 
Genuine Aboriginal Democracy

Lorraine Ray

Copyright 2012 Lorraine Ray

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Table of Contents

Uncertain Trysts

His Faithful Companion

Big Paper Skeleton

Fantasy Artifact

Genuine Aboriginal Democracy

Mother's Woman-Marine Bra

Work Out Your Own Salvation

Consciousness-Raising

Metamorphosis of Me

Snake Dance Disaster

On the Rio Mayo

Uncertain Trysts

Desertion claimed the edge of the place.

In a flood of cold morning sunlight, she scurried around the chain link fence and scooted away to where nobody else would be, to where nobody else could see the boss' daughter coming around the goodies, the guys, the sheet metal workers.

A foil gum wrapper glinted in the chain link, its silver teeth bared at the broken bits of filthy bottles beneath it in the Bermuda grass that nobody mowed. She skulked past the wrapper and the broken bottles and dove between Al Apadaco's service truck with its greasy red door and Phil Pascal's forklift with its hand painted self-caricature of an Indian in a black bowler and a cholla cactus G-string. Past the acid baths, past the broken compressors with their heavy stink of slug oil, she slipped unseen wearing that crazy alpaca poncho, that drab Peruvian thing with its lines of pack-laden llamas and snow-capped mountains and the fringe that always tickled her wrists. Underneath the poncho strode the woman with no name—though she did have one. It was Laura. Laura Stewart. Short and thin. Big brown eyes and long blonde hair. Laura.

Marugh. Marugh.

The shop yard cat trotted out from behind a tin shed. Black. An Arizona cat. A modest dreamer of scrawny lizards and acrid beetles and deep, deep ever darkening shade. He rubbed himself against her shin. What game is this, Miss? May I trip you up?

Out behind and up against looming rusty metal. Over mud pits and piles of poles, Laura Stewart scrambled, feeling the overwhelming dither of the brain and the shiver of the soul when in pursuit of a loved one. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, after Miss Estee St. Germain dismissed her French class with an energetic au revoir, Laura left the university and drove down Parkview Avenue past the sleazy hotels, past the confusion of used car dealerships, to the desert and the collection of ramshackle sheds and Quonset huts called Pueblo Refrigeration and Heating, her family's business on Orphanage Road. Looking north of the shop, you could see a fine litter of broken glass and shredded tires and coyote-ravaged diapers all the way to the railroad yards. Looking south, the Santa Cruz River wound its way up from Mexico, and when it flowed a few days each summer it carved out the pink and chocolate striated earth and brought up a lot of toxic heavy metals. Once you could also say that the river had brought up some of Laura's relatives (they followed its course in an ox cart), and ninety years later her half-Scottish, half-Mexican grandfather had gone into business with a half-Irish, half-Apache named Clarke and formed Pueblo Refrigeration. Laura was writing a novel in the back of the biggest Quonset hut and her father had given her a desk to work at.

Recently she had found another reason for coming there. On her way through the yard she spied on the sheet metal workers: those at work on the layout tables where the sheets were bent into ducts according to blueprints, others loading trucks with the finished ducts and equipment ready for installation. She never spoke to them; she was shy, and she thought them unobtainable, too good-looking, and sometimes (when she felt honestly snobby) too working class.

Off on her spying mission that morning, Laura climbed a small hill between two buildings and lo and behold, there they stood in a circle in a certain sun-bright, hard-packed clearing. The goodies, the guys, the sheet metal workers took a morning break together, standing in the overalls cramming doughnuts into their skulls.

That was a bad rhyme. Laura was subject to bad rhymes and bad thoughts about the overalls of the sheet metal workers, or rather what was inside their overalls: their bulging forearms, their massive shoulders, their mighty other members (gloriously unmentionable and delicious other members). Any young woman would be susceptible to so much male beefcake, not to mention their clever eyes and the way they sat in a circle on their haunches drinking beer at the end of the day. Intelligence didn't enter into it, but being eighteen and not having lost your cherry did. That was such a pleasant expression—losing your cherry—much nicer than saying she had never made the beast with two backs or gotten a bit of the goose's neck, and heaven knows if you lost your cherry you might find it atop your beefcake. Cherries and beefcake, overalls and skulls. Laura grinned at her own bad punning jokes.

Thaddah-thump. Behind her, through the open door, came the sound of someone cutting steel for a duct.

Mew. Ghhhatt. The cat cried and leapt away and Laura turned to see Cauhutemoc Grandillas standing less than thirty feet from her in a shed at a layout table. He was facing out, toward the open door, but looking down at his work.

If there was one worker at Pueblo Refrigeration whom she obsessed about the most, it was Cauhutemoc Grandillas. He was a behemoth of a man, a Mexican Hercules. And she loved the sound of his name, the mystery of it. Unfortunately, part of the mystery was exactly how to say it. She would hear his first name pronounced by various Spanish speakers around the shop and, though she thought she knew how to say it, in a few days she'd forgotten. The sound slipped away. She wondered if it was a bad sign to be in love with a man whose name she couldn't pronounce. Oh, but it wasn't love; it was just a big crush. And he wasn't married; she knew that now for sure.

But could he read a blueprint? She'd never seen him working there before, at the old breaker you moved by hand, no pneumatics, all manpower manhandling metal. Usually he delivered the sheet metal, counted the sheets or loaded the trucks with equipment. She watched him now; his big arm came back with the steel; his hips swung too, his shoulders twisted as he brought the silvery metal up to bend, to take the shape it should. Barely any strain showed on his body, and his feet were rock solid. Slam, bam. Slam, bam, almost effortlessly bending the steel. Laura drown in the sight of him. She imagined herself kneeling at the staggering man's feet, hugging his knees like a supplicant and asking very sincerely if he might be of a certain kind of embarrassing assistance to a young woman desperately in need of deflowering, and, in this scene of surrender, she imagined Cauhutemoc slamming the metal and banging it back again and again as she pleaded more and more earnestly and frantically for his favors and then, finally, when he pushed back his long hair and all his motion stopped...

But Laura was a little horrified, more than a little horrified, to see the real live Cauhutemoc stop and look up. Laura tried to noiselessly slither away; he hadn't yet noticed her. She crouched down and waddled, but Cauhutemoc's glance followed the sound and he saw her.

Horror of all horrors. She felt her brain bursting and her hands sweating and her stomach churning and her back going very, very stiff. It was the worst imaginable thing that she could imagine that she was not imagining—it was actually happening!

Then he grinned at her, his gloved hands hanging down at his side. Rather elegantly then, he took one glove off and carefully smoothed, behind one ear, a few errant locks of his long brown hair. Was he winking at her or squinting in the morning sun? It was hard to tell. Oh hell, hell. He leaned against the bench and crossed his arms on his chest, his big boots at the ankle. Was he giving her a come-hither look? Laura didn't stay to find out. She stumbled, bumbled back against a metal post and ran.

She fled across an open place with flecks of glinting metal.

Marugh. Marugh. The cat was coming, too. Where are you off to so swiftly, Miss? Miss and nearly trip. Running and stopping. Tail high. Puss, puss. Grhew.

Laura darted behind an abandoned cooling tower. On the far side of the tower there was a weedy dip and then a small hill that led to more sheds and ultimately, the big Quonset hut at the back of the yard. She climbed the hill and was halfway up when she thought she heard someone coming. Her heart squeezed up. Was the hunk behind her? Was Cauhutemoc really following her? It was too horrible. She thought she might vomit. But when she turned around at the top the hill, there was no one behind her, only the sound of the wind in the weeds and a cactus wren chuck-chucking from a nest in some nearby cholla cactus.

Laura scrabbled under a mesquite tree at the back of the first shed and plumped down on a black stump. Such a narrow escape; it had worn her out.

She petted the cat. The desperate thing made a shivery arch and wiped his whiskers on her jeans. A spider wed, caught on his face, dangled comically at the end of his whiskers. The cat flicked his paw up and shook his head, making maniacal eyes. "Messy thing," said Laura, teasing the web off. "Messy old mussed-up monster." His tail, bent at the tip, tickled her face. "I'm at a precipice, puss."

A precipice. What precipice? It was this. Stay where she was and she would become—what? A mad old nun, a virgin lunatic? Jump, and she would be doing the scariest thing she'd ever done. Well, if thoughts of mad virgins weren't enough to drive her to it, there was Cauhutemoc's astonishing body. There was a smooth bulge of muscles in his upper arms and a triangular shape to his back that Laura had seen the past summer when he stripped down to his waist and walked into the big Quonset hut complaining of a bug bite. She still remembered the way his brown back twisted and his big hand felt for the bit mark. The top of his orange overalls had slipped down slightly below his waist to reveal the wide elastic band of his underwear. It had been difficult for her to watch all that.

Only a gimpy middle-aged man with a lisp, an astigmatism, and a receding hairline would have the unmitigated gall to stand up in front of a class of horny eighteen-year-old women and proclaim that the characters of Ulysses and Hercules were outdated and irrelevant in the twentieth century. Laura's English teacher at the university had said that and everyone seated around her, the ass-kissing robots, had copied it into their notes and oo-ed and aw-ed and how profound that statement was. Laura hadn't agreed with them at all, but she said nothing. What her professor said had made her angry. She'd sat at the back of the classroom, rolling her eyes, glaring at her professor's white hands and his long clean fingers draped over the lecturn. Such pristine fingers. She bet he kept them squeaky-clean by stopping at every washroom between New York City and Arizona on his drive out each autumn. This would be his ironic, twentieth century idea of a Herculean task. Well, she was one female who responded to a healthy male body. And when some girl in the class with the improbable name of Miss Marlowe Wolvington read aloud that Marvell poem about the coy mistress and kept gasping and tossing her hair back off her face, Laura was hard pressed not to raise her hand and ask, "Hey, was this guy kind of effeminate or skinny or yucky or something and that explains why he had to work overtime getting laid?" Laura knew if the man in Marvell's poem had looked anything remotely like the sheet metal workers at her father's shop, his mistress without a doubt would have climbed atop him eagerly. Once she realized this, Laura wanted to lose her virginity to a sheet metal worker more than anything in the world. The idea appealed to her, but she wondered if she would be using the sheet metal worker. Well, she wasn't so bad looking, maybe the right man wouldn't mind?

Quite possibly she was unfit for college. She was too rebellious for the place. A person in college shouldn't have the kind of thoughts she had day-in, day-out. They should be like the rest of the undergraduates: ass-kissing robots. That was what the whole college scene was about. If you wanted to be a real rebel, you had to get out of that place and go out with men and machines, or run away to Mexico or something. You had to strike out at the system if you wanted to be creative.

She should quit and get a job someplace really interesting like a tortilla factory downtown or the tallow factory or that mysterious livestock yard near the freeway that she'd blundered into while aimlessly driving around town after class. There was something inside her that drove her toward honest work and that found intellectual tricks repellant. She liked the way people worked with machines. She liked it when men and women transformed simple things like sheets of metal into useful objects like air conditioning ducts or a plenum below a furnace.

Laura studied the ground around her feet, the yellow litter of dried mesquite pods, diminutive mesquite leaves, and pinwheel weeds. This was the soil where she'd spent her childhood. As a party of warriors with Geronimo, she'd raided from this hill, running down the innocents, skewering them as they arrived for work. She'd ground mesquite seeds on the old metates. Laura looked over at them, sitting side by side against the shed. She hadn't noticed them in years, the pinkish oval metate and the black metate with its four stout legs, which always looked like some swarthy beast about to scuttle away. In the future, when she was a very famous writer, she would have to remember to mention metates as her childhood inspiration for her writing. That would shock many people who would not know what metates were. But after she thought this, Laura began wondering what she meant when she said metates inspired her. Did a metate symbolize grinding away at something endlessly? Or monotony? Or worse yet, the way she slowly transformed every absorbing image into an unrecognizable dust?

She ought to stay away from the shop; there was no real reason to come there, but writing in the back of the Quonset hut at the desk that her father lent her was—inspirational. Not that she wanted to write about machinery, but there were moments and colors, impressions of the shop which stayed with her, like the way the glowing tip of the welder's touch stood out against the turquoise sky and the sound of the whoops of the service men when they arrived back at the yard on a Friday afternoon. There was an honesty and integrity that she admired. The big men were workmanlike, diligent and clever. Laura needed to become workmanlike. And what an atmosphere the old Quonset hut had with its high arched ceiling and the black and white photos of her grandfather's trips to Mexico, photos of jaguars and sea turtles and duck hunting on rice fields, old cars, and old employees. The photos climbed to the ceiling where two surprising squares of sky, two windows, were set high in the north side of the roof like mournful eyes.

And out of the blue, staring up at the blue of those squares, she'd found the opening for her new novel. "Couched against a guave crate..." Laura repeated it again with pleasure. The rest of the novel, after the beginning phrase, was unwritten, but it had something to do with the tormented existence of the son of the owner of a banana ripening plant. Lots of writers had written novels about tormented young people, but no one, absolutely no one in the entire world to her knowledge, had ever thought of writing a novel about a tormented young person at a banana ripening plant. That pleased Laura. She planned to throw in a lot of symbolic crap and the meaning of life and some biology and the whole bit, and make it a sort of a prose-poetry anthem written in a style no one had thought of yet.

Grappling with the facts about a banana ripening plant had proved difficult, however. From what her father had said, casually, months earlier, she'd learned that the banana ripening plant on Toole had a chamber which was pumped full of ethylene gas (to ripen them) and that gas killed tarantulas, which for some reason took up residence in most banana bunches. After the bananas were gassed, the floor of the place was littered with black tarantulas and yes, that was it, the prior Friday her mind had seized onto that, held onto that great opening image, the black hairy bodies of the tarantulas stricken in death poses here and there, there and here. Flipping her poncho over her head and dropping it onto the back of the chair, she had fallen upon her work eagerly and written about the dead tarantulas. Words, words, squiggly words in shorthand filled the pages of her red Big Chief tablet. (She had taught herself shorthand because the secretaries used it and she liked the secrecy of it.) She'd scribbled continuously all afternoon. At the end of the day, at five o'clock when the shop quit, she stopped and read back through her work.

Her disappointment had been gradual, but devastating. The black shorthand words were a little too much like the lifeless bodies of the tarantulas she was trying to describe. They didn't go anywhere. In fact the whole thing had seemed like a B-grade horror movie. The great symbolic meaning of it was lost to her and she could only see a lot of rigid tarantulas, legs in the air, on their backs, paralyzed.

But there was something to the sound of "a guava." Or maybe it was "couched against" that she liked? She tried the whole phrase again. Then she began to wonder what couched meant. It had something to do with lions. It had been in the beginning of an old play by Aeshylus. A watchman couched on the edge of a palace waiting for the sign that Troy had fallen. Could you couch against a crate? Maybe it should be "couched atop a guava crate." Oh, but that changed the sound of the thing, and it was the sound that Laura liked.

Behind the cooling tower, through a waving mass of pale orange globe mallow flowers, Laura saw someone mounting the hill. For a mad moment she thought it was Cauhutemoc, but instead the figure which appeared was tiny. Chopita Teetum, the old executive secretary of Pueblo Refrigeration, walked stiffly across the shop yard.

In a shaft of morning sun that sliced up her torso to her face Laura saw the face of an ancient abused doll with long gray hair left loose and flowing. Her big baggy brown eyes glowed yellow in the morning sun. She wore a black and purple plaid blazer and black polyester slacks with a sharp crease ironed up the front. Chopita was more Mexican than Laura, but some other nationality, too, perhaps German because she collected Hummel figures: a sweet red-cheeked boy in lederhosen with a little pointed green hat on a fence eating an apple, a girl in a smock with a lamb on an Alpine slope. Chopita kept those two on her desk at work and as a little girl Laura had played with them. Laura wondered again what she wondered every time she saw Chopita, whether the old lady thought Laura was a little peculiar in the sense of being interesting, destined to become a famous literary woman living in San Francisco and dressing in black with gobs of eyeliner, or, in what seemed far more likely, a little peculiar in the sense of being simply a little peculiar.

Laura looked back at the cooling tower, her eye attracted by a slight movement. She nearly fainted. Someone else was coming up behind Chopita.

It was Cauhutemoc. Laura stood up. She kept her eyes on him, but stood still. And just when he could have disappeared, and not seen her at all, he glanced over. Looked over at her. Looked over and smiled and changed his course toward her.

Go. Go. Take off. Bound, bound the cat flew off in front of her. Mew, swish. Awkward and armless in her poncho, imprisoned under alpaca, Laura scuttled away, hugging herself. She crunched through the mesquite pods at the back of the shed. The ground was thick with them, slick with them, and she skated on them past a painted window. Marugh. Marugh. Here came the cat, loving the fright, ready to run along under her feet. "Get away, puss."

There were spider webs, sticky long thin ones she had to break through. She put her hand against the wall to steady herself. She cracked dead mesquite branches and something sharp jabbed her scalp and ripped into her hair but she kept moving. Trotting now. On the far side of the shed the barns were sparser and she took off. Don't look back; don't look back, she told herself, but she did. Cauhutemoc paced up the hill, whistling and grinning. Some song. He was whistling some ridiculous song. What was it?

