 
# FAMILIAR ARTIFACTS

Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2018 Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

MIXING WITH WITCHES

MRS. WAINWRIGHT, LIFT YOUR HEAD

SQUAW DRESSES

KAISER A THING OR TWO

CIRCUITOUS LEMON ECONOMY

THE PEERLESS ORATOR

LITTLE HALF-BURNT COCKY-BABY

SCAT!

THE GOOD LIBRARIAN

EL HILO

BEWITCHING EARTH

MAELSTROM

MICRO TALES

MIXING WITH WITCHES

After I bought her homemade tamales for several months, Mrs. Rodriguez and I became friends. Or perhaps I should say better friends than we had been, for I felt free to ask her what I wanted to know about an area of Arizona where she was born. I suppose another way to look at our relationship is that she was more friendly to me so I would continue buying her tamales, and I was more friendly to her so I could feel comfortable asking her my peculiar question. Frankly, I might have been her only customer, the only person silly enough to give her ten dollars for a dozen of those skimpy things. Mrs. Garcia, another of my co-workers at the Klaxon Call Center, dissed the amount of meat in the tamales and claimed ten dollars a dozen would be asking too much for plump, well made tamales, while Mrs. Rodriguez created and sold flattened failures. I stood up for Mrs. R's efforts, arguing that they weren't as bad as all that and claiming I liked the flavor, etcetera. Mrs. Garcia cackled. Then the very next day Mrs. Garcia tried to sell me a badly-sewn blue satin pillow with extremely scratchy lace around the edges! I struggled to keep from showing my annoyance while politely refusing it.

Both of them, Mrs. Garcia and Mrs. Rodriguez, took me for a _gringa_ chump and I vowed never again to purchase anything from people at work. Buying from co-workers usually turns out like that kid book _If You Give a Mouse a Cookie_. One thing leads to another and pretty soon you're forced to admire their children's art projects, listen to a pitch for a timeshare condo in Florida, try on their mother's knitting or consider a hideous blue satin pillow. And while you have to examine that homemade stuff you have to figure out a way to keep from buying all of it without offending them.

Anyhow, during the time I was still paying for the bad tamales, this Mrs. Rodriguez character told me how I could find the shop I had been thinking of, the odd place my grandfather loved to visit. That was what I wanted to know from her. Apparently it was out on the Old Guernivaca Road a ways—I would come to pipe corrals and a sign on plywood saying _Tienda_ _Xoxtil_ and that would be it, the real deal. She thought they did still sell cans of chocolate covered ants, rooster combs, and powdered grasshoppers. Just as I remembered. Probably, she joked, the same tins I'd seen there when I was eight. "Nobody buys that shit. Makes sense that a _gringa_ would ask about it."

And the walls of the shop actually were plastered with huge bullfighting posters; she remembered that all right. But when I mentioned that my grandfather knew the _bruja_ (that is to say the witch) who owned the place, Mrs. Rodriguez shook her head slowly and started chuckling. " _Bruja_ , you talking about that kook who runs the store?" she chortled. "You say some pretty funny crap sometimes, even for a _gringa_."

Being subjected to this lady's ridicule peeved me. My grandfather was as Mexican as she was, and of course that did make me, his granddaughter, less Hispanic than her, so I suppose it was alright if she thought she ought to call me _gringa_. I wasn't about to put her right, for to do so would just cause difficulties. However I became determined to meet the witchy owner of the odd shop. And so the very next Saturday when I was off work I drove out alone on the winding dirt road, leaving the valley from the far southeastern edge of the city and travelling toward the little town of Guernivaca, Arizona.

Very early in my journey I realized the road I traveled had seen little use. The miserable ranches in that district tended to be the short-term obsessions of town dwellers whose interest in playing cowboys arose sporadically. Their livestock perished, their windmills fell into ruins, and nearly every third ranch was up for sale, or had been years ago; the signs looked awfully faded. I passed a failed winery and ranch with rows of gigantic abandoned trucks. That was the region around Guernivaca; an archetype of the American success story in the desert Southwest.

Once I approached Guernivaca proper I noticed an awfully lot of cows standing in stark fields staring hopelessly off at the horizon, swishing flies away with their scrawny tails and chewing their cuds. Most likely minute cuds. What was there to eat? Almost all of them appeared to be hovering near death. Actually, I feared that several of them had successfully made it to death and these probably rested somewhere under the vast clouds of flies.

Flies, flies, and more flies. They seemed to be my only other companions out there on the lonely road; whenever I came to a stop they landed on my windows and crawled around urgently as though they wanted in at me.

Following Mrs. Rodriguez' instructions, when I passed Patagonia Road I slowed my car to search for the strange store.

Mrs. Rodriguez was right. _Tienda Xoxtil_ wasn't hard to find if you kept on the lookout for the sign. A big old splintery board propped against a rusty orange and yellow tractor. The sign stood about ten feet tall with letters which had been recently dabbed with bright green paint. Under the name of the store the single word _rarezas_ , oddities, had been scrawled with a crabbed hand. Daubs of paint in the same dazzling green color decorated the board haphazardly. It looked like it had been painted by a kid.

A moonscape of deep craters jolted me as I pulled into the dirt lot in front of the old adobe store where a Plymouth with handicapped plates and no hubcaps nosed into the front concrete steps. The store itself was white plastered adobe, exactly as I'd recalled. Over the years the surface of the store's plaster had cracked horizontally and great hunks of exposed adobe brick had washed away, making a cavity, a cliff cave, at about knee level. The sight startled me. I suddenly remembered something. Fifteen years earlier, I had played in those same miniature cliffs with a toy burro and a chain of black and silver plastic bears which my grandfather had given me from the many rum demijohns he drank. A boy named Nasario had been with me that day, laughing at the toy bears, and I was sure that I'd given him one or, I wondered, had he been imaginary?

I parked the car under a mesquite tree, the only flat spot in the shade, and hurried to enter this old store. I was going to see the owner, this witch from my past! It felt to me as though I were about to do great things, to journey into a place of my childhood and see it again.

Up the three steps, a splintery door greeted me. A serape screened the glass, but I took hold of a loose doorknob and twisted it. The door yielded with a loud creak and I stepped in with a bit of a stumble on a high threshold.

Upon entering, I felt my heart beat in a persistent, loud drumming. To be honest I was rather terrified, but soon I found it was all as I had remembered.

The store's contents revealed themselves slowly, like unwrapping a candy. At first I stood rooted to the entry where I absorbed the strange smells, so fusty and wicked, the wooden shelves painted turquoise and the oak warped and water-stained floors. All around me, huge matadors on bullfighting posters swooshed their capes. Veronicas, that's the name of one of their moves. The undulating red capes swirled in front of infuriated pop-eyed bulls and behind the bulls were shouting crowds of well-dressed spectators.

After I had taken in the posters, I then discovered one overflowing barrel standing beside me which was labeled shark fins and another barrel in the corner labeled... Bats!

It took courage to walk slowly up the store aisle directly in front of me and discover an assortment of canned and bottled bugs advertising themselves with dusty faded labels. On the lower shelves pulverized roots and berries towered in baskets. I turned a corner to see mysterious love salves slathered into miniature mason jars and cloth dolls with spooky dark eyes piled crisscross in a cardboard box like so much vengeful firewood.

I crept down the next aisle grinning happily to myself. I had actually found it! The crazy shop of my dreams! This was the strange place I'd been to with my grandfather; one of the places he'd begged us to take him after his stroke. And I'd thought I'd imagined it!

Ah yes, I remembered something more. Hadn't he bought me a doll from that very glass case? The one I glimpsed with the huge brass cash register on top? The doll's head was clay, the hair done in silky black braids. With cheeks painted in red circles, yes, of course. The doll wore a red felt skirt and a green blouse. I still had the head. Where had I buried the body?

I was thinking of him, of Nando and all he meant to me, when a withered and wrinkled hand snaked out from a doorway behind the cash register and grasped the curtain. The cloth parted and the proprietress limped out from a shadowy back room.

She was incredibly old. As ancient as sin, as the expression goes, yet she was still trying to hide the toll the years had taken on her. She was one of those very old women who try desperately to hold off the inevitable slump in their looks; she wore a wig and her eyebrows had been sketched in black pencil. She had drawn them all wrong, crookedly and halfway to her hairline. Her real eyebrows could be seen emerging under the thick pink powder which coated her face. She'd daubed some powder on the backs of her withered hands. Cataracts impaired her vision and vivid red lipstick had been smeared hastily on her lips. The smear only approximated a human mouth.

"Hi," I said stupidly. I don't know why I spoke English, but I knew my Spanish sucked.

She jerked her head in my direction. "Hi," she responded and began moving toward me. She followed the sound of my voice.

Something about the crabbed way she was coming at me worried me, so I darted around that shelf to another aisle. But she kept moving with me, following my footsteps. "I've wanted to shop here for years," I said, trying to make my voice sound relaxed and merry.

"Oh?" she breathed.

I took a dive into another aisle. "Yes. I came here with my grandfather many times, years ago," I gushed. Why was I planning to parade our family history in front of an old woman in a strange shop? What was I thinking?

"Oh," she said, "your grandfather?" She shuttled her legs forward stiffly. I noticed she wore tennis shoes and loose gray nylon slacks. The slacks flapped at the front in a silly way when she walked and one of her shoelaces dragged behind her.

"Yes," I flitted away from her again.

Her face contorted. She stopped coming after me and groped her way to a spot beside the counter.

"Is there anything you wanted?" she asked eventually. I noticed she spoke slowly and breathlessly.

"No, not really. Well, I wanted to look around. That's all. Just to look around." Then I realized what I was saying was rather tasteless. Why disturb this old woman and buy nothing? "I'm sure I'll buy something, but I'm not sure what."

"All right." Her voice sounded grim.

I inspected her potions and because she didn't follow me, I grew bold again. I picked out a rose cream and something to remove freckles. "My grandfather just loved it here," I gushed when I brought these items to the counter. "I could use these." I took out the cash and she snatched it from me. I was owed some change, but I decided not to mention it.

"What was his name? This grandfather of yours." She dropped the salves into a small brown bag with the name of another shop on it.

"Breverton. Fernando Breverton." I replied proudly.

"Breverton, Fernando, Fernando, Breverton?"

Twisting his name backward and forward that way, she made it sound nonsensical. It was like she was preparing to chant it or something and needed to snap it in two first!

"Yes. I brought his picture." I wasn't sure why I had brought my grandfather's photo with me nor why I pulled it from my backpack and stepped close enough to her to hand it over. Did I actually think she would remember him? I knew he was charismatic, but not everyone fell prey to his charm.

She held it close to her cataracts. "Handsome enough. I don't remember him, though."

My disappointment was probably palpable. "It was a long time ago," I demurred. I reached my hand out to get the photo back from her, but she continued holding it. I could sense incredible strength in her fingers as I tried to tug it from her. I let her take it.

"Let me bring him back," she offered vaguely. "Probably I'll need Fluser-deep and Wimple-max and pinch of soap. Maybe two groklimics and a wentro. That's a good Hellbroth Boil. Was he Hispanic?"

"Half, but whaaa?" I began in shock after hearing her strange vocabulary.

"Then no soap," she snapped.

"Soap! Bring him back?" I responded in shock. I'm not sure if it was the offer to bring someone back from the dead, or the fact she used soap to do it, that terrified me.

She spun around slowly. "Isn't that what you wanted?"

Boy, she had me there. I probably did think subconsciously that something like that was going to be offered. Now that I faced it honestly, I disgusted myself. What was I trying to do? Had I become a total kook because of nostalgia?

"From the dead you mean?"

"Sure, yeah. I'll do it for you. In a wink." One wrinkled eye crunched into something resembling a convulsion.

She glanced at the photo and looked around the store shelves nearest her as though there were a item for sale that would bring him back especially, but she had forgotten where she shelved it. "This face is a tricky one. I need the right mix."

Throughout the shop shelves she shuffled, picking out jars and dried herbs and depositing them on the countertop. Finally, she tottered around the counter and pulled out a hot plate and some vials. She fell immediately into mixing a potion.

Her mouth opened and her eyes closed. "If there be any forces present...."

"No, I really don't think..." I came to life and reached for the photo again, but she ignored me and swung around.

"And if those forces will unite!"

"No, please, I don't want this." I reached over the counter and grabbed one corner of the photo. I tugged it away from her, but a corner ripped away. She held onto the corner while I stashed the photo in my backpack quickly.

Her hands clapped once. "I only needed a piece of him!" She dropped the corner of the photo in the pot. "I know! I will call animal forces together for you. You like my store. It's the least I can do for you. How about a pig, a snake, or an eagle?" She beamed.

My mouth gaped as she waved her hands frantically. I glanced around the dark shop, half expecting to have to draw back from Something. But for all her clapping, nothing happened.

"No, um, ma'am." I frowned at her sudden vigor. "Please, leave him alone." I followed her urgently when she walked around the counter.

She didn't respond.

"Listen, don't!"

"You don't want him brought back?" She spun around, her sneakers fumbling the turn.

"No, please, leave him alone." I followed her.

She stood in the middle of the floor and crowed suddenly, though her wig slipped far forward with the effort. Her hand fumbled to pull the wig back on her nearly bald head. "All together! Forces of Life! Forces of Life, I call upon you! If you be here, strength upon death. Untie this man! Untie him now if any strings hold him! Untie them!"

It was a ghastly witchy voodoo rite and she thought I had ordered it!

"Forces!" she screamed.

"I said forces!" she reiterated.

She sunk slowly and began swaying. Was she going into a trance? Oh, this was absolutely terrible! She resembled a cobra in front of a snake charmer. She must have been communicating with the dead! Why had I even come! I didn't want to witness this. I didn't want my dead grandfather brought back! And I didn't want to watch as this hideous old witch fell into a trance!

A moment later, I realized that the effort of shouting had exhausted her. I had met my witch and she had injured herself trying to help me! She reeled and gasped her way to a low chair. I thought she came close to collapsing completely! I couldn't think how I could help her as she slowly sank in the chair cushion.

I kneeled near her, watching her eyes roll back in her head; her hands gripped the chair arms. What evil forces controlled her? Had the spirit world begun to kill her?

"My whi...ffer," she gasped finally, "I need my whiffer." She gesturing vaguely toward the glass case where the cash register stood.

Whiffer? That sounded like a potion. What horrendous concoction was this whiffer thing? Entrails of bats, eyes of newts?

I thought for a moment. Then the word made sense. Of course, this old lady suffered from asthma! She needed one of those inhalers. Old asthmatic people often called them whiffers. That's what she meant. Sure, I'd seen kids at school use them in the nurse's office!

"Just a minute," I cried, jumping up and dashing around the counter to get it for her. I knew what they looked like but it took me a moment to locate one in the pile of dusty junk.

When I saw it, I grabbed it and I dashed back. She snatched it from me and shook it. She sucked the asthma medicine slowly twice.

I saw the drug begin to take effect. Her shoulders relaxed and she sat normally.

That seemed a good time to get out of there. I stood up quickly and remembered my purchases still sitting on the counter. I stuffed the paper bag in my backpack and zipped it shut.

"Listen, I don't think you ought to exert yourself anymore today," I said.

She paid me no heed and dragged herself up. She took two steps toward me. "My ankle, oh!" she yelped, collapsing sideways against a shelf.

I rushed to her side and cupped her elbow. I helped her stumble forward and fall into another plush chair under one of the biggest bullfighting posters.

"Ah," she sighed, more comfortable there.

Sitting for a moment, she collected her thoughts and worked her witchy hands on the chair upholstery again. "I will become a pack of hungry coyotes for you who have helped me!" she eventually croaked. "I will travel the world, skipping across the tops of thousands of saguaro cacti, on boats over the stormy oceans, to ice-bound and jungle continents and everywhere I go I will wipe out your enemies and make them suffer thorns in their sides, burning embers in their eye sockets. I will do this for you! For you!"

"But I don't have any enemies. Not any, actually," I explained rather pathetically. I found myself on my feet and backing toward the shop door.

She struggled to see me and couldn't. She jabbed an arm in my direction to check if I was still crouching beside her. With her arm waving frantically in the air she cried, "Where are you going?"

By then I held the door knob in my hand behind my back.

"I want to tell you I absolutely adore your store," I said as I turned the knob and almost leapt outside.

Through the closing door, I heard her last words to me: "People who oppress you will despair! You and your family will triumph! This, I promise!"

Seconds after I fled out the door, I had the keys in the ignition and my car roared to life. I'm not ashamed to admit I tore out of there, but as I left the area I could have sworn one of those dead cows out in a dry pasture took the time to give me a wink.

When Mrs. Rodriguez asked me, I denied ever visiting the shop.

About a week later, Mrs. Garcia showed me an assortment of voodoo dolls her niece had sewn and a bottle of Extract of Palo Verde Beetle, excellent for removing pimples.

### THE END

MRS. WAINWRIGHT, LIFT YOUR HEAD

Want to know how I waked up? You won't believe it if I tell you. What happened this morning at my father's house was dope. His house is his new place, with his girlfriend. The new girlfriend, not the old one. Because the old one took off to Vegas or something. I didn't really like her, but she made okay pancakes sometimes when she got a pancakey-type feeling and wasn't feeling sick. She got sick a lot from too much meth. Says my dad.

Is my dad the one who shaved my head in a Mohawk? That would be yes, Mrs. Wainwright. With his new girlfriend's electric razor. He's gonna buzz some more shapes and stuff into the sides next weekend if he gets the time and everything. Maybe the Raiders' logo! Which would be so cool!

You think that might be against the school dress code? Aw, so what, really. What can they do to me that they haven't already done, right? Anyway, Dad's a real artist with a shaver. He can do that Raiders' logo dope. My dad says this electric razor's gonna save a lot of money for haircuts for me. He's not gonna use it for his own hair. But his new girlfriend does use it on the sides of her head below her pony tail. That's why she bought it. Yes, they do call that undercut, Mrs. Wainwright. You're trying to be with it? That would be the wrong expression, Mrs. "With it" is kinda lame, actually. Maybe give it up.

But listen to what happened this morning like I'm trying to tell you! Mrs. Wainwright, are you listening? I can't tell when you put your head down like that on the desk. You need to get more sleep. That's what the other subs always tell me, so I'm telling you.

Are you listening? Head lifted up? Well. I waked up with something on my chest! Guess! You can't guess?

You don't want to? What was on my chest? Go ahead, try and guess?

No, not a pillow.

A snake! I ain't lying. And it scared me pretty bad, it did! Later I thought it was dope. You can imagine? Not really, Mrs. Wainwright. Yeah, you probably have a pretty good imagination. But still. You can't imagine what it's like to wake up with a big old snake on your chest. I am going to have to tell you.

Dad sure was laughing a lot about the sound I made when I waked up and saw the snake. It's not like I don't know he has them snakes. I just didn't expect one on my chest first thing in the morning. I sleep on a blowed-up mattress in the front room. And I waked up thinking the sheets were in a ball on my chest except that actually was Dad's snake. The ball of sheets was moving, very slowly. So I opened my eyes a little. But everything was fuzzy. Then I blinked. Dad's snake was looking me in the face and flicking its red tongue around.

Dad thought it was funny and so did his new girlfriend. The snake was about as scared of me as I was of him. It was a constrictor, but don't look so shocked, Mrs. Wainwright, I was too big a prey for it, Dad said. It was kinda yellow colored with a little green and black eyes. Nothing like waking up with the weight of a snake on your chest. Okay, you think it's not too funny. Well, I might have agreed at the time. Dad said it almost scared all the freckles off my face. You don't believe it would do that? Yeah, it was just a dumb joke. Dad tells a million of those dumb things. Dad was sitting there watching the whole time while I waked up. He even filmed it on his phone. We're gonna have a record of that joke forever. Boy, oh boy, was he ever happy about it.

That's the thing about Dad's place; it's kinda creepy sometimes when he gets creepy ideas. I just hafta watch it around him. I hafta get prepared for scary stuff. Dad likes to leave rubber masks like of that clown, you know, _It_ , and stuff hanging on my doorknob and weird stuff like that to freak me out. Gags, is what he calls them. But gagging isn't funny, is it? Gagging means chocking and you could die! Right, Mrs. Wainwright?

You don't like this violence stuff I'm always saying, Mrs. Wainwright? I should stop talking about it and stay on task? I hate these worksheets and who says these have to be my task? My teacher? Who is she now? The one they had in here broke her arm when she fell and so they let her go. Now they got no teacher. So nobody is now my teacher.

That lady, my teacher before, was doing a take down on the girl who spit. I can't even remember her name, but you're lucky she's not here now because she spit all the time. Spit was flying everywhere. So icky. I don't know where they took her or maybe she runned away? Anyway, all the aides were on break or busy so my old teacher tried to do the take down of the spitting girl alone and it broke her arm. She quit after that. Or retired, the same thing. You don't know how to do take downs? Leave it that way. You don't want to do those. People get their arms broke who try that shit.

Mrs. Wainwright, when are we walking around the school? One thirty you think? Ok, that's pretty soon. I guess. Yes, I know my clock times. Do you think I don't? Sheesh.

Violence, though, is pretty important. Like Five Nights at Freddy's? That's all fake. You should get a hold of some real stuff. Ever hear of the Holy Cost? No? You know when people were in showers with gases killing them? Yeah! That! That's it. In Germany. It's worse than anything in Five Nights. My teacher said that and she was right! Five Nights at Freddy's is make-believe. I've seen ten times worst pictures of that Holy Cost. We heard about it one day in my other school before they sent me here. To Mary Meredith.

I had a girlfriend here for a while. Do you believe me? I did have a good girlfriend. She was the best. You know, you don't have to do violence to be here, you could also have seen violence. Lot of people who come to sub here don't know that, Mrs. Wainwright. Yeah, there's been a lot of people take this job. The teacher job and your job as the aide lady. The aide, Mrs. Farrino is her name, and she keeps getting sick or driving to Phoenix for concerts and not coming in for a week! So what I'm telling you is my girlfriend saw her dad kill her mother. For real! With a knife. She kept drawing pictures of knives and telling kids at school all about what happened, all the blood and stuff, so they put her in here at Mary Meredith. To protect other children from hearing about it nonstop which was too much horror for regular kids. I mean she really didn't talk about it, not to me, but she kept drawing these scary pictures and then she'd talk about the pictures to other kids. So they sent her here, and she was my girlfriend for a while. We always ate our lunch together. I don't know where they shipped her out to. Dad always says, "It sounds like Grand Central in that school of yours."

One night I watched a horror movie where people were blinded. For real. It was a horror one, yeah. Dad likes his horror movies. That's all he watches basically. His new girlfriend does, too. They met because of horror, I guess. She said his T-shirt was cool. I think it had a killer clown being chopped up or something. Anyways, in this movie I saw this lady was tied up and her eyes got punched out. You don't want to hear? Oh, gee, screw you, Mrs. Wainwright!

No, I'm not gonna say I'm sorry! I'm not!

You're a jerk, Mrs. Wainwright!

A fucking jerk!

Sorry about that. They took me down and then hauled me off. Where? To the padded room again. I'm off some of my meds this week because we didn't get the forms in to the state. That's why they gave me you. My own aide, sorta. We let the form lap. In the program they have.

Lapse? Okay, whatever, Mrs. Wainwright. You gotta walk down with me because I have one pill I can still take. And they got it ready about eleven. Just in time for lunch. For a few more days. Usually there's two in the bottom of the Dixie cup. I don't like swallowing them. Even with water.

We go this way, Mrs. Wainwright. You've never worked here before? I can see that.

That's where I go. What do I mean? What do you mean, what do I mean? That's where I go to the padded room. You asked. Sheesh.

What's the padded room like? I don't like it. It's like a crazy place. I saw a movie about that one night with my dad and his new girlfriend. All about a crazy man and his girlfriend. It's probably too violent for you though. I don't want to get in trouble again so I better not say it. Why? I might say something rude again and end up in the padded room all by myself which is not dope, actually.

Turn this way. The nurse is this way where that little room is with the open door. We gotta stand in a dumb line. You wait with me. No, they won't give you any pills if you're in the line. The nurse has this big notebook with every kid's pills listed. Mrs. Wainwright, no offense, but you're kinda dumb. It's okay, we get a lot of dumb subs. It's a job for dumbos, no offense.

Hello, Nurse Karyl. Yeah, I have another sub with me. Name is Wainwright. I don't know when my dad is gonna return the f-ing form. You gotta ask him. He doesn't answer his phone ever? Okay, well, he probably thinks I'm in trouble when he sees your number. I'll try telling him. But he don't listen to me none about nothing, no how, never.

Okay, I'm swallowing it. See?

Let's go. Back to the room. You're turning the wrong way, Mrs. Wainwright. If you go that way you'll be at where the high schoolers are. They are a bunch of crazy-assed fools.

So do you want to hear about that movie with the nutty man and his girlfriend? Okay. You forced me to tell you. Don't complain, okay? Then I'll tell you. I woke up in the night a couple of weeks ago again and nobody was awake and this movie was on. _Brain Blood_ was the name of it. I know, sounds scary, huh? I sleep in the front with the TV, like I said. The movie, _Brain Blood_ , was all about the crazy man, you know, and the man he finds out his girlfriend has another man as her new friend and like she jilted him is what my dad said and then the crazy man is a brain surgeon and he has to operate on the boyfriend so he destroys his brain and makes the boyfriend into a zombie. So this insane lover ends up so crazy that he hammers a chisel into the doctor's brain to get his revenge. That happens in the very end. Then he shows up a lot as a zombie. Wowie, it is some good movie if you want to be super freaked out. _Brain Blood_ , don't forget.

You don't think that's good? For me? Sometimes I don't, too. It's really scary and weird. The doc is a real kook. I mean a super weirdo dude. You probably wouldn't like the movie. I agree. What's your name again? Mrs. Wainwright, that's it. Mrs. Wainwright. I sure hope you're here tomorrow. You're a lot of fun to talk to. I get to thinking and talking with you. Yeah, I'm working. I'm working! What does it look like I'm doing?

And this other movie. Where there is a man with a face all burned with acid. Like a melted face all blah and everything like burnt butter. Turned out this chick did it with acid and she visits him and he gets revenge for what she did to him. Man, it is cool! But creepy. You wouldn't like it. And I don't remember the name of it anyways.

No, I don't know what he did to her.

Really my dad is the king of creepy stuff. Yeah, I wish he wasn't into it so much sometimes when I'd like my little home sweet home like anybody. Horror, horror, horror. I guess I've probably had enough. I'm like living non-stop horror! Maybe I'm a little mad about whoever makes up all that shit—excuse me—because it isn't good for the kids like me, but they don't care, they just keep thinking it up. Like a factory. And selling more horror so it goes out there and gets to kids and scares em real good at night. But they never think of us kids and how it does stuff to us. What's it like for us?

America makes fear, actually, is what it does now. We just sell fear all the time. Halloween is so big, man. So much shit sold to decorate with horror. I'd rather think about motorcycles or something, but my dad don't stick to that for long and I don't know why. I get him interested in looking at motorcycles and the next thing I know, wham, he's showing me skeletons on motorcycles, and tattoos of zombies on motorcycles, and motorcycles on fire with people roasting on them. It's kinda awful.

But around Halloween I think my dad is the fucking bomb. It's the truth. That's his season. That's when he shines, you know. Our place always has the best decorations. Always, we got the best decorations in anyplace we lived. I used to bring kids home to see them and they couldn't believe it. Their eyes were super big seeing it all. Decorations like bloody dolls and creepy clown masks in the dirt and stuff. He got the dolls at Goodwill, real cheap and painted them to be bloody. Real graves, too. Dad dug em and he had to wet the ground with a hose. Arizona soil is crap, not like Missouri. Arizona soil is like digging concrete crap. Pretend I didn't say crap, Mrs. Wainwright. Anyway he dug these real cool graves for the bloody dolls.

