult to be a chosen person with a place like this as the center of your being. You face many challenges from the family and friends who are jealous and feel that they are being left out. Of course, you have to expect normal people to be jealous and wish that they could be part of what you are experiencing. Few are chosen. I was a privileged person in this matter and I know it.

"This is the story of my own strange adventure in La Tiradita.

"One especially hot May evening, La Tiradita was nearly deserted of people. Except me. I was doing what I usually do which is to clean the shrine of candy wrappers and plastic bottles. All the rubbish of people comes in with the wind. My back was to the entrance for a while. I was ready to tell people about what is here, but no one was coming to visit.

"Then three very, very powerful and frightening witches, college girl witches, some of the most evil of all the witches in the world, visited the shrine planning on fulfilling their disgusting desires. These three powerful young witches were in their twenties and were beautiful. On that fateful night they made their way past the shrine, past that door where you came in now, looking here and there at the same things you are looking at. Blood red was the color of their evil eyes. They acted confused and drunk, like they were on drugs, but that was only their way of putting me at ease, though I was not fooled. Peering this way and that. Hmmm. Hmmm. They acted as though they had never seen anything like the shrine before. They acted innocent and uninformed. Which was a lie, of course, because every witch knows all about this place and I recognized them immediately as witches of the highest order. I knew who they were and what they were. There was no mistaking those awful beings. They could not trick me. I could tell who they were and anyone who might have told you differently does not know what they talking about. Their modern clothes did not hide the ugly interiors of their hearts and the way they thought about the world was seen in the aura surrounding them. They had very evil essences around them. You can believe me on this.

"I noticed right away that each lady was carrying some pails or some tubs like a lady would do her underwear laundry in. Pails with handles. What was in those big pails, I wondered? I wondered that the instant I saw them. Bueno, I walked out the gate and approached them and introduced myself. They asked what the shrine was and which way was the river and I talked to them in a friendly fashion so as to not tip them off to my knowing all about them and what they were up to, which was no good. I drew them in toward the shrine and told them the same stories I'm telling you tonight. I made the stories really interesting as I always do. But they weren't interested in my stories! They said they wanted to put down their pails for a minute. I told my stories, but slyly looked at those pails that they had left on the ground for a minute! Imagine the horror I felt, the horror that struck me to my very bones, when I saw the things inside the pails wiggling strangely.

"What were in the pails the witches were carrying? The pails held poor defenseless wiggling newborn ninos.

"Imagine. I peered very closely and saw the squirming babes with my own eyes. How were they keeping those babies quiet? I think they put them under a spell so they would make no noise while they were being carried down to the river. But no spell known on the face of the earth by any witch could keep a baby from wiggling.

"And you will not believe the strangeness of what I will tell you now. They were babies when I first looked in the pails, but when I looked again, they had turned into toads!

"Whose poor children had they been? It is not possible to know. I pity them for the way they were treated. To be turned into toads, what a fate. Who did they offend in their brief life?

"All I know is that these babies were turned into toads by undergraduate witches. Undergraduates are the most evil beings in the world. They are all witches and warlocks! You will find out how corrupt they are if you ever interview them. There is no depravity that they have not tried. They are not good like the nice girls and boys who marry young and carry on the faith and family the way they should. No, these depraved people think that thinking is better than having a family! It's a sickness, I tell you. And female undergraduates are the worst. They consort with the devil on a regular basis. Their drinking is obscene. Their drug use is horrid. I often give them tours here and they think this place is amusing. Amusing.

"How lucky I was that I did not interfere unknowingly in their evil plot. I could have done something clumsy without thinking, something which would have irritated the witches and I wouldn't have even known what I had done. I did not know how close I was to death; I'm sure they would not have hesitated to kill me at a moment's notice when I had performed something that irritated them. And you can take my word when I tell you that they were horrible witches, not to be trusted farther than you can see on a dusty night.

"Could I have stopped what happened? Oh no, I think not, even with my faith and my fear of the Devil. There was no way I could have stopped what happened to those babies. I have had this told to me many times from the greatest of good witches in Arizona. What could I have done? I am not a witch and cannot stop spells that are cast by evil ladies like those. Even a great good witch might not have been able to stop them.

"Perhaps the babies were their own children, though I do not believe they were. No, those were the unwitting stooges of their works and were no relations of the witches. Perhaps, they were the children of some poor women who crossed the witches, a neighbor who had looked at them crossly or stopped one of their evil plots without even being aware of what was happening. You can run afoul of a witch so easily.

"I looked through the newspaper for unsolved cases that I could pin on the witches. Several ladies helped me in this. We searched for clues of babies born near that date. Unfortunately, I discovered nothing. Maybe these babies were the children who kept the witches from men the witches wished to possess? This often happens because the presence of a child makes it hard for the witch to possess the soul of the male and therefore she must be rid of the blockage, which is the baby. Only those witches could tell us what they really were doing when they took those children into the shrine. I wish I could quiz them now. I would not be afraid, believe me. I would like to know the truth. Of course, they were even too powerful for me and I would be no match for them.

"Never mind. The fact is they wished only to be rid of the troublesome little babies, but without the bad vibrations associated with a violent death. You see, the violent death of a small child can disturb even the powers of a very powerful witch. Maybe that was the reason why they could not simply suffocate them. Or leave them in the desert to die. Those methods would have been more direct and this puzzled me until I consulted with a great witch of Arizona who told me killing the babies directly would have reduced the undergraduate witches' powers.

"And what became of those toads? I knew you would be curious about their fate. I can certainly tell you. When they realized I had seen the toads, the three witches took off toward the river. I never saw any of them again.

"But I know what they did! I saw the babies with my own eyes, and I saw them when they were toads, too! I saw it all. Believe me. I am your witness.

THE END

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.

CONNECT WITH LORRAINE RAY

Read her Smashwords interview at https://www.smashwords.com/interview/LoRay and pose questions.

Visit her Tumblr blog http://lorraineray.tumblr.com and leave a message.

Contact her on Twitter: <http://twitter.com/@LoRay00>.