Down on the border, down Meh-hee-co way.

Another building. She slipped behind it. Run, move, claw, stomp on a black branch lying in her way and the old thing was rotten and cracked down with a pop, dropped her down fast and jarred her jaw, but she kept on and saw in a tangled blob, someone's underwear, green, silky, prophetic perhaps. She was breaking branches, snapping them back in front of her eyes and the mesquite popped and flung black bark out.

Finally, she saw the vending machines. Coffee and soda machines huddled together under a hut with a tin roof on top. Chopita was there. Cauhutemoc wasn't. Laura gasped for breath when she stepped onto the concrete apron of the hut. She wanted to shout for help, to tell Chopita that Cauhutemoc was pursuing her. Instead she stuck a hand out from under the poncho and dropped a quarter into a slot. Coffee with cream and sugar. At another machine Chopita waited for a cup to fill with glutinous soda.

"Good morning, Mistress Laura," Chopita said. She always called Laura that. Or worse yet, Missy. "How's your French?"

"Oh, um, good. Pretty good, I guess."

Cauhutemoc came up. To another machine, looking sheepish. He dove deep in his pocket for change, staring at her all the while. Laura had never seen him so close. He fascinated her and yet she couldn't look him in the eye for fear he would read what she was thinking.

"You like learning French?" asked Chopita.

"Well, some," Laura lowered her voice. "It's just a language." Laura wanted to get the French class out of the way. She didn't want to be discussing French when he was there beside her.

"You don't want to take Spanish ever? Learn some Spanish? That would make your Dad proud. He works so hard on his." Chopita's cup was nearly full.

Oh, and now the Dad!

"Well, it's not that I won't ever, um, ever."

"You're probably tired of hearing it around here." Chopita sipped the soda.

Laura shot a glance at Cauhutemoc, and he grinned a grubby smile. He'd bought a bag of potato chips, and he opened it and popped several in his mouth. "It's not that. I thought I'd do something different."

Laura looked back at Cauhutemoc. His smile returned and widened. He was grinning like some weird Cheshire cat. But he was so handsome.

She went to the edge of the hut and hugged a smooth tree trunk. The cat came and rubbed itself off the edge of the concrete. Rolled into a ball. Set near her like a sphinx. Cauhutemoc got himself a coffee. He went with the hot cup to the other corner of the hut and scraped his shoe on the concrete edge. A triangle of mud dropped. Laura stepped back to get a napkin. Cauhutemoc bolted back, too. So they were there together, but all she could manage was to look at his hands. A wooden stick to stir her coffee with. Bring up her eyes. Their eyes met and he smiled. They changed places. The cat got up and came around. With some disgust.

"That's the way my daughter was. Sick of Spanish. She took French, too. She could speak it fluently before she left even. She went to live in Paris in '73. For two years, she told me then. 'Two years, mama.' Now it's been five. I keep saying, 'When are you coming back?' Ay, maybe you'll live there?"

"No. I'm not going to live in Paris."

"But you know the language?"

"I'm not going to live there."

"Maybe you will. You'll be living there and speaking French and you won't remember Arizona or any of us at Pueblo Refrigeration."

Cauhutemoc coughed.

Laura couldn't look at him. At times he appeared to be a half-wit, prowling, moronic. At other times he looked like a sly genius. She'd never spoken to him or even overheard him. Perhaps he didn't know English. She imagined him saying something half-witted in Spanish to her while he imprisoned her in his immense arms. El blubo y blubedy con blub blub blub blah blah. She imagined him tossing back his head and laughing like a maniac.

Why was she thinking these awful things about him? Oh, it was horrible, horrible to decide to throw herself at a man. The fact was she had to do it or face not doing it. She didn't want to end up like the nuns she'd read about, mad nuns sucking pennies. And it was an adventure. And real things, at last, were happening to her. Passion. Illogic. She was loose on a stream of fervent madness. It would give her things, real things, to write about because real things would happen to her. She wouldn't be imagining tarantulas at a banana ripening plant. She wouldn't be describing dead tarantulas for pages on end. She would be doing something real.

She could stop the whole thing then by walking to the Quonset hut with Chopita and getting on with her novel full of dead tarantulas. But what a defeat that would be.

She shifted her feet. He shifted his feet and began whistling again. Like a gravedigger's whistle it was, a gravedigger swinging his pick up over his shoulder, merry to be doing the deed of finishing her off.

Finishing her off? Wasn't it the start of something?

Where would they have it off? In his trailer at the Circus Trailer Park (why was she so mean, accusing him of living in the Circus Trailer Park?) or a dreary little apartment above Five Points? She tried to imagine the kind of hovel he would live in and the slumped, unmade bed where she would make love amid porn, dirty dishes and cockroaches. She reminded herself that she had to be very nice to him and not say insulting things about the place he lived in when he took her to the place he lived in no matter how awful a hovel it was. A hovel, make love in a hovel? With a Hercules?

"Well, I'll see you up at the office," Chopita said, stepping away. Did she sense something between the two of them or wonder why Laura was still standing there?

"Good bye," said Laura sadly.

What should she do? Not be a mad nun? Not be a virgin lunatic? Embrace this off-kilter kind of love? The fact was she wanted to do it. The fact was she was ready to do it.

A great breath and a step. Down. Eyes at the back of her head. She would lead him around the welder's hut.

Laura slipped around the back of the hut and squatted on the very edge of a buggy old couch that someone years prior had dragged to the north side of the hut. What color had it been originally? It was the color of Arizona dust now, like a coffin, and almost her size. Great rips navigated the ancient, rotting material.

Maybe he would take her right there in the open air on that buggy couch with dust puffing up all around her. Laura's heart squeezed up sharply twice. Any minute now he would come around the building. This was the moment before the big thing. And throwing her thin legs out on the couch she stretched out and folded her arms across her chest. Her head against the armrest was bent at an awkward angle as she prepared for Cauhutemoc to come around the building and ravish her.

The seconds ticked by. On the other side of the chain link fence, her father's old fishing boat, minus most of its bottom after a landing accident in the Sea of Cortez, sat on concrete blocks, abandoned on a strange sea of dirt and surrounded by barrel cacti. Someone from the shop must have planted the cacti there years earlier, judging from their size. A vandal with a baseball bat or a two-by-four had shoved over most of them the prior summer. Nothing but skinny roots supported them and no one could get them back up; they were too heavy, and so, left uprooted, lying about like booze butts hurled down in a speakeasy, they waited to die. Desperately mournful, those knocked-over plants, those barrel cacti, lying around like large, confused men, toppled down. Men tumbling, men stumbling.

It was the fate of every living thing to leave this world in a confused state. But why think so much of death at this moment? Was loving death? Maybe it wasn't good to go through with it with so many misgivings?

But where was he? Had he gone back to work?

Get up; get out, she thought. Get up now and run away before he comes.

More seconds ticked by. She didn't get up.

Where was he? My God, he wasn't coming! She had misinterpreted the signs. Perhaps he hadn't really been giving her come-hither looks. He probably wasn't even interested in her. She might have been imagining the whole torrid non-affair.

Did that seem true?

She thought he had been interested in her, but maybe he would do nothing about it today. Maybe right now he was back in the shed working. He might be taking a chance with his job if he did anything else.

But he had to do something! Doing something now was the absolutely most important thing that he had to do.

A fly landed on her knee and her hand was posed above it, but the fly was blithe and unaware and went on, second by second, living.

Minutes, seconds, so much meaning in the smallest moments that passed, but without any notice until the confusion of death. Like the barrel cacti. Shortly after they had been uprooted and were destined to die, they still bloomed and she remembered seeing the bees pollinating the blossoms on the downed cacti. And silly little pineapple fruit came later. She looked out at the sea of uprooted barrel cacti. Like silly tourists on vacation, spilling down a gangplank, with the gaudy yellow pineapples still attached to their heads like decorations on a hat, a New Year's party aftermath, celebrants strewn over the landscape, motionless, waiting for their inevitable death. Like everyone and everything: helpless, hopeless.

But she wasn't hopeless, no, for any minute he'd be coming around the building. And if he came, she would give herself to him fast, if he wanted her.

But it made her so sad to think that later that night the old barrel cacti would still be there staring up at the velvet blackness and the pinprick stars, the globs of milky multiple worlds spinning above them and her. Was there anything dying on the surface of one of those worlds and was it staring up at them? Fastened to the same lonely spot. But she would be gone and everything would have changed unless Cauhutemoc didn't come.

God had to make sure he came.

God had to see to this one little request.

She was praying for that, pressing her hands together and praying straight up to the azure vault of the sky. She was thinking of that, of her prayer, when who should come around the building but a certain big body, whistling.

# # # #

The End

# # # #

His Faithful Companion

"I'm a Finger Lakes Boy," said a chirpy little man in gold-rimmed glasses as he signed George very large in the front of a book, and Reedy much smaller.

"Like wow," said the pimply young man with a Jelly Roll hairstyle who was seated beside George at the drugstore counter. "Is it a book or something?" he asked, an expression of horror gradually spreading over his face.

"That's right!" George exclaimed, oblivious to his new friend's true feelings, "My book. I like to say I'm a Finger Lakes Boy, born ninety years ago in northern New York State."

"Crazy," said the boy, reluctantly taking up the small volume that was thrust at him by the stranger who had struck up a conversation at the counter.

"It took me five years to write it," George added.

"Super murgitroid!" exclaimed the young man, his eyes bugging. He slapped the thin volume on top of his stack of college texts. "There it sits. As much good as it'll do me. I don't dig reading."

"But this book will interest you. You see, I graduated in '85 at about your age, I suppose it was, and I immediately felt a need to strike out for the West, for Utah and New Mexico, the big open West, you see. And eventually I came to Arizona. I became an archaeologist, and it was a fascinating career for me and what you've got there is a book all about the Indians I've been privileged to know at my digs. They were wonderful people that I met in the high deserts of Arizona. Navajos and Apaches, Piutes and Hopis," said George, putting the cap on his fountain pen and clipping it to his shirt pocket, "wonderful people who helped me understand more about life than you can imagine."

"Meanwhile, back at the ranch," said the chap beside George. He worked his jaw in vigorous fashion to destroy his burger.

George frowned. He knew this expression about the waiting ranch was some kind of new, disparaging comment on the lengthy and boring nature of a speech. That it referred to his speech was something the old man couldn't fathom.

George sat trying to think of something to say.

"Well, word from the bird, maybe you shouldn't be giving a stranger your book like this." The young man gave George that advice and then sucked noisily on the straw that was stuck in his chocolate shake.

"Why not!" George exclaimed. "I have plenty of them. Do you think you're interested in archaeology at all? I'm assuming you're a student here." It was a reasonable assumption. George and the boy sat at Ryan-Evans' Drugstore Number 3, right outside the black basalt walls of the desert campus where George Reedy had been a professor for forty-five years.

An ancient waitress in a dirty apron trundled along the counter with a coffee pot and quickly pocketed Professor Reedy's generous tip.

"Aw," the boy whined, "I'm a student, all right. The problem is I don't know what to study. Not really, Pop, not at all. I haven't picked a major. It's a real drag to pick a major, lemme tell you. In the modern world, what is a man, anyway? Everybody's after you. 'Whattaya gonna be? Whattaya gonna be?' I tell 'em, 'I don't know. Stop with the royal shaft.' I mean, life is a real nowhere sometimes. How can I be something in the future when I've hardly even been anything in the past? Except a kid. But history, man, history actually gives me a pain right here in my side. A royal pain. Lemme tell you. I'm interested in the communists, all right. And all that Red hooha, but I don't know about the Indians."

George grew excited. "Well, say, you're exactly the type of person who needs to read my book. You're a man of action. If you read about my friends the Indians and our excavations together, you will feel yourself come alive and I guarantee it will help you decide on a major."

"Oh, I don't know about that," whined the dubious boy.

"You see, the Indian is a decisive person."

"Uh huh," said the boy, taking another big bite of his burger.

"That's what you need to hear about. I wish I could invite you back to my office for a man to man talk. A real heart-to-heart session. I used to have an office at the back of the state museum," George explained.

"Uh huh, what did they do—throw you out?" The young man lifted his straw and sucked holes in a hunk of ice cream at the bottom of his shake.

"I'm emeritus," George said in a shocked voice.

"Kinda an oddball?"

"No, it's an honorary position. I could tell you some tales about the early times in Arizona. Gun fights. Lost caves full of rare pots."

"Aw shucks, rare pots?" exclaimed the boy, "Is that what your book's about? Ah, Pop," he whined, "you otta take it back right now. I'm not gonna read that. Pots are not a gas. When you said digs I thought you meant you found Indian gold or something. It could be a blast hunting for Indian gold."

"You might be thinking of the Incas in South America. I never found any gold in my digs," said George.

"What a drag," said the boy. "Now if you were telling about a lifetime spent finding gold that would get my wazoo going."

"But I wrestled Apaches," George offered.

"Wrestled Apaches? Did they break your glasses a few times?"

George took a last sip of water out of his frosted plastic glass. "Would you have time for a tour of the State Museum with me? There are some interesting dioramas about the killing of the mammoths. I think you would find them to be a gas."

"Dioramas? Oh, nah, Pop. I've gotta class at one. I gotta cut out right away. I'm in English Lit, with some kinda weirdo lady who digs the Lake Poets. Why didn't they drown themselves, that's what I wanna know about those damn Lake Poets? All their daffodils and clouds give me a pain in my side." He went to work sucking the dregs of his chocolate shake.

"Well, read my book," said George. "Read it and see if it prompts a few questions."

The young man spoke with the straw in his mouth. "Aw, really Pop, I think you otta take it back."

"Absolutely not. It's what you need." George got off the stool, picked up a leather satchel, and shook the young man's hand. "It's been nice meeting you."

"Like crazy, Big Daddy," said the boy.

George left quickly.

"There goes Professor Pickax," said one of the gang at the window booth. Everybody laughed.

"I think he's kinda kooky," said one of the girls.

~~****~~

George matched pace with a young man heading toward the opening in the black volcanic rock wall that led into the campus. As they walked, they shared the meager shade offered by a row of stout palm trees.

"Heat bother you much?" asked George.

"Huh?" replied the lad.

"I asked if the heat today bothered you."

"Oh, yeah, yes," said the boy. They both walked through the open gate. The boy spurted immediately across the Bermuda grass toward the library.

"I felt the same way when I moved here from New York. I like to call myself a Finger Lakes Boy. I'm George Reedy." George followed the boy onto the lawn, struggling to keep pace with him, and stuck out his hand as they walked. "Professor George Reedy, emeritus."

"I—I—hafta split. I'm meeting someone up there," said George's companion, pointing toward the second floor of the red brick library where vague images of undergraduates could be seen choking each other and shooting paper airplanes.

"Sure nice to talk to you," said George, stopping. He was addressing the boy's rapidly retreating back.

~~****~~

George turned and backtracked across the lawn, and the road, until he found himself on the sidewalk in front of his beloved Indian museum, the State Museum, another red brick building of pillars and strange porticos, surrounded by cacti, palms and mesquite trees. Along with his title, George had retained an office in the museum for years, but when his wife had died, he'd cleared out, taking emeritus status, the small potted cactus she'd once given him, and the aggressive mess made by his published papers.

Although he no longer had an office, George often entered the museum and offered to give museum goers a personal tour, even taking them to the basement where he shared coffee and wild tales of gunfights and danger, true stories of his early life as an archaeologist in Arizona, with them and any skeptical, but good-natured graduate students. But when he went in the dark front doors of the museum that day, there was no one inside but the ticket taker at the counter beside a display of Navajo ghost beads.

George had forgotten the names of most of the Apache, Navajo, and Piute people he'd known decades earlier. He'd forgotten the names of digs—even some of the famous ones he'd unearthed—and many of the names of his former colleagues, but he knew everyone in the museum.

"Who's on the roof, Susan?" he asked the Navajo woman at the counter. George had seen movement on the roof as he'd approached the museum.

"The air conditioning man," she said, sawing her nail with a fingernail file.

"Is it broken?" asked George with real concern.

"I don't think so," she said. "Nobody listens to me. It's workin fine if you ask me."

"I'll go see," said George immediately.

"It's probably just that they're wasting money," she said.

George paced quickly across the linoleum floor, beside the huge tree ring slice, and up the marble stairs. The Anthropology Building backed onto the State Museum and the stairs in the museum led to their common roof. George's tiny figure climbed quickly to the top floor where he discovered a square of blazing sunlight. A lunch pail propped open the roof access door.

George stepped out into the sunshine. Although he knew the workman was at the air conditioner, he walked instead to the roof edge and stood looking down with his leather satchel in one hand. He studied the tops of cypresses and mesquites and after a few minutes he had completely forgotten why he'd gone up there. His brain was full of dark thoughts about his life's purpose.

"If you don't mind my asking, are you supposed to be up here?" said a voice behind George.

George turned to see a short fat man in a khaki uniform rubbing a part with an oily red rag.

"I like to watch any work on the museum," explained George, quick with his excuse.

"I thought you were looking over the edge," said the man. "Any particular reason?"