But I don't know if he can dig any graves in this new place, they might not let us rip up the front. Not that it's nice or anything, but the landlord is a real jerk. A pain in the ass, excuse me for saying it. He's on our case a lot. About the rent being late and what we're doing. But Dad probably won't stay there that long anyway. He never does stay long any place. And he sure won't with that jerk of a landlord. No use worrying about Halloween when it's only April! Right? I don't even know if his new girlfriend will want to move or nothing if we move to California before Halloween this year. She doesn't even make good pancakes. She don't even try!

But you can't live Halloween all year. That's just sad to try to do that. I told Dad that. And he didn't like it. I never saw him so mad at me as when I went and said that to him. His face turned as red as a beet and his neck too. His eyes bugged out like in movies where people are getting strangled. I never shoulda said that even though I think it's true. He grabbed my arm and squeezed it. Hard! He said I might have to go stay with my mother. And that would be a f-ing nightmare!

Why?

Because she's dead! Somebody kilt her and they don't know who!

I sure hope you're here again tomorrow, Mrs. Wainwright.

You're a great sub teacher's aide, and I'm real sorry I called you a big dumbo loser who was full of crap.

### THE END

SQUAW DRESSES

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah," said my brother, "or a sombrero."

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

"Hmmm," said my brother, "I'm just so bored."

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

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

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

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

We ignored her.

"Quit looking in here," she said angrily.

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

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

The cow bell clanked again.

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

We all looked at the door in amazement.

A woman wearing an expensive suit came in briskly.

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

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

"Well, hardly any," said Dottie quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Get outside!" she ordered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then do it, silly."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mother, we need to tell you something!" said my brother outside the curtain.

"Go back outside," said Mother.

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

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

"But something awful is happening!" said my brother.

"What do you mean?"

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

Just then the cowbell rang.

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

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

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

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

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

My brother and I took a giant step backwards.

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

The dress resembled electrified vomit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

### THE END

TELL THE KAISER A THING OR TWO

Copying a chart turned out to be the last task of the long, hot afternoon. But their gosh-darn teacher hadn't finished chalking it up on the blackboard, so the Fighting Mechanics had to sit around in those stiff old school desks, just waiting for their teacher to step away from the board. Most of the men who attended the temporary training camp in the basement of the Mansard-roofed building that had once been a gambler's den decided the only thing left to do was shoot the breeze the way people will when they need to waste time and there are plenty of other people around.

At some point in the near future, they supposed, the time wasting and dull classes would end, and naturally their thoughts drifted in that direction. They discussed the muddled minutia of the war from their far-away perspective near the Mexican border in Arizona, and they speculated about their upcoming role in the battles at the European front.

Some among them spread the rumor that the Fighting Mechanics were going to get drafted in early August, all of them, and shipped to London and Paris and great and famous places like that, and then be sent on to the front, maybe even before Christmas. An order from President Wilson, they claimed, would come at any moment, and they would be whisked away to glory. Several pretended to know the exact part of France where they would fight and something about the battle strategy. Few actually had a clear idea whether anything they'd heard were true, but they certainly hoped a draft before Christmas was correct, and not any later. Others were sure the war would be over without them and long before Christmas. No one doubted that once the Americans entered the damn Boche would be done. No matter where or when they arrived in Europe, they knew all of them would show the world how well warriors were raised in Southern Arizona.

"Heck, those Italians haven't taken Gorizia yet," said a young man who everyone took to be a bit of a fool due to the shotgun nature of his remarks and his general misunderstanding of the workings of the internal combustion engine. (As a bad joke, he had called it the 'infernal' combustion engine and after three lectures on engine mechanics still seemed to imagine that strokes were movements of the timing belt! Egads!)

"Who's Gorizia? Is she a pretty gal?" asked another joker somewhere along in the schoolroom seats.

"They'll never take territory! Those Italians are bogged down in the mountains," said someone else glumly. "Not going anywhere. According to the papers yesterday. I can't hardly stand to read em."

"Dolomites. Those are the mountains you're talking about?" asked a bright young man at the front. His name was Dan and he had only recently moved to Southern Arizona from New York. Having just joined their ranks, he worked hard to catch up with their names and ideas.

"And the Julian Alps," someone else piped up. "But where are they?"

"Say, what I want to know is why won't those damn Mexicans let up on their damned revolution during the war with Germany?" said an intense, bug-eyed gentleman. He addressed Dan and all those seated in front of him. "I've got a brother and his family living at the border. I don't want to leave them unprotected if the Mexicans won't let up. That just wouldn't be right. I'm leaving them unprotected. We're all leaving them unprotected! And there's that damn revolution. Shooting and all. Beheadings!"

"Aren't the Russians just as bad with their squabble?" a companion to his right replied.

"If you're talking of the Russians they won't be any help anyway," offered Dan. He fiddled with his pencil and added, "I've met lots of Russians. In New York."

"Gorizia, that's where the trouble is," the first speaker repeated.

"Where? Where do you mean?" an older man demanded.

"Just because he said it, don't mean it's right," said someone in another row.

"Oh, don't listen to him. My dad always said 'A man who don't know anything is pretty sure to tell it the first chance he gets,' " said Dan.

Several trainees laughed, and Dan felt a glow of pride at being the funny one of the group. He wished he could tell his dad about the success of his joke, but Mother had divorced Dad and now they didn't know where he kept himself. They'd come out West hoping to find him at his last address. But that hadn't panned out.

"The progress of the Italians in the passes is key," added Dan, trying to appear informed and yet solicitous of anyone's information in the classroom. He had turned around and perched on his desk in order to make friends with those who had assembled along the length of the chalkboard for the two-hour course.

But just then, the nervous-looking instructor who had chalked "Points of Maintenance of the American Transit Truck" on the blackboard spun around. "Gentlemen. Here are the salient maintenance facts. Please copy them into your notebooks immediately."

Dan kicked his legs out and flopped back down in his desk. A few of the men groaned while beginning to copy the lengthy chart, but Dan wrote eagerly. He thought there might be some good money in owning a fleet of trucks eventually. This information could come in handy then.

"Sir, is there anything more?" asked the foolish fellow who had been so worried about the Italians in Gorizia.

"The lecture has ended with this singular task remaining," replied the teacher with a sniff. He snapped his leather valise closed and stood, watching the class copy the chart, his arms crossed on his chest.

One by one, within a few minutes, notebooks slammed closed and the trainees lumbered out of their desks, through the classroom door, and up three concrete steps. They felt the fiery sun radiating from the volcanic rock outer walls of the basement classrooms before they emerged. Then desert landscaping of ocotillo, cholla cactus, and palms met them as they came up the stairs in groups. Eerie indistinct footsteps told them unseen people crossed the open landings that circled the building above. As a group, they crossed a dusty path over to the College of Mines building. There, the trainees had a small shower facility (meant for those accidents working with chemicals) and the trainees were permitted to use it now to change clothing before a short course of athletic training on the polo field and later to shower, if they desired.

They all carried satchels of loose shirts and dungarees and while they changed into these lighter clothes for exercise, the war discussion commenced once again.

"It will take us to push through from the west. Just wait till we get there. Then they'll see what someone from Arizona can do with the Kaiser and all his crew." This from an Arizona booster type. His head was cocked back and he looped his thumb in the belt loop of his pants. His pimply face was shiny and red and Dan had noticed he had copied the auto mechanical chart carelessly with big, loopy letters.

"To lick the Huns," said another. "That's all we've got to do. Keep our minds on that. We've got to whip them good."

Of Hun frightfulness and destruction, of the invading Boche, they argued on and on while slipping on their workout shoes. They argued about the absolute necessity of the draft, about when they would be the ones going over, if they would get to Arizona next in the draft, if maybe it would actually be early in August, and about the risk of not protecting the border with Mexico during their war in France.

"It's plenty tough down there on the line. I hate to leave the folks with nobody to stop the Mexican revolutionaries if they want to come up here and harm our women," said the same fellow with family at the border.

"Damn Mexicans. Damn Boche," grumbled the far length of the crowded dressing room.

"We've got our own problems. Why did they have to go and stir up trouble?" Dan commented to a man beside him.

"I read Germany was behind the foment of intrigue in Russia. They spread the rumors of tracts of free land. That made Russia, in the throes of revolution, not to be relied upon. We can't trust them to keep the Central Powers busy." That was a pompous fellow, Professor Meechum, who introduced himself to Dan as a college lecturer from somewhere in Kansas.

When the change of clothes had been made, they grumbled out the door and onto the field to have their fitness training hour. But they wanted to be trained right away. In better things. Like those gosh-darn Vickers Machine Guns.

The drafting order for Arizona arrived August 5th that year. The summer storms were huge that year and the town had heavy afternoon rain that turned the field to mud for several days before the notice came. Then they really knew they were going over.

When tramping together in the bright desert sun, they hooted about an old man on a bench who had plagued their athletic practice for several weeks.

"Isn't old Navajo Joe something, eh Dan?" said Professor Meechum.

"Why, who do you mean?" Dan asked.

"None other than that there. The old Indian gentleman on the bench," the professor replied, pointing. "Feast your eyes upon his bug-ridden hide."

"He's the silliest thing!" said the pimple faced boy who boosted for Arizona. His name was Walter and Dan knew him fairly well now.

"He's nothing but a sheep-faced, smelly-breathed despicable coot!" said another.

"The most stupid fellow I've ever seen!" said the man with family at the border.

They all agreed that the old Navajo who had plagued them during their training had to be about the silliest, the most sheep-faced, foul and loathsome grandson of a gawl-darned fool that ever was devised in all the United States of America, so help them God.

"Devised? Well, how was that?" Dan, the new one among them, shrieked in the cold shower water afterwards. There was so much mud they had to have showers now. "Won't born do well enough for the likes of him? How do you say it—devised? Explain yourselves, will you be so kind, men? I'm from Back East, don't you know, and I'm ignorant of any Navajo humor. Let me in on the joke."

"Why, it's no joke. He's the son of a sheep," they cried with a laugh, when soaping up. Then they all broke into their favorite song, singing it especially to Dan: "Old navvie-ho-ho-joe had an ever lovving mother, 'twas a M-U-L-E, 'twas a mule, 'twas a mule! And his father was a ewe, noboddy knew, old navvie-ho-ho-joe! In the paradise of Ar-i-zon-i-ay, that we proudly call our own, there ain't noboddy equal to navvie-ho-ho-joe! He may be a son of a so-and-so, but he's our navvie-ho-ho-joe!"

"Don't that top all?" cried Walter, the pimply boy.

"I'm awful sore," said Dan. "This cold water hurts!"

"Me too. I can't stand to stretch," said Walter.

"Both of you are out of shape. I never felt better. The exercise has done me a treat. What I want to know is why won't they give us a course on the use of the Vickers Light Machine Gun? Why wait until we get to France?" asked Professor Meechum.

"The Vickers is the thing. That's what we need. Why are they holding off on letting us get our hands on it? Don't they know we are able to handle it?" asked the man with family at the border.

"I don't fancy the idea of you with a machine gun," said Professor Meechum.

"Oh, quit being a so-and-so, will you?" replied Walter.

"The war could be won with submarine chasers," this was from Dan.

"Aren't those Huns the worst? Did you see what they did with babies in Belgium?" asked a man who had joined them in the shower.

"What about our own Arizona hero?" said Walter.

"Who's that?" asked the man who was just getting wet.

"Our own balloon buster! Luke is his name."

"Oh, isn't he the finest. I would fly one of them aeroplanes with him if I could. He's dropping bombs on the Boche balloons. Took out about half a dozen already," said the man with family on the border.

"Say, is that so! That's showing the Kaiser a thing or two. He won't be sending balloons over the poor troops," said Dan.

"I want to get my hands on one of them Vickers, though," Professor Meechum repeated.

"If we could only protect our own on the high seas!" cried Dan.

The next training day Dan thought to ask Professor Meechum and the others how had such a mascot attached himself to them, the silly old Navajo who showed up every day like clockwork right when they were assembling and found his spot on the bench where he sat rigidly and watched every gawl darned move they ever made as though he would even know what modern warfare was? That set them off exclaiming: Who was he trying to fool by watching them practicing there on the field? He probably didn't know at all what they were doing. He might not even know what Europe was. And what would he make of the Kaiser? Say, wouldn't that be funny if they ever asked and he didn't know what Europe was. Say, that was a fine old joke to pull on Old Pop once and they must remember to do it.

"Old Pop, where is Europe?"

"What do you think of the Hindenburg line? Will it hold?"

"Is the Kaiser the greatest?"

"Do you like the Old Stars and Stripes over Europe?"

Then, why, one of them they didn't know said, "Old Pop over there, remember he could be considered a Yank, too" and the rest of them laughed. It was too, too funny to believe that anyone would think such a thing, but luckily he would never go abroad, and someone said he wouldn't pass the health test to get in to Europe. Probably has consumption, yes, probably, from the reservation they did have consumption and were put in the sanitariums in town. Probably escaped from such a place for some hours, but they ought to keep him in, being such an ugly old coot. Some of them said he was mad, a silly man indeed, the Navajo who sat on the bench smiling at the boys in practice, smiling into the sun there. They laughed at him and his approval of their military exercises.

And he did approve.

Their running earned his grunts. Their sit-ups earned his claps. And he was always nodding at them as though he approved highly of their half-hearted jabs with bayonets.

By September they were preparing for a wonderful adventure overseas. The bright light of Arizona boiled down on their khaki shirts and trousers, their laced shoes and broad brimmed brown felt hats. All newly issued. They were getting dressed for the war over there.

Navajo Joe smiled when he sat down on his bench and saw them in their new uniforms. He clapped again when they began their exercises. Those thin and wrinkly old hands of his made less noise clapping than baby's clothes flapping in the breeze.

Toward the end of their training session, Walter was the first to speak.

"Say, I don't particularly like the way that fellow sits there every day," he said, glaring over at Navajo Joe.

"Silly old Indian Joe," another mocked.

"Sometimes, I think he might be a German spy," said Professor Meechum thoughtfully.

"Naw, he's just old Navajo Joe," said another.

"He oughta come into the showers with us? Did you notice he stinks?" asked Walter.

"Why no? Does he? Do tell?" said Professor Meechum.

"He stinks to high heaven like a dung hill and a dead dog," said Walter, his pimples gleaming in the fierce sun. "I noticed it because I was near to him today. And it was terrible to smell his stink."

"He's nothing but an old man. They all stink. So did my grandad a fore he died," said Dan.

"Well, he stinks worse. Worse than any grandad. We should wash his hide," grumbled Walter.

"Well, that my son, that is what I call a brilliant strategy. Why not?" asked the Professor.

Dan felt a momentary panic. Were they really suggesting putting the frail old man under a cold shower? Surely, it was a cruel joke, but then three of them, Walter, Professor Meechum and the man with family at the border, ran whooping and hollering toward the bench and the rest of them followed. Dan, too.

They dashed over to where the man sat and picked him up between them and carried him on their shoulders. And he waved and smiled, not knowing what they were planning. All the way to the College of Mines they carried him like a hero in some triumphant parade.

Dan followed. His arms hung limply. He tried to wet his lips, but he couldn't. When he spoke his voice came out raspy and he couldn't make it louder than their yells. He watched what was happening in absolute horror. He knew he should be saying something, yelling at them, pulling on them or even slugging them if it meant keeping them from tormenting the poor old man, but somehow Dan couldn't overcome his fear of disapproval.

"Listen, I don't think..." Dan began. "When the sun goes down it's frightfully cold. We can't wet his clothes! Not in November."

"Hush, boy," said a man near him. "Leave them alone."

Dan tried again when they got to the showers, but in the tiled room he couldn't make his voice heard over the echoing shouts and whoops. "This isn't right," Dan cried, but no one heard him.

They carried the old Navajo right into the showers and turned on the taps. Water poured out on his head. They drenched the old man in the shower stall and then, when he had almost collapsed, they picked him up and brought him out again. Somehow, on the way out, they even bumped his head on a pipe. He didn't cry out in pain, but only touched his head which Dan saw was bleeding slightly.

They let him down on a small lawn outside the entrance to the shower room and he stood in the late winter sun, trembling and dripping. His long white hair plastered his eyes. He tried to stand up but his wet clothing acted like a vice holding him bent over. A chill wind swept across the desert. He said nothing. One by one, they returned to the showers. Dan ducked in quickly himself. Hopefully, surely, the old man didn't live far from campus.

Dan undressed. He glanced in the mirror and saw the thin straight line of his mouth. Why hadn't he said anything? Did he want to be popular with these freaks? When they had done something like that to an old man? Their cruelty left Dan shaking.

When he came out the door, Dan immediately searched the buildings. No sign of the old gentleman they had abused.

Ahead of him a group of Fighting Mechanics roistered toward the mule-pulled streetcar. "Bye, Indian Joe," they called out laughingly on their way off of campus. "We'll think of you when we're over there!"

They spent two weeks in pup tents in Georgia before they shipped to Europe. Dan got to be with Walter and Professor Meechum. It seemed they did need hardening up. And they did think of the old man a few times when they were on their maneuvers in the rain.

"Funny old coot, wasn't he? That old Navajo Joe," said Professor Meechum, sipping bad coffee from a tin cup under a dripping tree.

"Wonder who he's watching now?" said Walter angrily.

"Boy scouts!" said another young man.

"Yes, that's it. My little brother probably!" added another fellow.

"Is your little brother in the Boy Scouts practicing there?" asked the professor.

"He says so. But he's an awful braggart. I spect he's lying."

Dan said nothing, but he worried.

The ideas they had of the European terrain and the equipment carried them across the Atlantic. In their tightly backed bunks, with the cold sea outside steel hulls, they rained wrath on the intercepted letter which had called them "idiotic Yankees."

During the voyage, their shared opinions of Black Jack Pershing varied. The low point was that he was a stiff old so-and-so. The elated opinion was that he was the best and the brightest their country had to offer and that their brother had served at the Mexican border and could attest that General Pershing was the finest and proudest commander.

But in all their bickering they heartily agreed upon one thing.

That one thing was the Greatest of all the States in their country, Arizona, which they planned to represent spectacularly in the war over there, the silly old war, started by a bunch of silly old Europeans who didn't know their left foot from their right and didn't live in any really rugged places like Arizona. Wouldn't the Europeans be surprised whenever they actually got there which was going to be in a few months at least, leaving Arizona (an extreme affliction it was to do that), travelling on trains, and then this ship, and they would show those high-fallutin' Europeans a thing or two then, by golly. As in the popular song they loved to sing: over there, over there, send the word...and some such nonsense.

The Arizona National Guard troops had been across the border from Agua Prieta and Nogales, at the border with Mexico, of that they were surely proud, and now they marched off their ship and onto a train to the cheering crowds. The good old 158th Infantry and them being the Fighting Mechanics.

"It's the Lafayatte Escadrille that teached them!" cried Walter.

"Why don't they call it an American name? I don't like the sound of that Escadrille thing!" complained Professor Meechum.

On a stool in a bar in France they imitated the funny stiff Navajo Joe sitting at the stadium on the bench, watching them practice. Oh, the French gals thought that was grand, the way they did that thing, very funny. Dan sat quietly and didn't laugh.

Someone slouching at the end of the bar was reading an English paper. "They shot down Luke. But he refused to be captured and he shot at them until they killed him."

"They killed our Luke?" whined Walter. "Is that really true?" He tore the paper away and read it himself.

"Shot him dead beside his own aeroplane," said Walter sadly.

"Remember old Navajo Joe at the field?" they asked each other the night before they were split up. Their unit was deployed at a depot and served as replacements anywhere along the enemy lines in France. They couldn't stay together.

"Wasn't he funny...?" asked someone sadly about Navajo Joe.

"Sure wish I could see him sitting there now. Wonder if he still is. Oughta write my mother and ask her to take a gander and see if he is still sitting there like a post."

"Do you suppose they're training more?"

"No, we were the last. When our boys get there the war will surely be over."

"We'll all be back and find out. When we're back there we'll find out if he's still sitting there. Like a post."

"I believe he was an enemy agent," said the professor.

"Oh gosh!" said Dan grimacing to think of what had happened.

"Oh, he was an old sheep-faced son-of-a-gun. That's all," said Walter.

Then gas came over at them that night, the night they came into the depot which was run by the 158th. It burned the flesh—that mustard gas or was it phosgene creeping at them—gas which blinded or partially blinded—even killed. They didn't know to get their gas masks on fast in the dark.

In the morning they were told again that they couldn't stay together, because most of them were dead or blinded.

Dan didn't care. He didn't want to stay with any of them. Not since the Professor and Walter had both died the night before during the gas attack. And he was shipped to a hospital with partial vision damage without ever seeing much of the front.

The Fighting Mechanics had a band. And those band members that weren't injured or killed in the gas attack were selected as President Woodrow Wilson's honor guard at the peace conference in Paris.

In the end of January, 1919, young Dan sat on the bench in his somewhat blinded state feeling the warmth of the sun on his face. His mother had taken him to the university finally after he had survived the flu to his old stomping grounds at the university to sit in the sun and relive his days of training on the small field. The flu epidemic had hit Arizona right as Dan was discharged. The virus spread across the state. Schools, churches and movie theaters were closed. The state fair was cancelled in November.

"I feel awfully self-conscious with these funny glasses on. But it's better than being totally blind. I just have to be careful in the desert sun."

"Most people have only just taken off their masks, Dan," his mother explained. "They're not going to bother about your glasses."

That was one of the first things he'd seen in Tucson, people in gauze masks. For a whole month he'd seen that. After a month at home the flu had changed forms and people didn't catch it, only pigs and chickens.

The word mask made him feel sick because he thought about the Professor and Walter who couldn't put their masks on in the dark. They never even got to use a Vickers Machine Gun.

He'd already been sitting there for quite a while when he dimly saw someone walking on the lawn. His sight had already returned partially from the gassing and he wore special sunglasses.

Dan called out to the figure. "Hello, hello there, please."

"Yes, sir." The grounds worker walked toward the stiff young man sitting on a bench at the side of the polo field.

"Do you work here?" asked Dan.

The man looked at Dan sitting on the bench. The way Dan seemed to turn his head oddly let him know he was blind or partially blind. "I have for years, yes. I'm a grounds keeper. Polo grounds. In front of you."

"I'm partly blind, but I knew this place before when I could see. I did my training here, you see. There were lots of us."

"Ah, yes," the man replied. "I remember."

"There were lots of us."

"Yes, I remember," the man repeated.

"I'm glad someone does."

"Well, you have done a great service to your nation."

"Do you really think so?"

"Truly. Do you doubt it?"

"I did sometimes there, but now you make me feel worthy of the praise. Thank you."

"You're very welcome. Now, I have to get back to work, if you'll excuse me."

"Oh, of course." Dan could hear the footsteps pacing away and he could even see partially when the groundkeeper left.

Dan exuded confidence and excitement when his mother arrived to pick him up.

"I had a great time in the shops," she called when she approached the bench where her son sat. "And look at you! Smiling again. You look like your old self. Why, everything is coming back to normal now."

"Yes, Mother! Imagine that! You had a good time at the shops and I had a great time here! I didn't think I would. You see, I met someone who remembered us trainees. And he said we were worthy of praise for being over there. He really thinks a lot of us soldiers."

"Wasn't that nice?"

"Yes, now I feel so much happier. I'd like to come by again maybe in a week or so. I'd like to talk to him one more time. It made me feel so much better about all I've been through."

"All right. If you think it's helping you. Of course, we will do it again."

Dan thought about coming back to sit on that bench again all week. He knew exactly what he was going to ask. It was about the elderly Navajo gentleman. Dan needed to know if the Navajo man was still around. But if he was around, Dan sure wanted to apologize for the awful thing that had been done to him. He'd never told Mother. He never wanted to think of her knowing about the shame of abusing an old man. And his only friends at camp and on the trip over were some of the ones who'd hurt him. Now they were dead.

Two weeks later his mother was able to take him back to the bench. His eyesight was getting better by the day. He almost could make out the features of the groundskeeper.

"Back again?" said the groundskeeper.

"Yes! I'm so glad you remember me. I'm getting much better. I've been able to walk a little by myself."

"That's fine, very fine."

Dan could see his blurry image turning away. "Could you answer a question?" Dan asked.

The image halted. "Why yes, sir. If I should happen to know the answer."

"Before we left for the war, we all remembered an old gentleman who sat on this very bench."

"A what, sir?" The groundskeeper's figured loomed closer.

"A gentleman. Who sat here on this very bench where I'm sitting now. You must remember him if you've been a groundskeeper all these years. He always chose this bench. I believe he was a Navajo Indian? We called him Navajo Joe, which wasn't very kind."

"Oh...yes. I do recollect him."

"A man named Navajo Joe? Does he ever come back here? To sit? I'd like to apologize to him, you see."

"Well, sir... I'm very sorry to have to tell you this, and you being so kind to ask about him, but that gentleman happened to have died several years past. He was well known to me. Some rowdy bunch of undergraduates who were trainees studying here took it upon themselves to throw him into the showers one day as a prank and the poor old soul died just a few days later. I suppose that happened after you left. They had knocked him on the head carrying him on the way out of the showers, you see. The university tried to find those responsible but they had already shipped out for Europe, the lot of them. Every last one of them were useless in my opinion. If I ever knew one of them, I'm telling you, I wouldn't be able to talk civil. I can't even be civil thinking of them. Letting a vicious thing like that happen to a wonderful old man."

Dan felt tears welling in his eyes.

"Everybody feels the same way around here," the groundskeeper added. "And they aren't welcome back here if they ever come."

Horror transfixed Dan's face. "I see. I see. Quite so."

"That's the way I feel. That's all."

Dan said nothing when the groundskeeper walked away.

When Dan's mother came to retrieve him, she struggled to get him to the streetcar, and she couldn't understand it, for all his improvement was gone and his condition had slipped back considerably.

### THE END

CIRCUITOUS LEMON ECONOMY

The little boy who was a lemon salesman staggered across the cracked asphalt of Calle Obregon. He was dragging forward in spurts a plastic bag which bulged with the sour yellow fruit. Three blocks remained before he would reach the border between Sonora, Mexico and Arizona. At the border he would sell the lemons, sell them and yet not sell them.

He crossed the traffic lanes and reached the curb on the other side, but was forced to wait in the street in front of a parked car while the black bulking figures of two widows struggled to mount the high curb in front of him. While he waited, he glanced down at the elongated neck and plump body of the sack. He admired the way the ripe lemons thrust their fat yellow bellies against the plastic. He admired the way their curved bodies pursed at each end. Some of the best specimens retained a green stem and two glossy leaves. It was true what his mother said about them being almost too beautiful to sell, true that he was lucky to have found them along the railroad tracks.

He looked down at them fondly, but suddenly he saw something in the bag that startled him.

Before he could examine the startling thing closely, the widows moved forward, and it was his turn to climb the curb. He stepped up with one foot and swung the bag upward, using his trailing foot as a forklift. On the sidewalk, he fought his way through the hectic crowd, still lugging his precious cargo. Eventually he worked himself over to a quiet section of the sidewalk on the far side of the torn awning of the Hotel Fray Marcos de Niza. There he stooped over his bag. A dark amber lemon, defaced with an ugly black splotch, and growing gray fur, showed through the plastic. How had that bad one surfaced?

He knelt and untied the knot in the neck of the bag; with a poke, the rotten lemon disappeared. That was a trick of the trade. You had to...

He never saw the ambush coming. When he was down, hiding the furry lemon, and his back was turned, someone snuck out of the alley beside the hotel. A swift shove between his shoulder blades and the little boy hit the sidewalk. A hand grabbed his wrist and yanked it, and his bag of lemons vanished in the arms of another, older boy.

***~~~***

A queue of fuming cars waited to cross the border from Sonora, Mexico into Arizona. On a billboard slanting out of the hillside, a crimson-lipped woman smiled down on the line of cars and words beside her face read: "Adios, Sonora. Please Declare All Fruits and Vegetables." The tan blouse on the woman in the ad merged with a torrid plain of twisted cacti sprouting in the background of the billboard and that background, in turn, merged with the actual prickly pear and cholla cacti of the real hill. Below the sign inside the waiting cars on the road, children bounced off one another, scratched their prickly-heat rashes, and stroked the tissue paper beards of their Santa Claus piñatas, which their frugal parents were buying cheaply nine months too early. Around the cars, dozens of urgent, insistent, or pleading children bolted in a desperate race to sell trinkets. They had some successes; boxes of gum, cheap dolls, and straw hats found homes inside the scorching, north-bound cars.

Ten cars back from the border, a man and woman talked inside a minivan.

"I wish our sons were more like that," said the man, hitching himself back in his seat and poking a toothpick in the direction of the pleading children.

"What do you mean? They're starving and desperate," said his appalled wife.

The man turned and met his wife's worried face. "Of course I don't mean I wish they were starving but," he said, "I wish they had some gumption. Neither of our little fellows ever express any interest in doing anything for themselves and they don't take the slightest interest in my job. They don't appear to have an inkling about what I do for a living."

"I think they're interested," she said, "but teaching high school algebra wouldn't be easy for an eight-year-old to understand. And I don't want them messing around with those dangerous chemicals that you use to paint lawns green. I read the labels one day and that stuff is scary."

"I know, I know. I just mean I've got a lot riding on Mexico. I want you and the boys to be a part of it."

"We are part of it, said his wife. "We went to Hermosillo, didn't we? I'm sure when our sons grow up they're going to enjoy traveling with you representing Green Desert Enterprises. And the chemicals won't be as bad for them later when their bodies have grown."

"The main idea I had is what I want them to be interested in. I want them to know that water is a scare resource. There are plenty of Bermuda lawns in Mexico and Mexicans like a green lawn in the winter the same as anyone else. And I want them to know that Mexico is going to be a profitable place to do business."

His wife nodded. "Sure it is. Father says you're dead on target about that."

"But I mean, look at these kids," said the man. "They're incredible: up at dawn, working, thinking of moneymaking ideas. Nothing gets past them. They see opportunities everywhere. It's enterprise in action, human thinking conquering difficulties. It's amazing how resourceful humans are. I don't think it should be taken for granted. I think it's a wonderful thing about our species."

"Well, I see what you're saying, but I don't see blessings in childhood poverty," said the dubious woman. "I think I'm right about that. They may be working hard to make money, but I don't think it's their own idea. Circumstances forced them into it. They'd like to play the same as any other boys."

"Let me tell you something," began the man. He looked at his wife's pretty, but determined, face. "Oh, never mind." He snapped the toothpick in two and tossed the halves out the window. His face had a hard wistful look as he leaned away from her and concentrated instead on the eager children.

On impulse, he rolled his window further down until he could lean out.

"Hey!" he hollered up the line of cars.

"You're not going to buy something, are you?" asked his mortified wife.

***~~~***

Two boys ran toward the minivan. The larger of the two had a sack of lemons over his shoulder and ran stiff-legged, burdened by the lemon sack and by his efforts to ward off the blows of the other smaller boy.

"Lemons?" asked the bigger boy, stopping beside the minivan door.

"Yes," said the man. "How much?"

"Five dollars for the whole thing," said the boy with the sack.

" _Ladron_!" screeched the little child. He rained blows on the big boy's arm and back.

"Does that cover your overhead?" asked the man.

"Over?" asked the boy, "Just five dollars, sir, not over."

"I'm just wondering if you're making all the profit you can."

"Okay, sir," the boy smiled.

"He's always worrying about everyone else's business," said his wife, laughing and leaning forward to address her comment to the boy.

The boy struggled to bring the sack to the car window. The little boy increased his punches and kicks and he tried to pinch the plastic of the bag so he could somehow pull it down from the window.

"Are you and your little brother arguing today?" asked the man.

"Oh, yes," said the boy, smiling sweetly. "We always fight."

"Just like our boys," said the man.

"That's true," said his wife.

The weight of the bag shifted and the man conveyed it across the steering wheel and onto the floor beside him. "Oh, it's heavy," he said. "Good value for the money." He patted it fondly and stiffened his lower body so he could slide his wallet out of his front pants pocket. He flipped the wallet open and handed a five dollar bill out the window to the larger boy who bolted away with it. The younger boy gave chase, shrieking, crying, and trying to wrest the bill away.

The man watched the fleeing pair as he put his wallet away. "Only one bag. Did you hear that boys?"

He scowled in the rear view mirror at his sons. For an instant, the two squirming boys stopped pinching and punching each other.

"There's a lesson for the two of you. Those poor boys are going to earn five dollars between them and yet they're willing to sacrifice their Saturday. No Little League games. No silliness. It's strictly business. I tell you, Mexico is going places."

His wife patted the bag and smiled. "Tomorrow I'll make us a great big pitcher of fresh-squeezed lemonade," she said proudly.

***~~~***

"Where were you born?" asked the border guard, standing outside the minivan window. He was a barrel-chested man with pale brown eyes and carelessly shaved jowls.

"America. Ah, that is, Bajada, Arizona," said the man.

"And is everyone in the vehicle an American?" The guard shifted the belt of his uniform so that it slung lower across his belly.

"Yes."

"What was the purpose of your visit to Mexico?" asked the guard.

"Business in Hermosillo."

The woman leaned forward and said: "Yes, he's in business. He's going to be the only business in Mexico that can paint their lawns green."

The guard who had listened patiently to her looked pained when she finished. He glanced at the sack of lemons, squinted, and put his hand on the roof of the van. His gaze fixed on some homes clinging to the hills south of the border. "Do you have any fruits or vegetables to claim, sir?"

The man moved uncomfortably on the car seat and, not looking at the guard, asked: "Excuse me?"

"Does your car contain any fruits or vegetables purchased during your stay in Mexico?"

"Only these lemons. I bought them from one of those industrious young lads." The man's shaky hand flapped in the direction of the hustling pack. "Behind us."

The guard took a deep breath. "No fruits or vegetables can be brought into the state of Arizona from the state of Sonora, Mexico without a certificate of fumigation. Can you provide this document?"

"A certificate of fumigation? Of course not. I just bought them from the little boys. You must have seen them yourself. They're probably still around." The man gripped the steering wheel with both hands and wrenched himself around.

"I'll have to confiscate the fruit, sir," said the guard. He extended his hand calmly.

"But you understand I just bought them?" protested the mortified man.

"I'm sorry, sir, but unfumigated citrus are not permitted to cross into Arizona," explained the guard.

"We shouldn't have bought them," said his wife. "It was a foolish thing to do."

"Daddy, you ought to go back and punch those kids," said one of his sons, looking back on the road.

"No, no, son, don't blame them. They're only doing what they have to to make a living and that is very clever of them to fool me. Very clever. But I can't believe this," said the man. He slanted the sack out the window into the arms of the guard. "You can see the boys. Why don't you tell the Mexican authorities to stop them?"

A weary expression crossed the guard's face. "Have a safe journey," he said, dismissing the car with a light touch of his hat.

***~~~***

The guard carried the sack of lemons to a battered garbage can which was just barely across the border into Mexico. Was it really because the can was brimming that he placed the sack carelessly on top of the lid?

Hidden behind a sign, the little lemon salesman peeked out and saw where his beloved lemons languished.

When the guard had returned to the guardhouse, the boy sprinted to the can and pulled the bag down. The heavy bag slapped to the sidewalk. He wrapped his arms around it and bore it away quickly, hugging it tightly against his chest even though his knees buckled.

"Ever see a fakir take food out of his stomach?" said the guard to a co-worker who noticed what the boy was doing. "Yesterday he must have sold that same bag three different times."

### THE END

THE PEERLESS ORATOR

Newfield Hall, one of the lesser theaters between San Antonio and San Francisco, stood like a sentinel on the edge of Dust Tank, Arizona. Though the hall was shuttered and a little dilapidated, it was a dignified place with a glass expanse on the theater front, complicated moldings and doors, and a dark overhanging story, a home to the Ramses Golden Trumpet Masonic Lodge on alternate Tuesdays.

On the south side of Newfield Hall, a long expanse of adobe wall led to a small alley, a scrawny cactus hedge, and behind it, a large Victorian house. It was here one spring night in 1883 that a large noisy crowd gathered.

Brightly lit windows displayed forty or fifty of Dust Tank's most important citizens crammed into the small parlor of the house. Earlier that night they had witnessed a remarkable recital at Newfield Hall. An elocutionist, or orator, had arrived to entertain them. The Peerless Orator, as he called himself, had performed many splendid oral selections, including _A Kissing Cup's Race_ , and _The Face upon the Floor_ , and excerpts from Shakespeare, too. His hours of speechifying had been a sensation. The parlor buzzed with treasured lines from his speech, and the people gestured and grimaced, back and forth, elucidating and unraveling his method of delivery and by doing this in the gas-lit room they cemented bonds of tribal solidarity, an exclusive adoration for the glimpse of high culture they had experienced together.

Too soon the Peerless Orator would leave them and travel across their desert toward San Francisco. The next morning–they could hardly bear to think of it—the nine o'clock stagecoach would whisk him away. No doubt he would become famous there and they would never see him perform in their small town again. They were happy for his success, and gratified to be among the first to see him, but disappointed at their lowly status. He would leave at nine the next day, never to return. This conclusion was inevitable.

Until then, though, the elocutionist calmly soaked up the admiration of the crowd. His host had given him tea with lemon and fussed around him as though he were not a person, but a fragile display, pinned to the deep-tufts of her enormous green velvet couch.

He made an impressive effect there. As it was still, technically, late winter, The Peerless Orator wore a double breasted Prince Albert suit, a cashmere suit of beautiful brown and white with a modest invisible striping. His boots appeared to be cut from the softest leather and to be perforated in a clever flowery pattern, and his suspenders displayed dainty white dots on a gray background. A walking stick leaned against his knee and his hands alternately rubbed the nickel head of that stick or played with the ends of a black silk scarf, compelling it to manifest a perfect Persian bow at his neck. The glossy top hat he carried everywhere (and which appeared in the parlor's gaslight to be floating beside him on a pillow) mystified and enthralled everyone, and, all in all, they agreed that the finest gentlemen east of the Mississippi were not more stylishly dressed than this man, their remarkable visitor. If they had been pressed to mention any oversight in his appearance, it would only be the minor let-down of his winged moustache, for a few of them who had gotten close enough noticed that it was somewhat unkempt and needed trimming.

The entire crowd loved this natty gentleman who had entertained them so fabulously, but among them The Peerless Orator had made one special conquest.

She, who could barely imagine that a genius like The Peerless Orator had graced a stage anywhere near her desolate town, sat on a chair in the corner near the door with her aunt's reed work basket on her lap. She was twelve years old, had long blonde hair, and she was thoroughly in love with this extraordinary elocutionist. With wonder, from afar and through the shifting crowd, she gazed at him, trying to remember everything, everything precisely, about him.

All that was him, she vowed, everything about The Peerless Orator, his clothes and his conversation, must later be recorded on the sheets of L'Esperance Papeterie which, she reasoned, her earlier self must have kept blank all those years for just that important purpose now. She must note every detail of the buttons on his boots, his tie, suit, suspenders, and that strange floating hat. She must remember the way the scene from Colorado had been painted on the drop curtain behind him. She wondered if she could paint something like it with her watercolors? She had to remember the way he walked onto the stage, his power and presence. She needed to memorize the way he had looked when he paced away from the podium. His Persian bow was stupendous. And of course the most important aspect of him was his voice and she knew that she must commit to heart his speeches and his conversation in the parlor this evening. She was not apt to hear him again, and she would have to relive this night for many years. She planned that he would become her manly inspiration for the rest of her existence. He was to be a sort of guide to true manly greatness.

"Please," asked a man near the elocutionist, "won't you tell us your impressions of our desert?"

"Yes, do," implored a woman seated on the couch with him. She selected a soft candy from a plate on her lap and bit it eagerly.

The Peerless Orator balanced his teacup on his knee. At times he had an odd way of moving forward on the deep-tufted couch so that it seemed that he was undulating, or that the Kiser fringe of the couch was tickling him. "Ah! Your desert!" he began ecstatically while making one of those strange moves, "In my brief walk from the hotel I found many, many things to my liking!" He smiled and seemed to want to leave things at that.

The awkward silence that followed this remark lasted only a moment.

"But, what in particular?" asked the lady, persisting. "If it isn't a bother for you to tell us."

"Ah, very well," The Peerless Orator seemed a little lost for words. "I noticed, for example, that there were no violets, or anemones, or anything in the likeness of a flower. Still, I appreciated your trees with their bright green bark."

"Palo Verdes!" said a nearby man, providing the name of the tree. "Those interested you?"

"Very much. I respond to green in simple, elemental way. I really am quite primitive."

"No, no," said another lady, laughing. "You could never be called primitive. Never in all our imaginings. You, sir, are culture brought to life for us! Before you came tonight to our town and made your speeches, we had never really been privileged with culture and had not received any tidbits of insight from the realms of higher thinking in the Eastern Coasts and Continental Europe. I could say that you, sir, have brought us truly, truly, to life."

"Oh, how kind of you to say so. But, speaking of life and death is quite painful for me still, for you see, I am still in mourning, partially, for my mother. She died this winter and I had almost hoped I had found here a world so still that spring would not bring greenness. Such a world could never hope of the reformation of evil and the renewal of lofty struggles as a yearly rite. You see, I despair of spring at times when I think of her, especially when I think of her."

"Do you?" said an onlooker in awe. "You despair of spring?"

"I do. At times."

"What interesting ideas you convey," said another woman sitting on the far end of the couch, "I think it's the way you pair them. Green and reforming evil...spring and yearly rites...I would never think of linking those ideas."

"I cannot live in the broad zones of the average," said the Peerless Orator, as a way of explaining himself.

"That man," whispered an irritated gentleman to his wife, "happens to be a quadruple-plated idiot."

And she, the little adoring girl, overheard that last remark. She could not believe what that man had whispered. That man actually believed himself superior to The Peerless Orator!

But that dreadful moment for her evolved into something worse. The Peerless Orator had finished this thought! It seemed there were not going to be more impromptu speeches, and he swallowed his tea and brought out his watch case.

"I am afraid it is late," he said, "and I must be going to my lonely hotel room. The preparations of another show call to me. The struggle with my muse continues nightly."

On his way across the parlor, shaking hands, accepting the compliments and fond farewells of the well-wishers, The Peerless Orator prepared to leave the room, but the aunt of the little girl intervened. She stepped forward and pumped The Peerless Orator's hand and mentioned her young niece standing beside her chair, wanting so much to meet the gifted elocutionist.

"Why, is she your niece?" asked The Peerless Orator, approaching the girl where she stood. "Is this the little girl? Oh, she's a dandy," he said, bending down over her.

She looked up, bravely, into the deep brown eyes that were meeting hers at the zenith of her twelve years of life.

His large beautiful head came down to hers, the silk tie having its Persian effect, the suit smelling faintly of orange oil. The suddenness and wonder of it was almost too much for her, but she was proud to find that she didn't faint.

From her angle beneath him, she couldn't help but notice his moustache and his nose.

It was odd, but his nose, which had seemed so noble, so Roman, before, had nostrils that bristled with hundreds of nauseating hairs! She had never known before that men, even Peerless Orators, might have horrible hairs emerging from their noses.

Nose hairs! How could she love a man when he had such things?

And it was worse. She thought she saw something in all the hairs which wiggled faintly at her.

"Aren't you a special daisy," said The Peerless Orator.

He bent his head and kissed the top of her small plump hand.

She closed her eyes for an instant and then, looking up again, peered up at the large head that had risen. Though she told herself not to, still, she could not stop staring up his nose.

"Aren't you a darling little girl," he was saying, now patting her hand. "Yes, a little girl with her work basket."

It seemed to her most definitely that in his nose hairs something wooly and terrifying writhed.

She tried to glance away, but she couldn't. She was mesmerized by the strange interior of his nose. Those hairs seemed so stiff, so brush like. And that wasn't all—they were slowly crawling out. Didn't anyone else in the whole room notice? Not even her aunt who stood close?

She closed her eyes again. But when she reopened them, what she saw next was clear. The something that she had thought she saw above his moustache was still there, and it had a head, tiny glowing eyes, mandibles, two maxillae mouthparts, and jointed legs with hooks!

The hairs had evolved into a bristly, wooly caterpillar!

"Such a dainty," he added to her aunt. "All of daintiness."

Everyone in the room looked at her, smiling.

"If only," he began, "if only I could capture her innocence tonight." And as he finished saying this, the head of the wiggly caterpillar with its hideous pairs of Thoracic legs, rippled, undulated, and moved forward, pulling its rear segments completely out of his nostril.

It let out a high pitched, dictatorial chatter. It was the authentic voice of the orator that only she could hear.

### THE END

LITTLE HALF-BURNT COCKY-BABY

The carcass landed atop a garbage can with a thwack. The chef who threw the bird down to the can from a loading dock wiped both hands on his grimy apron and bellowed through the screen door of the restaurant to his assistant, "Get me a store-bought chicken at the Super Big!" That was the name of the local Big Box store. "Organic and cage free! And pronto! That ugly half-a-cock from the farm burnt his fucking self all up!"

As the chef came in the back door, his assistant burst out the restaurant's front door and raced to his Jeep on the way to the Super Big. A paella must have chicken stock!

From his position atop the garbage, the half-a-cock heard himself called ugly and his one and only eye widened in alarm. I know it is shocking to learn, but he was being tossed out while he was still alive! His skin had been scorched on a grill. He had only a few tail feathers, one eye, half a head and half a body, and a single droopy wing, but somehow with all those problems he maintained optimistic thoughts about the future of his life. He had always imagined himself beautiful, so he told himself he had misheard what the chef said.

His confidence resulted from a helicopter mother hen. When he'd been born, the old mother hen had eyed him pecking out of the shell and she'd said, "He's only half a bird, that's what I get for having chicks late in life, but I will name him Cocky-Baby. For him every half empty glass will be half full."

Constantly she praised Cocky-Baby for his incredible beauty and, as his name implied, she babied him. She told him he was the best bird and she built up his ego, until eventually, as with many young roosters before him, Cocky-Baby imagined himself playing lead guitar in an Indie band, and he ran away from his mother and the egg farm. In fact, only that morning the chef had seen him hopping on his one leg down a busy street toward a guitar store and had stopped his Mercedes and popped Cocky-Baby in his trunk before he could even crow. What happened in the restaurant is a horror story, but Cocky-Baby wasn't worried because he'd come out half unburnt and half alive.

Now, as he lay in the can in the alley behind the restaurant, Cocky-Baby tried to pull his confident, half-a-self together. He didn't get much of a chance before a black and white cat plopped off a brick wall and crept down a rut in the alley. She smelled Cocky-Baby's yummy burnt flesh and she wanted to eat some real chicken instead of the organic non-GMO canned cat food her owner shoveled into the pet dish constantly.

This cat leapt on the garbage can and nuzzled her whiskered face close to Cocky-Baby's neck. The cat made the mistake of licking Cocky-Baby's prickly skin and talking to him instead of biting off his head quickly the way her own mother had taught her. If her mother told her once she told her a million times she needed to be ruthless with her prey, but this young cat detested nagging.

"How did you get naked like this?" the cat asked. "Oh darn, I know I'm not supposed to talk to you."

"Don't you know blackened hen is the latest craze? but the chef inside there went too far with me. He left me on the fire. I was only half a chick anyway, born that way. Nobody ever gave me clothes. I heard them say my mother was too old for laying. I believe they killed her after I was born. Now I've been burnt and discarded, but I'm pretty sure this is my lucky day."

"Have you been reading philosophy?" asked the cat suspiciously.

"Not really it's just that I noticed you've got a lot of fur. Can't you spare some for me?"

"Well . . . I do suffer from hair balls. I suppose I can spare a few. I'll cough you up one." The cat coughed up a black hair ball and then another and plastered them on the bare parts of the flattened bird's half-a-body. He was then completely black.

"Thanks," cried Cocky-Baby. "I knew things would work out for the best. This is the best of all possible worlds!"

"Just like I thought. You have been reading philosophy," meowed the cat who slunk away slowly.

Cocky-Baby lay in the sun for nearly an hour. He found he couldn't move and he stiffened. "Still, I'm only half burnt, and I'm still half alive, and only half stiff."

Eventually, an old lady who liked to dumpster dive in the alley early every morning spied Cocky-Baby all black and flat and thought he was a very handsome discarded weathervane. She snatched up his rigid body and took him home to her tiny adobe house.

"I'm optimistic about what this fine lady has planned for me," thought Cocky-Baby when he was in her plastic grocery sack on the way to her home.

She laid him carefully on her front steps and went into her little garage. "She wants to start a garage band!" thought Cocky-Baby. "She's probably a retired music teacher and she wants to manage a band in her spare time. I've hit pay dirt! I wonder how much guitar lessons will cost. I could live in that garage."

A few minutes later the old crone came out with a hammer and a box of nails. She returned to the garage.

"She's building me a recording studio!" Cocky-Baby cried happily.

She stumbled out of the garage with a step stool. She placed the stool under her porch eaves and went back to Cocky-Baby. She lifted him tenderly as she mounted the steps with the hammer and a nail in her other hand.

Quickly she lifted Cocky-Baby to the roof and drove a nail through Cocky-baby's foot, pinning him to the center of her wooden weather vane.

"There," she said when she finished and had climbed down the steps. "That turning cock looks fantastic up there."

"Listen to her praise for me!" choked Cocky-baby whose foot throbbed. "This has been the best of all possible mornings!"

Cocky-baby spent a long day in the hot wind. He spun in every direction squinting so the pink dust covering the mountains and canyons didn't scratch his one eye.

"Only a few more hours and she probably hear my audition," said Cocky-Baby. But truthfully inside he was becoming discouraged.

Late that same afternoon, a sparrow flitted by before circling around and landing on Cocky-Baby's slumping shoulder.

"Listen, I get around a lot and I can tell you blackened chicken is like the latest thing. I think you might get terribly, terribly popular or something," chirped the tiny bird.

"Are you trying to turn my head?" asked Cocky-Baby wearily.

"Oh no," said the sparrow flying away, "The wind does that well enough."

### THE END

SCAT!

1. On the last day before Christmas vacation, when one of the school janitors swept the halls with his long oily broom and checked carefully that each classroom door was locked, the two teachers strolled out together, out of the pink and red brick high school and toward the desolate parking lot. The desert sky above them was a brilliant bowl of noontime turquoise across which a fighter jet streaked cold war contrails. Some prankster had impaled a hunk of metallic green Christmas wrap on the barb of a portly palm tree; the two teachers passed the palm leisurely. Behind them the janitor grappled with a thick chain, struggling to secure the door handles. He glowered at the two departing teachers who had taken so long to record their grades.

Their stroll took them as far as the start of the parking lot asphalt. There Dana Jones stopped and stared with the vacant, rapacious look of madness common to seabirds or great reptiles. His dogged companion had just asked him a peculiar question. "You want to know why we have big brains," Dana reiterated.

"Yeah," chirped the new shop instructor, quick with a grin, "You know our heads barely fit through the birth canal now as it is."

Dana smirked at his young co-worker and strolled away from him. He took a straight path to his Jeep, stepping easily over a splintered wooden railroad tie, used as a parking barrier. The younger man, now ebullient, followed Dana. When he caught up to Dana, he sauntered at his side. A sideways glance, while he licked his lips and stroked his beard, enabled him to scrutinize Dana's bronze face.

"So what do you think?" he braved.

"About what?" said Dana.

"Come on," groaned the persistent colleague.

"Come on where?" Dana said disinterestedly.

"Give me one more nifty idea," wailed the young man. "Before the Christmas vacation," he added.

"You want to know why we have big brains?" said Dana, dropping his leather portmanteau, biting the earpiece of his sunglasses and letting them hang from his mouth. "Was that it, kid?"

"Yeah."

"Well, all right," said Dana, "I'll give another piece of my mind, but I really ought to be charging you for my brilliant perspective. The fact is we have big brains because we have to make up bigger and better lies." At that, Dana removed the sunglasses from his mouth and slipped them on. He continued talking as he moved away: "We became detectors of other peoples' lies. We evolve ever bigger brains so we can play tricks and evade one another. 'You are thinking that I am thinking that you are thinking that I am thinking...' Like that. We read each other's tracks. It's all vestigial hunting instincts, actually." With that Dana shrugged and walked away.

His audience guffawed loudly and pursued him.

"Am I terribly funny?" asked Dana, getting into his Jeep.

"You're marvelous," gushed the fellow teacher, "I think it's fantastic the way you think. You're so original. Only you could relate hunting with the size of our brain. And you know, I want to be a better hunter."

"Well, that's right. You told me that, didn't you. A better hunter this year, was it?" Dana depressed the clutch and flipped the key he'd slipped into his ignition. His Jeep roared to life. "It takes a smart man to hunt well, especially in the desert. On rocky soil tracks are seldom seen and hard to follow. You have to know your scat," Dana explained.

"Huh?"

"Scat," Dana jammed the Jeep in reverse. The gear box squawked. "Dung. The dung of your prey."

"Dung! Did you just say what I thought you said? Did you just say dung?" The young man was ecstatic.

Dana suddenly turned icy. "I'm trying to become an expert in it. I happen to be a member of a very exclusive club in town that studies spoor. You have to know all your spoor, kid, to be a really good hunter."

Glancing away from the shop instructor, Dana suddenly snapped open the clasp on the portmanteau and began searching a side pocket.

"You're too much, Dana," said the admirer leaning in from the idling Jeep's open window. "You're just about the most interesting individual I know. Actually, you are the most interesting."

"Thanks."

"But you're really too much."

"You don't believe me? You think perhaps I'm lying," said Dana.

"Lying! Ha ha! Sure, I suppose. I never know when you're kidding me. Or lying."

Dana turned and handed the young man a piece of paper with an address written on it. When the young man stood up to read it and no longer leaned in on the window, Dana backed the Jeep.

"Wait!" shouted the young man. "What is this?"

"There's a meeting next Thursday," Dana snapped. "Why don't you challenge yourself? Become a better hunter over the Christmas break."

Dana threw the car into first and drove away into the busy noon traffic on the Friday before Christmas.

He was cackling.

"Idiot, goddamned young idiot. But I will play along," said Dana to himself. "And get what I want."

2. Dana Jones recruited the young instructor, whose name was Fredrick Millstadt, into the Scatophagous Club. Fredrick came to his first meeting thinking of the whole thing as a facetious joke. As with many others before him, he was enticed by Dana's wit and waggery, the wild way that blue-eyed heathen thought. He never imagined friendship with Dana would have a cost.

It wasn't hard to find the house where the Scatophagous Club met on the day after Christmas; the Scatophagous Club was located in a mansion in the old Snob Hollow section of town. It even had its own brass plate on the door.

Oh, but the whole thing was absurd! Secretly, Fredrick loved the idea of an exclusive club devoted to tracking animals. Which was located in an old mansion. It was almost too weird to be believed.

A rather ordinary-looking man who sniffed a great deal let Fredrick in. This same door-greeter ushered the shop instructor into a small, windowless room where Fredrick took a seat at a table. Fredrick was almost late.

When the lights went down in the small room minutes later, a man at the back began narrating the slides. "Tonight I'm going to begin by taking you with me into the papyrus swamps and river banks of German East Africa," droned a plump, pale man dressed entirely in khaki. As he spoke, late-arriving members of the Scatophagous Club filed into the seminar tables that had been placed in a U-shape. They stared at the caricature of a jungle explorer who fiddled first with his notes and then with the hand-held controls of a slide projector. Suddenly, the projector came on and whirled the slide carousel forward furiously.

A beam of light, full of dust motes, traveled to the screen where a matted square of emerald appeared. The slide showed trampled grass.

"I visited Africa initially in 1968 while accompanying my father, Professor Adrian Hupstone." The peculiar man went on to recite with pride the various awards his father had garnered in a lifelong study of a certain African moth.

Fredrick suddenly realized that Dana Jones listened from the room's darkest corner to the man's rambling filial tribute. His feet crossed at the ankles and propped on the table, Dana rocked back in his chair and yawned.

"I'm not sure exactly what we're looking at here," said the speaker. He brushed a trembling hand over his notes.