"Well, no," said George, walking toward the workman. He didn't like being cagey.

"Are you supposed to be up here?"

"Well, I'm George. I'm the museum's founder."

"The founder?" replied the man in surprise. "Of this museum?"

"That's right. George Reedy's the name." He contained himself before he'd said anything about being a Finger Lakes Boy.

"That's something." The air conditioning man walked back to the unit and George followed.

"I guess it is. Oh," said George remembering suddenly why he had gone up there, "is the air conditioning broken?"

"No, this is just a yearly thing. An annual inspection to make sure all the parts are working."

"Oh, that's all right then. Do you mind if I watch you?" George asked.

"Not at all. Not at all."

George sat on a nearby vent in the shade of the top of the stair shaft.

"Do you happen to know the principles of air conditioning?" asked the man.

"As I understand it, the chiller serves the purpose of extracting water from air," said George promptly.

"That's fundamentally correct, sir. I congratulate you on your engineering knowledge."

"Thank you."

"Now, when I went to Carrier school in New York and—"

"Wait! Do you know New York? I'm a Finger Lakes Boy myself," said George, building up some enthusiasm again.

"I don't know New York at all. I'm from Arizona, third generation, and my mom is from Mexico, but I was sent to Carrier school there for a month and I was saying—"

"I have a book I'd like to present to you." George quickly slipped one of his books out of his satchel and reached for his fountain pen in his shirt pocket. "It's a wonderful book which I happen to have written and—"

"Whoa, a book?"

"My book. About my adventures in early Arizona on the Mogollon Rim. At my digs. Let me get out my pen and I'll inscribe something in your very own copy that you can keep."

"No need to do that," said the mortified man.

"I have plenty of them. It's what I like to do."

"Well, I still think—"

"Now, you'll enjoy reading about my adventures with Indian friends up on the Rim. Do you enjoy adventure stories?"

"Uh huh." The man turned back to work while George signed the book.

"I had some wonderful friends among the tribes there. They were great people. So willing to help when I needed workmen. They have a deep appreciation of the world. I learned a great deal from them. From working up there."

"Do you ever go back?"

"To the Rim?" asked George.

"Yeah."

"No. Haven't in years."

"It's just that I like to hunt up there," said the repairman. "I've been there before." The repairman was examining parts inside the air conditioning box as he spoke.

"You don't say!"

"They have some of the old Indian places up there, I guess that's what you mean by your digs, fixed up like and open for people to see now, you know," the repairman said.

"Say, is that so? Well, I suppose I found most of them."

"That's something!"

"And people come in to see them?" asked George

"Sure. Don't take my word for it, you ought to go up there in person and see. If you're the one who found those places, you of all people ought to see them," the repairman said sensibly.

"Do you know, you're the first person to suggest it," said George.

"You must have thought of it yourself before?"

"Maybe, maybe, it's been a while. Maybe it's been a thought of mine. Sure, maybe. Tishba, do they see that?" George asked the man.

"Tishba?"

"That's the name of one of my digs."

"I don't know the names of any of them. Sorry. Why not go up there yourself, though? It would do you a world of good, don't you think?"

"Sure. That's been tickling my brain for years. I've thought about Tishba. I haven't seen it in years." It seemed to him possible that another, more remote ruin might have been a little further into the canyon. The Apaches who had been with him at the time had hinted of it.

That was it. He would outfit himself for the autumn, see Tishba again and scout around a little for another tremendous site, something to rival Tishba.

~~****~~

George lay in his blankets in a back room of the trading post. The blankets swathed his thin legs and were tucked under his thighs. To discover that Paul Weaton, the owner of the trading post, was still a considerate man who remembered George had surprised him. Paul had let George make a bedroll in the trading post. He'd even said George would be no problem. Yes, Weaton was a good man, a rare thing nowadays. He'd asked George no questions about what he was doing up on the Rim. George supposed word that he wasn't a part of the State Museum anymore hadn't reached there yet, because Paul seemed to assume George was still a professor.

Sometime in the night, George awoke.

He had the strangest feeling that someone or something was watching him. A log of thick mesquite snapped and popped in the fireplace. George studied the bald-headed bear head looming over him on the log wall. Some blankets hung on the wall. A picture of a canoe on a lake attracted his eye. Just then George noticed several other blanket rolls in the far corner of the room. Something gleaming in a red blanket caught the light of the fire. An immense haggard eye leered at him through a slit in the blanket.

"I'm glad to see you again, Little Captain," said a voice from within.

It was an odd voice, a voice whose English wasn't particularly good, which addressed George.

"Who is it?" asked George, making an effort to sound casual and hide his concern about who might lie there.

No answer came from the bundle. The eye regarded him.

"I repeat, who's there?" said George, challenging the shape.

The rags suddenly unfolded, chrysalis-like, in the red glow of the fire. The effect on George was terrifying, more so considering George's sleepiness, and his mental state from the long tiring drive to the Rim, so he sat up, staring at the menacing whirlwind. As layers of tattered wool parted, the room filled with movement and sound, leaves fled across the floor, and large embers broke off the gray log with a dry snap of errant footsteps on a trail of twigs. Each ember breaking open, reddened to a scarlet glow the figure of an old Apache.

George stared at the man. He recognized the face, the dark eyebrows and peculiar lopsided grin; the man was a guide and...a horse wrangler. He'd worked for George many years earlier.

The man shook with laughter.

Hand were pumped and backs pounded and the pair of old men glowed like two newly minted pennies in the firelight.

"My old friend and companion!" said George happily.

"I frightened you," replied the man.

"Yes, yes..." George searched his memory for the man's name.

"Turner," said the man.

"Turner! Yes, you had me worried," said George with a hearty laugh.

"I scared you."

"You did, only for a moment."

"For more than a moment!" said Turner.

"Well, well, my, my, this is an occasion," said George awkwardly. "I have just the thing for us. Some fine whiskey. Do you still drink?"

Immediately, as he mentioned the whiskey, two young men arose from nearby bedrolls. "These are my nephews," said Turner. George, fumbling in his things for the whiskey, paused to shake the young men's hands.

"I haven't thought of you in years," said George. "But I knew you right away."

"You knew me."

"The times we had. So many good times!"

"Have you come to search for another Tishba, professor?" asked Turner.

George sat up happily, "You read my mind. You always could. Another Tishba. My idea exactly. As I think I told you once, I had always thought another site might exist near that famous place which would rival or surpass it."

"I think you might need some young men to help you with the heavy climbing and, perhaps, an old man to remind you when to quit at the end of the day?"

"Yes, there's some truth in that," said George.

"We are your workmen," said Turner.

"Well, you are!" George agreed.

So he had found guides and workmen. George noted with satisfaction the nephews' strong limbs and pleasant smiles.

~~****~~

In the morning George purchased ponies and more supplies from Paul Weaton and, leaving his car at the trading post, they set out together in the direction of Tishba.

Life flowed back into George. In every evening camp, in every pink mountain morning, he sang songs of the open road and camp.

Turner and his nephews were agreeable companions in that wild country. The nephews displayed a fondness for sudden horseplay which made George merry again. George wrestled with them, caught them by the waist and turned them. Their favorite move was a brisk butt in the stomach against rocks or small trees. The effect knocked him quite senseless.

Turner himself was dependable and very cooperative; he would share cups of coffee and discuss things in English. At first, their nights involved the old professors and the Apaches they had known. Later, their stories were more intimate, for they found they had a great deal in common. Turner was unmarried and childless, and partially deaf. Life had not been easy for him, either.

Quite a serious accident nearly occurred in Crow's Pass. George rode ahead on the narrow trail and the nephews and Turner followed with some long poles he had discovered. They misjudged the turn of the canyon and knocked George quite hard on the head, stunning him. It took him several hours, but he recovered. Turner was annoyed at his nephews for their carelessness, but George told him not be troubled.

Before the fire one night Turner lectured the nephews and seemed engaged in an effort to convince them of some position of his. George's Apache had suffered from disuse and he could make out only the single word "robbery." Later, he reassured Turner that they had enough men and there should be no concern about them being robbed.

In his zeal to reach the hills, he agreed to cross the Little Colorado in a bad spot (he was surprised the boys had chosen it for their uncle said they knew the crossing well); halfway across George's pony slipped on a hidden rock, throwing him beneath the surging water. They came up farther downstream, two brown forms thrashing their limbs, hoofs and hands, propelling themselves onto the shore. He discovered then that he was stranded. He watched as the boys took their time discussing among themselves the best method of rescuing him. However, he grieved when the exchange became heated and there seemed to be a violent difference of opinion. Later, Turner alone inched around a big rock, throwing George a rope.

Turner had little to say about his nephews' disappearance except to offer a feeble story about their desire to visit a nearby town. He reassured George that they would meet them again at the cave in a few weeks. George knew they would never see either man again

He was not annoyed, only disheartened, to discover that they had taken most of the food, but, he told himself, he was no man if he couldn't forage on his own. Provided they left before heavy snow, they would eat well enough.

George's good nature returned as they entered Gray Canyon. Sadly, he discovered that Tishba had not been developed as a site for visitors, for it was much too remote. George and Turner were able to descend into the cave and relive the work he had done, however, much to George's delight.

Then they began searching every day for the new cave site which George was certain existed.

Their work together in Gray Canyon was diligent and thorough.

~~****~~

"We shall quit for this year soon?" asked Turner one morning after the two men had investigated a great deal of the canyon without finding a new cave site.

"Oh, yes, you are right," George replied. "It is about time I faced the facts. We aren't going to find the other cave. I had hopes...but I must be realistic. I think we will leave in a few days, yes, only a few more days and then I will give it up."

"Snow will be here soon," his old friend reminded him.

"Possibly. The signs are there for it," George looked out the flap of their tent. "The signs are there, certainly."

George and Turner hunted game whenever necessary and that afternoon Turner succeeded in shooting a fine large turkey which cheered them both.

But the cold hurt Turner's joints. Starting that night, George made a nightly ritual of massaging his companion's legs.

The next night, after he finished rubbing Turner's legs, Turner noticed George glancing wistfully at the fine gold watch he had been given years earlier to commemorate twenty five years of service to the university.

"That watch makes you sad," said Turner.

"Perhaps," said George. "A little."

"The school was your home, the students your children," explained the old Apache, "Now they are lost."

"Yes, my friend, those days are lost," George sighed, "Lost to me forever."

"The watch is haunted."

"Yes, I never thought of it that way. I suppose you're quite right."

~~****~~

Their meager provisions grew smaller by the next day and the snow came and was permanent, yet they had not found the cave.

"Why not go back now, Little Captain?" asked Turner late one night.

"We shall, we shall, only a few days more," replied George happily.

The very next morning George arose with an enthusiasm and was stirring the fire. To his surprise, Turner, who was usually up before him, was perfectly still that morning.

As Turner was very deaf, George made a great deal of noise about the tent, hoping the sound would wake his companion. Yet the old man didn't budge.

After moments of indecision, George approached the silent shape. He knelt near the bedrolls and felt one of Turner's limp hands.

The skin was cold.

And Turner's eyes stared at the glowing tent wall.

George drew in a shocked breath. The cold air cut his lungs.

Oh, God! What had he done!

Delaying and delaying leaving the Rim, now he had killed his only friend on earth, a man who had remembered him and helped him!

George had killed the grand old man, his only faithful friend.

His brain was reeling. He stood in complete confusion above the cold body of his companion. His only thought was of retreating to Tishba, his cave ruin, and he trudged toward it, tears running down his face.

The pines sparkled with snow that morning. The clouds over Gray Canyon had cleared and left a beautiful turquoise patch above. On the way George saw a place where an animal had rolled in the snow.

Deep in the cave he was alone with his sorrow.

~~****~~

Here was the silhouette of a park ranger.

"Mr. Reedy, answer me if you are in there," the ranger demanded.

The cave was silent. The figure of Professor George Reedy, Little Captain, lay in a corner of the cave.

"Sir, I must ask you now under penalty of law to stop what you are doing. You are committing trespass by excavating on this land. I am now climbing down the ladder," he said, "To place you under arrest."

George lay in a fetal position, in the corner of the cave, his thin white hair standing on end.

"Sir, I charge you with a violation of..."

"That's of no consequence to me," George cried. "You must arrest me on the charge of murder!"

"What murder, sir?"

"I am responsible for the death of my only friend left on the face of the earth." George's hands trembled and his knees knocked as he spoke. "Because of my foolishness, my selfishness, my ego, a very great man is dead," George said.

"Who, sir?"

"His name is Turner and he was a dear friend of mine in every sense of the word."

"Where is this dead man?"

"I left his body where I found it. In our tent. In his bedrolls."

"Sir, I assure you that there wasn't a body there. I went to the tent first to look for you. No one was there."

George sat up and put a hand to his brow. "No one?"

"Not a soul."

"Surely in the blanket rolls?"

"There was no one. Only one set of blanket rolls were left."

George sat up.

"And footprints in the new snow led away from the camp," said the ranger. "One set was yours and the other led away. I received a message saying someone was excavating here."

George stood up and swayed. What did it mean?

Was it a trick of his, pretending to be dead, the ultimate trick? No doubt he'd rolled in the snow to chill his body and held his breath, not blinking his eyes as George examined him. In his depleted physical state, shocked by grief, George hadn't thought to take a pulse.

What joy George felt upon realizing that his faithful companion still lived! Sunlight never seemed so warm. Nor a winter jail so homelike. And it mattered not at all that he had misplaced his gold watch, which might have been useful for his bail.

~~****~~

Sunlight, bright, white, gleamed and glittered on the new snow. A young man's footsteps up a path punched blue craters. At the end of the path, two pine boughs bent across a doorway where gold letters on glass read "Graham County Jail."

The door to the jail creaked when it opened, and the young man walked a little too quickly across a plank floor and past the hides of a bear and a cow, some tattered serapes, an army of heavy parkas on a coat rack, and the wanted posters for 1954.

A dark wooden counter separated the visitor from the jail. Bringing a slender book out from under his coat, the young man opened it to a front piece photograph and placed it on the counter in front of a bull-necked officer. "I believe you have this man in custody."

The big sleepy man slid forward on his stool. He put on his half-glasses and took the book in his hands, peering at the photo. In it, an old man held an enormous earthenware olla, held the jar gently, for it was reconstructed of potshards, the jagged holes where large shards were missing exposed the pot's empty center. The old man in the photo had the face of a timid God in spectacles. He was bald-headed, sloped in his shoulders, with a large nose, a white moustache, and weak, sad eyes which evaded the camera. '"The author at Tishba'," the bull-necked man said, reading the title underneath the photo aloud.

"Is that someone you're holding?" asked the young man.

"Yeah," he said with a nod, "It looks like Little Mary Sunshine. That's what we call him. He smiles a lot. Almost all the time."

"I'd like to bail him," said the young man, "if that's possible."

"Sure," said the man. He got off his stool slowly. He reached under the counter and snapped a bolt back in order to life a hinged section of the counter. Motioning the young man forward, he performed a perfunctory search. "I've got to pat you down," he explained. "Griff!" he hollered up a narrow stairway.

A plump, slow-eyed gentleman with a large mole on his chin a detective magazine in his hand waddled down. "Yeah?"

"It looks like Little Mary Sunshine might be a professor. This gentleman will bail him."

"Say now, that would be something," said Griff with genuine enthusiasm. "We never had one of those in here before. I noticed how peculiar he was."

Climbing the stairs behind his guide, the young man watched the jailer's figure reflected on the glass of framed newspaper articles which clung to the crumbling adobe walls. The yellowed papers under glass told grisly tales of desperate last hours, of mayhem, and madness. Men dangled above poisoned wells or were hung by robbers before help arrived.

"Some of our bad guys," said Griff when he noticed the young man slowing to examine the articles. "Mormon Bill," he tapped a glass, "Texas Howard," he tapped another, "Shoot-em up Dick."

They climbed until the stairway opened out. At that juncture the walls became a dusty gray rock; the jail cells were blasted into the ridge. "You can see him over there," Griff pointed in the corner of a big communal cell.

Six empty cots were scattered across the concrete floor. On one that was shoved in a corner, an unshaven, filthy old man slumped, smiling in a pleasant, but vacant manner at his hands. The young man on the other side of the iron bars studied him without any acknowledgement from the old man.

"His bail is sixty dollars," said Griff, crossing his arms over his big stomach. "Do you want to speak to him?"

"No."

"Are you his... grandson?"

"No. I'm Paul Weaton's son. Professor Reedy left his car at the trading post."

"The wife's dead?"

"Yeah."

"And he's really a professor?"

"He was."

"A retired professor. Well, well. I've never seen one of them before. The world's full of peculiarities—"

"Please, keep your voice down," the young man whispered. "I'm sure he can hear you."

"Little Mary Sunshine? He don't care. He sits in his corner smiling away at the world. I don't know what he's got to smile about. All this trouble." Griff shook his head and led the way back to the stairs.

Halfway down, Griff swung around, "Say, have you really got sixty dollars?"

# # # #

THE END

# # # #

Big Paper Skeleton

Dust smears her town. One beaming yellow sun drowns in the smear. Two flags beneath the sun begin the trouble.