Five young men clustered near Dana. "This is one of the deep tunneled paths used by hippos to move along the river bank," Dana explained.

"Oh yes, how silly of me. Thank you Dana." The speaker glowed briefly in Dana's direction. "Dana is always here to help."

"Quite all right, Adrian. Proceed."

"Is this the Bubu River we're talking about?" asked another gentleman in the back.

"Oh, yes. I believe it is," the pale man's voice trailed away.

"All right. Where is this river, the Bubu, located relative to the photograph?" said the same man.

Elsewhere in the museum a door closed loudly.

"You're badgering him," complained Dana, "Go on, Adrian, just ignore him."

"Well, where in this slide is the hippo scat?" insisted the same questioner.

"You will see hippo scat on his next slide. Notice here the dense jungle growth which the hippo has trod down so methodically. Now. On the next slide... ah, here—here we see the fresh droppings of a passing hippo. Notice how they are splashed over the bushes," Dana said.

"What size was that specimen?" grinned the interlocutor.

Everyone turned to Dana. "Well, I would say—"

"You didn't measure it?" Fredrick realized this questioner seemed furious at Dana.

"Well, covering the bush as it does I would say...one foot by two over the bushes as...as I was saying the droppings are splashed over the bushes as the animal's tail quickly wags to the right and to the left."

A series of slides then flashed on the screen showing the same broad smears of hippo dung across a variety of low bushes and shrubs.

"Can we say anything about the diet of the hippo from the color?" the angry questioner asked Dana. Adrian looked puzzled.

"Not that I'm aware of. I believe it's a diet of aquatic foliage which doesn't vary a great deal."

"You believe their diet is unvarying?" quizzed the furious man.

"Yes, that's right."

"What evidence do you have for that, Dana?"

"Just a myriad of studies," admonished another man in a quick spin in the questioner's direction, "We didn't come here to listen to you!"

"You didn't come here to think, either, did you?" said this mocking man.

Dana's fan club hissed.

The young shop instructor was one of those who glowed in Dana's direction. He leaned to another man beside him. "Dana's really making this jerk sweat," he crowed, "What an oaf!"

"Excuse me," demanded Adrian spinning in the direction of the darkened corner, "Is someone talking?"

"This isn't the first time," whispered the other man to the shop instructor, "Dana stole his girlfriend. You ought to have been here when—"

"Is someone talking?"

"Tell me later," whispered Fredrick under his breath. But somehow he never quite got around to asking about that.

"I wish that if someone has something further to say they will repeat it aloud as a question so that I might address their concerns," seethed the speaker. He crossed his arms at his waist. "No? No questions?" he demanded.

Another slide appeared on the screen. It showed a muddy hole under a tree.

"The African natives," Dana began, "tell a very interesting story relating to the scat of the elephant and the rhino. It seems that man in early times could not tell the feces of the rhino from those of the elephant. Man often pursued the elephant thinking it was the rhino. Eventually the elephant got angry and he told the rhino he'd better think up a way for man to tell the difference between rhino scat and elephant scat. Because of this, the rhino always digs a hole where he defecates."

"Wow, Dana really knows his shit stuff," said Fredrick.

3. After attending this initial meeting, Fredrick laughingly accepted probationary membership and was lent a series of cards with descriptive notes and sketches of the principal fecal matter of local desert mammals. He didn't show them to anyone, especially not his girlfriend—Dana told him when they spoke briefly after Christmas break that keeping the club secret was for the best—but he explained that he had joined a hunting society, which she approved of since her grandfather had once been an avid hunter in Minnesota. Fredrick confided in Dana that he couldn't broach the subject of scat with his girlfriend. He was afraid she'd laugh at him. Dana agreed; keep it hush-hush from her, Dana advised.

From these scat cards, Fredrick graduated to the Scat Club's weekly series of clinics in the surrounding wilderness, Fredrick chuckled his way into learning how to identify the single pointed end of dog and dog-like scat.

Each time he went out to the clinics, Fredrick told his girlfriend that he was attending a hunting club, though he worried about this. One weekend in particular, Dana said he would amuse Fredrick's girlfriend by taking her along with him, and Dana's girlfriend, to the state fair in Phoenix. Fredrick had a slightly uneasy feeling when his girlfriend reported that Dana had seemed a little too friendly on the excursion. She thought Dana's was flirting with her. "He's a friendly guy," Fredrick protested. "I don't have a better friend."

And so the scat work went on. Fredrick cackled when warned of the ease of confusing specimens of fox, coyote, wolf, bobcat, mountain lion, and badger dung. He smiled during the study of the granular pellets characteristic of raccoons, the seldom solid castings of the opossums, the folded cord of the weasel and the blunt end of bear scat. But when textures were analyzed, the dry hard castings of a winter diet, he was surprised to find himself beginning to enjoy it. Contents, odor, position and color entailed a grinning scrutiny of specimens; which could be called brownish pale green and which pale greenish brown?

Within a month, the topics, which at first had seemed ridiculous, engrossed Dana's devotee. Fredrick was excited to collect the rock hard pellets of animals which had devoured clay or visited salt licks. Titillation rocked him when he was shown photographs of the rare, nutrient rich, dark scat of shrews, rodents, and lagomorphs, uncommon because of re-ingestion. And when, ultimately, he was asked to take the field exam necessary for full membership in the society he agreed happily. The test was quite stressful. A Scatophagous member led him to a pre-discovered specimen where a series of questions were posed. What animal (of what family) had made the dropping? Was it possible to detect age or sex? What direction had they traveled in? Was the spoor recent?

He passed the test; another of Dana's initiates had joined the only club of its type in the world. With rites rivaling those of any society of builders (all candles and robes and mispronounced Arabic) new members were installed one cool April evening. At the end of the installation they were ushered before the giant walnut door of the Scat Club museum. There another engraved brass plate presented the image of a scarab pushing a pellet of dung to his home.

"Oh, sacred scarab! Oh, symbol of ancient Egypt! Oh...Oh," cried the giddy curator in bifocals losing himself in the midst of the ceremony, "Oh, symbol of resurrection and immortality! Open! Open for us!"

He rapped three times using a replica of the brass beetle's articulated pincers as a door knocker. The Scat Museum opened for Fredrick.

The drama of the moment was increased by the fact that no mention had been made of the museum's existence until that moment in the initiation ceremony. And the contents of the museum were stunning. Room after room of specimen cabinets displayed the work of many men's lives.

"Canids," bubbled the curator, sliding open one drawer filled with cloud-like cotton which cushioned neat rows of plastic boxed specimens. He walked ahead and left the drawer gaping.

The new members scrambled to follow him.

"Ochotonidae," he proclaimed at another cabinet. He bent down and triumphantly exposed the contents of the drawer.

He continued into other rooms to more cabinets and more drawers.

The effect was soon dizzying.

The next Saturday morning, Dana recommended the shop instructor become part of the museum staff. As a new member he was put to work in the painstaking process of categorizing, organizing and preserving the collection. His chores included folding and stapling the newspaper used to dry specimens, labeling boxes, and examining new specimens for signs of the egg of a certain moth which when left in a sample devoured it from the inside out. He lacquered unstable samples and joined fragmentation teams which washed the millennium-old scat samples from pack rat middens in bowls of water, thereby extracting the natural history of the era of Christ. And he continued his study of scatology.

Like several others before, Fredrick gradually found himself spent by the effort to understand the tracks and feces of mammals.

And he found he was spending less and less time with his girlfriend.

He sought Dana's advice back in the faculty lounge at the high school the next week.

"Keep at it, kid. Immerse yourself in the subject," jested Dana speaking from behind his impenetrable Ray Bans in a full reclining position on the couch in the teachers' lounge. "Excuse my little joke, but I like what I see."

"It's just that there's so much to this and my social life is suffering," blurted Dana's colleague blowing across the surface of his black coffee.

"What is it? What's happening?"

"My girlfriend is less than enamored with me right now. She's talking about us breaking up!"

"Nonsense! Well, listen, you're bound to be discouraged by a female. They aren't hunters," said Dana, "But remember you're striving for something noble. Something peculiarly male, actually."

"I thought it was funny when I started," confessed the young man. Fredrick continued with his own worried thoughts, staring at the ceiling. "I really think she's breaking up with me. And we had so much in common."

"Forget her."

"You said yourself she's a real beauty. You mention her hair and her dark eyebrows. And an hourglass figure."

"Don't listen to me. I'm just a randy old guy. What you're studying is special. She doesn't appreciate it. You want to be able to lift up a specimen, still steaming, cradle it in your palms, break it open and see—everything. When you're really good at it, you'll swear you're reading the minds of animals."

The fourth bell suddenly jangled. The door swung open. Two other teachers entered.

"Thanks, Dana," said Fredrick as he left.

The lounge door was closed an instant before Dana emitted a gurgling, strangled snicker.

4. A month later poor Fredrick discovered he had no girlfriend. She informed him that she had someone new to date.

Fredrick's recompense was that he was in the Scatophagous Club and becoming an expert at spoor identification. He found it to be a rewarding field of endeavor.

Until about six months later. It was then that he realized while talking to another high school teacher that Dana was dating his girlfriend! In fact, they planned to marry!

"Listen, Dana, so-called friend of mine, I want to tell you a story about deceivers," said Fredrick with narrowed eyes when he finally caught up with Dana in the high school parking lot late one afternoon. "I want to tell you a story about fucking liars and the fucking lies they tell."

"Have you been drinking?"

"No, I wish I had."

"Did I lie? I told you I like liars and lying. Therefore I was perfectly honest. I told you I compete for everything and so I do. You just didn't like me competing for what you had. And winning," said Dana impishly. He looked at Fredrick with those crazy eyes of a seagull. Or reptilian eyes, thought Fredrick, the eyes were definitely reptilian.

### THE END

THE GOOD LIBRARIAN

Over the years, whenever you saw me looking at the grassy, burlap-covered book, snug in its own matching cardboard sleeve, you'd begin the odd story of how you had acquired that edition of _Leaves of Grass_. "That book is Walt Whitman's reminder to me of Senator McCarthy," you would say.

As a young teen, age thirteen or fourteen when I first heard your story, I disregarded the tale and considered it strange, and frankly embarrassing, that you, my very own dear mother, supposedly a well-educated woman and once a librarian in a small town on the Salomonie River in Indiana, didn't know that Walt Whitman published _Leaves of Grass_ in 1855, which I was fairly certain was not the McCarthy Era.

I attributed your mistake to a flawed early interest in schmaltzy books rather than really good literature. You confessed to me that you stayed awake nights fretting over the fate of Elnora Comstock in Gene Stratton-Porter's _The Girl of the Limberlost Swamp_. I thought you were silly for fearing that Elnora wouldn't sell enough moths and artifacts from the Limberlost to make a living, and when you took me to her log home I was deeply and sincerely unimpressed. A few years later, I realized that I was the one who was confused about your edition of Walt Whitman's poems; you weren't saying _Leaves of Grass_ was written in the McCarthy Era, only that you got your copy in the early 1950s. And I respected Ms. Porter's early environmentalism.

Whitman's leafy book in its fading green burlap sat on the bottom shelf of your glass and wrought-iron bookcase in its appointed slot between the _King James Bible_ and Elliot Arnold's _Blood Brother_. How you loved to tell about your brush with the celebrity author (not God, the prophets, or the apostles, but rather Elliot Arnold, who you worshipped along with Gene Stratton-Porter, though hardly anyone knew or cared about that book even then) and you used to brag that while you worked the desk at the Arizona Historical Society Library you had guarded Mr. Arnold's briefcase every lunch while he took his well-earned break from researching the Apache chief named Cochise, Apache camp life and lore, and the career of Tom Jeffords, the Indian agent who befriended Cochise. But I was dubious of this story after I pulled that book off the glass shelf once and discovered it had been published in 1947. Hadn't you still been in the Women Marines in 1947, I wondered? I decided you were confused and when you saw Elliot Arnold, if you really did, or he must have been writing a second Cochise novel or helping to research the acclaimed motion picture screenplay that was being written by someone else for a tall, dark, deeply tanned actor from Brooklyn who would portray Cochise.

Then, just when I was completely confused about the dates of _Blood Brother_ , you'd leave Elliot Arnold and jump back to the story of how you had acquired _Leaves of Grass_ , and you had an evolving tale, but you always ended by arguing in favor of your sister-in-law and her husband's innate goodness. The only way I could explain your faith in their benevolence was to realize that you existed as a librarian first and foremost and were subject to the odd fancies of that profession; only the truly good, you claimed, would prevent the destruction of a copy of such a famous, important book. However, you never gave them back that book.

To me the whole story smacked of that sick era, the paranoia of the time a few years before I was born when a senator ran rampant, finding communists in pumpkin patches and in Hollywood movies and you had stopped guarding Elliot Arnold's briefcase long enough to marry Dad. You stood in the screen door of the white adobe out on Allen Road in your pleated paisley skirt with my older sister, a curly-haired toddler, riding on your hip while your sister-in-law and her husband lingered outside your home in the dirt yard so their kids could pet the plaster donkey—Dad must have bought one of those in Nogales along with the big, straw-covered rum demijohns that ruled his life in the evenings. This day was the last Sunday afternoon before Matty and Jacob left Arizona for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. In the late afternoon sunshine, which was so bright in the spring even though it filtered through a neighbor's scrawny eucalyptus tree, Jacob turned away to squint through the screen door—it wasn't the bright light or his cigarette smoke burning his eyes as you first thought--there was a nagging something he wanted to do about which he still remained uncertain.

It was that sick era, and the paranoia of the time, making him do what he really wasn't sure he wanted to.

"Here he is! Our new lieutenant," you called from behind the screen. They heard you clearly, yet they still gathered around the plaster donkey without approaching the door. "Don't stand on ceremony, Jacob, Matty, please, come in," you called. When you leaned against the screen door to push it open, Jacob hesitated, made his decision, and walked across the dirt yard and up the red concrete sidewalk to the steps at the threshold, and that was when you first noticed something held stiffly in his hands, something he thrust toward you awkwardly.

Since it was a paper bag, at first you thought it might be liquor he was giving you. He was a heavy drinker, heaven knows, or rather he was an alcoholic, the same as Dad. His excuse for his alcoholism arose from his earlier years; his Mormon father, of Dutch lineage, overcame his love of booze by beating his twelve children, and Jacob ran away from home for his senior year of high school and lived in a cave outside his little hometown in Utah. He liked to tell about some Ute relics, a broken clay pipe and some mysterious pottery chards, he had found in the cave and left there. A few days after Jacob's graduation his maternal grandfather who lived in Connecticut sent (to General Delivery) the train fare for a trip to the East Coast where Jacob worked as a yatchsman, and he could tell you how tycoons lived during the Depression. He could tell you all about it, and their lives in those mansions, and they had some strange morals, too, he knew all about that. After Pearl Harbor he joined the Air Force and that was where he found his real family. And he lived in England and flew B-52s which were bombing Dresden and later he brought the holocaust victims to England on those same bombers. Sure, those memories of a plane full of starved men might have made him want to drink, but he probably started on those yachts in the harbors of Connecticut. I suspected the war trauma was an excuse.

You were hoping it wasn't liquor because you didn't want Dad drinking more than his share, more than the few rum and cokes you knew he would want. By then you'd realized he'd come out of the Navy an alcoholic. Rum and coke was his favorite poison. You never drank at all and Benny, Jacob and Matty thought that was terrifically funny. The Marine, the Woman Marine librarian, didn't drink, but you'd met Dad for the first time in a bar as you always said when you should have been studying for your art history final.

But then you noticed the bag was a flat one from a department store, the type you get for a man's shirt, and this had something other than a shirt in it. Not liquor, definitely.

"You can keep this for us while we're in Dayton," said Jacob. "You're just what we need. We're going to use you as a librarian, Junie." He was talking about you that way because they knew you worked in the little library across from your home in the small Indiana town on the Salamonie River. And they knew you were a librarian in the Marines at the hospital in Cherry Point, North Carolina. But those Marines mostly wanted magazines. And _God's Little Acre_.

"Hey, I think you've got that backwards, Jacob," said Dad, handing him a rum and coke. "A librarian loans out books. She doesn't take them in."

"Yes," said Matty, "the librarian gives out books. Oh, but then, remember, the people return them." She was finally coming up the concrete steps.

"True," said Dad.

You were surprised and bewildered by what your brother-in-law said, and surprised by being handed a brown paper bag the minute he came in. But maybe more surprised by something stiff in Jacob's voice, just a hint of something awkward in his tone, the cough at the end, the way he stood apprehensively in the middle of your small living room. With his light blonde hair, shiny red cheeks, and ready smile, Jacob never stood uneasily when he was off-duty, never blushed, never apologized. He used to like to say "never be ashamed of a patch, only a hole." Who could have expected someone to begin a serious discussion of politics–Air Force politics mixed with the current national insanity–almost the moment you opened the door to them.

In your hands a medium-sized brown paper sack crackled, it was the type and size for a shirt from a department store, but instead there was something rectangular and heavy in it. You had my sister on one hip and this bag in your other hand and you lifted the bag up and down, squeezing it and measuring the heft playfully.

"Say, what is this? What's this, Jacob? What's this all about? Is it a joke?" You laughed nervously, too. "I don't understand. Is it a gift for us?"

"Well, not exactly, Junie. It's what we just said. We just want you to keep it for us," said Matty.

You were distracted. Behind Jacob, Sandy and Rikki walked in behind their mother. Rikki struggled up the step in his new silver leg braces. It had been a few years since they learned that he had Muscular Dystrophy.

"It's nothing really, Junie, I guess we shouldn't care, but with Senator McCarthy making all this trouble, you know, you can't take a chance with a promotion on the line. At least, we can't."

"We have to think about Rikki," said Matty, sitting on your sofa and adjusting the serape that was draped over a rip in the back. "If we were in a different situation we could buck the higher ups. When we're at Wright-Patterson we're going to take Rikki up to Boston to some of the nation's best doctors. The Air Force will give Rikki tip-top care."

"Well, I know that's true about the Air Force, but what is this?" you asked again. "What have you got in here?"

You measured the heft again and squeezed it. "So it's a book?"

You rattled open the sack and glanced inside at the upside down title. "What is it? Walt Whitman? Oh, _Leaves of Grass_? Well, that's a wonderful book. Why are you giving me this? I don't understand, wasn't it yours? Wasn't it something you liked? You sent away for it. It sure is a nice edition that you got."

Jacob explained how it was for them. Of course, they'd liked it—without knowing much about it. They knew it was considered an American classic, and they had sent away for it in a series of great books every American ought to have in their home. The Library of America Series it was called. Of course, who knew who picked the books in the series and they hadn't had a hand in deciding which titles they would get, no, it wasn't any of their doing, certainly not. Jacob had always heard it was good poetry and it was something he had wanted to read before, something he probably would admire, but he hadn't. Because he hadn't had time to read it, well, there was so much to do in the last year or two as he rose to become a lieutenant. He hadn't had time before someone high in the Air Force brass, higher up in the pecking order even than the commander at Dayton, Ohio, had made a list of authors whose books no Air Force personnel should have in their possession and this was passed on to another brass and on to another and maybe, they told you, at some bases it would be laughed at, but in Ohio, oh no, in Ohio it was going to be different. The top man, Jacob told you, believed in adhering to every command and made surprise inspections of base homes.

You expressed shock. You said that you hadn't heard of such a thing as a list of banned books being prepared by the military and it ought to be on the news and many people in the country would find it shocking that they had been presented with such a thing as a list of books they couldn't be allowed to own. You were shocked that they considered it ordinary, trivial, when the right to privacy was guaranteed in the United States Constitution.

"Oh, but that really doesn't apply to the Air Force, Junie," said Matty.

You laughed–the Constitution didn't apply to the Air Force. "Well, that's just funny. Of course the Constitution applies. Air Force or not, it's part of America," you said.

"No, not really."

"What! What do you defend, if you don't defend the constitution? That's just silly. That's a silly thing to say, you see," you explained.

"Well, Junie, we've always been subject to search. It's just something you get used to. You know from the Women Marines and Benny, you know from the Navy, that they can search your locker at any time."

You agreed. That was quite true and you remembered it. Your locker had been searched when you were a Woman Marine at Cherry Point. But was it the same to search someone's home? Oh, maybe if it was on the base, yes, maybe then it would be all right. Would it really be all right? It didn't seem so in a way. It seemed wrong and maybe un-American. But a locker on the base, mightn't that be different?

"Yes, and Walt Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ is one of them. One of them on the list. We didn't have any books but the one," said Jacob.

"The one. One book on the list. Well," you said. "Well."

"So you see we can't keep it," Matty explained.

You frowned. "I don't think that follows. You can keep it. I guess what you're saying is you don't want to–"

"No really. We can't," said Matty.

"But we don't want to throw it away. It's silly, but can you keep it?" asked Jacob.

Looking back on it, you always supposed guilt and shame made them try to brush off what they were doing by describing it as silly and trivial. They were only ridding themselves of one book, which they were at pains to explain they hadn't read. Yes, they hadn't read it. Hadn't had the time and they hadn't picked it out themselves, of course.

That bothered you later, but not at the time with a baby on your hip and a chicken a la King over rice and an orange Jello with marshmallows to wobble over to our little linoleum-topped table. But later it bothered you that they were happy there was only one book that they owned and that they hadn't read it. It bothered you that they kept repeating such a thing. Were they relieved that they didn't have to be too suspicious of themselves? That there was only one thing wrong with them, made them less suspect and then, of course, they hadn't ever read it.

Later, objections bubbled out of your head uncontrollably. Why give you the book? Why not simply hide it? Didn't everyone have a closet that was private? Wasn't a bedroom private enough and didn't everyone have a small bookshelf there or couldn't they simply have slid it under the bed? Surely, they didn't really believe every inch of their home would be searched?

And you realized they seemed proud that they only had one book on the list.

No, the fact that the Air Force had put it on the list was enough for them to think that there was actually something about the book that was dangerous. They believed the argument that the book itself was un-American! They believed they might be changed, turned into a communist, by reading it or by simply keeping it around them. That was it! They had proved their own culpability, gullibility, by the fact that they had given the book to you.

When you thought of it several months later you always said it made you burn up inside. They should have been ashamed to own so few controversial books, instead they were relieved or even proud of their ordinariness and a little disturbed by being found to own something on the list, even if it was only one book by Walt Whitman.

Still, a year later, you reached a slightly different conclusion. You were more understanding and forgiving and you could sense something in them which rendered them unable to destroy _Leaves of Grass_. Whatever that was, it held them back from doing something so wrong. In a moment of happiness you reasoned that they had to be good because they hadn't destroyed the book. You took it as a sign that they were fundamentally good people deep inside. There had to be respect in them for Walt Whitman, or else they would have tossed the controversial book away in the garbage the first day the list was mentioned. They didn't have to give it to you for safekeeping; it would have been easy to dispose of it surreptitiously.

Or, was it simply Jacob's Dutch cheapness? And wasn't that a mean stereotype—you got after yourself for saying it—even to me and yourself, but could it be true? Was that all there was to them wanting to keep _Leaves of Grass_? Well, well, you told yourself, thrift was a good in and of itself. And no doubt their respect for the written word was so high that they couldn't destroy the book. Now that meant something, didn't it?

But you had your doubts. They probably were only excited by the bindings, the trappings of the promise of erudition through the enrollment in the Library of America Series. One volume a month. The grassy green burlap cloth, scratchy and drier than the words inside it, a cover that went a little yellow on the edges over time. As I said at the beginning, the book in its grassy cover slid into a matching grassy green box. A tomb for _Leaves of Grass_. Although they had been purchasing the Library of America in installments you now thought they did not have the spirit of the librarian, American, or un-American.

You wondered slyly over the years if they realized that trusting you with the book was more evil than owning it in the first place. The evil lay in the fact that they couldn't bring themselves to destroy the book. That act of preservation made them more suspect.

You thought they knew somewhere inside themselves that they should have been braver. How it must have hurt for a decorated Air Force lieutenant to be ashamed of not being courageous. It must have felt unpleasant, and to cover it up they had to make it seem comical later.

But they said they did it for Rikki and that part was reasonable, it placated you at the time. You agreed to that then and for years later. Surely, they made good sense. You agreed their son got better medical attention with his father in the Air Force; that part was sensible and what parent wouldn't be afraid of losing their job. With a handicapped kid it might be worse, the fear of messing him up. That added a complication, made it less cut-and-dry. What should they have done after all? Weren't they being reasonable about it? Was it unreasonable to ask more of them in the situation?

But you were making convoluted arguments. The whole thing was simple. They were too chicken to own it, to fess up to their violation. You thought later they should have displayed it proudly on their coffee table when the colonel came and challenged him to read it.

Years passed and you still had their copy of _Leaves of Grass_.

~~~***~~~

They came through town in 1956 when Jacob was transferred to a base near San Bernadino, California. They stopped in for another family dinner and mentioned casually that they wanted the book back.

But you calmly refused to give it to them.

Surprised, perhaps a little horrified, by your refusal, they put a comic face on it.

"It seems now that Junie has got her own copy of _Leaves of Grass_ ," said Matty.

"When you gave up that book you gave it up forever," you said drily.

"Junie's nothing but stubborn. We aren't getting Walt Whitman back anytime soon," said Jacob, turning their shortcomings into yours.

~~~***~~~

They came back in 1965, when Jacob was trying for full Colonel in the Air Force and he could only get it by shipping to Vietnam.

Jacob asked for _Leaves of Grass_ again.

"How about _Leaves of Grass_ , Junie? When are we going to get that book of ours back?"

Your position strengthened with further reflection. "Anyone who is so afraid of authority does not deserve to own _Leaves of Grass_ ," you explained, talking in a clear hard voice.

Your implacable attitude astonished and amused everyone.

Where, you said, was their simple apology? Where was their frank acknowledgement that they might have been in the wrong? Where was any expression, any recognition, that they might have been part of the evil of that time? Instead they used a mocking air about the book. That was why you wouldn't return it.

By then you had concluded that they didn't deserve _Leaves of Grass_. Their argument that their son might be harmed seemed to make more sense initially than over the years. The writing of one who celebrated the ordinary man was too controversial for the military, too communistic, and you felt they had bought that stupid argument. It was bigger than the petty matter of the book. It was a bigger argument. It was not the book, it was the principle.

Of course, in a sense, they deserved their book back. It was once theirs; they bought it, they put it on their shelf; they only loaned it to you, thrust it on you that day of their goodbye dinner party, with the understanding that after the troubles you'd give it back to them and everything would be all right once the storm of McCarthy was gone. You were a librarian. At least they had the good sense to preserve the book and the taste to want to put it on their bookshelf in the first place.

But had they shown any respect for the ideas in the book? Had they shown that they now respected Walt Whitman more than their base commander? Would they now salute Walt Whitman instead of an eagle on a staff or the red, white and blue? No, to you, the answer was no again.

You thought they ought to form a cogent argument for the return of the book. They ought to explain to you the error of their ideas. If only they had had enough self-knowledge to confess their own weakness in the face of authoritarian dictates. Instead, they laughed off the time in which they had given up the book and demanded that you laugh it off too and give them back the book. But to you it wasn't a laughing matter. To give in to unjust arbitrary power in the matter of a book banning was indefensible in your eyes. Hiding the book would have been cowardly. Why not display it squarely on the coffee table and challenge the unjust, challenge the mind of your base commander and his tacit agreement with the list of undesirable books?

What was bravery after all? Jacob had flown B-52s over Europe. He had flown back holocaust victims to England. That was bravery of the physical sort. Was he only brave when given orders to be brave? Could he only be brave physically but not in the mental realm?

You keep their book. You never give it back, and everyone agreed that we suffered for your foolishness, and we all chuckled at you about it. You were terribly stubborn and funny.

Why did you do it? Why ever did you do such a strange, stubborn thing? What an odd thing for a former small-town librarian to do. A librarian from the Salamonie River. You keep that book away from them forever.

"Gosh, Mom, you ought to give it back," we laughed. "It's like you stole it! You're a librarian who stole somebody's book!"

"You really shouldn't keep it, Mom. It's not very kind," I said foolishly.

Think, Mother, think, we teased you, is keeping their book what a good old fashioned Indiana librarian would do?

### THE END

EL HILO

El Hilo, a.k.a. Buckaroo Bob and half a dozen other stage names as I later learned, scared me right from the start, but I don't think I would have gone through with some of the things I did if I'd have known how badly I was going to be scared in the end.

I didn't think a puppeteer ought to be frightening, not when he's putting on shows for kids and pretending to want to do grand things for the world like unite Mexico and America and eliminate cross border misunderstandings. Anyway, I sensed right away that he was pathological, pure evil, and I was going to have to stop him, not to mention the fact that he was trying to bed every undergraduate in town, my roommate Nola Petrie as a prime example, though Patrick says that part is just normal male behavior and nothing to get concerned about, but then he would.

I was already feeling a little creepy that first night when I heard Nola mention El Hilo, what with the storm and the sirens that wailed down Park Avenue on our side of campus and the palm tree that fell down and took out a really old saguaro cactus that a stupid guy I knew had carved the name of his band on, and I wished that saguaro had fallen on him. It wasn't just the weather, though, it was what Nola said. She stood there, her big brown eyes and boyish haircut peeking out above a stringy Mexican vest that was striped in Technicolor and had run something awful in the wash and she looked exactly like a shoeshine boy from Nogales. Her skinny little body barely blocked the light that flooded out around her from a bare bulb in our closet. She held a wire coat hanger in her hands and was tying a crocheted bra top that looked like it wanted to be reincarnated as a pot holder onto the hanger when she suddenly told us, "El Hilo says that the words that I speak as a puppet will be truer than my own. I probably shouldn't even talk as myself anymore; it's just a waste of my talent."

Right away I felt a chill glide over my skin the way it does when you come out of an air-conditioned building on a June day in the desert. The hairs on me positively stood up! She had barely begun to tell us about this mysterious person, El Hilo, and his high opinion of her puppetry skills and already I was thinking he was a First Class Freak-a-zoid Douchebag. As she was my new roommate naturally I wanted to listen politely and get along with her. I was listening, but the more I heard the worse it all sounded.

Patrick, who was in our room uninvited as usual, lounged on my bed tossing one of my old Smurf dolls up to the wall so that it smacked a poster and came down in his hand. He was a big show-off when it came to his physical prowess.

"You mean he doesn't let you talk?" he asked finally.

Now ordinarily I consider Patrick to be a loud-mouthed dumbo who I do not listen to, but this question was spot-on, as my English father would say.

Nola ignored him.

"El Hilo says I have like a natural puppeteer's outlook," she gushed, "and he says that's like a rare talent coming directly from supernatural forces which control our inner 'strings' kind of in the same way we're controlling the little dolls, you know? And people who have this talent and are like in touch with the inner 'strings' can project themselves into the characters more clearly. They have a direct path."

"A direct path." I parroted the end of her sentence because that was something this girl who was a junior in communications taught me one lunch at the student union when we had ordered the same meal. She was all into empathetic listening and how it helped communication and I guess college is a good place to try out the theories of people you share a lunch of enchiladas with.

"That's right," said Nola, wrapping the strings that went across the back of the bra top around the coat hanger's neck. I watched as the top swung over the center of the hanger like a miniature hammock.

"How old is this El Hilo dude?" Patrick asked and sent my poor Smurf flying head-over-heels toward the cobwebs again.

Nola hung the hanger on the closet bar and stepped back to close the door. For a moment the flimsy top stayed tied, but then it slithered slowly down and plopped onto the lid of a cardboard box only to slip to the closet floor. "I haven't asked his age," answered Nola in a flustered voice. She stooped to pick up the top, fumbled with it a moment brushing dust out of all the little crocheted holes, and then draped it directly over the hanger bar and slammed the door shut.

"I bet he takes Viagra," said Patrick matter-of-factly.

"Patrick—" I began, but a clap of thunder boomed above us, making a twin echo somewhere east of campus and rumbling up to the Catalina Mountains. All three of us looked up at the ceiling instinctively as though the lightning would be visible through the water stained plaster. That summer I had studied a book of Norse myths and legends at my friend Fria Wolfe's house and I wondered facetiously if old Thor was into Viagra. I pretended the notes about the Inuit for my sociology class that appeared on the computer screen fascinated me.

"Somebody's knocking," said Patrick suddenly, lurching up from my bed in his clumsy, bowlegged fashion, pulling my spread partway off and knocking his wooly knees against my latest furniture find, a rickety computer table with some carved cowboys and looping lariats on its edge where I liked sitting cross-legged in front of my laptop.

This obscenely rich girl from Scottsdale named Courtney III, who had her own stable of Arabians for God's sake, slipped through the door and pressed herself against the wall. She kind of wiggled her shoulder blades around because the light switch must have been jabbing her, but I think she also liked to jiggle around in front of Patrick. "Can I please, please, tell you guys something?" she breathed. She epitomized the Drama Queen and had set fire to two or three microwave ovens with foil and teaspoons already.

Patrick, the big lummox, was enjoying the whole thing. "Nothing to it," said he. This was his favorite tag, which he repeated with an annoying regularity. He stood there right in front of Courtney with his arms out from his sides, my Smurf getting squeezed in his overexcited hand and no shirt on, the big shamrock tattooed on his back assailing me with 'the green.' He loved to bug me about him being Irish and my having an English father, although like most Americans he really hadn't a clue about what was going on in the Republic.

"It's like wicked weird," Courtney said breathlessly, "I was just doing my laundry downstairs. In the Laundromat. It's so weird. Somebody like stole my stuff out of the washer!"

Nola was the first to offer an explanation. "They do that sometimes. It happens in dorms." From the look of it, she had quite a few more things to unpack from her suitcase, and it was getting late, but she was trying to be helpful.

Patrick, forever the lingerie connoisseur, piped up eagerly: "Was it like wicked good stuff? Hottie stuff? G-strings and lacey bras?"

"Yeah, some of it was designer shit," Courtney III said in true horror.

I wanted to inject a dose of sanity into the conversation. "Are you sure though? Maybe you looked in the wrong washer."

"There's only eight of them down there," said Courtney III thoughtfully.

I bit my lip to keep myself from blurting out that I doubted she was capable of searching eight washers.

"Look again anyway. Look in all of them. And the dryers," Nola suggested, "somebody might have put your clothes in a dryer for you. They might have been trying to be nice."

Courtney III agreed that that made sense and started back downstairs.

"And come back afterwards and tell us what happened," Patrick called. He had one hand on the top of the door as though he might decide to hang off it like an ape.

"Wait. Let's go with her," Nola suggested.

Patrick shrugged. "Okay."

Nola and he followed Courtney III on what I was sure was a fool's errand, leaving me groaning. For a few seconds I sat there in front of the computer by myself, but an empty dorm room in a big thunderstorm isn't my favorite place to camp out alone. I tossed my well-chewed pencil down and wormed my way out from under the table. Just then, a flash of lightning stabbed the town somewhere outside the window and I scooted for the door.

"I'm coming down, too," I said to their shadows which were already creeping up the stairwell wall like liquid ghouls.

Huachucha Hall on a rainy night is not the cheeriest place. The wrought iron railing on the stairs looked awfully snaky and the descent into the soil where the Hohokam dug their pit houses always made me think of yawning graves. Then we had very bad luck on the second floor and ran into a girl named Tuppence Ochoa whose family had been in Arizona for ages and who liked to lurk around the Laundromat at night telling unsuspecting residents really gruesome ghost stories. The first week of school she'd corralled me there and told me about the crawling Apache who was supposed to be traveling in some kind of time vortex near the north wall oozing blood from a musket ball lodged in his left eye socket. Hearing that we were going down there, she fell enthusiastically in with us. I swore I could see the wheels in her strange head turning as she tried to think of which ghost story was the best to mesmerize this big crowd.

We stuck close together in a line, now there were five of us, clattering down the tile steps toward the dorm basement. When we reached the first floor we picked up two more girls who asked where we were going and wanted to join us to catch the laundry thieves. They fell in behind me. One of them must have known me and heard about my former roommate who was an obsessive compulsive hand washer and had been taken away to Taos by her parents the week before, because she asked: "Is she your new roommate?"

I nodded. "Nola Petrie. She was just telling me all about her major." I lowered my voice. "It's puppetry."

"Puppetry? Is that a major?" asked the other girl in considerable shock.

"Theater, I guess."

At the bottom of the stairwell we peered across the hall at the frosted window in the dark varnished door where gold letters with a disintegrating d said 'laundry.' Powdery laundry soap showed some sloppy footprints and a mangled dryer sheet clinging to the baseboard partway up the wall looked like a small ghost.

"Look!" Courtney III yelped when she had reached the bottom step. "The lights are out!" She nervously rolled the waistband of her shorts lower on her hips and I couldn't even read the big letters SWIM stitched on her butt.

I heard my own raspy voice asking: "Did you leave them on?"

"No . . . I turned them off. But someone's been here. I just know it."

We entered the laundry slowly, letting the door glide back on its own until the brass knob whacked some empty metal shelves with a bong that made us all jump. The light of the campus streetlights beside the path outside glowed through a series of dimpled panes at the top of one wall. These windows were near the ground at street level and we could see the heavy rains had left a high water mark, Bermuda grass chaff, in a meandering line. We stood in the lighted rectangle from the hall lamps and peered around the laundry for a moment and then Patrick flipped the light switch. The overhead fluorescent flickered nervously and I had the impression that everywhere people were running away. Those washers and dryers with their lids opened looked like shocked monsters about to vomit.

"Maybe you checked the wrong washer," Patrick suggested.

"Okay, I'll see." Courtney III walked straight to one washer and looked in and we took our cue from her and began opening washer lids and banging them closed.

A few seconds later we all noticed Courtney III still staring frighteningly into the tub of the first washer.

She sucked in air and put her hand gingerly down past the agitator. "You won't believe it," she said. "This is wicked weird."

Nola and Patrick jostled shoulders beside her to look in and the rest of us crowded behind.

"Look," Courtney III began, "Look at my clothes. They're stuck up on the sides of the washer. And they're all twisted!" She delivered this in the manner of Roderick Usher, certain he was about to perish, to perish, to leave this mortal earth!

Silence greeted her histrionics.

"Somebody twisted them," she added ominously. She swung around, "Can you believe it!"

It took a second for us to burst out laughing.

"That's the way they always are!" yelped Nola.

"The machine does that," Patrick said in exasperation. "That's what happens in a washer."

"Oh . . . really?" said Courtney III.

"Really!" we all shouted back, laughing so hard it hurt.

"You actually thought somebody was pranking you?" yelled Patrick in disbelief. "You actually thought that!"

"I'm sorry," she wailed. "I really thought it was weird."

"God," gasped Patrick, holding his side, "you are completely lame."

"Sorry! Sorry everybody!" Courtney III said. "I haven't done my own laundry before," she pleaded, as we began to turn our backs on her and make the journey back upstairs.

"Sometimes, listen everyone," the girl named Tuppence was shouting over the noise of our grumbling, "listen, if you listen you will hear the creak of an old, old wagon on its way to Old Fort Lowell. I've heard it. Lot's of times . . ."

Everyone had left, yet she was still talking, her loud voice pursuing us.

"The last time I did laundry down here, and it's really, really creepy, there's a legend that this guy . . ."

"Shot himself after listening to you," said Patrick.

"I ought to show you some of the programs. From Paris. And Rome."

"Okay," Patrick said genially.

The three of us were jogging beside the black basalt wall that surrounds the university. This was my second day with Nola as my roommate.

"And he makes all his own puppets. They're hand-carved out of a special wood he gets in Mexico. And then he paints them himself. He mixes the best pigments in the world. He puts the paint on really carefully. In layers. Then they have to be dressed, if they're human. He never dresses animals. I only buy his puppets now. But my parents have cut me off for a while, so I can't buy anymore . . ."

Patrick managed to jog beside me and whispered: "Sorry about this, but I don't think I'll be hanging out with you anymore. She's too weird!"

My new roommate had already cost me friends.

Later that same day Nola began discussing puppets again. "It's the only subject I really care about, you know? Applying the art of puppetry in the manner of the greatest Mexican masters— La Corte, Omar Grande, and Contessa Gonzalez— you've heard of them, of course?"

"No."

"That's unusual. I find most educated people have."

I blushed in keen dismay to be caught immediately with so obvious a gap in my education.

Nola shrugged. "Anyway, applying their work to the modern pageant of human suffering seems like at the face of it absurd, you know, but like it's very simple, it's really strong, and it captures, it's striking at the very heart of cross-border misunderstandings between Mexico and America. Art comes to the rescue, you know? What do you think?"

I gulped in shock and gut-gripping terror. Had I been assigned another kooky roommate? "Tell me more," I said, though I dearly wished she wouldn't.

"Well," Nola said, crossing her legs and drawing the suitcase closer, "I have an awesome book in one of these suitcases, somewhere, about the origins of puppets. I've only just finished it a couple of nights ago and let me tell you it's wicked. Wait till you read it. And to begin with, you have to know that the word puppet it comes from the Latin 'pupa' and that you can translate as 'doll' or 'child.' Pupa, pupil, and puppy come from the same Latin word. A puppy is a doll-sized dog, of course. A pupa is kind of like a doll or puppet of a mature insect—you might not have thought of that—and I don't know if you ever noticed it before but the pupil in your eye has—" Nola jumped off the bed and slunk toward me while staring alarmingly into my eyes, "Yes," she said. "It does."

"Yes what?" I shrank from this disturbing person. This was not turning out the way I had imagined. Not at all. Could I exchange roommates right away and so late in the semester?

Bobbing and weaving like a cobra, Nola continued to stare into my eyes. "I see."

"What? What do you see?"

Nola stood up and dove back on her bed triumphantly. "Me. A little reflection of me looking in. And I happen to look like a puppet."

"Oh, really?" I didn't particularly want to think of insect pupas as little dolls and I was trying hard to forget that Nola had seen herself as a puppet in my eyes.

"Also," this strange roommate went on with her puppetry lecture, "puppets speak for mankind and they come from mankind's innermost primitive being and beginnings in the darkest recesses of his mind. So it's all very Freudian and that's why I'm going to take psychology because all the great puppeteers have a firm understanding of human thoughts. The id and the ego and all that malarkey."

"Yeah," I said apprehensively. Like most people, there were some dark reaches of my mind I did not relish anyone probing. And what college student used a word like malarkey?

"But what you really have to know is that the art of puppetry is ancient." This said, Nola unzipped her suitcase in an authoritative manner.

"Really?"

"Oh yes." Nola mysteriously flipped open the soft vinyl lid of the suitcase. "Do you know that perhaps—and I think certainly—there were primitive puppets in the caves of earliest mankind? And puppeteers all over the world are expecting any day for an early puppet to be found somewhere on earth that shows conclusively that puppets entertained cavemen around the fire. Maybe they gestured with the bones of animals as they chewed on them, dancing them around, reenacting their favorite scenes from hunts, before they chopped out the marrow and made needles and tools out of them. Most early dolls were made of bone."

"Oh yes. I've certainly heard that. Bones were carved into dolls," I said, nodding vigorously.

"Dolls and puppets. Remember the puppets," scolded Nola.

"Oh, sure. I surely will. Now that I've got a real puppeteer for a friend," I tittered. A direct approach toward friendship appealed to me, although the image of a caveman dancing his grisly bone around made me wince.

Nola ignored the friend remark and began rummaging through her suitcase instead. "Here! Here it is. I'll leave this book beside your bed." She pulled a fat volume out of the suitcase and tossed it on top of my bedside dresser.

I reached over and patted the book. A glance at the dust jacket of _A World of Puppeteers_ showed the atrociously distorted faces of a particularly hideous pair of Punch-and-Judy dolls glaring belligerently at me. I blanched.

"I've got more suitcases outside," said this odd undergrad.

"Huh?" I said. "Oh okay."

She set her hands on her hips and blew out air to make her bangs fly up like a wave at a baseball game. "Your new roommates." After giving me this interesting tit-bit she spun around and sashayed out.

I thought there was quite a good chance that I might go mad with her being my new roommate. What did she mean by saying there were more? I hoped she didn't have lots of annoying friends.

A moment later she reappeared dragging two plaid, cloth bags with bulging sides. "I'm kind of a loner," I said at the same time that she said, "I'm from Eager, Arizona." My ears, filled with pool water from a noon swim, held the ultimate M of 'from' too long until it attached itself firmly to the front of the next word, and Nola's hometown became Meager, Arizona. Knowing the many dulcet and enticing Arizona place names, the various Bitter Springs, Rough Rock, Skull Valley, Wide Ruin, and Skeleton Canyon, I didn't think to question a town named Meager.

"Ranch upbringing, parents are wicked hippies and it was wicked awful up there in the wicked White Mountains, don't even ask me."

"Okay, I won't," I said, agreeably enough.

Nola turned her back on me when I snatched up a big pair of cottony pajama pants—then so trendy on campus—from its hiding place at the foot of my bed and scrambled to shut the door.

"I've never heard of Meager."

"I haven't either. What's it mean?"

"Where you're from?"

"You just said Meager. I actually said Eager." Nola's correction cut into me.

"Oh? Oh yeah. I thought I heard Meager. Weren't you supposed to move in weeks ago," I added a little crossly myself, hopping around the room, struggling to jam my leg in the pant opening.

"No."

"I thought you were. My first roommate dropped out last month."

"Really?" Nola crouched and grasped the handle of one suitcase. She pulled it to the closet.

"She was a kook," I said disparagingly and then I felt a pang of conscious. She had expressed some interest in me.

"Yeah?"

"Obsessive compulsive. She kept washing her hands over and over again."

"Really?"

"Oh, it was weird. Her parents came and hauled her away. To New Mexico."

"Really?"

"I kept waiting for you to come. Or I mean someone. They told me you were coming weeks ago. Absolutely weeks and weeks ago."

"Well, I'm here now."

"Oh, yeah sure. And we'll have plenty of time to get to know each other during the rest of the semester, won't we?" I added in an attempt to cheer up and sound less whiny. I stood in the middle of the room with one pant leg on.

Lugging the suitcase directly at me, leaving me to leap out of the way at the last minute, Nola threw herself and her case on her bed, saying, "All you need to know about me is that puppetry is my life."

"Excuse me?" I said, pulling the second huge pant leg on under the enormous, soiled, T-shirt.

"Puppetry is my life."

"Is that a major? Puppetry?" I asked this with a happy quaver in my voice. Feeling weak at the knees, quite shaken by the sudden entrance of her my new roommate and the remark about puppets, I dropped on my bed opposite Nola, and groped about in the bottom drawer of a small bedside dresser for a pair of socks, all the while forcing a smile on my trembling lips. I was determined to make friends with this new woman.

Nola's puppetry lecture wore on for half an hour. From glints and gleams in her wild puppetry ramblings, I was able to make out that Nola had fallen under the influence of a group of local Tucson puppeteers and, in particular, a man known only as El Hilo. Emerging a decade earlier from some obscure Sonoran village, this Svengali of Tucson puppeteers inspired all Nola's rubbish about cross-border harmony resulting from capering dolls on strings.

"Doesn't let you talk? Ever?"

"Hardly ever. I have to save myself to be a good puppeteer. Because I was chosen."

"Yeah, but. . . ."

"I shouldn't even be talking to you like this. I've been chosen to tap into this source using some mysterious power in myself, which El Hilo also has, so he understands people like me. I knew right away, instinctively, you know, that he was right when he told me all about myself. He knew all this stuff, without even asking. He knew all about Paul."

"Who's Paul?"

"My old boyfriend."

"When was this?"

"This all just happened a few weeks ago when I got to Tucson. Because whenever I have a puppet in my hands, you know, I just have another life inside me almost and the words aren't even my own."

"Hmmm."

"Also," Nola went on, "El Hilo thinks I have a puppeteer's presence and beautiful cadence and with some work on the ability to control the major marionette types and project my voice I could rival some of the world's greatest living women puppeteers, so life is very exciting for me now, of course."

"Yes, certainly. I can tell," an unnerved and jittery me replied.

"I'm to take private lessons with him in the evenings. Practice, practice, practice that's all I'm going to do. It's going to be very hard with university classes and these extra classes too. But it's a privilege."

"Sure," I agreed.

"A rare privilege, because El Hilo only has a few students every year. He and his troupe perform on some of the great puppet stages of the world."

"Do they?" I marveled, trying to envision these great puppet stages. Great puppet stages? Didn't that seem ridiculous?

"Absolutely."

"Are they expensive? I mean the puppets."

"Oh yeah, very. He really puts a lot of work into them and the expressions he gets on their faces are phenomenal. Now, you must come to all my performances and cheer me on because I've got so much stage fright with all the pressure of El Hilo watching me. I'm going to be new to his troupe so my puppet's parts will be small at first."

"Of course."

"But I can't make a single mistake, you understand."

"Yeah, sure."

"We need all the audience we can get because a lot of people think puppet shows are only for little kids. So invite all your friends and family."

"I really haven't made any friends here yet," I said.

"Well, why don't you meet them?"

I felt confused. "Them? Who do you mean?"

"My puppets," said Nola laughing rapturously. "Do you want me to introduce you?"

"Oh, yes, very much so," I lied, "but I'm off to breakfast and my first midterm. Calculus 50b. I tested out of 50a and I got placed into honors English too." I blushed at my own bragging and sensed immediately my roommate's disappointment that I wasn't an artistic-type person. "I'll be back this afternoon and I'd love to meet all of your puppets then."

"Well, all right," said Nola dismissively, turning her attention to unpacking. "I like what you've done to the room, by the way."

"Thanks. Um, I really can't wait to meet the puppets," I added as I grabbed her backpack and fled. "I guess I'm going to learn lots about them."

"Uh huh."

That afternoon, when I returned to the dorm after a dismal performance on my second Calculus exam, my new roommate had disappeared and I discovered that my two posters (the periodic table of elements and a rather sexy image of Tobey MacGuire as Spiderman), which I'd carefully taped to a bare space on a blank wall of the room, had been dumped on my bed and in their place an array of puppets hung at different heights from large white suction cup hooks.

At the sight of those puppets I nearly jumped out of my skin.

My reaction wasn't extreme. This wall of dolls belonging to Nola would have stunned a grown man, staring as they did with their ghastly eyes under thick, fuzzy eyebrows. They terrified me. It could honestly be said that Nola owned every monstrous marionette ever manufactured. One puppet, a large murderous-looking charro, seemed to lunge off the wall toward me, and another puppet, a rattlesnake, greeted the unwary passerby with vicious narrow eyes and long curving fangs. There were skeletons and giants and conquistadors, more homicidal than doll-like, sharp-clawed ring tailed cats and gnawing, needle-nosed mice. Not a single puppet displayed a friendly or innocent face. To the contrary their mouths suggested that they might be biding their time waiting for an opportunity to devour anyone unlucky enough to approach. And, as an added horror, each puppet sported liberal smears of glossy crimson paint as though they had been surprised before they had a chance to clean themselves up after some previous, highly successful carnage.

As I sadly gathered up my posters from the bed and was about to dump them in the corner of the closet, the injustice of what Nola had done struck me. Nola hadn't bothered to ask me if she could take those posters down, she's simply removed them. There had been plenty of wall space on Nola's side of the room; there really wasn't a reason to hang the puppets there except to irritate me. And what about that disingenuous comment about "liking what she'd done to the room." The posters were my only decorating besides my Smurfs!

A part of me itched to rip the puppets down and toss them in a jumble in the bottom of the closet, maybe cracking a wooden neck or leg, accidentally, in the process. If Nola hung them up again, I would crop them again.

But almost immediately I had second thoughts. Would it be wise to start a vendetta right away? I halfway hoped that we could be friends. To yank the puppets down would be to declare all-out war, something I felt I wasn't ready for.

Could I hang a sheet over them? I didn't have an extra one and the cool desert nights in October necessitated several covers. I took the case off my pillow and carefully draped it over the face of the worst looking marionette.

I set down at my desk in some relief.

But what if Nola returned?

I leapt up and pulled the pillowcase off.

Later that same afternoon, with those eerie puppets staring at her, I struggled to review my chemistry notes for the midterm, which was scheduled for the next day. Twice I got up and turned their heads, though when I sat down at the desk they somehow flopped back in my direction. Finally, instead of finishing my review, I tried my favorite light reading. I opened the book and tried to concentrate on the fifth page, but the close presence of the grisly puppets was too much. I shut my book and left the room.

A messy dinner of tacos and enchiladas at the Student Union, and a long walk through the sunny palm-lined lawns of the university did wonders to erase my fear of the puppets. When I got back to the dorm I would look for my crush in the halls, find out where his room was. What an excellent idea that was! I felt a zing thinking about it.

Sunlight bathed the serrate tops of the palm trees and occasionally a pigeon or dove would soar out from these palms across the empty yards and settle under a bush to peck at litter. Tinged pink and gray like a wooly mammoth, Pusch Ridge to the north buckled to its knees on the desert floor.

With the scenes of the university's peaceful autumn surrounding me, the wide, cool verandas of Old Main, the silvery fountains, shaded walks, and academic groves, I forgot about the extraordinary things that had happened that day and mingled instead with a white-haired crowd of alumni lingering outside the old theater, Geronimo Hall. The crowd was eagerly anticipating a modern dance recital, a movement interpretation of Fray Marco de Niza's entry into Arizona in 1539 and later brutal suppressions of the native population entitled _Dance of Our Desecrated Desert_.

The grandmotherly group helped me regain my emotional stability. Listening to their murmured comments about the lack of cough drops in their purses and the severe heat of the past summer—one hundred and seventeen for six days running—I began regarding them fondly in a kind of life-embracing vision of the graceful dignity of old age. It was also amusing to watch stubby women dressed in capes and voluminous skirts of crushed velvet.

I then overheard a lady talking on the far side of a date palm.

"What is it darling?" asked the chesty dowager to her companion.

A man snickered loudly. "Oh, it's the funniest thing."

"What is? What, dear?"

"It's the biggest hair rat in captivity," he said. "On the back of that girl's head. On the other side. Of the palm. Gad, she hasn't brushed her head in ages."

"Really?" The old lady peered around the palm trunk directly at my offended face only to withdraw hers hurriedly.

"Look for yourself if you don't believe me," continued the man.

"Shhhhhhh," warned the woman. "I do believe she's heard you, dear."

A quick check of the back of my head with my hand told a chagrined me all. I scuttled across the street and there loped angrily under a grove of olive trees, glaring back at the crowd of white-haired fossils.

That old fart had a lot of gall gossiping about a perfect stranger. I wished he would shrivel up more than he already had, if it were possible!

Upon my hurried return to my dorm, up the Mexican tiled staircase with its wrought iron rails twisted into inexplicable cactus motifs, and through the battered door of my room, the puppets frightened me more than ever for I'd forgotten to turn a light on when I'd left for dinner and therefore had to walk past my new puppet friends where they hung ominously in shadows. My hand shook as I struggled to snatch the chain on the small copper cowboy boot that served as my bedside lamp. Of course, I immediately saw _A World of Puppeteers_ with the demented Punch-and-Judy on the cover.

Never turning my back on the puppets, I seized my brush and fought for nearly an hour an ineffectual battle with the hair rat. Then, somehow, I summoned the courage necessary to undress. I knew I ought to stay up and finish preparing for my chemistry midterm but the notion of studying there alarmed me.

Lying in bed, I thought I could spy the puppet's gleaming teeth and hear the marionettes scrabbling about on their strings. They had a repulsive live presence in the room. Perhaps it was all that talk about inner 'strings' that was worrying me?

Every moment I anticipated Nola's arrival. The noises of other residents loping about together, giggling, sliding in gym socks on the tiled hallway, shouting "get your freak on!" over and over again, made me think Nola was about to unlock the door. Then the laughing voices moved away, rattling keys. The other residents were staying up late on the night of second midterms, studying, partying and listening to music.