There's her school. There are the flags. There's her mother turning back, back toward their small brick home, back toward a sink full of bubbles and breakfast dishes and the George and Square radio show, leaving her—a pale child with large brown eyes, short blonde hair, and a gap between her new front teeth—by herself, scuffing to first grade on a hardened mud rut. There's the creosote bush near the rutted path and the snake hole lurking at its base; her older brother once crammed his bad penmanship there. She sees the hole and the bush and the sun and the flags, the American and the arc of happy ray-beams that Arizona salutes, flapping halfway down their pole.

Flags belong at the top of poles; her big sister draws them that way, and when they fly high they make her feel proud like something good about Arizona on national TV or the singing of hymns in church or the reports of the defeat of the communists in Viet Nam. But she doesn't ask the crossing guard at Fifth Street about the flags; with his badge and his steel bar he looks far too fierce. Instead she takes the sidewalk entrance past the flagpole peering up at the low flopping cloth. Has the janitor forgotten to raise them? Why hasn't anyone at school pointed out his mistake? If the janitor has forgotten, surely Mr. Rykken, their principal, will punish him; he's strict; in his desk he keeps a two-inch thick paddle. But has he arrived yet? Behind a prim round privet his office does look dark. Is he inside watching, angry that she lingers on the steps, that she stares up at the flags? The thought terrifies her. She scurries past his wicked window and down the long open corridor to the playground.

At the water fountain on the playground she falls in line behind that nice big girl named Eloise Moreno. When Eloise spins around and swipes a dribble off her chin, their eyes meet, and she feels brave, so she asks about the flag. Eloise leans against the brick wall and says, confidentially, "They do that if somebody's dead."

A moment later the morning bell delivers its angry, clanging summons. Trudging to class in a very straight line, she thinks about what Eloise said. If someone from the school's dead, she hopes it's Mr. Rykken. Although that's a bad thing to think, it's also too good to ever happen.

Her teacher, Miss Flynn, leads the class into the room. At the back of the line she thinks her everyday morning prayer: may I never see an s ahead in a word, for she has a lisp and it makes people snicker.

They're inside, squealing at the teddy bear on his high shelf in the corner. Dressed like a pirate for Halloween with a black eye patch and a cardboard cutlass, his hat has a Jolly Roger on it, and he sits atop a box that is a boat. "The janitor and Miss Flynn dressed him that way," says Robert Ruiz, her friend across the aisle. "I saw them when I came back after school." Miss Flynn swishes by, sailing a paper with numbers to circle onto their desks. She thinks about asking Robert about the flags—why they hang low—when a thin freckled hand taps her on the shoulder. "Don't forget your speech therapy," says Miss Flynn.

On her way to her speech class a crooked dust devil swirls down from the empty desert lot, from the land everyone says Howard Hughes owns. He's a freak, that Howard Hughes; his nails curl ten inches long. Thinking of him, with the whirlwind around her, she dashes for the door. Although the knob turns, the door stays down. When she tries it again, a foot in the gap helps her snake her way through. The door slams with a loud bang behind.

The little room is dark. There's sunlight from a high, north-facing window, but the bare bulbs surrounding the set of dusty mirrors are switched off. That's a second surprise. She expects to see Mr. Harris in front of the lighted mirrors in a child's chair with his knees nearly at his ears. His dark eyebrows and his dark eyes and the way his hands caress the pages of books please her. But no one is there. The room is empty.

She sits and smooths the pleats of her skirt, trying to remember the beginning of Mr. Harris' lessons about the sounds of words and how to make them. He gives her rhyming hints to conquer her fear of the words that have letters she can hear in her head but not say out loud. "A final s," he likes to say, "should never be a nettle, remember that the sound is like a teeny hissing kettle." His eyes are so gentle and nice whenever he says that rhyme for the fearful lisping plurals: moths, slides, and rustlers. During her last session the past Friday, he recited his rhyme about the r being a kitten that purred deep in her throat and she thought that she would like to hold his hand and show him how she pretended to be the burro, Brighty of the Grand Canyon, on the rocks beside her home. But he said such a strange thing then. "Do you know about the everlasting arms of God?" he asked, staring at the floor. "They can comfort you if ever you feel small." She began to ask, "Do you feel small?" but stopped herself because small began with an s and she hadn't wanted to lisp.

Now she wants to say the word small and his name as well, with a little kettle hiss on the end, for she plans to be better at every sound that day.

Mr. Harris keeps a tin filled with pumpkin candy. She can take some anytime. She searches for it and finds it with its black panther crouching on the lid. Her fingers grasp one crescent-shaped orange slab. "Around the ragged rock the rugged rustlers ran." She repeats that phrase into the mirror and licks the cloying candy once. "Cake, cookies, candies." She practices that too. Sometimes, when there were other kids in speech therapy, she did their sounds, their problem sounds. Then holding the candy between her thumb and forefinger, daubs it on her lips as though she is a starlet in front of her dressing mirror, all unready in her underwear.

For the first time, and with alarm, she notices a row of rag mops and empty buckets. The room is a broom closet. The mops, like evil men, stand at attention, awaiting orders. She shoves her chair backward and flees.

Outside everything's better. The morning sun shines, yellow and round. A tranquil choir of wind carols in the pines. Quiet soothing pines, content with the plain brown birds pecking underneath their boughs. She walks on the sunny strip of the open school corridor, taking an interest in a steady stream of ants that disappear into a concrete crevice; small bits of candy dropped on their trail enrage and excite them. Sitting near the ants on a low brick wall, she chews her candy until her milkman, Mike, roars by in a big green truck. She jumps up then to see him, and the shamrock, and the leprechaun on the side of his truck.

"Hi, Mike!" She leaps up on the wall and waves.

"Oh, Mike!"

"Come back!"

Mike's gone, but a penny of her milk money from her pocket strikes bright ringing sounds on the poles under the overhang. Ta-ting-ding. Ta-ding-ting. She does that for a while. Then she swings some figure eights. Leaning out far, like a lady she's seen at the circus, she notices someone at the far end of the school. It's a janitor rubbing one hand with a red rag.

Her collar tightens against her throat. She pulls herself behind the pole, then peeks out. The janitor tucks the rag in his back pocket and strides straight for the school office.

Back. Back to the speech therapy room. But where to hide? A large paper chart of an open mouth with a graveyard of teeth and a raw red tongue hangs at a tilt on yellowed tape at the side of a filing cabinet. She batters her way behind. And there, between the chart and the filing cabinet, she cowers, listening for the coming footsteps.

A dusty smell of old paper tickles her nose. The big clock on the wall, which has always moved before, doesn't. A sparrow crashes the window and rockets away. The pink plastic dials on the front of Mr. Harris' record player make a funny clown face and a crazy man's face and the face of the man called Dr. Scar on the Chiller TV show. She shudders at the row of threatening mops.

In a flood of light, the door opens. Someone is searching the room. "Come out of there," says an angry woman.

She keeps still.

"I can see your shoes. Come out."

She wriggles free. A sour woman blocks the doorway, tucks her blouse into her skirt. "Are you waiting for Mr. Harris?"

She nods. She hates the word yes (with its sinister last s) and never says it.

"Come along," the lady orders.

On the way to the office the lady tugs at the standing collar of her dress and picks at her cuffs. "All this trouble," the lady says with a sniff. "I've got to leave early for lunch. I've got company coming. From Chicago. Do you know where Chicago is?"

She shakes her head.

"I didn't think you would. Out here there's no regard for the really important places. New York. Boston. Those are cities. Sometimes I think the entire East Coast of America could fall into the ocean and no one out here would bother to read about it."

"Here she is," the lady announces to a bosomy woman when they enter the office.

"Well," says the bosomy woman, picking up the phone, "our Miss Flynn—" she rolls her eyes upward, "—never collects her mail in the morning."

"Isn't she the oddest bodkin?" says the lady.

The bosomy woman winks. "Sit here," she says. There's a chair beside her desk.

The other lady raps on a door and disappears. That's Mr. Rykken's office. She knows it. The lady going in, knocking first, means he isn't dead.

What's the penalty for swinging on the poles? The two-inch thick paddle? She wonders how hard it will hit, and she knows she'll find out soon.

"The principal will see you," says the lady, reemerging.

Mr. Rykken at his clean steel desk wakes from a trance. His pale gray eyes water; his brown skin stretches into a smile under a mad halo of frowsy, white hair. A cheap print of a young woman picnicking beside a grassy green waterfall is propped on the desk before him, while the room in every corner holds a sense of emptiness, grass-stained golf shoes and a set of encyclopedias, bookmarked with sheets of colored facial tissue. As she sits down in a chair beside his desk, Mr. Rykken scribbles on a pad of paper. When he finishes, he tears off the note and folds it in half. "Did you especially like Mr. Hawwis?"

She nods, frowning; Mr. Rykken makes w's of r's.

"I thought so. I liked him myself. I know you will wemember the many things he taught you."

He glides open his bottom desk drawer. Now it's coming. Now she'll feel the paddle.

Into the drawer he reaches, bringing something out. A box of pencils slides across the desk with the folded note on top.

"Take these to Miss Flynn," he says, tapping them, "I suppose she's short of supplies."

She stares numbly.

"Go on," says Mr. Rykken.

She blunders back two steps.

"Go back to your class."

It's a long way back, a long lonely hall. A boy comes out of the bathroom and pretends to vomit. A ball hits some metal doors hard.

"Has Mr. Harris gone somewhere?" she asks Miss Flynn when she returns to her room.

"My God," says Miss Flynn, scanning the note. "Dear, dear Jesus and God." Miss Flynn sits for a moment with her palm pressed to her forehead. "Put the note in your desk. Take it home to your mother. Hurry now. Don't miss your recess."

She leaves the room, watching Miss Flynn, whose eyes glisten, whose mouth trembles.

***~~~***

When school ends that day she's glad. She hurries away her fastest, past the creosote bush and the snake hole, along the hardened mud rut, to where her mother waits. Holding out the note, she runs forward. Her mother takes it and reads it to herself.

Oh, there's been a lot of tragedy at her school, her mother explains. Does she remember when Miss Flynn cut her hand on the broken aspirin jar? That was her big nervous breakdown. She lives above her father's funeral parlor and isn't that a strange place for a lady to sleep?

And what of Mr. Harris? Well, Mr. Harris disappointed someone. He was from Indiana or his father was or his mother was or he lived there once—her mother, a big Indiana booster, isn't certain. But the big kids will tell her what happened and there's no use trying to hide anything. He harmed himself. He put a bad finish to the end of his life. But they're Congregationalists and should feel nothing but pity about it. She should remember that.

At night her brother sits on the couch beside her. They watch a Jerry Lewis movie on TV and during a commercial he tells her what the older kids know. Mr. Harris hung himself. Whether you get hung or hang yourself it's all the same: your tongue swells up, turns purple, and sticks out between your teeth. When you go into your grave, you become a skeleton, but it takes a lot of time.

That night in her bed she tussles with her sheets. When she goes into her grave, she'll become a skeleton. In the dark room the hunched coats in her closet become Mr. Harris teaching Mr. Rykken to say his r's. She hears Mr. Rykken muttering the rhyme about the rugged rustlers; she can't hear what Mr. Harris says. Only her controlled and repetitious thoughts about rabbits living in a shoebox produce sleep.

***~~~***

The next day is Halloween. She ought to be happy because it's her favorite holiday, but instead she feels the consequences of Mr. Harris' death.

In class she circles pumpkins and sings a song about ghosts sitting on a fence. Miss Flynn in a frenzy wants to see them happy and when, after lunch, she announces, "We're going to do something fun this afternoon." All the children clap.

Miss Flynn opens a low cabinet, which none of them have noticed before, and tells a boy to reach in and shunt out a box. The box is long, battered, and dusty.

The class gathers around, giggling, the boys jostling shoulders, the girls hauling up their anklets. She stands with them and tries to be excited too, when Miss Flynn flings open the lid.

They look down at a big paper skeleton.

"We'll hold up Mr. Bones," says Miss Flynn, walking to the corner of the room and taking down the pole she uses to open the high windows, "and fly him past the classrooms. We'll create a little mischief! Shall we? Won't that be fun?"

"Yes, yes!" they cry.

With some twine she has in her desk Miss Flynn ties the skeleton to the pole. When it's attached, she lifts the pole and with a bob makes the skeleton bow.

Out of the classroom they trot, shivering in the sudden heat, the sun's intense yellow light. The skeleton swoops against the turquoise sky; it's the frightening standard under which they sally, following Miss Flynn around the side of the building to the north walls. There they sneak, smelling the damp air dropping down upon them from the rooms above. "Shhh," whispers Miss Flynn, "we're ready."

As the paper skeleton soars past the first room, laughter springs up and chairs topple and children dash to the windows. A boy with a pen in his hand climbs onto the window ledge and screams, "Get out of here, you skeleton man!"

"Let's go on," says Miss Flynn.

And together they steal forward to the second classroom and then to the third and then along a whole wing of the school.

She glances up. The skeleton sails above her, its dangling arms reaching down toward her, its smile a vacant sneer. Rattling its way around the world. Where in this world is comfort?

"You're crying," says Robert Ruiz.

"She is," says a girl.

"Why is she?"

"You're really crying, aren't you?"

"She is. She's crying. Look."

"Are you afraid of the skeleton?" asks a boy who's only a blur. "Are you a little scaredy-girl?"

# # # #

THE END

# # # #

Fantasy Artifact

Incredible. How typical of her luck. Was there no way to separate the thing? Hideous, stupid thing. Had she been parading around the entire day with a frazzled hair clump showing at the back of her neck?

Tugging with furious fingers, Mary Cunningham tried to loosen the ratted hair knot. The purpose of her morning shower had been to get some cream rinse on the rat so she could comb it. Somehow, she'd forgotten. Daydreaming, no doubt, about Ian. She winced to recall that she'd been strolling down a corridor ahead of Ian McKensie when she'd smoothed the back of her hair and felt the tangled gob of hair. Luckily, her office had been nearby and she'd been able to duck in quickly. She wondered if Ian had seen her. Had he noticed her hair? He was so attractive with his dark brown hair and blue eyes. The way he stood with one hand in his pants pockets all the time thrilled her. Even his drooping moustache was a delight. She had a desperate crush on him.

Thoughts of her growing attraction to Ian troubled Mary. There had been too many unrequited loves before. During high school, she'd nurtured a passion for a blonde halfback who sat beside her in German and for the old movie stars, Dirk Bogarde and Montgomery Clift. When a tall bearded man in her fencing class at college had handed her a foil, she'd dreamed of him for months. In graduate school she'd fallen in love with a series of her fellow scholars. And in October, the married man upstairs at her apartment had bewitched her. Ian, however, was the first man she'd actively pursued. But flirting with a real person was a new skill. Recently, he'd seemed to scorn her attentions and a smirk developed on his face whenever she approached.

The sneering face of Ian bobbed before her like some snide, swollen balloon. She abandoned the tangled lump of hair and sunk her head onto her folded arms.

In an adjacent office of the Arizona State Department of Economic Research she heard the janitor spraying an aerosol can. He was talking in a loud voice. "I can't believe she's attracted to me," he said, "We're from different worlds."

"Blah blah blah blabedy blah blah blah?" someone asked.

Mary heard a can spray once more. She sat up. A pause followed.

"She keeps saying hello and smiling," the janitor replied.

"A splee," said the voice.

Love life of the janitor. But she always spoke to the groveling dope and smiled when she left her office late. It didn't hurt to be cordial, even if he was a bit of a ding dong. You never knew who he knew. His older brother might be a striking surgeon or his best friend a rising young lawyer. Besides, Mary thought you always ought to acknowledge someone who worked for you...gad! Had he been talking about her? Did he imagine she was attracted to him because she spoke to him and smiled? Was he discussing his prospects with her with a man in their office? Oh dear god. She hoped not.

Mary fumbled in the desk drawer for a pencil. Outside her window a pigeon lit on the dry skirt of a palm tree. Beyond, across a lawn of dormant Bermuda grass, the failing twilight obscured a row of gnarled olive trees. She sat in the semi-dark, doodling.

Ian McKensie. She liked his style, rather James Bond-ish, Indiana Jones-ish, that Ian. One word described him: debonair. Like the way he ordered a vodka gimlet at that bar in Denver after they both attended a conference panel discussion on Exchange Rate Adjustment. And his flawless clothes. He wasn't afraid to make his mark. He wouldn't be afraid of anything. Put Ian McKensie on the trail of...ancient artifacts and he became impervious to fear. Knowing well that the territory ahead was fraught with danger, he forded the San Juan River and headed toward Diamond Pass, one of the most remote regions in the southwest. Memories of resent massacres were fresh. Months earlier two young prospectors from Colorado had been shot by robbers while trying to flee their camp, yet Ian McKensie was eager to work on archaeological cave explorations.

Yes, that was it. That was what she wanted. With a sniff Mary leaned back in her chair, twiddling her pencil through air, resting her heels on the one clear corner of her desk.