Maybe I should get up and try to find my chemistry crush? Then I remembered that I had forgotten my plan to search some of the halls for him. Maybe he was one of the revelers outside?

But no, I ought to look for him in the morning.

While I waited for Nola to come in, I reviewed what had happened to me that day and as many of the extremely odd things Nola had said as I could bring myself to remember. Again she felt the hurt of discovering the posters ripped down and most of all my mind kept conjuring the scary looks of the puppets. I glanced at them in the dark; only the vaguest shadow appeared. If El Hilo had carved and painted all of them, he was someone I didn't ever want to meet in a deserted alley and I wouldn't want to go wandering around the interior of his mind; dreadful demons pursued him.

I hoped to God that he wasn't performing with those puppets for any young children. Someone really ought to stop him if he was. Why, he could seriously warp a little kid's mind! One point was certain; I would never willingly attend any of Nola's performances.

Sleep, when it finally came at midnight, was so unsatisfying.

The next morning I awoke with a start, my heart pounding, and my head buzzing with all that had happened the day before. Immediately I sat up and checked the bed opposite.

Its covers lay neatly in place, as they'd been the night before. A line of batik pillows rested against the wall in an unaltered state and the puppets posed exactly as they had been when I fell asleep. No sign that Nola Petrie had returned.

During a break between fencing and chemistry that morning, I dashed back to my room hoping to discover Nola and talk to her about the possibility of storing the puppets in the closet, or at the theater department, or with El Hilo, any place but our shared quarters, but I found the room empty.

At first everything appeared exactly like it'd been when I'd left in the morning. Only when I examined the puppets did I notice a change.

A naked hook crooked upward where the rattlesnake puppet had been.

Clearly Nola had returned to the room to take the puppet while I attended class.

I began scribbling an angry note to Nola ordering her to remove the puppets, but partway through I tore it up. Wouldn't it be better to speak to Nola directly?

By afternoon, when I returned for the second time that day, I was astounded to discover the rattlesnake puppet in its place while the vicious charro marionette had vamoosed. My heart raced to think that Nola had been there.

I wondered if Nola had a copy of my schedule and was deliberately avoiding me. No doubt she knew pulling the posters down was impolite. But where was she sleeping?

That evening I almost got brave enough to tear Nola's puppets off their hooks and fling them in the closet as I had wanted to before. But I shouldn't descend to Nola's tactics. I decided I was above that. To tear down another person's possessions was wrong, even if the possessions bothered you. Besides Nola was probably coming in every day and wouldn't I eventually encounter her? Wouldn't it be more reasonable to speak to her first before doing anything rash? My messed up thoughts meandered along these lines when I fell asleep.

And for the second night I didn't hear if Nola came in.

When I woke the following morning, I blundered to my feet and stared at the bed opposite. Nothing had moved. A quick check of the puppets showed them all still there with no sign of Nola having done anything.

Once more, an identical sequence of events occurred. I went to classes, checked in at my room, and discovered the charro puppet in its place and the pack rat marionette gone.

Thereupon, for many weeks, different puppets, sometimes pairs, appeared and disappeared, mysteriously borne away while I attended lectures.

As for the young puppeteer, she was consistent.

She'd vanished completely.

November arrived at Huachuca Hall without a glimpse of Nola Petrie; yet her puppets kept vanishing and reappearing. Every day when I returned from classes and creaked open my dormitory door I suffered mixed emotions. In part I wished Nola would be there so that she could finally confront her about the puppets and the posters, while at the same time another part of me hoped Nola wouldn't appear so that I could avoid the inevitable, and now rather anticlimactic, showdown.

Sleeping in the room with Nola's puppets was truly torturous and studying there wasn't much better. Almost immediately after Nola had disappeared I had decided that, despite the inconvenience, all my study sessions would have to be at the library so that I could get away from those monstrous marionettes. I never got the heart to simply rip them down and be rid of the problem. Instead, I trotted off to the library and made it my home away from home.

By early November, I began wondering if my peculiar roommate had actually dropped out of school. Another alternative was that she'd been hacked to bits and hurled down a mineshaft, perhaps by El Hilo who sounded like the perfect candidate for such a dastardly deed if the puppet characters he carved were any indication of the deranged state of his mind. This notion began to weigh on my mind so much so that she sought advice, appealing to the dorm authorities to find Nola.

"I wonder why you don't prefer a room to yourself, Charlotte. Most people do," said the dorm counselor, who was an athletic girl sitting at a great dark desk in a room in the basement of Huachuca Hall. She chewed a wad of greenish gum and wore a football jersey and a baseball cap. "Why are you worrying about her?"

"I'm not. I don't worry about her. But, I mean, she's disappeared for a more than a month." I finished my sentence and began gnawing at the corner of one of my fingernails.

"I've seen Nola Petrie several times," said the counselor in a matter-of-fact tone.

"You have?" I was genuinely appalled. "When?"

"Only this morning, and a few days ago. She's in and out during the day."

"Here? Well, okay," I gulped audibly. Of course, on some level I knew Nola, or someone with her key, must have been there in order for the puppets have disappeared and yet hearing it confirmed left me in an agitated state.

"Do you want to leave her a message?" The counselor drew a pad of paper out of the desk drawer.

"No, that's all right." In a daze, I fled without mentioning the frightening puppets, which were, of course, my main bone of contention with Nola.

Prudence dictated withholding from the counselor the fear I felt having to spend the nights alone with all those freaky characters. Would anyone understand? Maybe the puppets wouldn't bother other people? Was I being too sensitive?

Two weeks later, when nothing had improved and I hadn't once bumped into Nola, I screwed up her courage and returned to meet with the counselor, this time vowing to raise the issue of the puppets.

"Is anything else concerning you?" The dorm counselor's bored eyes made an effort to focus on my drawn face. Rocking her chair backward, the counselor folded her arms across her chest. "Shoot," she ordered.

"Well, it's just that I've been sleeping in the room alone all this time, since midterms . . ."

"Yeah."

"You see Nola left all her puppets in there. The room . . . it's filled with her puppets."

"Filled? Well, that's different." The counselor dropped all four chair legs to the ground and hitched her chair closer to the desk. "She's taking up more of the room than you think she's entitled to." The counselor flipped open the cover of a spiral notebook and jotted notes. "That's a real concern. This happens a lot and we know how to deal with it. Don't worry. I'll leave her a notice after I've check the situation myself and—"

"No. She's not taking up too much room. They're just so bizarre."

"Bizarre?" The counselor stopped her pen.

"The puppets are really bizarre. You wouldn't believe it. It's just awful sleeping in there with them."

"Okay." The dorm counselor sighed and began writing guardedly in her notebook.

"Yes. And I flunked my Calculus 50b exam."

"Ah, I think we're getting somewhere now. Flunked calculus exam." She wrote this with a flourish. "I can help you there."

"I can't study in my room with the puppets." My voice was becoming increasingly frantic as I unloaded the facts, which had been troubling me for weeks.

"Can't study with the puppets," the counselor wrote looking down at her paper.

"That's right." I began, cheering up, feeling relieved to have finally found an ally. "I don't think anyone really could, unless they were blind. Is there someone blind in the dorm that I could switch rooms with?"

"No," said the counselor still intent on her writing.

"That's about the only person who wouldn't mind them," I said with growing confidence. "It's been so awful since the first day she came. I can hardly sleep in there with them."

The counselor folded her hands in front of her, gathering her strength. "Charlotte. I don't know how to begin except to tell you the truth." The counselor looked up from her paper and met my bewildered eyes. "A person's first semester at college can be difficult. This is probably your first time away from home. Am I right?"

"Yes, but—"

"Studying at the university is a challenge. You're not the first person to find that out and you won't be the last. Here. I'm going to give you two important cards. This first one has directions to the Wildcat Study Center and there you will find brochures and a schedule of short courses to help with planning your studying and budgeting your time—"

"I really don't—"

The determined counselor thrust the first card at me and reached into a drawer for a second. "This second card I'm going to give you has directions to the Wildcat Student Mental Health Center and I'm going to write the name of a particularly friendly mental health counselor that I know. There's no stigma attached to this so please don't be offended, okay?"

I nodded mutely.

"I want you to come back and tell me how you feel after you've visited a mental health counselor."

"I don't need to visit a counselor. I just need the puppets moved out of there so I can sleep and study."

"Charlotte, we can't simply go into a room and move other people's possessions because someone else is bothered by them. Now, are you involved in any social activities at the university? Have you joined any groups or gotten involved in volunteer work? Anything like that?"

"No, I don't really have that much spare time."

"I think the study center's going to help you."

"Sure."

"And go out more with friends."

"Okay," I said glumly.

"And remember to do stuff at the Student Union. Get involved with university activities."

"Right."

"The university can really be a friendly place but you have to make an effort."

"Yeah."

That afternoon I failed my chemistry lab quiz.

Bright and early the Monday morning of Thanksgiving week, Nola Petrie resurfaced.

"Charlotte," she said, barging through the door. "At last you're here."

"Nola?" My whole body froze upon perceiving my bizarre, phantom roommate whose face I'd almost forgotten. "Where have you been?"

"This is my room still, isn't it?" Nola asked. With that, she stuffed a suitcase in the closet and tossed a notebook on the desk smack atop my open Calculus book. Nola plumped down at the desk and opened the notebook oblivious to the fact that I had clearly been sitting there moments before. After more than a month alone with the puppets, I no longer feared them, and although they still annoyed me, I'd actually begun studying in the room several weeks earlier.

"Where have you been?" I repeated. Genuinely stunned, I stared at Nola as though she were a ghost.

"Right here. I never see you."

"I never see you! You never slept here!"

"Oh, the lessons with El Hilo were so fabulous. Here, here's one of his programs." Nola reached into a pocket of the notebook and pulled out a tan paper folded in half. She thrust it at me.

I looked down at the paper Nola handed at me. I took it and studied the photo of an extremely handsome man on the cover. The luminous brown eyes and high cheekbones of the man in the photo gave him an appearance of divine origin and his thin body appeared well toned and strong. I couldn't believe that I was attracted to him!

"Is this El Hilo?" I asked without opening the program to examine its contents. How could someone so handsome design the horrid puppets Nola owned?

"Yes. I was staying at his place to get the most out of the atmosphere. The puppetry atmosphere. But he's got too much company now." Nola sniffed in a rather putout fashion. With a dejected pout she took back the program, and stared blankly at El Hilo's fetching image.

I peeked around Nola's shoulder for my own second look at El Hilo. I lingered there undetected for several minutes and had only turned away to get my backpack and leave when Nola left the chair and flew to her puppets.

"Well, now for the introductions." Nola swept the charro puppet down from its hook and shoved it at me.

"I'm Pete the Pepper Hot Muchacho," said Nola in a mechanical voice. She thrust the marionette's small fist at me.

Reluctantly, I shook the freakish little fist, all the time thinking how awful that marionette looked and wondering if a puppeteer and a normal academic-type woman could ever be friends. This puppet's foul smile and the odd way Nola had of talking when she controlled him left me cringing.

The goofy marionette broke into song:

Chiles, hot and spicy, so is my song,

Oh, li la,

La, la, la,

Oh li la,

La, la, la.

Chilies, hot and spicy, so is my love,

Oh, li la,

La, la, la

Oh li la,

La, la, la.

Chilies, hot and spicy, so is my life,

Oh, li la,

La, la, la,

Oh li la,

La, la, la.

During twenty more stanzas of this song, which was put together like a snake's skeleton, that is, dully-repetitious and uninspired, with every stanza following the pattern above and consisting almost entirely of las, Nola had the puppet perform a jerky dance of unparalleled stupidity. This puppet song in the peculiar voice of Nola—getting in touch with her inner 'strings'—struck me as more berserk than anything I'd witnessed. My sincere wish was to crawl away into a corner and hide.

Suddenly, Nola affixed the charro on its hook.

With the puppet out of her hands, something came over Nola; her eyes rolled in her head and she lapsed momentarily into a trance-like state, breathing heavily through dilated nostrils. Just when I contemplated grabbing my cell phone to dial 9-1-1, Nola gave a slight shiver and sighed.

"I've had such a revelation, Charlotte," Nola began as she came back to herself, "Have you ever thought of how close a puppet is to the activation of the association of the mental," she tapped her head, "and the physical? Of nerve fibers coming from the hand and producing energy flowing out in an aura? And what form do you suppose the aura of a puppet takes when it is in the hands of an ordinary person? And then again, what is the aura like when the puppet is conducted by the hands of someone who is in touch with the inner 'strings'? Guess, go on, guess."

How could I reply? The aura of a puppet—what was Nola thinking? I had never heard such drivel. Fuck, I thought, of all the people to assign to me. My roommate's mind was mush.

"Well, the aura of someone like me who is in touch with the inner 'strings' is so powerful and mighty that—"

"Nola, Nola," I interrupted. "I don't want to stop you, this is all very interesting, but I want to discuss something, something we really must settle today."

"What?"

"I was wondering if it's possible, if there was any way you could find any room, possibly, for your puppets somewhere else besides here. Maybe at El Hilo's house or apartment? I could help you move them?" As an ulterior motive, I was already entertaining a hope that she might get a look at the real-life puppeteering freak.

"No, there's no room there."

"But he makes puppets. He must have tons of them. Surely, since you're in the troupe—"

"No, he's far too crowded already."

"How about renting a big locker somewhere on campus?"

"Absolutely not. They'd suffocate."

This odd comment blind-sided me so I sputtered for a moment. I recovered and tried again. "Well, what about the theater department? That's your major and they probably provide some lockers. There isn't a bit of room there for them?"

"I'm keeping them here."

"But really, Nola, I don't think that's reasonable considering I'm only asking you to—"

"I'm keeping them here."

Feeling a tight constriction in my chest, a panting and panicking me dropped the topic.

That morning I attended classes and saw Nola only for the few minutes it took to gather my notebooks and stuff them in my backpack. Monday afternoon and evening, Nola imbibed El Hilo's freaky lessons and performed in one of his troupe's rather mysterious productions (I, thankfully, hadn't been invited) and consequently Nola returned past midnight when I slept. Tuesday afternoon, however, the bigger problems began.

Nola insisted she would inflict another tedious puppet song on me that afternoon. I killed the concert by performing my own disappearing act—vanishing into the stacks of the university library after my last class, but after a few hours I tired of spending my sunny afternoon tucked away in musty book stacks.

Luckily, I discovered the garden.

I'd passed it several times during the semester while strolling between the old agricultural college and the mining building on my way to the library. A living ocotillo hedge, the snake-like ocotillo whips blooming with fiery red flowers at the top, surrounded the exquisite park and kept me from noticing the world hidden beyond the hedge. But that beautiful Tuesday afternoon a hummingbird's coppery dart into the garden attracted my attention. I noticed a square of grass behind the barbed ocotillo and, rounding the hedge, found an open gate.

At first I crept in fearfully. Although no warning signs were posted, I worried that the garden might, nevertheless, be private. The lovely place brimmed with orange and lemon trees, exotic palms and succulents. In the very center of a grassy lawn a tiled fountain bubbled. And as I mentioned, hummingbirds buzzed through the open quad.

I found a sunny, somewhat hidden spot near several Boojum trees and there I sat waiting for an authority to march in and throw me out. Finally, encouraged by the total lack of interest anyone displayed toward me being there, I opened a book and began reading.

Wednesday I claimed the garden as my own. In the morning I purchased a lightweight aluminum chaise lounge at a convenience store near campus and stored it in a bicycle closet at my dorm. That afternoon, before the Thanksgiving break began, I carried it surreptitiously out a little-used rear door. I then escaped into the walled confines of the garden where I enjoyed peace, without puppets, spreading open the chaise lounge on my grassy spot near the Boojums, those bulbous, blobby bodies looking like her own spiky, but friendly, monster companions.

Though for the first minutes I cowered whenever passerby shuttled outside the ocotillo hedge, within an hour I realized that few students noticed the pleasant square, it being slightly off the beaten track on the big campus and well hidden behind its ocotillo windbreaks. Briefly, a pair of girls in bikinis suntanned near me and a young man and his mother completed an application to the university at the side of the fountain, but other than these limited intrusions I was left in peace in that fabulous place. It was my refuge. Four hours of peace ensued. I actually read four whole pages of _Basics of Chemistry_ , safe from assault by puppet.

Back at the university exactly a week after Thanksgiving, I turned the eleventh page of my chemistry book and glanced up from the page in time to distinguish a peculiar figure outside the garden, scuffling near the ocotillo fence. For five whole days I'd gotten used to privacy and the lovely feeling of watching people come and go outside who never came in, but to my horror I watched this figure blunder through the garden entrance.

Nola, battling with a chaise lounge identical to mine, crossed the lawn heading straight for me. "Hello, mind if I join you? I wondered where you were going. This is fabulous. Real cozy." She set the chaise lounge beside me and opened it. With a great deal of relief I noticed the lack of puppets.

Nola flopped on the lounge.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," I said glumly.

"There's a message for you at the front desk."

The next afternoon Nola blundered across the lawn again. But in addition to the chaise lounge she also carried a puppet. There was nowhere to retreat to and I could only clap the chemistry book shut and glare at Nola.

"Today we're going to perform for Charlotte," said Nola swinging a new, truly scary-looking giant.

"Bueno, bueno," said the giant, clapping its fists together more in the attitude of someone preparing to sock an opponent in the jaw.

"She thought she was going to read her book, but no, no, no," said Nola in the goofy voice of a dimwitted giant.

"Nola—" I began.

"Who is this Nola she's talking to?" The giant tilted its grotesque head to the side and fixed one fist to its wooden skull. "I don't know her?"

"Nola."

"I don't know Nola. Let me tell you all about me. I'm a giant and my name is El Gigante. Let's shake hands."

I clamped my right hand under my armpit.

"Now I'll sing you my favorite song. It's all about my life in Mexico and how I grew so large. Do you think you'll like to hear all that? Don't you think that would be interesting?"

By the second week in December, Nola and my relationship had gone from bad to worse.

"Can't you stop being a puppet for one hour?" I said one rainy evening in our dorm room as final exams loomed.

"I mustn't leave my puppet persona. El Hilo says this is very important. Beginning puppeteers must always embody their characters. Which one irritates you the least?" asked Nola cheerfully.

I threw down my pencil in disgust. "All of them irritate me a lot."

"Come on. Pick one. Just one. And I'll be that one for a while." Nola remained near my puppets waiting for Charlotte to decide.

"I hate them all."

Nola snatched one and swept it to my side. "This is Jose Javelina. Say 'hola' to him."

I stared down at my page of calculus, my chest tight with rage, a seething feeling of injustice growing there. How unlucky it was that I of all the people in this dorm had ended up with such an annoying freak. Why hadn't I ravaged the puppets months earlier?

"This is Jose Javelina. Say 'hola.'"

"Hola," I said in a monotone.

"Oh, I don't think someone is too happy today. I think what someone needs is a puppet show."

"No, I don't need a puppet show!" I choked on my angry words. "I need a puppet show right now like I need a branch of cholla cactus rammed up my butt. Now, leave me alone. You aren't forcing me to the library again. I'm not going out tonight."

A wounded Nola replaced the javelina puppet on its hanger and brought out the charro marionette instead. Leaping onto my bed, she swung it toward me at my desk.

"Hola."

"Get it off my book." Had Nola been heedful of others she might have noticed the dangerous edge to my voice. But Nola was a person incapable of ever thinking that other people might be irritated by her.

"Dancing for you, lady." The witless, evil charro marionette tipped over in a stupid bow and tromped around the margins of my open calculus book beginning a miniature version of the Mexican hat dance.

"Get away." I swatted one hand in disgust at the goofy puppet as if it were a pesky fly.

Nola swept the charro off the desk, hung him on his hook, and chose a different tormenter.

The yellow, segmented snake crawled up the desk. "Oh, hello, are you talking to me then?"

"Get lost."

Nola carried the snake puppet away. She hastily grabbed up another marionette.

"Hola."

"Get—" I stood up and swatted at the hideous, discombobulated mouse that popped up in my face.

Quite by accident, my fingers entwined in the mouse's strings and, in the act of trying to set them free, I whipped the marionette sideways and round and round like a zany whirligig.

As pathetic as it is was, the sensation of snatching control of that puppet and sending it twirling delighted me. Puppet abuse was pleasant! I wanted to do more! I had never felt anything like this before, and although terrorizing a real person was impossible for me, I found marionettes took it rather well. At last I was getting back at those wooden monstrosities for the horror-filled nights they'd given me and the exams I'd failed because of them.

Only one small detail constrained my enjoyment: Nola insisted on remaining attached to the strange little thing.

Around and around I swung the puppet with Nola, in the voice of the mouse, screaming: "Ouch! Oh! Please help me! You don't know what you're doing! Think about what you're doing! I know you don't mean it. You can't! I have feelings. Stop hurting me. You shouldn't do this. You're molesting my little bod—"

Then the battle began in earnest. I, having heard enough of the mouse's mealy-mouthed protests, summarily snatched the puppet's stick from Nola. No sooner had I done this, than Nola plugged me in the stomach and retrieved the stick. Being then back precisely where we had started, the animal in us emerged. I sunk my teeth into Nola's hand, reclaimed the stick, and stepped briskly to the door, trussing the marionette in a tight ball using its own strings, and flinging open the door, whereupon, like some great cat, Nola sprang on my unprotected back. Pulled backward by the force of Nola's stranglehold, I spun around, threw a punch and throttled Nola's head with the bound-up mouse, also adding clawing and whacking whenever possible. Finding myself released by her efforts, I stumbled toward the stairwell only to have Nola dash after me at full tilt and reapply the stranglehold. For a second time I spun around and clunked the puppet against the side of Nola's head. One clunk, two clunks, three . . . we grappled each other, cursing and kicking.

Just then a resident named Kevin Green, who was my own crush, paced joyously up the open stairway of Huachuca Hall resolutely returning to his dorm room after a discussion with his beloved grandfather about his major which he had changed from engineering to microbiology and which he was now considering changing to psychology with his grandfather's assurance that a certain amount of indecision your freshman year was normal. After their Chinese dinner at a restaurant off-campus, Kevin, thoroughly in the dumps before dinner, felt a jaunty happiness and optimism about the years ahead. When at first he heard vague voices shouting, he didn't bother to slow down or retreat.

On the landing above, Nola and I stood panting. "I hate your puppets," I screamed.

Hearing this, Kevin's steps did slow.

"I have hated your puppets and I will always hate your puppets!"

Kevin's foot faltered above the next stair.

He listened. What was that about puppets? He must have heard wrong. Tentatively, he took five more steps and stopped.

It was at that moment that I chose to hurl the mouse puppet down the open stairwell.

A scream of agony, rather like a mouse, left Nola's throat as the contorted puppet narrowly missing a shrieking Kevin who crumpled against the stairwell wall.

What in the world was that balled-up thing that had almost brained him?

Half a dozen doors flew open and a bevy of astonished undergraduates stared at us, the battling, screaming pair and the crumpled dude on the stairs.

Following the hearing that night, the council of dorm counselors moved Nola to a room on another floor. I was allowed to room alone. A thorough mental health consultation was recommended.

Months later, when on my own I bravely badgered El Hilo's eerie puppet troupe and haunted his spooky puppet theater to such an extent that he placed my name at the top of his lengthy enemies list, sometimes, in the dead of night, I can't help wondering if savaging his puppets was a noble public service to the children of Tucson and the world, as I claim, or if what I really seek is private revenge against Nola Petrie for what had happened at the dorm. Truthfully, the source of my interest in El Hilo's puppets may have more to do with an attraction to the puppet maker than in any imagined wrongdoings by Nola Petrie.

### THE END

BEWITCHING EARTH

1.

It's funny about the doors. Funny about you and your antique, hand-carved doors, which I have to admit right from the start no longer impress me.

"I've learned from my years of dealing with the wealthy," you began that last afternoon in one of your fatigued voices, implying, disloyally, that for years your customers had plagued you, and that you, perched in a vast mansion at the boundary of a mountain bighorn preserve, were not in fact one of the wealthy yourself, "it's the front door that matters to the rich. They all want a grand entrance. An elm gate. With brass rings and fittings. Taken from a small Shanxi palace."

You were talking to me, and ironically it amuses me now to clip your words and use them as your front door, your introduction to the world. Upon finishing this pronouncement, you tilted your glass of Chardonnay to your lips. Your glass was cut from the best Scottish crystal, part of a complete set you had owned for years, or so you had bragged when you poured yourself a glass that afternoon. While you were drinking, to distract myself from the awkward situation, and probably also to keep myself from crying—you have to admit it was a intense situation for me—I was trying to remember whether it was you who told me that Scottish crystal was more collectable than Irish. Yes, I decided, it had to have been you, no one else I knew cared about crystal and you had made a big deal about the fact that the Irish didn't make the world's best cut glass. It had been during one of those evenings when you warned me I would have to learn a lot about the best things in the world if I wanted to be considered really well educated. Anyway, suddenly, on that last afternoon, your green eyes twinkled and your mouth drew across in a tight line, rather obviously to hold in a giggle that threatened to bubble up. I wondered then in dismay, if you were laughing at me for coming there and discovering you with this lady, who, I was beginning to suspect, was the other involvement, The Someone, you had been hiding from me.

But you weren't about to talk about that. The one thing you didn't deal in, in all your dealings, was the truth.

"It sets up the whole effect of their wealth, the effect of their mansion in the mind of their visitor," you continued with the door observation. "The guest mounts the steps to their porch, walking tentatively up." Your hand with the wine glass climbed as you spoke. "And there they find. A proper kind of door. A fabulous door, carved from oak, from India or Peru, carefully polished, and sanded in a workshop for hours three hundred, no, six hundred years ago. It's an aged and wise door that the rich want, a door that is knowledgeable of how to be a door from years of being the entrance to the house of grand people. The guest presses the bell. After an appropriate interval, the magnificent door swings inward and a maid bids the guest to enter. The door impresses the guest wonderfully. It impresses the guest more than having the maid answer the door. She's just a lackey. It's all about the door. And," you added, "I sell them the door. At an inflated price, of course."

I remember I sat on my stool and stared gloomily around the room at the empty expanse of your ultra-modern kitchen. I didn't feel as though any impressive doors were opening for me, and I was beginning to feel as though you were considerably less noble and a more trivial person than I could ever have imagined in my best attempt to get over you.

I didn't have much time to mull over my new unfavorable impressions because the lady with her elegant, severe black bun and an arm loaded with beaded Huichol bracelets clicked in black high heels around your kitchen island, and she smiled and sipped from the edge of her crystal goblet, one that matched yours. "Don't you want a glass of wine, dear?" she asked me again suddenly, "I doesn't matter to us if you're under age." I was amazed that she could drop these killer barbs at me so lightly and easily, seemingly with no compunction about the crushing effect. I don't think she had more than five years on me, and I was only nineteen.

"No, thank you," I said. I watched as the winter light reflected off your pool, dancing over the surface of the porch beams. It reminded me of a summer monsoon storm or the shockwaves of alien killer beams in a B movie. I noticed with surprise that your pool was one of those weird infinite-edge things that I thought we had ridiculed once. Had it really been only a month earlier? And there, at the tasteful edge of the tasteful pool you had placed a valuable metate, the grinding stone of the poor Mexican, with its matching mano, the stone that fit in the worn center. This old workstation of the simple Mexicans lingered sadly at the edge of your gallons and gallons of chlorinated waste that gave the illusion of spilling onto the slopes of some faraway blue desert mountains. And I noticed another telling detail. The image of several saguaro cacti peeking up behind the pool surface were bent or tilted ever so slightly. I suddenly realized that the crooked image was caused by heat waves rising from the water; you were heating your pool in winter. I saw you look over the rim of your expensive crystal at me and you noticed me looking closely at the pool, the heated pool, the very thing you had recently condemned.

"I sense," you demanded of the lady, "that you're not interested in my theory. You just walk around grinning and running my taps."

"I am interested," she protested.

"Well, are you?" you asked me.

"Sure," I said.

"I think it's rather symbolic, then, my door theory. Don't you think so?" you asked.

"Oh?" I said. "Of what?"