Ian's small string of pack burros plodded into Diamond Pass; at the front of the burros, his student assistant, Mary Cunningham, rode at Ian's side, both of them mounted on ponies. The trail they took led upward over loose outcropping of red shale and into the heart of the canyon where, on either side, massive cliffs towered. Looking up at the immense bluffs, Mary felt afraid of what they were doing. Yet she trusted the strong, silent Ian, whom she secretly adored.

After a trek of almost three miles, they encountered traces of an abandoned camp. Ian ordered Mary in his gruff manly manner to shorten up the burros' lead. "Bring them up," he growled, glaring over in her direction. She yanked the rope tied to the lead burro. Why couldn't Ian be kind to her? It seemed that to him the beautifully wispy, delicately virginal Mary, cowering at his side, was a despicable worm, groveling and incompetent. He hardly noticed her, except to criticize her actions in his cold imperious fashion. And he never used her name.

Rounding a tight bend of the trail, Mary's eyes climbed skyward, blinking back angry tears of love for Ian while examining every crevice for movement. When she glanced down again she was astounded to discover that they had ridden onto a narrow slanting shelf of rock.

The shale began to crumble beneath her pony.

"Help!" she screamed.

Big chunks broke loose and plunged over the cliff edge. Ian's pony bounded forward, onto the wider portion of the trail that lay ahead.

"Help me!" she screamed again.

"Spur him, you fool!" shouted Ian.

Mary struck her pony's ribs with her heels; she beat its beck with her open palm. Its hooves clattered on the angled shale. The pony and Mary slid backwards, burros braying behind them. The pony sprung forward and slid, sprung forward and slid. Mary felt her mount begin to weaken.

Ian swung off his pony and dashed back to her. In an instant he had snatched the burros' rope and slapped her pony's rump.

Up, up her pony struggled, charged forward, and held its position. It lunged again and was up.

Ian brought the string of burros through.

After their ponies and burros hurried up the difficult, narrow and twisting pass, the trail widened and afforded a backward glance. Ian halted in the shade of a cliff and lit his pipe. He clenched the stem in his teeth.

"Will there be another way out?" Mary asked, struggling to catch her breath, while sweeping her golden tresses back from her face.

"Maybe," replied Ian, "Maybe not."

Mary splashed water from her canteen on a handkerchief and held it to her brow.

Ian's expression was grim. "I should have seen that narrow section coming. I led you out there. I must have been daydreaming," he said.

Day dreaming? Mary was stunned. What would be have to daydream about? Her, perhaps? She quivered. It was the first time he had addressed her with something other than a bellowed command. It was the first time he'd shown concern for her. Her chest ached. She felt as though there was a taut string stretched between them. She had no time to enjoy the sensation, for Ian spurred his pony forward and rode swiftly and masterfully, manfully and marvelously, forward on the trail. The comely young Mary followed.

Further up in the canyon, caves ripe for exploration appeared in the rocky precipices; Ian established a camp beneath them. He instructed Mary to lead the livestock down a small gully in the Pass where there was grass and water. Like the innocent child she still was, Mary soon forgot the difficulties of their situation. At the sight of a spring surrounded by grass, she stripped down to her lacy, ribbon-trimmed underthings and bathed in the cool spring water. While she frolicked nearly naked, she glimpsed Ian set the coffee pot and Dutch oven on the campfire rocks above. At times she had the curious feeling that he watched her with his icy and domineering pale blue eyes.

Later, with her wet underthings clinging to her pink skin and her sun-warmed dress on top, Mary worked at Ian's side, conscious of his closeness and the home-like felicity of their situation. Perhaps that night when they would sleep so close together on the ground in their blanket rolls he would roll over her way? Perhaps a chink would appear in that cold, masterful, domineering, and dispassionate armor he wore...?

"Well, hello," said the janitor who was opening Mary's door. An ugly flood of florescence streamed from the hall; a ring of keys jangled in the lock.

Mary catapulted forward in her chair. "Hello," she said.

"Working late again?" the janitor asked, his dark eyes glowing. He towered in her doorway. Tanned and muscular arms bulged from the sleeves of his uniform.

"Yes," Mary replied, fumbling under the desk for her garbage can. Before he could come further into the room, she got up and handed it to him. She groped along the wall for the overhead light switch. With a flick of the switch her office became a glowing yellow cube.

"Hey, how about them Cougars!" He rocked backward on his heels and forward on his toes.

She blundered back to her desk. She hadn't seen anyone rock on their feet since third grade. "Huh?" she said.

"The Cougars."

Mary stared.

"I guess you don't follow football. Lots of women don't," he said, as though it were all right with him. He dumped her trash, glancing twice at the heap of blonde hair which fell out. With a ridiculous wrist flick and flourish he fit a new liner into the can. She gaped at him. "I do magic," he confided, "At children's birthday parties. My best friend is a magician. From Mexico. He owns a baby elephant and rents it out for parties. No kidding."

He pulled a spray can out of his rolling cart and shook it. The top edge of her bookshelf was lightly misted. Lemon rained. He slid a red cloth forward and back, forward and back, rubbing the imitation wood and shuffling closer to her. When he reached the end of the shelf, he returned to the far end without glancing up and repeated the same actions on the next lower shelf. Watching him creep toward her, Mary wanted to scream. What a ghoul. Hunched shoulders. Neanderthal eyebrows. Scars of corpuscular acne on his cheeks. Ugh.

At work on the third shelf, the janitor cleared his throat. "I see the museum next door is having an opening next Saturday night. 'Mankind Meets the Monkeys.' And "Tarahumara Traditions."'

Mary pretended to be studying a tattered international trade journal. The page in front of her was foxy and coffee-stained.

"Are you going?" he asked. He plodded out the door and fiddled with a broom on his cart.

"I don't think so," Mary muttered.

"What was that?"

"No," she said.

"You should," he said, coming back to her door.

She slapped the journal closed and threw it on a slumping pile. "I'll have to think about it."

"I try to get to a lot of educational dos," he began, leaning against the doorjamb.

Mary nodded. "Uh huh."

"Learn, learn, learn," he continued. "That's my motto. Mother says I'm going to overwork my brain. But I've told her that's nonsense. The brain isn't something you've got to conserve. You're supposed to exercise it. That's my theory." He showed no sign of leaving.

"Okay," Mary answered, turning away. "I must get back to work now."

"Well, have a nice evening, Miss Cunningham," he said. "Do you want the overhead light off? No? Goodnight, then," he smiled, gently shutting the door.

Mary swung around again and stuck her tongue out when the door closed, pulling a series of faces which were worse than any displayed on the Furies. "Of all the luck! I've attracted a goon head. And he lives with his mother," she said to herself. "His mother thinks he overworks his brain! I have a lobotomized loverboy after me!"

Damn glamor magazines. She wished she'd never read that article about the ten things one could do to overcome shyness. One of the suggestions had been to say hello to everyone you met. What drivel that was for a woman. Now she had attracted a nitwit. His best friend loaned a baby elephant out to children's parties? Thrilling. He had arguments with his live-in mother about educational "dos?"

She'd have to get rid of him. That much was certain. She'd have to ice him out of the picture. Cold shoulder him into another country. Banish him to oblivion.

Mary waited to hear him finish the next two offices before she switched the overhead light off again.

Ian would never tell her to have a nice evening. Good grief. Nice wouldn't even be in his vocabulary, except if it were the city, pronounced differently. Ian was...a rugged man, a man's man, who had known women, tough women, in cities all over the west. But had he ever known one as delicate, fresh, and sparkling as Mary Cunningham? Mary thought he might like to know her, but it would take time.

Mary propped her feet up on the desk and returned to a certain western canyon where the campfire glowed and their bedrolls beckoned...

After the camp supper was cleared away, Ian sat down before the fire with his pipe. Strange. Was he studying his notes on possible artifact locations or Mary's slender form stretched out on her blanket? It was difficult to tell, with him wearing a black patch over his left eye. How had he gotten that dark, ominous patch? Had he been wounded in some manly endeavor? A duel, perhaps? Or had he fought in a far-away war? Once more, mystery lurked in the past of that enigmatic man.

With the last rays of the sun striking the canyon walls, the cliffs reflected all shades of color from deep red to light buff, and the huge pinnacles were turned into the fantastic shapes of gleaming castles, towers, and spires. Deep shadows began to form and the worries which had melted away in the afternoon returned in the eerie glowing dusk. Were they going to be able to leave the canyon or would they be trapped there forever? Whose camp had they discovered? Would they be attacked in the night?

"Get some sleep," said Ian curtly. He sat bolt upright at her side, his back leaning against a pine tree truck, a rifle crossing his lap.

"I feel afraid," said Mary, her lower lip trembling. She gazed up at his strong, confident form looming above her. His face was chiseled steel.

"There is nothing to be afraid of, Mary, for I am here," Ian said manfully, masterfully. He looked down at her with his one good cold blue domineering eye.

Mary. He had used her name. He did know it after all. Then magically, wonderfully, he bent over and brushed a lock of her ethereal hair from her cheek. Moving slowly, he planted a kiss on her flawless forehead.

She couldn't restrain herself. "Oh sir, oh sir!" she cried.

He held her brusquely in his arms...

"Mary?"

Someone rapped on her door and slid their key in. It was the return of the loony janitor.

"What do you want?" Mary asked hoarsely.

"I forgot to mention something," he said, poking his head in.

"What?"

"I forgot to tell you that the openings at the museum have some really nice ethnic food." He was leaning into the room, into the dark, with his hand on the knob.

"Yeah? I'm not a fan of ethnic food—"

"And you might want to bring your boyfriend—"

Mary snatched her briefcase from the corner of her desk. She crammed a pile of papers into it, then the journal she'd been pretending to read.

This was it. Time to lie and make up an imaginary boyfriend, but she didn't speak fast enough.

"—or anyone else," he added happily, when she hadn't responded affirmatively to the boyfriend probe.

A door down the hall shut. Someone was leaving their office late, whistling. Their heels clicked on the linoleum.

"I've got to go," Mary said. The grinning, stooped janitor shuffled backward into the hall.

"Don't worry, Thomas, I keep telling you these things have a way of working out," Ian McKensie said, strolling up. He clapped the custodian on the back and jogged off.

"I think it has!" cried Thomas with glee. "You won't believe it! I'll tell you everything tomorrow night at the opening!"

"Okay!" Ian called. "There's nothing I like better than sampling ethnic food. And the exhibit sounds interesting!"

Mary stepped out of her office in time to see Ian's retreating back. Harris Tweed jacket. Then nothing.

He'd gone to the elevators. Damnation. She flew after him without glancing back at the big happy custodian.

She heard the elevator ding its arrival. Her arms pumped. Her briefcase struck her thigh repeatedly. She had to get to the elevator fast. It was a chance to ride down alone with Ian. She'd be able to say that she was going to the opening, too. She'd be able to claim she liked ethnic food. Maybe smiling at the janitor hadn't been a complete disaster if it meant she could be at a social gathering with Ian.

She dashed down the hall, running headlong. Stupid heels. Stupid tight skirt. And how much of that rat had she gotten out of her hair? She thrust the hair at the sides of her head backward, felt where the hunk was, and tried to cover it.

She turned the corner.

The space in front of the elevators was empty. Where was Ian? She spun around. An elevator one floor below banged closed. Mary heard a faint humming.

Ian went down and away.

Damnation. Tripled.

# # # #

THE END

# # # #

Genuine Aboriginal Democracy

"A rival, a peril, a pair," chimed the red-headed woman who liked to speak in aphorisms. She related this thought with a great deal of care and then braced a yellow bowl of raisins against her stomach.

Far off, away on the horizon, winter's gentle desert thunder chuckled in a low peal that built and blended before it reached them at the crowded little kitchen. The chuckling thunder made it seem as though nature itself was responding to the idea that danger and a rival would make two humans fall in love. Perhaps nature liked clean truth, or enjoyed the sham of man's tiny romances, that showed love to be a ghost and man to be easily manipulated.

"He starts Spanish; I start to want to laugh," said another elderly lady, rather apologetically, to everyone standing around the table.

"Si," concurred the lady beside her.

Jagged forks of silver lightning struck far in the distance. Thunder rumbled again. The smell of rain on creosote drifted across the city as a Christmas storm arrived in the southwest.

"His Spanish—it's got to be the worst ever!" someone exclaimed.

Everybody laughed.

"You shouldn't laugh at him," said a lady who stood over a rubber basin her hands to the wrists in a heap of white masa dough. "He's a poor boy. It isn't kind. Such a poor boy."

She tisked and turned over the masa dough. The crowd in the kitchen were manufacturing stogy tamales for sale to benefit the Reappearance of Anauk.

"He'll be happy with her. She's ugly, but kinda sweet."

A more abrupt woman with heavy eyebrows cut to the bone: "Let's speak plainly. She almost looks like a goat, and no Salvadoran would have her."

The whole kitchen laughed with obvious embarrassment at what had been said.

"Someone thought she was pretty," said a young lady at the table with a malicious laugh.

"They say it was a priest," whispered another.

"Oh, really? Tell us what you know about it, not that I'm surprised."

"It's not right to gossip about her, poor goat!"

"But they match cuz he kinda looks like a squid," added a little boy.

The whole kitchen exploded in laughter.

"Yes, oh yes, he does, he looks almost exactly like a white squid thing!" said the red-headed lady. "Forgive me, oh, but it's true."

"Or a dead fish!" said another.

***~~~***

How the dead fish named Joseph G. Terrel came among them in their Movement for the Reappearance of Anauk, and how they came to decide he must be with the goat-faced immigrant is a longish story.

It begins with understanding principled men. For a principled man who is continually incensed by the miscreant deeds of others (and the many resulting world social injustices), true contentment lies in remote, inhospitable places. While in these deserts such a man feels at ease surrounded by a landscape which is devoid of shelter and populated by savage beasts in whose souls no sympathy dwells. Without the comforting presence of lush green meadows or any definitive sign of the promise of life which God renews each year in spring, the principled man silently revels in the knowledge that he will meet his death far removed from the world of human evils and far from hope at the same time. In such lost places, he supposes, John baptized, Jesus wandered, Muhammad prophesied. And for the modern version of an austere gentleman, happiness, which truthfully is not his object, flows from the self-imposed solitude and tragedy of his earthly sojourn, and though he may finally adopt an attitude of quiet resignation to living, it is still quite anomalous when he displays anything remotely akin to joy.

Joseph G. Terrel was just such a fiercely somber young man, who had grown increasingly scornful of the great American prosperity of the 1980s. During the last years of that decade, when Joseph was studying for his doctorate in sociology at Harvard, he supplanted his vaguely scornful attitude with an impregnable lifetime principle: wealth and the pursuit of individual pleasure must be condemned as vehicles for the imperialistic exploitation of the poor (he reached this conviction during long afternoon discussions in one of the last counter-culture enclaves after the terrible encroachment of chain coffee stores of Au Pain Boulle). He was seen in the company of one of his only friends, Juan Berrios de Barca, a Harvard law student from Mexico, and he vowed, even before he turned in his thesis to consider only those tenured-track offers from university located in impoverished, relatively desolate places and to eschew the comforts of wife and family in favor of the advancement of worthy causes.

Early one spring afternoon the sun shimmered off Boston's remnant snow and the patrons in one of those cafes in Harvard Square consisted of Joseph and two students who sat across from each other in a booth and lingered over their thick wedged of sandwiches, all the while adopting gravely defensive postures toward their stacks of books. Joseph served himself a steaming cup of coffee and promptly ripped open a sugar packet, scattering the contents across this table. He was anxious. When the string of bells on the restaurant door jangled, and Juan walked in, Joseph stood up and laid one palm in the sugar, awkwardly brushing away the sharp sugar pricks.

Juan ordered hard rolls, but without waiting for them to arrive, launched into an intense discussion regarding his opinion of the teaching position Joseph should accept. Upon examining Joseph's three offers, Juan declared that without a doubt the Arizona offer, because of its proximity to several shabby border towns and depressing Indian reservations, was especially pitiable, and therefore ideal. With Juan's opinion set, Joseph became visibly more relaxed; his friend's opinion was so highly prized that he already had planned to let Juan choose for him since Joseph never could decide anything for himself. That afternoon he accepted the offer and began preparing to move to Arizona.

So that was how, at the urging of his friend, Joseph chose the appointment at the university in Arizona, where he soon became a familiar sight, walking deliberately across the Bermuda lawns and alongside the university's ponderous black basalt walls, a tallish, thin man with large, pensive brown eyes, glowering behind tortoise-shell frames. Each noon while the university was in session, he sat rigidly on the balmy porch benches surrounding the second story of Old Main (the original university was completely contain in that building in the 1880s) dressed even during the summer's greatest head, in a brown cord jacket and matching waistcoat, with saggy khaki trousers, and black zippered half-boots, worn at the heels and unpolished.

He developed an immediate appreciation of every strange form of desert vegetation or wildlife, whether it was the chains of pendulous cholla cactus, the imposing alien figure of a giant saguaro cactus or even a lizard, a bug or a snake. He formed an alliance with the marked impermanence of the place; the hapless trailer parks and matchbox homes, scattered about like bone chards, gratified his appetite for deprivation. Then, as an increased charm associated with his move, he encountered the same cheerful privation abounding nearby in Sonora, Mexico.

By his third year in the desert southwest, Joseph had fashioned himself into a contemporary John the Baptist, banished to the wilderness; half sociology professor, half-social activist, a resolutely virtuous young man. But he missed the great discussions with his friend.

Over time, Joseph's impressions of the desert, filling his letters to Juan, strengthened Juan's emerging conviction that he too should work there, offering his legal services freely to all and sundry under-repressed people. So shortly after he received his degree, Juan arrived in the desert, passed the Arizona bar exam, and established his law office in the crumbling second story of an aged adobe building.

Very soon after he opened his office, Juan taped a hand-lettered notice on the opaque window of his front door which proclaimed that free legal services were a right to be accorded all residents of the land of Greater Anauk, which stretched from Nicaragua to Massachusetts, areas encompassing the Aztec empire and including rather wild projections of the extent of its trading relationships. Juan had learned of Greater Anauk after he joined the Nauhautl Society, the Party of Mexicality, which had as its goal the creation of a genuine aboriginal democracy. According to the party doctrine, in a genuine aboriginal democracy, man lived together like fingers in a hand. Such an important form of democracy was thought to emerge once man returned to the principles of the ancestors of Anuak: rejected the retrograde dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, revived the animalistic relations existing in Greater Anauk prior to Spanish and English domination, and ate corn instead of wheat.

As never before in the history of Joseph's moral passions, this peculiar-sounding goal, the awakening of this extinct religion in Greater Anauk, immediately consumed the greater part of Joseph's thoughts. When he wasn't at the university teaching, he sat in Juan's office, conducting a campaign of regular submission of wild diatribes against American policy in Central America for the society's newsletter "Azteca Grande," articles which Juan meticulously, but rather wearily, translated into the archaic version of Spanish the newsletter employed. With increasing fervency, Joseph endorsed the opinions of society elders, including those who perished in the Spanish genocide of 1500, whom the society preferred to believe had not died, but rather had gone to sleep (and still regularly attended their meetings in spirit).

Unfortunately Joseph's fervor in his continuous work of behalf of the Movement for the Reappearance of Greater Anauk, soon troubled Juan. Juan, who was twenty-seven years old, was not yet married himself, but he had an active social life. With a little inquiry about his friend's past, Juan realized that Joseph's troubles stemmed from overly strict, uptight parents. The sight of Joseph's severe person persistently inhabiting his office distressed Juan, who realized that Joseph's sudden obsessive interest in things pro-Mexican ameliorated his loneliness. Such loneliness and celibacy never figured into Juan's plans, so he vowed to end it for his cause-driven friend.

Periodically, through his involvement in the society, Joseph had been asked to provide one bedroom of his two bedroom apartment to be used as a safe house for Central American refugees being smuggled into the United States. Joseph had always been eager to offer a spare room of his, too. In this, Juan saw an opportunity to effect the change he desired.

***~~~***

Early one morning during the Christmas break, Joseph left his apartment walking to the University to leave his semester grades with the sociology department secretaries. He found them perched on their rolling chairs drinking wine out of Styrofoam cups and listening to Christmas music on a radio. They split Joseph's grade sheets between them, and, placing a ruler over each sheet, laboriously check that the grade written into column two matched a clean mark in the appropriate bubble.

With the last sheet inspected, the secretary let out a grunt of approval.

"All right, Professor Terrel. I hope you and yours have a very merry one," she beamed to the back of his coat as he whisked out the door.

"He's a strange bird," sniggered the secretary into her cup of wine.

"Isn't any 'yours' to him, is there?" said her friend.

"I would be very surprised," the first replied.

"I would be very, very surprised!" her friend exclaimed.

Together they hooted, long and loud.

***~~~***

Joseph shook out his raincoat and hung it in the living room closet. He was eager to devote that morning to his writing, which he relished assembling during the winter break after having neglected it in the last weeks of the semester. On his desk lay the scattered notes for a new article asserting that human sacrifice, which never actually a major element of Aztec life, displayed a courage of conviction on the part of the brave sacrifice victims.

The morning was a very dull one; the Arizona sun was not shining, the atmosphere was close and oppressive and a drizzling rain fell. Looking outside the corner window of his living room, he surveyed the extent of a muddy puddle in the parking lot of the Cochise Court Apartments. The pool of brown water reflected a meager string of Christmas lights draped through a patch of prickly pear cactus and glowing in the new gray morning like eerie fruit. Someone had painted several of the cactus pads different colors, embellishing each with a smiling face, the suffocating effect of the various pigments subjecting the cactus to a gradual, yet winsome, death.

Joseph was surprised to see a white station wagon skirting the brown pool to park. Juan emerged, strode to Joseph's door, and without knocking swung open the screechy screen door, furtively sliding an envelope through the mail slot. Joseph went to the door immediately and seized the mysterious crinkled envelope from amongst the dust bunnies and hair snags littering his rug.

The message explained that the society urgently requested the provision of a room for one refugee until the first of January, at which time transportation for this unfortunate of American aggression into the welcoming arms of a benevolent society member in Ohio could be arranged. Because of some newly aroused suspicions on the part of the INS, and the proximity to Christmas, this refugee had not been able to find shelter with anyone else.

Joseph rose indignantly from his chair upon finishing the note, raked with moral consternation at the thought of such a lack of generosity on the part of other safe-house operators. And at Christmas!

He immediately dressed for the rain and drove to Juan's office, where the society recently rented part of the lower floor.

As Joseph parked his car at the curb in front of the old adobe building, he noticed a group of transients gathered around a full-sized replica of the Bethleham stable. Most of them camped temporarily in the town on their way to the less tranquil but assuredly winterless streets of Los Angeles. They squatted here and there on the elevated sprinkler head in nearby palm tree wells. A few glared at Joseph with great ferocity, others who recognized him ran across the avenue to ask him for the handout which he never denied them.

A significant knock at a side door, and a woman of the society let him into a small kitchen where a group of women collectively manufactured some stodgy tamales for sale to benefit the Reappearance of Anauk. Joseph was told the refugee was at that moment hiding in the cellar.

"In the note Juan mentioned that no one would help, so I knew I had to do this," intoned Joseph in carefully pronounced Spanish, struck by the deep symbolism (for a desert dweller) of a nearby bowl of water in which dried corn husks were reinvigorated prior to becoming tamale jackets. "I'm appalled that no one else would find the generosity to help." This was Joseph's first conversation conducted during the whole day and his voice crackled like a poorly tuned radio station.

"Oh," Maria's so pretty," blurted a woman who prodded the soaking corn husks, "Everybody likes her. Actually we've all started to love her." She emphasized the word we've, smiling significantly at Joseph, implying that he would be next. The other women, who were fully aware of what was going on, glared at her, making shushing signs and shaking their fingers at her under the table, but one of the chiding women buried her face in a dishcloth, covering her laughter.

And the little boy ran out of the room. "Ack, the squid face is here!" he cried in Spanish to whoever would hear him in the other room.

Joseph remained oblivious to the chastening or the laughter, and his Spanish was so bad that he missed the significance of what had been said to him and about him. He watched mutely as the women prepared to assemble the tamales, slipping their hands into shimmering plastic sandwich bags, securing the bands at each wrist with a rubber band. In a few minutes, a burly society member appeared in the kitchen doorway wearing an enormous black raincoat which he coolly lifted in order to draw a key from his trouser pocket. One woman whispered briefly with him. Joseph was called out of the kitchen.

"Whenever he speak Spanish," whispered one tamale-assembler once Joseph had left the room, "I can't help laughing."

"You shouldn't laugh. It isn't kind. He works so hard, poor boy," said a lady with her hands in the masa dough.

"That's correct."

"Oh my gosh, he is going to be happier, though."

"Of course, we are doing him some good."

"I don't know why we should help him," snorted one lady.

"He works for the society."

"What kind of work? I never see him doing anything in here."

"He writes papers."

"I don't think that's useful."

"Well, Juan does. He knows what it useful."

Having been conducted through two large rooms, Joseph emerged into a rain-deluged patio and small stairwell leading to the refugee drop, the cellar of a rather rowdy 19th century saloon and, subsequently, the herb cellar of a paranoid pharmacist named Tito Flores, who converted it into a bomb shelter during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Joseph was guided to the shelter door by the lumbering man, who unlocked and opened it, unnerving Joseph with the scraping, splintering noise as the rain-swollen plywood scudded scraped across concrete, ending with a dull thud when the door struck a floor-to-ceiling stack of recyclable newspapers which had been hastily placed there out of the rain.

Looking down, he saw a small chamber lined with white washed bricks, containing only a canvas cot and a portable toilet and illuminated by a single bare bulb. The shadowy figure of the refugee, called on to emerge quickly by the society member, ascended a small set of steps, seeking support with one hand on the newspapers, struggling with a battered brown suitcase.

When Joseph beheld the refugee, he gasped. To him, she was a beautiful young woman in the last stages of pregnancy.

Though Joseph felt an immediate fear at the sight of her, he moistened his lips, and with difficulty omitted some croaking Spanish, which he hoped tempered the rash way he took the suitcase from her and led her to the patio gate. The burly society man, who was in attendance for fear of sudden INS action, fumbled to undo the gate latch; his black umbrella tilted comically, deflecting a small stream of rain down the part of his hair.

"Shit," he exclaimed, shaking his head and wiggling under the black raincoat as the gate open.

Joseph dropped Maria's arm, sprinting through the gate and past the huge man, springing up the drenched sidewalk to his car with Maria's suitcase under one arm and his car keys drawn in the other.

"Hey! Come back here," yelled the burly man, "Do you know what you're supposed to do if you think you're being watched?"

Maria shuffled across the slick sidewalk toward Joseph's car.

"Yes, of course," replied Joseph, his eyes growing wild at the sight of this beautiful specter moving toward him, his hands shaking violently as he tried to place the key in his door lock.

"What?" asked the big man taking a few threatening steps toward Joseph.

"Call you?" Joseph fumbled.

"No!" exclaimed the huge man angrily, "Call Juan!"

"Yes, of course," Joseph started the engine and unlocked the passenger door.

When Maria was settled in the seat, and had waved goodbye to the man at the gate, Joseph lurched the car away from the curb and headed for his apartment.

He made only one remark on the way home; it was really his favorite slogan and he was confident of how to express it in Spanish: "A new order of ideas and principles must be instituted in the regions of the old Aztec Confederation."

This opinion met a quiet, thoughtful reception within Maria's great brown eyes. Juan had been right, she thought, Joseph was a very serious man, but nice, like a young priest.

When they reached Joseph's apartment, Maria joined Joseph in his kitchen for supper.

"In Guatemala, do most Nauhautl members think the great cataclysm will be caused by nuclear warfare or ecological collapse?" he asked.

"Both, simultaneously," she said serenely in English. "And you can speak to me in English. I understand it well." She did not want to say his Spanish was atrocious.

"Oh!" Joseph exclaimed. "I am writing a paper with that exact idea! I have it in my room and I would very much like to discuss with you..."

By about ten o'clock that first evening, after Joseph had talked to her continuously and even read the article aloud, she went to her bedroom exhausted. He remained in the living room, excited and somewhat hysterical. When finally he passed her bedroom, he paused near the threshold. By touching the door ever so gently, he could nudge it ajar and see inside.

Maria was lying on the bed with head deep back in the pillows: her hair a shining black mass around her. Though Joseph had seen her for the first time only that afternoon, their conversation and her appearance completely unnerved him. So much so that for several hours after he had entered his bedroom he simply sat on the edge of his rumpled, unmade bed. He seemed carried away in an ecstasy or fit, there being a tightness in his chest and numerous uncontrollable shivers.

Of great and immediate concern to him was the reoccurring notion that with too much of this sort of stress, his work for the society might suffer. And surely she had a husband, or knew the father of the child? Suddenly, he wondered why it was that mysteriously no mention of the father of the child had been made. No doubt, he waited for her in the Midwest, in Ohio was it, or had she come ahead of the father? To think of usurping the father's place with the mother so close to the delivery of the child appalled Joseph, who simply would not tolerate such wickedness in himself. He wondered what he could have been thinking.

Eventually, however, Joseph grew more composed and no longer babbled to himself of the importance of the Nauhuatl political agenda, and of the distressing nature of his thoughts, but fell into a deep thoughtful sleep while listening to the cold rain in the patio.

His rest was comparatively undisturbed and he rose early on a sunny but cold Thursday morning, ate a slight meal of cold cereal, and devoted himself anew to his article. He was enjoying the flow of his ideas about the ecological disaster that the world was going to endure soon. But when Maria awoke and began washing her clothes in the bathtub, singing softly, the hysterical feeling again returned, and at half-past nine o'clock Joseph feared he would not be able to control himself during the ordeal of her stay. What was the length of it going to be, anyway? Did they know exactly when she was leaving for Ohio?

With the washing done, she whispered past him, her skirt swishing, the wash load borne awkwardly on one hip. Joseph was badly startled. As she made her way outside to the clothesline at the back of the apartment complex, he lurched up from his desk, not to assist her with her dripping burden, but to lock the flimsy door behind her with a flick of his wrist. His mind immediately grew calm with the thought that Maria could not return unseen. However, he knew the feeling of safety was only temporary.

He fled directly back to his desk, ridden with guilt, but summoning such feelings of righteousness as he could manufacture. After all, he told himself, she was surely a distraction from more important issues. If the thought that she could not enter the room unexpectedly comforted him and enable him to continue with his article, then it was necessary. But again, he began to shake and mutter, on par with the night before.

In this distressed condition, he concluded he had to be rid of the poor girl.

This dreadful resolution being formed, the next consideration was how to effect it: he considered it frantically, until at length the stress of the unwelcome "new emotion" of love, prompted Joseph to resolve on calling Juan, to claim that the INS was closing in on him and the girl was bound to be seized.

Now, as Joseph dialed the phone, helpless in the hands of his own inhibitions, one could not help pitying him. He appeared to be almost unconscious, both elbows held close to his sides, the hand holding the receiver rubbing the other wrist, both of which truthfully burned as though they were bound up in strong leather thongs. His shoulders, from the tension of relating a lie to Juan, hovered near his ears and his face was now distorted by fear; his lips were parched, his eyes were fixed upon vacancy, and his face was ashen.

Juan answered the phone and hardly seemed surprised that it was Joseph calling.

"What is it, Joseph?" Juan asked.

"Juan, I don't know what to do," Joseph paused nervously, "I think the apartment is being watched."

"Well, why don't I drive by later and see about that," Juan said slightly sympathetically.

"Oh, Juan," said Joseph tearfully, "I think you ought to take her...Maria...back."

"What is it that's really bothering you?"

There was a stony silence from Joseph.

"Don't you see you would be putting the society at risk by moving her so soon? You wouldn't want to hurt the society, or Maria, would you?"

"No, no," Joseph blurted, "But I have another problem."

"Yes?" sighed Juan.

"Some of my family is...that is...ah...I'm expecting my...cousins are coming to town this week. I don't see how I can continue to keep Maria," he chattered.

"Oh my. That is a problem, Joseph," replied Juan.

"Yes. I'm very concerned...naturally...of coo course..."

Just then Maria tapped on the small window pane of the locked door like a hungry bird.

"I can't understand why you didn't mention this when you agreed to take her." Juan remarked sternly.

"I didn't know about it ahead of time. Really."

"But surely you could explain the situation to your cousins and offer to put them in a hotel just for a few more days," Juan suggested.

"But I'm worried about her being here in her...her...condition. Her husband, the father of her child, must be eager to be reunited with her, especially during this season. I would gladly pay her fare. Isn't her husband expecting her?"

"No, Joseph. The father is dead," Juan answered gravely, "and, of course, we don't dare move her if you say you are being watched."

Joseph delayed placing the receiver down, though Juan had hung up. The insight about Maria's marital status visibly affected him.

Maria rang the front doorbell and when Joseph admitted her, his face softened, and was full of longing and remorse.

She said, "You forgot me."

The reader can guess the rest of the story only too well. How, in that season of so much happiness on the evening of the very next day (which was Christmas Eve), Joseph proposed, Maria accepted, and soon after they were quietly united for life by an appropriate Aztec ritual. The machinations surrounding the first and only love of Joseph's life were thus accomplished in three tumultuous days, and I suppose it was in many ways preferable to a more modern, unarranged courtship, perhaps fitting in with the odd ways of the Movement for the Reemergence of Anuak.

After the Aztec wedding ceremony, Joseph returned to his article with an increased vigor, which he had not imagined possible: renewing faith that every sort of creature may be grateful for affection, and rendering Juan's friendship all the more magnificent because of its influence for good, Juan having bestowed upon the world a Joseph of greater strength, and, among other fine moral effects from the union, perhaps in some perfect future, a genuine aboriginal democracy.

# # # #

THE END

# # # #

Mother's Woman-Marine Bra

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

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

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

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

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

"I've already told you."

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

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

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

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

"No," she said.

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

"No," she said.

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

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

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

"Yes, tell us," I cried.

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

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

"Owned Arizona!"