"Oh?" you said, mocking me. "Of the ever opening door, symbolizing new opportunities. Fresh ones in the future. Opportunities for the young. Opportunities for the old. What's behind the door? Another life or another death? That's an old story, the lady and the tiger. Do you know it?"

"Sure," I said, working to feign a sort of unconvincing cheerfulness at anything you or she would say to me.

"I can never remember," asked the lady of you in a deadpan voice, "which one he ends up with. Is it the lady or the tiger? Do you know?"

"Oh, that's a simple answer. The lady IS the tiger," you said. "That's always been my answer. And life is like the lady and the tiger. Maybe there is life after death and God behind one door, and behind the other door, nothing. I don't know yet about that part. The doors in my life keep leading to doors."

"You always try to make everything so deep," said the lady. "He always tries that," she said, appealing to me," but it's a defense mechanism. I have him psychoanalyzed in some notebooks of mine. I just have to find them." She leaned against a counter and crossed her legs at her ankles. She drank her wine quickly.

"Don't read those," you warned me taking a gulp from your wineglass without looking up.

"But he makes a boring subject, don't you think?" she asked me, coming up from the wine.

I nodded happily though I felt tears welling in my eyes and a burning at the back of my throat. This lady, who supposedly was your shop lady and had pretended to have arrived there to pick up some keys, had a lover's ease in your home. But I was your lover, and you had never invited me there. That thought made me shrink into myself, so I peered around my shoulder into a large, somber bookcase that leaned behind me.

There shelves of pinched clay people met in a conference of oddities, your Nayarit figures, pinched clay men and women blowing pipes and beating drums. You noticed me looking at them. "These are lovely," I said, "I supposed when the day is done and you're asleep they'll pick the lock, scramble about, and carry on miniature rites on your kitchen counters." It seemed funny to me; I could picture them doing that, could animate the strange, pink clay men and women over the spare modern surfaces of your home.

I spun my head around in time to see a look pass between the two of you. Absolute ennui. Blasé irritation.

Still I longed to sacrifice myself at the altar of your severe sophistication.

### 2.

I had discovered you that November at a white elephant sale.

I lived, as you knew, in one of the older dorms under the football stadium. I shared a stuffy room, my roommate was seldom there, and we shared common bathrooms, with the men urinals still standing as crazy urns in the women's. I think it was the week before the sale when the half-sheet, the bright pink flyer advertising the Anthropology Department's sale, sprawled on the ledge below the mirror in the common bathroom. Reading the biggest print on the flyer, I was excited by the idea of a White Elephant sale, something I had never been to before, and I carried the flyer back with me and left it on the old beige painted desk. Immediately I planned to attend, to chose several good Christmas presents there for my older sister and younger brother, both of whom liked oddities as much as me. As days went by, however, several midterms occupied my mind and I had forgotten all about the sale until that Saturday afternoon when I chanced to slide my French textbook over and rediscovered the bright pink ad.

By then it was already past three o'clock, and I have a strange fear of arriving near the closing of a sale or at the moment when a shop owner locks up his shop, of being in any place frankly that is announcing an imminent closing. I hate a pool when the lifeguard whistles the swimmers out for lightning or when an alarm goes off and a gate bangs closed. I don't think I told you about that phobia of mine. There's nothing I hate more than the feeling that I will be accidentally locked into a department store. It's an odd phobia, I wonder if it has a name,

This White Elephant Sale, which began at ten that morning, was due to end at five, and it was way past three, but in an uncharacteristic move I got my purse and left for it anyway.

I left my room and walked in the dark hall; blue and pink carpeting stretched ahead. I fell against the brass bar of the door and left the stadium in a fine, jazzy mood, enjoying the bright palms and pigeons of our desert campus. I was planning my winter holidays, celebrating some superior grades, wondering what the sale would be like. The campus was unusually quiet that day.

You appeared late in the day, too, and to me you were much like some ethnographic prize or exquisite oddity that a museum docent had set aside under a table in a box for a relative who never showed. Surrounded by several admirers (why I didn't see them I'll never know), wearing suspenders and an outlandish ethnic shirt, as I stood in line to pay for my purchases (a guitar and an alpaca shawl), you told me you were knowledgeable of Nayarit art.

You also explained that the New Guinean crocodile snout tucked under your arm, which I thought resembled a pot roast (an you laughed at what you said was an apt description, it was as though you were then approving of my wild imagination), was in fact originally meant for the bow of a boat. It wasn't an antique, you explained; it might have been carved within the last forty years. For my part, the moment I saw you I wondered how I'd gotten so lucky.

When I walked out, suddenly, I was with you, or you managed to be with me, in the sun-stricken cactus garden outside the museum, and you were talking about the time you spent in New Guinea. You were born in southern Indiana, you explained, on an apple orchard and your Irish parents had convinced you at eighteen to embark on a missionary trip to New Guinea to spread the gospel. I had never met such a witty person, a person so knowledgeable of anthropology, archaeology, and antiquities in general. While you talked every specimen, every tiny poignant pincushion cactus became enchanted. Your assessment of me was a little less sanguine. "You have a pleasing air of innocence."

### 3.

What I meant when I said it was funny about the doors was this. When I think back on us, and how you kept me seeing you when I first began to sense that I was making a mistake, I seem to have been led through a whole series of them. Doors, I mean. You were leading me through a crazy collection of doors which were swinging open, and swinging closed, banging me in the face, and brushing me aside. Heavy old traditional doors from important places in some part of Back East, and okay, I'll be truthful with you and admit they were the type of doors which were unlike ones I had ever known. Doors from mansions, I guess, like the ones in substantial novels, those old Edith Wartony things that I'll admit I haven't yet read but have heard contain, oh contain very carefully and permanently, heroines who are wasting away because society says they can't be in love with someone grand or they get excluded from being part of a set of really important rich people who are blundering around mindlessly, and who work at marrying one another, or failing to marry one another, unhappily, always unhappily. Novels about someone who had to compromise.

All your doors seemed to be straight out of places like that and your job was to make sure the doors you purchased would be used out here in the dusty West and that you would be paid gobs more money than what they were worth.

Yeah, your doors were stolid and substantial and they excluded someone as insignificant as me. But I did discover something in the process of the exclusion. You could say it's sour grapes now on my part, but truly rich people often are the only people who don't know how to properly appreciate the world. They are living behind some heavy doors, all right. But the people who write novels mostly don't get that or they're fobbing off the fabulous tales of the rich to the desperately bored poor. I got some insight into what the rich are missing out on, though it took me a long while to realize what I had actually picked up. As you pointed out once, I'm a little slow.

And at the same time there were other doors in my mind which also opened and closed and seemed to show me things that you pretended were not there. Deceptive doors, beautifully hand-carved, but nevertheless, deceptive. It took me a long time to trust my own instincts about the lies. I have to excuse myself for thinking someone older would necessarily be an expert in understanding the world, understanding themselves, and always operating in a realm of truthfulness. For all your knowledge, there were quite a few life insights lacking. Of course, on my part, I can fault myself for a youthful self-deception, for I actually thought you were walking with me through some of those thresholds when what you really did was shove me forward and slam the door behind.

But doors were what you did for a living. You were a dealer in old doors, in odds and ends, columns, expensive antique ones, called architectural details, mantles, chandeliers, fireplaces, stairways and all that heap of household crap found in really significant old-wealth mansions. You had all your smallish valuable crap in what had once been a grocery store and the big valuable crap in a warehouse near the railyards. The grocery store was in the center of the city's first shopping center, an imitation Mexican square with niches, statues of saints, arches, fountains and clinging vines. Not so convenient to your ultimate customers, who lived in the foothills, but the store had a loading bay so some of the heavier items could come off a truck into the shop.

Smack in the center of a replica Mexican village. That was where your shop was. I wonder if you realized the irony of trying to sell authentic pieces from a store in a shopping center meant to imitate a village in Mexico? I doubt you ever thought of that. Subtle humor wasn't ever your forte. I tried to point out subtle things, the way the scorching desert sun hit the top of a deep crease in a workman's shirt so that it gave the illusion of limitless black below in the crease and you would never see it. I think your comment at the time, when I noticed the strength of that shadow, was that "you know, of course, you'll never be taken seriously by any really important people if I continued with this obsessive delight in odd moments of chiaroscuro."

All that stuff in your shop went from your old grocery into the homes of the extravagantly wealthy who were living out their winters only in the desert foothills. And you were successful at what you did. Very suave and impressive with your knowledge of antiques, archeological items, and historical links. You successfully filled the homes crammed up there at the base of the mountain, Frog Mountain, that's what the natives, the O'odham call it, with some of the finest junk from the East Coast of the United States, China, South America and Europe. But the sad thing is that the O'odham who used to spend their summers there on the top of the mountain are now unable to hike their way to the top of the mountain. They're unable even to walk on the rich people's property. That never occurred to you or your friends, I suppose.

But you were very knowledgeable of the artifacts of the O'odham, especially rare old black baskets which your clients valued. They never realized those were meant to be wash basins, that they were used to wash dishes and babies. And your clients loved old metates. They liked to place those corn grinding stones around the edge of their negative edge pools. This common implement of southwestern women's work looked beautiful near water, you said.

A lot of your time, during the time I was with you, you were enjoying life by laughing at those people who were unlucky enough to be your clients. You ridiculed the way they had made their fortunes, the peanuts they sold for airline snacks, the smelly dog food that made them a fortune, and the masses of ugly cotton sweaters. Funny, you never realized what a sell-out you were, that you were even worse than them. How could someone feel superior who sold their services and therefore sold themselves to the heirs of a dog food fortune or to peanut vendors? Even I could eventually see that. Even someone as gullible as I was then could suddenly have enough insight to see that.

But it's funny that it took me a long time to realize it myself. And to realize that you never really loved the world the same way I did. I guess some people are constitutional unfit to appreciate their time on earth. I suppose there's some religious thing that explains it. A hell region you're destined to land in, according to Dante. Probably one for every religion about which you are so well informed, and yet so poorly inspired. You were too busy being sophisticated to appreciate the things around you–the little insignificant things that signify everything good about living on earth. You never saw the tiniest detail of what was around you. That's the one thing I got out of knowing you. Life has a lot to show a person who looks. But truthfully it's pearls before swine for the others.

### 4.

So we walked around that cactus garden together outside the Anthropology Department on the sunny afternoon in November, and you cleverly found out the things about me, my insecurites, and ways that you could seem to be furnishing whatever I needed.

That was the first of many nights I spent in a sort of heaven on earth. Where we parked, San Xavier Mission was sculpted nacre, lopsided with its unfinished tower shining against a sky of variegated purple and gray, a sky like a great draped serape.

Halfway up the nearby penitent hill, your hand traveled up my blouse. And the mission bells announced the night's regular divisions. It was a while before I discovered that the house we'd stayed in later wasn't yours. You used the homes of your clients for your casual affairs. You kissed me as you left me the next morning at the door to the dormitory under the football stadium (you were amused that I lived there) with my Christmas gifts, the guitar and the alpaca shawl.

Despite any misgivings, clearly sensing how precarious things were, whenever I was with you my world became magnificent. During our picnic in the canyon, tawny leaves, tiny and oval, showered from the black branches of a mesquite tree onto our upturned faces, landing there, and there, and in the hollow of your ear. I watched those leaves scatter on the surface of the canyon stream and meander around boulders, past cacti, and tumble toward the desert floor of our valley, miles below, and our town was all a dusty blur that day.

On the evening of the opera (you were so kind to take me to that), some gargantuan tossed a tortilla squarely into the sky, no, it only resembled a cloud, and tore it to shreds as though he, too, were in a mad passion. I was looking up at the sky. You were busy visiting with some important New York clients.

How naïve I was, how starry-eyed and fanciful. I suppose you sensed immediately a tinge too much adoration. I should have played it cooler, I should have managed myself better, but every moment with you excited my senses. I saw and felt extraordinary things and tried to tell you about them. Not that you heard me.

In the end, when my ardor had peaked, your cell phone began malfunctioning. Subsequently, within a week, I arranged to meet you at your actual home in the foothills. With its thick Persian rugs, and its even thicker adobe walls, it was a fortress, a bulwark with a black basalt foundation and a surrounding army of saguaro cacti. Arriving there in my old car, I realized I wasn't astute about irregular Navajo weaves, about the pillars of the Raj, about the chandeliers one could expect to find in ruined Sonoran haciendas. I realized I wasn't astute.

Before we could talk, your shop lady arrived to pick up some keys. Impeccably dressed and coifed, on one pale arm she wore three Huichol bracelets of bright-colored beads, depicting lissome scorpions and corn blossoms. Her black high heels clicked endless ellipses around your kitchen island as she drank her wine and eventually made herself lunch, and I knew she was laughing under the impassive mask she kept on her beautiful face.

When she'd gone, I begged you to explain. "You're imagining a distance that doesn't exist," you said, smoking your pipe a little angrily, quirking one auburn brow. And I, wanting—oh, wanting more than you can imagine—to believe you, buried my face in your chest with tremulous sighs. Buried my face, buried myself.

### 5.

The only person I confided in about you was Marisol. Another undergrad, she lived in the dorm room across the hall under the football stadium. You wouldn't ever want to know her.

Sporting fishnet stockings and boots, my Guatemalan dormitory neighbor, whom you never met, lingered outside her door as I came up the stairs and headed for my room. My key tumbled my lock with a loud clunk when she came to my side, suddenly seized my elbow, and hauled me toward her room. "Listen, I have to talk to you," she said, dragging me through her open door. I went along–she wasn't going to let me do otherwise--and immediately when I came through her door my elbow brushed against a pale and spindly tomato plant that had clambered out of the drain of her sink. "It grew from a tomato in an experimental salsa. I flushed the salsa down the drain, but a seed must have caught in the top of the pipe. I didn't have the heart to kill it," she said with a careless wave of her hand.

"But your sink," I said in horror.

"I can use my neighbor's."

In the middle of the room, where she let go of my elbow, she stood close and commiserate, ready to share secrets. "Forgive me for being so pushy, but I think you're in love with an idiot. The same thing happened to me. He is a professor, isn't he?"

I shook my head. Evidently, she'd been eavesdropping or else she'd seen you pick me up or I'd been crying too loudly over you the prior night. "No, he's an antique dealer. He's got a shop full of old doors and stuff." Talking about you left me weary. I let my eyes travel up to her ceiling where three dazzling sombreros hung on shortened chinstraps. I drifted away from these hats, to her window where I studied the craggy pink and gray mountains with their recent sprinkling of powdered sugar. When seen from the outside, our rooms form the headdress, our windows become the eyes, of a stylized and rather stolid Kachina god, who hunkers down, game-weary, against Hopi Stadium's façade and watches the play of light and shadow in the far-off canyons and sharply chiseled hoodoos of the Catalina Mountains north of the desert valley. "Really he's been very, very nice," I said abruptly. "Considering my problems."

For an instant, gravely, she studied me. "I have something for your dealer of old doors," she said, crossing the room to an open closet. There she began riffling some hangers.

I was about to leave—she hadn't explained what she was doing, and my need to cry was beginning to overwhelm my curiosity—when suddenly she found what she'd been looking for and shoved the other hangers away.

Out it swooped. The most amazing shirt. At first I could do nothing but stare at the multitude of tiny daisies, blooming on the shoulders, the shiny bouncing bunnies, the intertwined, enraptured red roses and mysterious blue velvet doughnuts that some mad seamstress had embroidered and appliqued indiscriminately everywhere on what seemed to be soft, striped flour sacking. "It's a little wild," I said, approaching the strange shirt, all the while secretly enthralled. "It's _a lot_ wild," she corrected me. "Huipals. That's what they're called. There from Guatemala, like me. Imagine showing up in this with a little slacks and a chunky gold bracelet." She snapped the shirt up to her, making it blossom out around her torso. "Try it on," she commanded. Not waiting for me to refuse, but quickly unpinning the shirt from the crackling paper cover on the wire hanger, she hoisted the heavy shirt over my head and fit it on me. When she'd smoothed it at the back, I gazed down at the thickly festooned fabric and felt as though I had metamorphosed into a mysterious jungle princess, or some ethereal, shimmering parrot.

"It's Guatemalan and very, very old," she said. "These shirts come from different villages. They are very beautiful, too, as you can see. And of course, my grandmother put a spell on this one." Noticing my alarmed expression, she added, "Nothing murderous. It's a love spell. But it works a little strangely. Sometimes people fall in love with you, sometimes you fall in love with people. Another time you might fall in love with a sunset. It's unpredictable. Do you want to borrow it?"

"Desperately," I said.

"Then it's yours. Keep it for a weekend."

Still wearing the wondrous shirt over my jeans, still gazing down at it, I mumbled a confused goodbye to my benefactor and crossed the hall to my room; in a daze I began making plans to see you, if only once more.

### 6.

Last night, before I came to your shop today, I cobbled several practice scarecrows, wardrobe scarecrows (or are they called skeletons?) showing the possible pants, the shoes, and the jewelry that I might wear with the shirt. Reverently, on an old plush chair of mine (it's embarrassing to admit I began collecting antique furniture because of you), I laid out my final choice: the Guatemalan shirt, my favorite jeans, a charm bracelet, and high-heeled espadrilles. All night in the dark my best practice self sat akimbo, flattened, awaiting your approval.

I wonder now what I had in mind then. Did I truly believe in the love spell? Were my thoughts toward you kind, or did I plan to attack you in my magical shirt like some avenging, folkloric Valkyrie? One wearing a Guatemalan ethnic shirt? Well, I suppose three nights of crying over someone you love can produce a state akin to madness. My thoughts were certainly muddled.

But this morning I believed it was a glorious shirt, a marvelous shirt, scintillating and fashionable. When I awoke, I blinked at its wild embroidery; my hands shook when I touched it. In this shirt I knew you would love me. You would adore me as much as I adored you.

When I dropped the heavy shirt over my head, it fell onto my shoulders like a leaden bell, a kooky bell, with cold clapper legs, conking knee knockers, underneath. The surface of the shirt was so ornate that it seemed to have a life of its own; this was unexpected. As I descended the cracked linoleum stairs and shoved the brass bar on the door to emerge out of the stadium dorm, some uniformed football players, helmets in their beefy hands, whistled at me and barked. I saw them trip away, glancing back in disbelief, slapping one another's artificially large shoulders.

Slipping behind the wheel of my car, I hoped I didn't look as odd as I felt, nevertheless another man gulped before I had closed the door, and two women on a bus bench leaned toward each other and whispered. The shirt seemed to weigh a ton, but—I reminded myself as I smoothed it with one hand—the shirt was beautiful, and it had a spell on it, and through it, you would love me.

How the sky shone this morning. What distinct puffy clouds the desert can produce in December, what sprightly packages of clean white joy. A turquoise opalescent bowl had locked down over the cactuses and rocks in our valley and put everything in sharp relief and gleam, seeming to set the world to my purpose, seeming to celebrate my journey to the old imitation Mexican village with its niches and arches, its stairways and balconies, its chimneys and roofs. Somewhere there you'd hidden your shop.

I stepped out of the car and into this village, and immediately my upbeat mood changed. I looked forward fearfully, searching for you, jumping at the movement of sparrows and the sinister sway of fairy lights in the breeze. Here and there, but always skyward, corroded beams jutted out of the brickwork, and tile arches marched down. Thick wooden lintels provided threatening eyebrows to the various window displays: the soaps, the Indian jewelry, the dinnerware, the humongous bottles of humectant jojoba shampoo. With so much going on overhead, with vines trailing from the walls and a crazy quilt of talavera tiles in every corner, I was afraid I would blunder into you—or your spooky assistant. Under a safe arch, I lurked in a cold drippy shadow, emerged once, then retreated.

It was unclear whether I really wanted to find you. Did I think I might find her instead? Or you and her kissing in one clandestine corner?

At last, during a short foray away from the arch, blue neon on a stout tower snaked out the words: _Sonora_ , _A Country Restaurant_. Next to the restaurant, at the top of a flight of red concrete stairs, I saw shop number nine. That was your office above your shop, _World Arts and Architectural Salvage_. Once the caretaker's home, your office had a sleeping porch attached where airmen stayed in World War Two. Sometimes, I remembered you telling me, you spent the night there on a cot or arrived early to take a shower in the bathroom. I tried to imagine you in a robe on the porch, awake and happy to see me.

As I climbed the wide steps, past pots overflowing with succulent donkey tails, my gaze fixed on your glass doorknob. I thought I saw it turning, and I wondered if your assistant would spring out from behind the door, dash down the steps with a knife, and plunge it into my chest.

Partway up, I felt something tug my arm, and I wanted to scream, but instead I looked down at my dangly charm bracelet that had snagged the embroidery of the shirt. This was harmless, but in looking down, the toe of my espadrille caught the edge of the next step, and I pitched forward, landing with a sharp impact on one knee. I got up slowly. Then I noticed your dusty "closed" sign propped in a small side window.

Outside the village bakery, under a stout palm, flower boxes with occasional overarching weeds clung to a wrought iron gate. I drank a coffee there, gently probing my bruised knee, while at another table, two elevator repairmen slouched forward, their Styrofoam cups steaming in the cool air. One of the men dipped a finger in a spill and dabbled coffee droplets. I suppose they wanted to discuss the young woman in the strange shirt at the next table, but I could easily overhear them. A dispatch walkie-talkie, propped against a napkin dispenser, yawped and a voice said, "The lights there just burned out...do I replace those or have them do it?" The two men sat up and grinned at someone else's troubles, and I thought of my predicament, and wondered what I would do when you came. What could I say? How should I act?

I sunk down in my chair and glared at the bizarre shirt I was wearing. Any illusion I had regarding its magical powers vanished. I noticed the folds of the shirt always arranged themselves such that the chartreuse bunnies showed only their headless hindquarters; the roses, I had to acknowledge, more closely resembled fiery cabbages. I began to wonder exactly what Guatemalan disaster, what Central American conflagration, the skirt commemorated. It seemed no surprise that the woman in fishnets wanted to be rid of it.

To the bottom of your steps, I returned, looking, I knew now, like some misshapen refugee. I dropped onto a concrete bench directly in front of a window, yours, that had gone unnoticed before. There I studied: three marble monks, as pale and expectant as me, a straw pig with a tatty mat on its back, a hairy paddle with a gruesome face carved on it. What would I do when you came?

High above, an arch spanned the gossamer sky. At the apex of the arch, a niche appeared like a ruined fireplace or a stage for some diminutive vaudeville troupe. I obliquely eyed the proscenium where a crumbling statue of our Lady of Guadalupe opened her benevolent palms. Half her clay face had dissolved; she was as hollow as an Easter chocolate.

When I'd sat for a moment, a bird flitted into the niche beside the mute Guadalupe. It was a cactus wren, a spotted bird, with a white chest and a close-fitting brown jacket. The wren crouched low, sharp toes gripping the edge of the wet brick. A white line above its eyes gave it an intense, argumentative expression. It glanced up at its huge sidekick and did a comic double take. Rather bravely, yet surreptitiously, it peeked around the Guadalupe's skirt, studying her bare toes and the folds of a capacious sleeve. I watched the wren shuffle a dance step or two, bow to the statue, bow again and wait, just as I waited, though if you came I didn't know what I'd do.

Then, without warning, the wren pecked the hollow statue and jumped back as though it expected some angry retribution. After a brief pause, the hem of the Guadalupe's dress felt again the sharp snip of the wren's beak, and the bird jumped back once more. Still there was no response. All at once, the wren made jabbing cuts at the hands of the statue, at the face, at the elbows. Repeatedly the bird popped forward and back, its wings flapping, its legs sprung wide, until, finally, with a violent thrust, the wren bashed the statue, smashed its chest again and again against the Guadalupe, and fluttered off, wildly, hysterically.

I chuckled. What an odd scene, though when I thought about it I realized that I shouldn't have been surprised; I witnessed them often enough. Everywhere I went there seemed to be comic niches, God-bestowed moments, impressions of a life too glorious to ever encompass in words. Tiny mesquite leaves falling on our faces, clouds like giant tortillas, the lopsided mission at night, those were more to me than simply the backdrops of our love affair.

Here I understood finally and completely that, unlike you, I was acutely aware of the world around me. And, more importantly, I knew I loved the world more than I had ever loved you.

I turned my gaze to your door. Just then a woman's pale arm wearing three Huichol bracelets abruptly unlocked the door from the inside and flipped the sign from "closed" to "open". Your bare legs came close to her and from the way your feet were positioned I knew you and she embraced. And then you stepped away and laughed—or rather your shower did—coming on in a squeaky, insincere giggle, squawking a raucous race as the water coursed through the old iron pipes. So you'd been there all along.

### 7.

How happy I was on my way back to the dorm; I cherished every block that I drove, though I was alone, though you weren't with me.

I had seen what I needed to. I had seen the arm of that lady that I had met at your house. The lady with the assortment of Huicol bracelets. I saw your bare legs near her. I knew then clearly what it meant. I suppose I needed to be hit on the head, almost. But I was proud of the fact that I didn't need to go to the door again. Your shower had turned on, her arm had come out and changed the sign. I didn't cherish any illusions anymore.

I took the first steps away from your door with a certain confidence and happiness. That was strange for me as I somehow still thought I would be crushed by discovering the truth and perhaps, without wearing that Guatemalen shirt, I would have been.

As I walked away from your door, I noticed the tiles on the stairs were worn in the center and that each tile was extraordinarily beautiful. Next I noticed the succulent ice plants that spilled over pots that were mounted on the side of the iron railing. The beauty of each sparkly pink bloom was more than I could stand. I loved all of them, individually, ecstatically.

And on my way home in that heavy, silly shirt, I grinned at so many things in the world surrounding me. In rusty relief, on a truck panel parked at a stoplight beside me, the profile of Abraham Lincoln contemplated the West he had never seen and I loved that rusty patch and I grinned at it again and again; at a crosswalk where a large pink wad of gum had been stuck on a walk button, I couldn't keep the smile from bubbling into the laugh of a happy person contemplating the thing they love most. The world was crammed with exquisite moments of fun. I smiled broadly at an aged cowboy, emerging from a bank, who felt for his back pocket and tucked his worn wallet into his saggy baggy jeans. How glad I was to have seen that. And when a palm frond clamped onto an antenna in the wintry wind and hung on and on, like a desperate silent movie star, I saw it as the victim of some giant off-screen fan, a universal victim, a cellmate in this prison of pain and beauty, and I laughed.

When I meet the Guatemalan coed again, I'll tell her the shirt with its love spell worked—and it did. For when an ocotillo, one of those towering bouquets of thorny sticks, stood trembling, as stiff and socially inept as me, before me in a planter on my way home today, everything fell into place, and I knew that awkward plant and I were destined, yes, certainly destined, to be lovers.

### THE END

MAELSTROM

Illuminating the canyon cul-de-sac with its headlights, a car swung ever so slowly counterclockwise and cast the humongous hobgoblin of a saguaro cactus on the bedroom drapes. As the huge shadow tiptoed away, leaning backward and lengthening, its two arms rose as though a prankster had shouted " _Los manos arriba!_ " from the canyon below.

Behind the drapes, Bennett, Malone, and Swan's most highly successful junior partner undressed for bed after the late-night Christmas Eve cocktail party, and at the same time his most highly unsuccessful wife, seven months pregnant, lay already curled up in their bed in the position she called The Fetal Beetle. She appeared as stiff as any well-preserved mummy under a comforter and quilt. This was proving to be one of the coldest Christmases in memory.

"Who was the old lawyer you were talking to?" asked Tim as he set his shoes in the corner near the closet.

"What?" she said.

"I heard you talking to that old lawyer from Nogales."

"Oh, you must mean Mr. Riojas."

"What were you talking with him about? You seemed a little upset."

"I was upset. I still am."

"Well, what's it all about?"

"He happened to mention something about a person in Nogales. It was a person I met—a strange man from a long time ago. I found out who he was."

She lay still looking into the dark. Her pupils were gleaming. Tears, perhaps, thought Tim.

"So who was he?" asked Tim as he stepped quickly to their dresser.

"A vagrant."

"A vagrant? Why is a vagrant important to you?" Tim struggled with a diamond cufflink. In the dark of their bedroom the cufflink's mate glimmered on a silver tray.

She shrugged her shoulders. "He isn't. He's not really very important."

"Well?" The cufflink dropped on the tray; Tim pulled off his shirt, spread it carefully on top of his pants on the back of a chair, and slid under the covers beside her. He molded them into two spoons. "When are you going to tell me what this is all about?"

"He saved my life."

"What?"

"The man I asked about saved my life."

"When!"

"I nearly drown when I was a little kid."

"You never told me this."

"I wanted to forget about it. We were shopping in Nogales one rainy day—well, rainy doesn't really describe it. A hurricane came up from the Sea of Cortez. That happens sometimes in the early fall."

"You nearly drown in a hurricane? In Mexico? Is this another one of those sad stories about your parents?"

She ignored that. "You know Dad. With him it's always hooray for Mexico! Hooray for the cheap guitars and the dusty piñatas! Hooray for the wind and the rain!"

"But a hurricane?"

"Yeah, trash was flying everywhere. We'd barely crossed the border when the wind toppled a rack of ponchos; it flipped them over and spread them out and I thought they were going to take flight like a flock of headless witches."

"And your parents didn't stop?"

"Three or four people warned us to. When we passed that big hotel, Fray Marcos de Niza, a man shouted, 'Hey, folks, you're going the wrong way! Don't you know there's a hurricane?' And Dad shouted back, 'Hurricane? What hurricane? I've got rum down here with my name on it.'"

"That sounds like your dad." Tim chuckled.

"His rum," she said. "The only reason we were with him was that every person, regardless of age, could bring in a fifth, duty-free."

"Oh, I didn't know that."

"There's a lot you don't know, Tim. Anyway, I had the wind in my face. I was skipping on the pavement at my mother's side, smelling the far-off scent of wet creosote and vanilla and wool. I tried to study every shop window we passed, the baskets brimming with jumping beans, the rubbery dolls in sombreros, the onyx chess-sets. Then I saw it, the ultimate window. It had a display of carved wooden fleas spread out on a beautiful blue satin cloth. There they were—fleas reading the _New York_ _Times_ , driving Impalas, feeding chickens, holding hands, and painting the Sistine Chapel. I tugged Mother's dress. 'We don't want to do any shopping,' she reminded me. 'Lottie keep up!' Dad bellowed, 'or I'll sell you to some toothless old hag.'"

"Lovely," Tim said with a snort.

"Wasn't it. And it wasn't an idle threat to me. I could see the circles of women huddled together in the alleys, hiding the trinkets they sold in their rebozos. They were about to face a hurricane wrapped up like crepe paper surprise balls. I thought if Dad sold me to them they would put me to work selling chicle, and I was worrying about my future when one of my brothers shouted, 'The Constipated Conquistador!' That was what we called a crabby-faced Spaniard in a golden sun helmet that was painted on the backdrop of a photographer's donkey cart. Seeing him meant we were near Red Horse Liquors. Dad thought they had the best price on the demijohns of rum."

"Once we were there we gathered under the awning. 'No dilly-dallying,' said Dad, barreling into the shop after his precious demijohns. Mom opened her purse and handed each of us a quarter. 'Go around to the bakeries,' she suggested, because they were around the corner on a back street. I should have, but instead I went back after one of those fleas."

"You still like crazy little toys, don't you?"

"Yeah, I do. And that day I ran back to where I thought the shop with the toys was. Just then the rain began falling. Ice cold drops splashed down on the sidewalk and slammed into me. I couldn't see the shop; I suppose in my rush I had passed it. When I arrived at the bottom of Avenida Obregon, I turned around and ran back. Finally, I found it. The rain was coming down harder then."

"There were bells tied to the shop door. When I came in, I surprised the saleswomen who were folding blouses and laughing, their hair pulled back tightly into sleek black buns. One of them was drinking from a tiny cup. I stood at the back of the window and examined the fleas. After many debates with myself, I settled on one dressed in a serape and strumming a guitar."

"When I came out with my flea, the rain pounded the sidewalks. Water poured off the awnings; cold streams of it spurted unexpectedly out of drainpipes that led from the high roofs of the old adobes. The street had flooded to the curb; a brown river rushed by. I began running south toward The Red Horse, which was on the other side of the main street. As I ran, I tried to find a way to crossing where the flood was shallow. Pretty soon I came to an intersection where I had to ford deep water or stay where I was. A skinny man in a madras shirt ran toward me hollering, 'Juditha! Juditha!' I thought he might offer to carry me. But he didn't. He simply ran past, and for the first time I felt afraid. The water was raging down from the hills. Nogales is like a funnel at the border. I hesitated and then leaped in. I felt it above my knees, warm water. It was moving so swiftly. I waded toward the opposite curb. Halfway across, things began happening. First there were sounds. I heard a glub, glub, glub noise. That was the warning."

"Warning of what?"

"The manhole cover shot up. Trash spewed out. There were bottles, toilet paper, and cigarette packages. It all came up. The water rose to my thighs. Then everything that had come up started going down. Round and round, the water just began turning and turning. The sewer guzzled down the contents of the street. For a moment I felt hypnotized by the open sewer hole. It was like a great navel, a link to another world. Even the heavy manhole cover was caught in the maelstrom."

"That must have been terrifying."

"You have no idea. I was so afraid. The water tugged at my knees. It was hard to keep going. I lost my footing and fell. I tried to stand up. Then the whirlpool grabbed me and shoved me sideways, toward the sewer hole."

"Oh my God."

"My mouth opened, but no sound came out. For some strange reason I was very careful to hold the little flea out of the water. I slid toward the hole again. I was heading for it and I knew if I went down the sewer I would drown."

"What saved me at that moment was that I fell into a pothole. I sat on the muddy bottom of it. The pull of the water jammed me against the lip of the crater. But I wasn't safe. If I didn't go down the sewer, I was still sitting in the middle of the street and there was a real danger that I would be run over by a car."

"I thought I would call out to someone. But there was no one to call to. I sat there without moving. There were things floating by. The fruit from a barrel cactus bobbed past looking exactly like a tiny yellow pineapple."

"Isn't it strange how you remember little things from scary times," said Tim. "But nothing as bad as this ever happened to me," he added.

"Or to me ever again. And that was when I saw him. He came down from the hills somewhere above the border, wading through water that was moving so swiftly I could have sworn he was walking down the crest of a waterfall. He wore a long brown cape like a musketeer or a monk or something. The cape dragged the surface of the water. His hair was all matted, dark underneath and light on top. But it was his face that was so unforgettable. Oh, Tim, he had such a long face. With heavy eyelids and such a grim expression. As he walked he dropped his head forward as though he had looked at the ground so long he could never look up again."

"When he came near, I smelled a foul mixture of urine and garbage. The closer he came the more it seemed he was looking down at me. Nothing about my plight seemed to register with him, though, and he didn't speak. Then he stopped. He came near me and leaned down. I shielded my face, thinking he was going to strike me. Instead, his hands slipped under my arms and he lifted me up. Mud and water slid off my legs. He began carrying me. For a moment I thought he might take me to the sewer hole and drop me in. But no. He took me up the street. Near The Red Horse. He set me on the curb. Drenched. My patent leather shoes filled with mud. Grass and twigs. A chewing gum wrapper. Mud in my shorts and grit in my shoes. I washed them. I washed them off, I was thinking, 'dip them in the water at the edge of the curb and—'"

Tim cleared his throat. "So you found out something about him?"

"Yes. I just did."

"What was it?"

"I found out he was well-known in Nogales. He was born into a very wealthy family, but he chose to live on the streets. They called him Las Cuerdas Marrones, Brown Strings, after his stringy brown hair and brown ripped cloak."

"Was he mad?"

"No. Not at all. Mr. Riojas said he was completely sane. It was tragic love that made him behave that way. Mr. Riojas thought he had a romance with a girl who rejected him and that drove him to the streets to wonder around, dirty and alone. He lived in one of the caves east of the border crossing. The old prison where Geronimo was kept. Mr. Riojas gave him money whenever he needed it."

"Such a sad, romantic story," said Tim.

"He died a few years ago. When I heard about him, heard that he was dead tonight, it's so strange, I didn't feel safe anymore, Tim. I knew in my heart that I'm not safe. And I don't feel safe or happy about our baby. The world is too awful, too dangerous. I don't want to bring life into it. I don't want to be responsible."

"But you are safe. It's Christmas, the safest, happiest time of year. Don't let a thing like this get you down."

"I can't help it."

"Don't let it."

"I don't feel safe anymore. I don't feel like our baby is safe."

"You are." He pulled them together tightly. "You're safe. Perfectly safe. Completely and totally safe."

"No, never again. Not anymore."

### THE END

MICRO TALES

### THE TRAGIC BREAKAGE OF MY MEXICAN DOLLS

They were the foolish and conceited great-granddaughters of a strong-arm cacique of northern Mexico. They detested their family's ancestral achievements, and furthermore, their father's commerce bored them. They had been educated at great expense at a private seminary in Guadalajara, but were primarily schooled in the art of spending twice what was prudent from the enormous income their father gave them. Upon their graduation from the exclusive finishing school, their father lamented that their good taste would ruin him.

They desired power and intended to marry it. In the meantime, each had hopes of starting torrid affairs with matadors.

Their straight black hair was slicked back over their ears with turtle oil and gathered in enormous braided buns. Their movements were carefully chosen and always accompanied with a clatter of red and turquoise bracelets. Their abundant jewelry was a native type and, as they frequently told others, "inspired by Aztec motifs." In the daytime, they wore high heels and tight fitting dresses or slacks. Nights, they decked themselves in the kind of stylish, Aztec-inspired dress, so popular with tourists, but theirs were authentic, and they were knowledgeable about the origin and construction of each item. For three years after their finishing school graduation, they stormed about Sonora in a black Mercedes, trading for a new model each year, and they always had these vehicles accessorized with smoky, powered windows.

People of rank and social viewpoint welcomed them to visit their homes. Theories in vogue with wealthy and young Mexicans attracted their interest. They learned native things during the nativist period. They struggled with _Nauhutl_ , the language of the Aztecs, associated only with Mexicans, ate corn, and between themselves shared self-consciously their new Aztec-inspired names. For a while they fancied themselves as Women of the Movement of the Reappearance of _Anauk_. Later, as the style among young intellectuals evolved to the worship of European ideals, they practiced French.

One day, while listening to a French cassette, the older sister drove their Mercedes, like a projectile, like an avenging black beetle, straight off a cliff.

Their necks snapped the instant the Mercedes landed and their crumbled bodies took days to be retrieved.

### THE END

### HORRIPILATION

With the writers' group buttressing her around the table, and thank goodness they were there to hear her read aloud, she produced from a tattered black purse at her side the cherished sample of her work containing as sacrosanct the image of the two sisters under umbrellas at that park long-ago in Boston. Although she could never remember which had which, she knew one sister's umbrella was brown and the other was black. This wasn't the Isabelle Gardner museum, she added, but a fabulous, massive botanical garden near it, where hydrangeas like the heads of eavesdropping pom-poms crowded the sisters who sat discussing the meaning of their grandmother's death in Indiana on the park bench near the flat silver saucer of the lake.

The rain pinged on the lake's silver saucer, the silver saucer impinged on their bench. Those at the table should keep in mind, the writer explained, that the two sisters had taken a pretend constitutional around that lake, each carrying an umbrella, and they had conversed in a facetious manner like two ladies in a late 19th century novel in which ladies might take a constitutional under umbrellas around a lake.

Someone of the writers' group suggested that just discussing death and sisters, even sisters who were being highly facetious, should she manage to do it well, reeked of the blasé yesteryear when the modern reader fully expected the sisters in such a leafy remote location with rain and a darkening sky to be attacked, stabbed, and mutilated. This helpful writer buddy added that she could then choose whether the murderer would drink their blood or have sex with what remained of their corpses. And the murderer would film it and put it on the Internet. Another lady at the table agreed, oh, how she wished the writer would write it so the assailant would use an ax to scrape the ground over their body parts, making sure that their bones should be buried in that park near the bench and then in some leap of magical realism the murdered sisters could "speak" to someone else sitting at the park bench decades later!

"It's so good it raises my arm hairs," said another writer at the table.

"That's called horripilation," added another.

"Or," the writer objected dryly, protecting her sacred creation, "the sisters could simply discuss death in a way no one had before without any of the mutilation and stabbing."

"If you want to guarantee failure go ahead and do that," replied a sarcastic man who never listened to anyone's readings but his own.

"Couldn't a masturbating male be lurking in a hydrangea bush?" suggested another productive gentleman, happily, cheerfully. He wrote reams of porno.

"Or," said the first lady, "could the discussion turn suddenly from the grandmother's death to some strange, sick family secret?" Those at the table took to this. Sad, sick family secrets. They held onto the writer's image and discussed the way the waters of the pond reminded them of sewers and suggested vaginas. Could the two sisters be secretly taped while revealing a damaging family secret? Why did she shun a story with a damaging family secret?

"Also, you could do something with your obscure Native American heritage," piped up the porno writer. "Have them sexually attacked by a Native American ghost from the past."

The writer stuffed her short story into her purse. "Thank you for your suggestions," she replied. During the rest of the read aloud they noticed her sniffing, quietly.

### THE END

### SOME FAMILIAR ARTIFACTS OF THE SOUTHWEST

Elegant Kleptomaniacs winter in the Southwest of the past. They open the rear door of the family car with sunny smiles and steal a boy's navy blue sailor coat fresh from the cleaners. By April they've left the desert for San Francisco.

Starlets, whose husbands have been recently killed in bizarre ballooning accidents in the Punjab, flee the Hollywood press and mourn anonymously in the dark adobe of our old pueblos. The local dude ranch hosts an English princess who aspires to ride western-style, while a fabulously wealthy Eastern woman (an heiress of a vast cold cream fortune) briefly owns the corner desert lot, the one with the dead dog and the trashed '49 Chevy. Crossing that same vacant lot on her way to kindergarten, a girl brushes her winter coat against a stand of cholla, detaching a joint of the cactus onto the hem of her coat. Feeling the spines stab her, she runs blindly ahead and disappears into the school screaming the alarming testimony, "Jumping cactus got me!" When the Women's Botanical Club holds their annual meeting near another cholla patch, an old lady visiting the Southwest from Toledo promptly topples backwards in her Mexican leather chair. She is brought upright again and offered a tiny cup of Ibarra chocolate.

During rodeo week, ladies with bouffant hairdos don slender, peg-legged Levi's that zip up the back or the side. There is a school rodeo square dance. Grimacing horribly throughout, little girls touch the flushed fleshy palms of unpopular boys. No one understands the caller on the warped phonograph record.

One Saturday noon as the air raid sirens wail, the silly man on the television animal show unlocks a portable cage and gets bit by a molting coyote named Bob. The Monday at school everybody's giggling about that coyote.

It's the duty of every child to cross the border into Mexico and thereby save the taxes on a fifth of run. Childless couples corral the neighborhood children into the back of their station wagons to fulfill this mission. The children beg to be brought paraffin skulls full of colored sugar water, clicking Mexican jumping beans infested by the larva of a minuscule moth and rag dolls without legs (but with a second head under their skirts).

Mothers warn that Valley Fever's in the mud, nevertheless, hearing river toads singing in the arroyos each summer, the children vanish, clutching empty peanut butter jars, into the realm of the Hairy Man and the tadpole.

A withered old bitter-looking woman turns her Pontiac with its Indian-head hood ornament straight toward a huge pink dust devil. Perceiving it directly in front of her, she comes out of her angry thoughts into a furious race to crank up her window before being sand blasted.

A young woman in the modern dance troupe drops outs of high school and becomes a stripper at the Blast-Off Bar near the Air Force base. The sons of Apache Indian fire fighters mutely attend art classes, then join the marines. The Ox-bow Saloon continues to serve the coldest beer.

Cousins in the East remark that a real Christmas doesn't exist in the Southwest; Santa Claus _pinatas_ with their curly white tissue paper beards grin in response. The evenings before Christmas are spent building puzzles (incongruously, of English thatched cottages and looming Bavarian castles), uncovering plump raisins in the bellies of tamales, and laughing at the zany man on television whose couches are all _gangas_.

From the screened windows of a crumbling desert tubercular sanitarium, the wind carries the sound of hideous, hacking coughs. People with slack mouths can be seen staring at a sea of weird, waving creosote, a graveyard where they plan to be buried.

Snake skins puff up and whisk away in golden hoops across lawns of gravel colored pink, and green, and turquoise. A girl rakes the colored gravel in swirling patterns and watches a molting coyote wittily navigate Main Street.

### THE END

### ANIMAL THEATER: A TASTY TIDBIT

After the battle in the bullring concludes, join the throng outside the ring.

Step briskly to the end of the line and elbow your way forward toward an orifice in the theater.

A social contract provides the poor with the meat of the show. It's a tribute for those who can't afford tickets to the performance. The bull, of course, is served, sliced into convenient steaks. Occasionally, a horse. But the actual flesh of the matador? Rarely.

Shuffle forward toward the dark door that you must reach. Where is the front of the line? Why does no one come out, proudly displaying their dripping packages, parading those bloody tidbits to those of you who still wait?

Who in this happy crowd can picture their tomorrows, for the abject animal pleasures of today?

### THE END

### THE DINOSAURS AT COLDITZ

I had my annual Christmas party for the club members out here at the ranch last Saturday. Boy, oh boy, was that work. I'm still bushed from it. I think I might have thrown my hip out a bit, but I haven't told anyone but you about it. I hate to complain. Anyway, they really came out for my party. Quite a few of them drove out here in the late morning, though I know it's a tough drive for them at this time of year when everyone has to cherish every Saturday with the family and space out all the holiday parties and family get-togethers. Don't they have a lot of parties at Christmas? Work, church, neighbors. You name it, everybody throws a party. All they need is another annual party from a club to have to attend, you know, but they came out for me, bless them, they came. To my party. Ah, it might have been to see the vineyard of mine, too. I brag all the time about it at the club. My brothers make fun of me about all the bragging I do. But I wanted them to know what they're seeing out here. The kind of effort I put into the vines and planting them and everything. No, I don't make my own wines. Yet.

With my white moustache and, let's be frank, my big belly, a lot of the members say I ought to play Santa Claus. No, I never have. My hair is only going white as my nephews like to tell me. They say it's not white enough yet for me to play Santa Claus. Oh, they're just buttering me so I'll buy them things.

As I said, I hate to have a party this time of year, but I've been asked many times throughout the year to make my property available for the club. All these acres and I live alone out here in the Empire Mountains. It's the right place for a club party. Hey, I got the parking, right? And I like to do things for the club. I always volunteer at the toy sale. So anyway, people say they want to see my dioramas against the background of the mountains and it's just too darn hot out here in the summertime to hold anything outside. Nobody wants to come out here then! People think it's kind of jolly to see my dioramas at Christmas, or so they say. I'm not going to call them liars.

I put a lot of work into each scene with the G.I. Joes and the vehicles. People from the club respect that. All the uniforms for the G.I. Joes and the roads, planes and miniature houses, of course. I really work on the buildings. I couldn't even tell you the hours I spent on Colditz Castle, or as the German's called it, Oflag IV-C. Schloss Colditz. Yeah, that was the biggest effort. Did you know Colditz served as an insane asylum? The inventor of the airship had to recover there. When you get out there look at the detail on the Augustus of Saxony coat of arms over the gate. That was a doozy. But some of the other ones weren't a cakewalk either. And if you look in the courtyard you'll see the Colditz Cock, the glider the Allied prisoners assembled in the attic. And I got the River Mulde in front. Some of the bushes were hard to make there.

Boy, I get so gal darn mad when their big winter coats knock over parts of the scenes. That's the thing about having it at Christmas that drives me nuts! Those darn coats. And you don't need to keep them on in Arizona, not in the late morning or early afternoon! It's pretty hot in the sun. I keep begging people to take those darn big coats off, not that it gets me anywhere with most of people.

Like I said, I spend a lot of time with Escape from Colditz Prison. Then along comes this fellow with a big old mackinaw coat and whoosh, over goes fifteen Weimar guards! A whole line of them. Gee whiz, I keep writing in the club newsletter that they need to be carefully if they're coming out and I even printed up little signs to remind them while they're viewing the scenes, but they have to go and knock everything over. When they leave it's like they've been mowed down. That's how I threw my hip out. I jumped right in and tried to get the Nazi guard up and I threw my hip out funny.

Yes, it is a little unconventional that I include the triceratops in the Escape from Colditz. No, there wasn't one there, I know, yes, very funny. Ha, ha. If you walk out there, take your damn coat off!

### THE END

### EXTINCT FLIGHT

The wrinkled old woman clambered onto the cliff ledge. Spreading her arms widely, she jumped. In seconds, her skinny falling body lanced the path of least resistance and slipstreamed into the skytrails of the condor-like prehistoric bird, _Artemix_ _Arbutulus_. How many people think erroneously that the path of an extinct bird would be extinct, she laughed. But in eighty years living, she'd learned things. Time to send down the plumb lines and shoot out the rock-attaching auger, she thought, trajectory –T minus ten degrees!

### THE END

### PEACE SURPLUS

Delmar Octavio popped open the top of the colorful paint can. Pink to paint the enormous P. He relished the task of repainting the sign in front of the War Surplus store. Instead of War Surplus it would now read Peace Surplus. A lucky painting job, so cheerful. He had not taken a drink for three years.

Winter, the sun was down early. The train going by fuzzed his senses. He could not stand the figures that aimed their guns at him from the darkness of the underpass. Toward him, the faces of some men turned. People he shot in a village a long way away in Vietnam. Their bodies were rotten by now and he was living in Arizona. He had not taken a drink for three years. He had not taken a drink for three years.

### THE END

### WHEN NAPOLEON MET JESUS

Squished between two buildings, the muddy vacant lot collected various men of ratty attire. They had built themselves a long lean-to, almost a warrior's great hall, out of warped and splintery boards and underneath the moldering roof they were eating and discussing great things over the burned remains of some chicken drumsticks.

A pool of muddy water spread across the front of the lot between the men and the sidewalk. Above the hobo hall, a huge poster of a bullfighter disintegrated into shreds of paper which hung in tatters off the bricks. Lawyers and stenographers scurried in a cold desert breeze to their bus stop or their cars past the collection of vagrants, smelling the burnt bones, and the vague stink of urine.

Cheap wine and the desert night began confusing world history and culture together.

The trouble started when someone not allowed into the hall, the unwelcomed, angry young man called out. The squinting angry young man sat on a wall outside their group on a broken piece of concrete. Outside the hobo hall on his own.

"That was a nice chicken you shared," said an old gent.

"H'okay," replied the donor.

"Go ahead! Take care of each other like a bunch of monkeys! That's all you are! Monkeys scratching each others' backs!" screeched the excluded young man.

"You don't like us being good to each other? That's because you think you're some kind of world conqueror. Like Napoleon. You think you're Napoleon," said the old man.

"Shut up!" screamed the exile. He was almost in tears.

"Yes, that's right. You certainly do," said the chicken donor. "But you'll learn your lesson."

"Shut up. Shut up all of you!" yelled the young man.

"That's you, thinking you're Napoleon," commented the old man.

"Napoleon, he ruled the world and yet when he met our Lord Jesus, he wept and kissed his feet with great genuflections and anointed them with perfumed oil," proclaimed another man with a decrepit hat and holey pants. He pronounced his sermon in such a pious manner, like a preacher, which was how he came to be named Holy.

"What? When did that ever happen?" asked a sarcastic man with a cloth hat rolled up in his pocket and few teeth.

"Everyone knows that when Napoleon met Jesus he kissed his feet and anointed them with many perfumed oils," Holy repeated speaking quickly.

"He didn't. Why, that's a vile lie. That's a bold-faced lie of the worst sort!" said his toothless companion.

"Do you deny that Jesus is the holy king? The master of mankind?" Holy cried.

"Everyone bows down to Jesus." The old gent explained this simply as though there was no point in making any further argument. He liked to try to calm Holy down whenever possible.

"Well, that's not my damn point, you imbeciles! Napoleon never bowed down to Jesus because he never met Jesus! Jesus! Jesus was living a long, long time after Napoleon. It's like the cavemen and the dinosaurs. They weren't ever together. Get it? Some people got that stuff confused." The toothless man left his mouth hanging when he finished.

"What do you mean? Are you taking our holy lord's name in vain? Why are you mentioning dinosaurs? I mean that they were apart."

"No, I'm not! Sheesh don't you know your damn world history!"

"I thought I did. Exactly when did Napoleon meet Jesus?" asked a young red-haired man who had smears of mud on his face and shaky hands. "I'd like to hear that, Holy."

Holy took a deep breath, but before a word left his mouth the toothless man jumped in: "What! They didn't! Of course they couldn't meet; they were born almost two damn thousand years apart."

"And yet they did," intoned Holy solemnly. "Mystery of mysteries. Curtesy of Our Lord."

"What?! No, they didn't." The toothless man tore at his hair in frustration.

"Don't you know Jesus was born years after Napoleon?" said a man from Georgia.

"Before! Napoleon was born after Jesus! After Roman times! Napoleon wasn't dressed like no damn Roman guy," said the furious man.

"How did they dress in Rome?" asked the red-haired man.

"Why, in sheets that made robes. Don't you know nothing?"

"Shut up all of you! I have a knife!" cried the man outside.

"Napoleon's still screaming," said the old gent. "History of the world."

Holy stood up and walked to the end of the shelter. "Son, are you gonna threaten us all night?" He said this rather plaintively.

"I can stab any of you! I can stab you whenever I want!" cried the outsider.

### THE END

HIS LIFE SPENT AS A CASCARONE

Inexplicably, relentlessly, his life evolved into a farce. The advantageous marriage he made to his childhood sweetheart ended in a bitter, late-life divorce. After the divorce settlement, he slunk away from the large ranch home he had purchased, taking only his clothes, a favorite recliner, some old Mexican records, a bench vice, and his gray Chevy S-10.

He settled in a teeny railroader's home near his grandchildren's school. Shortly thereafter, his adult children adopted unreasonable and disrespectful attitudes toward his only foible: a bottle of expensive French wine each Friday night. He failed to anticipate a time when his Spanish accent was too thick for the younger Americanized crowd at the Society of Mechanical Engineers monthly meetings, a time when his carefully composed speeches there only amused the onlookers. Eventually, uneventful days lingered unendingly and he begged his children to let him care for a few of his grandchildren after school two days a week. And they relented.

Along the way to a farmers market one day with one of these grandsons, he passed a shop window displaying an old Easter _cascarone_ , the empty shell of an egg stuffed into a paper tube, which had been propped in a dirty corner of the shop window. This particular Easter treat, made for thwacking someone's noggin to spill confetti, had jug ears and a bald head. The canny grandson who walked with him immediately noticed the resemblance between his grandfather and this dressed egg. " _Cascarone_! _Ay_ , _Tata_! _Tata_ _Cascarone_!" shouted the child, pointing at the Easter treat and then at his grandfather's head. Later that day—he wished to ask the Fates why they determined it had to be the same day when so many of his grandchildren were visiting—his other grandchildren took up the cry " _Tata Cascarone_!" Like a swarm of screeching pterodactyls, they circled him on their tricycles and bicycles. Legless, armless, tucked into a paper tube, a _cascarone_ he might very well be! "Now," he thought, "this is the way this wonderful world works its precious evolution. I have arranged to spend the last days of my life with grandsons and granddaughters, the fruit of my loins, and they believe my brain consists of confetti!"

### THE END

### END OF THE ANTHOLOGY

### ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Explore other novels by Lorraine Ray on her Smashwords page. <https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LoRay>

Podcasts and audiobooks of some of Lorraine Ray's writing will appear for purchase in the summer of 2018. Look for the links on her Smashwords pages soon.

Find her on Wattpad and Goodreads.

Read her Smashwords interview at <https://www.smashwords.com/interview/LoRay>