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

"Off," she said, swatting at us.

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

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

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

"And you were young?"

"Yes, I was young."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Was that man punished?" I asked.

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

"What did they do to him?"

She opened the can.

"Did he go to prison?" I asked.

The oil from the can was draining into the sink.

"How was he punished?" I insisted.

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

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

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

# # # #

THE END

# # # #

Work Out Your Own Salvation

Denny Limmer hummed "The Streets of Laredo" under his breath as he stacked the returned books on the counter. He closed his eyes, breathing in the scent of old books, combined with the lemon oil he'd used on the desk earlier. Perfect! He finally had the job he'd wanted since he got his library card in first grade.

Miss Foxx's footsteps sounded behind him. "Ahem."

Denny smiled up at her until he noticed her sour expression.

"Stop that infernal humming," she ordered. From a side pocket of her black dress, she produced a key ring. The museum guard was troubled again by his intermittent bursitis, she explained, and no one else had arrived yet, therefore Denny would be the one to unlock the museum that morning. She showed him which key to use. He took the blob of keys from her and shook it with an impish snap of his wrist. He tried to think of something important to say to the old librarian, someone who might befriend him eventually. "Break forth through the barred portals, oh great southwestern lore and legend, to ye people of no knowing," said Denny.

Miss Foxx sighed, "Whatever you do, don't speak to the protester. He's a very disturbed person. If he's outside, you must come up and tell me right away, but don't engage him in any conversation. Is that clear?"

"Oh yes," said Denny snappily, without really listening.

"All right. As long as you understand."

Denny left the counter and the sunny expanse of empty tables in the library using a hallway Miss Foxx had shown him. As he departed, he paused to tap the black stenciled words "staff only" on the exit, but was stunned when the steel door swept closed, driving the door handle into his left hip. There's gonna be a big bruise there, he thought with a wince.

Through a series of long gloomy museum corridors, Denny toyed with the phrase "part-time assistant librarian." It wasn't his first job, but his good fortune at finding this job astonished him. That morning he felt so excited. He'd made a decision the night before and today he felt that he was embarking on a new career as a librarian, able to assist scholarly people. In Denny's opinion scholarly people needed a lot of assistance. It would be a lifetime spent actually helping people. And important people, too!

Miss Grimm, the guidance counselor at his high school, had tried to talk him out of majoring in race track management and vintner culture. Denny wished he'd listened to her on both those scores. Those majors had not suited him. Being a vintner was a bad fit. It had kind of dawned on him suddenly that if he majored in vintner culture he would be contributing to public drunkenness! Who wanted that on their conscious? The thought horrified him. Besides, he hadn't really liked the agriculture students. When he had switched to thinking he wanted to be a vet, that hadn't lasted long, either. All those details about animal bodies! From being a vet, he had switched to wanting to run a race track, since if he didn't take care of the horses he could run everything at a race track. There was something about a race track that scared him, though, maybe it was the idea of the bells and the competition and the gambling. That wasn't a very noble profession, after all.

Actually, the guidance counselor hadn't been much help for Denny. Nevertheless, Denny planned to visit the old school on Friday afternoon and leave a bouquet of roses for her. Afterwards, he might hang around the parking lot when school was out and tell some of the younger kids where he was working. He bet they'd never known anybody who'd become a librarian.

That thought just cleared up all the gray clouds troubling his mind.

In a hallway painted pea green, he lingered at a staff bulletin board. A notice on the board announced the employee picnic in a canyon in April. That picnic sounded fun, thought Denny. He didn't read far enough to see a notice at the bottom of the flyer that said only full time employees were invited, for he was bounding eagerly down an open staircase toward the main floor of the museum, one palm skimming the iron railing, his gaze fixed on two potted cacti placed at the bottom of the broad stairs. Mother would like those, he thought, his sneakers caressing the museum's marble.

When Denny reached the museum entrance with its towering glass doors, he was chagrined to discover that he'd shoved Miss Foxx's key ring into his pocket without remembering which key he'd been shown as the one that unlocked the museum entrance. Denny studied the ring carefully and tried to remember what the key Miss Foxx had picked out had looked like. Why hadn't he paid more attention? There was no question of going back to Miss Foxx's office. What would she think of such an inattentive employee? Denny begin the laborious process of testing the different keys methodically.

Key after key probed the shiny brass works. By his fourth time around the ring, Denny thought he'd probably tried each one twice. The thought made him jittery. Why did the guard have to be sick on Denny's first day? That bursitis thing sure sounded phony. Denny wondered if the guard was a chronic malingerer.

In the course of his fifth examination of the ring, Denny became aware of a large man with blue tinted glasses standing outside the museum. The man wore a red checked cowboy shirt and jeans, and his feet in Mexican sandals were cracked and grass-stained. He chewed gum and watched Denny with a satisfied expression. "Are you opening soon?" asked the man abruptly. His voice, penetrating the glass door, sounded as though he were underwater.

Denny started at the sound of a voice so near. "Yes, yes," Denny nodded, "one moment." He thrust his black-rimmed glasses farther up the bridge of his nose. Had it been a thin silvery key Miss Foxx had used? Or one with a bulldog on it? Suddenly, the key in his hand turned the lock, and, pressing a bar which spanned the door, Denny burst out into the crisp air of a beautiful spring morning.

He felt a rush of happiness, success, and good spirits. A part-time librarian's assistant was a grand thing to be! "Good morning," he said, ushering the visitor inside with an exaggerated gesture. The man stood still.

By now, Denny reflected, Miss Foxx might be wondering why he hadn't returned her keys. Denny turned his back on the man and grasped the key ring. He gave it a crisp tug. Nothing happened. He pulled the jangling mass, shook it, and jammed it in harder. The key remained in the latch. Denny could feel the large man studying him through those peculiar blue lenses. Denny wondered why he didn't enter the museum.

"You're new here, aren't you?" asked the man.

"New? No," scoffed Denny, heedless of anything but the stubborn latch, "I'm a third generation Arizonan. My great grandfather came to Fort Wagstaff after the Civil War. He was out here for years killing Apache Indians." It was then, when he finished speaking, that Denny realized three distressing facts: the man was not asking if he was new to Arizona, an enormous plywood sign which resembled a cross leaned against the thick ivy clinging to the side of the museum, and what he'd said was highly imprudent. From where he stood, Denny could read the red scrawl on the placard, "Beware Racist Mummy Snatchers!" A quick scan around showed Denny that there wasn't another soul outside the museum.

By process of elimination, Denny realized in horror that he'd just spoken to the protester that Miss Foxx had warned him about.

The man released his breath with a long, slow hiss. "So, your great grandfather came to Arizona to kill Apaches, huh?" he snarled. "You! You little punk! I've killed a hundred better people than you by mere accident on the highway. I'd like to take your scrawny turkey neck and wring it this way and twist it that way, and you'd squawk your squawk and you'd talk your talk, and your great big blue eyes would bulge out of your head like—"

Denny leaped across the threshold, dragging the door shut behind him. Denny yanked the key which came out in his hand, sending him staggering backward.

What had he done! The man pressed himself against the glass, his thick brass belt buckle clinking against the door pane, his pudgy hands strangling the air. Denny read the belt buckle's slogan: "Bullets, Budweiser, and Broads."

That man was crazy! What was it Miss Foxx had told him about this protester? Denny struggled to remember. Hadn't she told him that the man had become deranged over Native American causes? Hadn't she explained that he plagued the museum staff? They'd had him arrested for trespassing, according to Miss Foxx, so he always stayed outside. He'd even spit on a minister they'd sent as an arbitrator. 'We have to work out our own salvation'; that was what the frightened minister had said when he left. He couldn't do a thing with the man!

Denny had been cautioned against speaking to the protester. And what had he done! He'd not only spoken to the man, but he'd told him his great grandfather had come to Arizona to kill—oh God, Denny didn't want to remind himself of his stupidity—his great grandfather killed Apaches!

Denny retreated from the entrance. He stood, dismayed, beside an American flag and an Arizona flag inside the museum entrance.

What should he do? Perhaps he ought to apologize. But what could he say? The man was glaring in at him, but Denny felt he ought to make an attempt. He crept to the door, where the man was standing, and pushed the bar slightly; the door opened. "I'm terribly sorry for the unspeakable outrage I uttered," said Denny through the crack in the door, "Can you find it in your heart to forgive me for saying such—"

"Tell Miss Foxx my first demand is the release of mummies of Native American heritage! Release them first and we'll talk!" yelled the man.

Denny recoiled, pulling the door closed. A moment later he thought better of leaving things as they were and opened the door again, but by a narrower margin. "I went to school with Apache Indians whose fathers' were firefighters for the National Forest," he said. "They were wonderful people."

"Doggie spittle!" hollered the man.

Denny hopped backward. The man's curses were still coming. The direct approached had failed; it was time to withdraw. Denny sought cover.

He ran toward a darkened diorama where papier-mache Indians wearing black fright wigs held gray Styrofoam boulders over their heads. They were heaving the stones onto the shaggy back of a woolly mammoth, about half its true size. The mammoth, accepting the justness of their blows, rolled its frightened eyes heavenward. Blood pooled under the doomed beast. Denny scrambled to put its bulk between himself and the man at the door. When he'd hidden, the mans garbled rantings decreased.

It occurred to Denny that if he climbed the main stairs (the same stairs he had come down) the man outside would be watching his back. Denny's insides squirmed imagining it. He vaguely remembered seeing an elevator on his arrival earlier that morning. If an employee went by, he could ask them the whereabouts of the elevator.

Denny waited, his heart beating more slowly. He began to feel sorry for the man at the door. Perhaps he'd experienced some difficulty in his life which had made him hateful. He might have been married to a Native American woman.

Somewhere, in an unseen office, someone sneezed. Shortly thereafter, a toilet flushed. No one appeared. He'd have to locate the elevator himself. He stepped briskly from behind the mammoth.

The instant Denny emerged, another harangue exploded from the man at the door. Denny bolted. At the bottom of the stairs, he wheeled around a corner. Fleeing to the end of a short passage, he confronted a caged doorway. Was there no way to the second floor but those stairs? Where was the elevator? Denny dashed to a nearby door and opened it.

He entered a wing of the museum that was divided into modular workstations. The first two cubicles he passed were unoccupied except for empty cardboard boxes and scattered razor blades, but in the third a woman turned toward him from a computer screen. Denny recognized her soft, sympathetic eyes.

"Hello," she said, "Didn't I meet you earlier?"

"Yes, you did," said a breathless Denny, unable to remember her name or function. She might have been the one who had him fill out paperwork, but he didn't want to hazard a comment to that effect.

"How is it being new here?" she asked.

"A little difficult," said Denny honestly.

The woman blinked twice and took a sip from a ceramic mug which had a lime-colored snail for its handle.

"But fun," added Denny, "I'm so nervous this morning."

"That's all right," she said in a slushy voice, "There's no reason to be nervous is there? You haven't done anything wrong."

Well, that was the thing. Denny thought he had. What he had done by talking to the protester seemed to be exactly what he shouldn't have done. He knew Miss Foxx had made a big thing of the importance of him not speaking to the protester.

"I unlocked the museum door," began Denny, wanting to tell her about his mistake with the protester.

"Good," she replied. "We always need someone to do that." With one hand the woman smoothed her black skirt which had been appliqued with pink shapes. Denny thought the figures resembled flamingoes.

"I like your flamingo skirt," he said.

"They're quail, actually," she said with a placid smile, as though she would have gladly had them be flamingoes, if he insisted.

Courage swelled in Denny. She was friendly. Perhaps he could tell her what had happened; maybe she'd had a similar experience. But before he could speak, the woman set down her cup and hastily returned her gaze to the computer. As though she were answering some silent directive, she executed a series of hypnotic keyboard strikes. When she finished each phrase, the computer beeped satisfaction.

She's busy, thought Denny. I shouldn't disturb her.

She kept typing in the same strange fashion. Her fingers were continuously jabbing the keys and her kind eyes were fixed on the screen.

I'd like to do that all day, Denny mused. A pang of guilt accompanied that longing, for he remembered a fib on his job application; he'd claimed to be computer competent and had fabricated some gibberish about writing code for a computer. What would he do if Miss Foxx asked him to write code or fill in a spreadsheet?

Denny search for some sign of the museum elevator or the stairs. There had to be a way out of there. Behind the woman there was a window with frosted glass, its sill crammed with African violets. A door to her left was blocked by a chair and a teetering stack of notebooks. "Is there an elevator somewhere?" asked Denny finally.

"Behind you," said the woman, pointing. Denny spun around and tittered, "Thanks. I haven't been able to locate anything this morning." He left her to press the black elevator button and then hastily ran back. "I like your quail skirt," he said in time with the elevator's ding. He hurried into the elevator car and faced outward.

The doors closed slowly, and Denny leaned against the elevator rail, crossing his legs at the ankles. He looked at the nice lady at her computer one last time. A white square passed the frosted window behind her.

What was that?

Denny strained to see what it was before the elevator doors closed.

It was the placard of the protester.

The elevator door slammed.

What had he done! That nut was following him. He'd seen where Denny had run and he'd walked around the outside of the museum in order to watch him through another window. Denny shuddered.

When he reached Miss Foxx's office, Denny found the old librarian discussing a water stained pamphlet with a bearded man who smoked a meerschaum pipe. Miss Foxx grunted at the sight of her keys and introduced the bearded man as Denny's supervisor. Denny was unable to repeat either of his Czechoslovakian names. His name sounded something like Zbenbak Zidlestromber.

The bearded man took Denny back to the library and the counter which might very possibly been a place where he'd begun his morning. Two researchers were already seated at the tables. They must have come in after he opened the door. A line of pink paper slips stretched along the counter. Those were the patron's requests. The bearded man handed Denny one. He needed to locate a poem entitled "The Lament of Big Nosed Kate."

It was scary looking for things in the archives. Denny had to walk long aisles of bookshelves. He had a feeling that he was about to be murdered.

When Denny emerged from the maze of florescent-lit shelves with the file, a nervous young woman clutching an imitation crocodile briefcase snatched the file from him. The bearded man scribbled something in a ledger and handed Denny another slip.

He processed fourteen more requests. The young woman with the crocodile briefcase sought photos of Mexican steamboats and the records of a female Confederate spy who'd fled Alabama and had lived incognito in Arizona for fifty years. The other patron, a grubby old man in a blue suit, asked for the diary and drawings of a man who'd been scalped and a sample of 19th century hair art depicting a cattle drive. The hair art was packed in a black carton and after Denny brought it to the old man at his table, the man returned to the counter complaining that it was infested by beetles. He took the infestation personally, he explained, because it was his mother's hair. Tiny beetle husks sifted from the carton when he opened it on the counter. The bearded man told Denny to take his mid-morning break.

The tables of the library had filled with intense young scholars and old ladies with straw totes. Because she was the only one in the library sitting alone, Denny joined the women with the crocodile briefcase. When he sat down and opened a newspaper, she whisked her briefcase farther away from him and glared in a ferocious manner.

Denny surveyed the want ads, his stomach writhing at the attractive details in an ad for an unskilled plumber's assistant. The anxiety he felt from his skirmish with the protester had been increased by new fears of his supervisor. Denny knew he wasn't processing the pink slips fast enough. How long would he be given to improve? Maybe they'd let him practice that weekend?

Outside one of the library's immense casement windows, two sparrows, sheltered by stout ivy vines, fought over a twig. Denny stood up, strolled to the window, and leaned out of the open frame. He sniffed the fresh morning air. The splendid grounds of the museum extended below him. Rows of stout palms and gnarled olive trees lines up on either side of the museum's broad concrete approach, which was surrounded by a yellow Bermuda lawn turning green in shady patches after a winder of dormancy. On the dry skirt of a nearby palm a pigeon lit, shot off, and arched into the sapphire sky. As Denny admired a jet airplane, a movement beneath the windowsill caught his eye. He looked down on a dirt path. The protester stood there laughing. He brandished his sign above his head and made a chopping motion like the huge placard was an ax. Denny sprang back from the windowsill and spun around. His supervisor was watching him. He signaled Denny to return to the counter. "Never jump like that in the library," he scolded.

Denny processed fifteen more requests that morning. He tried to work faster and made two errors. His supervisor ignored his apologies. Near noon, when he was scheduled to quit, Denny saw the nice lady with the flamingo-like quail skirt approaching the counter. "Miss Foxx would like to see you in her office," she said. Denny was so frightened he didn't ask any questions; he supposed he was about to be fired and, feeling himself a docile innocent captive, followed her in resignation to his ruin.

Miss Foxx occupied an enormous wing chair in a corner of her office under a large dark painting of an angel emerging from a copper mine. A brass plaque bolted to the picture frame read, "The Seraph of Silverbell Mine." Denny sat on the fringed ottoman that Miss Foxx pointed out beside an ashtray dirtied by the cold ashes of his supervisor's pipe.

"You're new here—" began Miss Foxx.

"Yes, it's been a wonderful morning," Denny lied.

Miss Foxx studied him coldly and continued. "I try to meet with new staff at the end of their first day," she said, "I want the Southwest Museum to be a friendly place in which to work. What attracted you to library work, Dennis?"

She was not firing him! Denny's spirits soared. "That's such an interesting story, Miss Foxx," said Denny, "I'd like to tell you."

She indicated with a stirring motion of her hands that he should.

"Well, it's strange, but do you know that all I ever thought of in high school were girls, and goats, and the Future Farmers of America. Last year my parents were worried about me," continued Denny, "so they sent men to see this guidance counselor, Miss Grimm, at my high school. She said because I was a third generation Arizonan, I ought to be interested in the history of the state. She told me I ought to get a degree in library science and become a librarian. I ought to help scholarly people. Scholarly people need lots of help. Right then and there that I decided to become a librarian." He left out the forays into vintner management, race track management and vet school.

"So you think libraries are great contributions to society, then?" asked Miss Foxx. She was putting paperwork away in her drawers.

"Oh, yes," said Denny earnestly. He thought it might be a good time to discuss the protester and his mistake, but Miss Foxx continued.

"Denny, I wonder if you have heard about the great fire in the library at Alexandria, Egypt?"

"I have to confess something, Miss Foxx. I don't read the newspapers as much as I ought to. I know it's a fault if I'm going to be a librarian. People come in a lot and ask about current events like fires! Even ones in Egypt!" he said solemnly.

Miss Foxx assessed Denny coolly for a moment.

"The fires to which I made reference, Denny, occurred in 47 B.C."

"Oh, those fires," said Denny.

"According to the histories of the Hellenistic Age," she went on to explain, "half a million manuscripts perished. What do you think of that?" asked Miss Foxx.

"Horrible!" exclaimed Denny.

"What do you think of Euclid flaming?"

"Appalling!"

"Of Hipparchus charred?"

"Just awful!"

"Of Eudemus ignited?"

"Miss Foxx, do you think you could write those names down on a piece of paper for me?" Denny asked. "I'm trying to better myself by learning stuff. I'd hate to miss the chance to learn about all those great guys you just mentioned."

"Denny, what would you say if I told you that I believe the fires were set by a librarian?" said Miss Foxx.

Denny sat up.

"Are you shocked?" she asked. "You see," she said, thrusting a pencil into the wispy white bun on the back of her head, "library work isn't the splendid profession you've imagined. It never has been. Library work, working in a library, destroys people. Two of the finest human beings I've had the pleasure to know and to call intimate friends of mine became librarians along with me and they are now—" Miss Foxx struggled to say more. "They are both currently housed in the Arizona State Asylum. I used this very phone to call their ambulances." She displayed a black rotary-style phone with a straight black cord.

Denny could barely swallow. He felt his throat closing and his palms sweating. What was she saying? What did she mean by saying library work destroyed people? How could she ever suspect that a librarian burned down a library?

Miss Foxx sank into her wing chair, her eyelids closed. "I want you to think about what I've said before you choose library science as a major."

A bulky palm tree outside Miss Foxx's window rustled. Denny had been thrilled by the idea of being a librarian. Now Miss Foxx was telling him if he became one he might end up in the state asylum!

The old woman consulted her watch. "I've held you too long. Your shift ended at noon." She stood and shook his hand. "Good day," she said.

Denny blundered from the old woman's office. He wondered if he should remain inside until he could exit the building with someone who was going to a late lunch. No doubt the protester was out there in a shrub or a hedge waiting for Denny to appear. He would attack Denny with full force. Denny had said the worst possible thing he could have said to someone upset about the abuse of Native Americans. But what did it matter? What could that madman do to him that hadn't already been done? It was all over. Miss Foxx had completely disillusioned him about having a career in library sciences. She didn't want him to become a librarian. The librarians she knew had gone crazy!

Denny wondered if Miss Foxx wasn't a little mad herself. Denny wondered what it would feel like to be hit on the head with a great big plywood sign. He thought he might prefer it to the morning he'd had.

He plodded out the rear entrance of the museum, feeling in his front pant pocket for his bus token. He was disappointed when the protester didn't lunge out from behind the graffiti sprayed trash scuttle. No one emerged from behind the thick oleander hedge, either. A rustle Denny heard in the dense suckers of an olive tree proved to be a lizard. Of course, thought Denny, the protester could be lurking behind the stone wall on the west side of the campus. Denny studied the ominous volcanic basalt, marched toward it, and stopped parallel to an opening. He breathed and stepped out.

The protester wasn't there. Instead a glob of pink chewing gum bobbed on the split tip of an enormous agave plant.

The east of the building must be where he's hiding, thought Denny, trudging eastward on the dirt path where he'd seen the man. When he got to the east wall of the museum, the bricks of the building gleamed with the noon sun, but the protester wasn't there. Denny walked from the east to the north again, near an oleander hedge, around the trash scuttle. He'd circled the building once. The protester had eluded him.

Out onto the Bermuda lawn ambled Denny. Someone had turned on a sprinkler; it had a broken head. Water gurgled out of the pipe sideways. Denny stood transfixed by the sound of its joyous, bubbling voice and the sight of the yellow Bermuda chaff and dirt floating on the liquid surface which rolled toward his feet.

"I'm ready!" hollered Denny suddenly, "Hit me with your sign!"

No one moved.

"Come on, you jerk!" he yelled at the oleander hedge, "Hit me with your sign! Hit me with your goddamn sign!"

Denny glanced around. The protester didn't appear, but Denny saw Miss Foxx in her second story window. She slowly brought the receiver of her black telephone to her ear.

# # # #

THE END

# # # #

Consciousness Raising

Did I hop up? Did I blurt out "goodness!" in a surprised mousy squeak? Was it really me scrambling ecstatically on my hands and knees across the floor to the battered cardboard box where she kept them? And is that my voice I hear raving on and on, calling them the sweetest, most darling little things, pressing them in pairs against my cheeks?

Somebody should have clobbered me over the head. Somebody should have put me out of my misery. Maureen, as I recall, simply stared. But did I notice the frosty look she fixed on me? Apparently not. I played with them. With her kittens. At a consciousness raising forty years ago I lavishly and tenderly nuzzled teeny meowing kittens.

Raucous were the chuckles that rocked me over and the hearty teary guffaws that I later experienced whenever I remembered that consciousness raising I went to in 1971. Between sips of steaming oolong, with a friend hearing my tale, I would screech: "Comic!" "Misadventure!" Or managed: "Such a boob!" The absurdity of that consciousness raising, of my actions and the actions of my weird host, amused nearly everyone I told. How could I know then what I know now: that the single painful visit of slightly more than an hour's duration portended worse things to come. After twelve years of torment and a failed marriage, that consciousness raising haunts me, horrifies me now, for had I truly awakened then I would have been spared so much. Those are eerie things, the future consequences, the coincidences, and the pairing of past incidents.

I'll blame it on youth, for I was scarcely sixteen at the beginning of my story when I sat late one afternoon in my parents' home. As it was an Arizona afternoon in June I spent it indoors with the curtains drawn and the air conditioner on high. In that cool, cavernous environment throughout the long summer months I intended to read the world's great literary works, though I had been out of school a week and hadn't begun yet, to teach myself Latin and Greek, and to become an expert appraiser of art.

"Do you want anything from the grocery?" my mother asked on her way out the door.

"Oh, nothing in particular. Nothing I can think of," I said, perching on the piano bench in our living room. What I really needed was a European education, a visit to one decent art museum, thousands of Cliff Notes, and access to a library with more than the collected works of Owen Wister. None of this was available at Food Giant.

"Suit yourself," Mother said, closing the door. I listened vaguely as her car crunched the fan of turquoise gravel on the drive in front of our small 1950s, ranch-styled tract home. Freedom. The summer of accomplishments could begin. But which of my many challenging tasks should I take up first? I was stymied when the phone rang and I picked it up.

"Je voidrais le parle de femmes importante cette. Quelle?" These extraordinary words, or something like them, greeted me.

My heart began to pump as though a harrow were passing over it again and again. "Huh?" I managed.

"Je pardonnent parle femmes importante y cette?"

Gibberish. I could read the French language, but I was utterly hopeless hearing it spoken by a living person who wasn't recorded on a cassette in the attitude of an overindulgent uncle speaking to a four-year-old. "I'm sorry, I can't—"

"Forget it," said a woman, cutting me off. "Am I speaking to Brenda Bennett?"

"Yes."

"I'm calling on behalf of a group of activist women. We plan to begin an Arizona branch of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union. We hope to hold feminist consciousness raising. There are over 100,000 women nationwide participating in consciousness raising meetings. One of our members mentioned your name—possibly—as a new member. Our next meeting is this Saturday at one. Do you think you can attend?"

"Yeah sure. I guess so."

The caller gave me the address. I hung up and immediately shouted a war whoop. How thrilling! A phone call from a French-speaking intellectual. I wondered what a consciousness raising meant; the term was fairly new then. Would it do me a great deal of good? Needless to say, little was done toward my self-improvement that day; I bounced off the walls instead.

As the week went on and the event approached, however, I began to have real doubts. A consciousness raising sounded a little scary, what was I supposed to do? Who would be there? I wished I had asked the mysterious caller more questions. And when I looked up the address that I'd been given, I saw that I was being sent to a home in the Davidson Addition, a very wealthy subdivision of old adobe mansions. Impressing someone who lived there seemed far-fetched when the most common reaction to me at high school was outright prolonged laughter. Ordinary people thought me stuffy and peculiar, wealthy people thought me poorly educated and goofy. If the invitation wasn't a mistake, could it be a cruel hoax? The whole thing was vaguely discomforting.

But on the day itself, bravely dismissing my fears, I told my mother I was shopping at Sav-Co and left for the feminist consciousness raising. After a baking trek through scalding cul-de-sacs, there remained a large squalid patch of desert to cross. Past the rusty carcass of a truck and above the prismatic glare of a fine pavement of broken bottles, I finally saw the high ground of the Davidson Addition. Nearing the address, I was amazed to discover that I had been sent to what was unquestionably the largest mansion, one resembling an immense disintegrating wedding cake. The sheer bulk of the white tower on the north end staggered me. Inside the mansion's outer walls, a black Lincoln straddled the drive. There were no other cars. Though this relieved some of my anxiety, I was still intimidated; the porch light had been left on all night, and a huge moth clung to the screen door quite near the bell. I hated moths and stood watching it, weighing my dread of the soft fat moth body against my concern that someone inside the house might see me acting oddly. At last I crept onto the porch and felt for the bell while holding my body well away from the moth. The chimes reverberated solemnly inside and I was wishing the sound were more muffled in order to reveal any approaching footsteps, when the door opened and a hectic man, a woman, and the moth shot past me without the slightest acknowledgement. "Maureen," the woman said curtly to someone in the house, "one of your little friends is here. Do try and deal with the mess in the kitchen." The man and woman slipped into the Lincoln, the solid doors thumping with the finality of a vacuum seal, the tires spinning a stinging barrage of dust at me as the car tore away.

I was stunned. Were these French intellectuals? Surely the woman was a parent speaking to a child. And then the answer came to me. The name Maureen could mean Maureen Maywood, a fellow high school student, a terrifying girl from my fifth period French class the prior school year. Maureen conjugated the French language without error, never mispronounced anything, and received such perfect grades that she'd been exempted from the final exam. Maureen and I traveled in different leagues intellectually. Though only sixteen herself, she exhibited distressing symptoms of a lifetime spent actually knowing things. I, on the other hand, specialized in mnemonic devices. Given her obvious superiority, I was uncertain whether to stay or return home as quickly as possible.

The issue was decided for me. The hazy figure of Maureen materialized behind the screen door. She wore a purple tie-dyed caftan and Fry boots; her long black hair, having just been washed, hung in a frazzled mass, and a squint troubled her goat-like, gray-green eyes.

"Hello Maureen. Is everyone in the backyard?"

"Since you're here, you may as well stay," she said, shoving the screen door open in my face.

"I'm sorry," I said, mincing my way around the screen. "Am I here at the wrong time? Wasn't the consciousness raising today at one?" I edged past her into the dark house. An icy air-conditioned downdraft raised goose bumps on my arms and legs, and I became temporarily blind, a common condition when coming indoors in Arizona in June.

"I should have realized when I called you that the turnout would be abysmal," said Maureen. She shut the door. "Of course everyone wanted to hear Plath read at Kachina Hall."

Not knowing what she referred to, I changed the subject. "How many people are here?" I asked, peering around, groping for a guiding wall.

"You're the first," said Maureen. She vanished through a swinging door.

I followed her and found myself in the Maywood kitchen. Under a ceiling of fidgety fluorescence there were piles and piles of dirty plates. I watched Maureen chose a single red apple from the foggy depths of a sliding vegetable drawer in the bottom of the refrigerator. As she casually slumped away, I trotted after her, noting a thick volume of Rabelais in French beside the toaster. I suddenly remembered that Maureen's mother was a published French translator, and I sighed, yearning for just such an intellectual home life, though I was rather glad my middle class mother cleaned up after herself.

Chaos in the form of horsehair sofas and overstuffed ottomans greeted me in the vast Maywood den; I had difficulty keeping up as Maureen zigzagged ahead. When she suddenly plopped onto a rocking chair, I spun around in a frantic search for a suitable seat. I picked a nearby sofa. It wasn't long before I regretted my choice, horsehair having an undesirable quality when one is wearing shorts.

While I suffered prickly tickles on my thighs and calves, and nervously awaited more company, Maureen rocked herself, content to munch her apple. Her eyes had a creepy, smug look, exactly resembling a horned toad lounging atop an anthill. Under half-closed lids, she seemed to be studying me and, in evil glimmers, laughing. Flinching at the unwelcome scrutiny, I comforted myself with the thought that my mysterious benefactor would arrive soon. After a few minutes the silence between us became embarrassing, so I made small talk—mostly about school. When Maureen replied in monosyllables, I concluded that she was angry. "I'm sorry if you stayed here for me. You probably wanted to go to the reading instead, but I'm sure the others are on their way."

"Perhaps," said Maureen to her apple. "On the other hand maybe nobody but you will bother coming." With a sharp flick of her wrist she turned the apple and bit it.

"Oh. I'm sorry," I said. I didn't like the way she said "you," and it shocked me to hear that the person who had nominated me might stay away. "Did you say a lot of the women you invited went to hear Plath read out loud? I've heard of her—Plath—didn't she write The Glass Jar or something?"

Maureen, her mouth agape over the apple like a snake's jaw dislocated before its prey, halted the chair in mid-rock. "You mean The Bell Jar."

I grinned at my mistake. "Oh yeah. Same thing."

She studied me with real disgust. "No. There's an idea incorporated in the title. If you think they're the same, you may as well call her book The Peanut Butter Jar or The Big Bread Box."

I chuckled.

Maureen rolled her eyes and emphatically snorted. She tossed her apple in a wastebasket; the fruit had become an hourglass-shaped corpse. "I suppose you've never read it."

"Well, actually, somebody told me it's pretty good."

"You've heard it's pretty good," Maureen said in a mocking tone. "You don't hear Plath is good. You've got to read her. Come on." She launched herself out of the rocking chair. I stayed on the sofa, my hands in my lap, and cringed as she stomped by. "Shouldn't we wait for the others?" I asked, leaning forward, my body willing her to return. "Can we hear the doorbell from there?"

Frowning, at a loss for what to do or say next, I studied the high, beamed ceiling made of saguaro cacti ribs and an enormous, apocalyptic oil painting of an erupting Mexican volcano. In the painting, screaming peasants with their backs aflame fled a fiery caldron. Somehow at that moment that world seemed rather inviting.

"When the others arrive we'll want to be able to hear the doorbell," I ventured plaintively. "Maureen?"

I got up.

"Maureen? We'll want to hear the others when they come." I crept across the room toward the threshold where Maureen had disappeared. Summoning all my courage, I discreetly peeked around the doorjamb and found myself inches from Maureen's scathing face.

"It's twenty minutes until two o'clock," she said in a withering whisper. "I think we can safely assume they're not coming."

"Not coming—?"

"We're going to have to stay in my room, so I'll loan you my personal copy of The Bell Jar." She spun around and pounded up a flight of stairs.

I hesitated, then followed. "Why do we have to stay in your room?"

"Because my stupid parents let my stupid brother come back from the Desert Arbor, that's why."

The Desert Arbor? That was a reformatory!

Trailing Maureen through a high-ceilinged hallway on the second floor, I glanced into a bedroom where a huge adolescent male with corpuscular acne saw us and shouted, "Brought home another palsy-walsy?"

"Drop dead!" Maureen yelled, charging back to kick his doorjamb.

My chest throbbed; I was hardly breathing. "How did he end up at The Arbor?"

"Attempted suicide, threatened murder, and beat up the idiotic bag full of God called my father." She ushered me majestically into her room. "That's from Plath. The bag full of God part, I mean. You'll read it, of course. Plath hated her father, and I hate mine." Maureen slammed the door and immediately leaped on a step stool and stretched her arm toward a spot in the towering shelves of books. "There are frequent references to this hatred of her father in The Bell Jar. Watch for them when you're reading and jot them down. Then we'll discuss what you find. The Bell Jar is an important book for you to get acquainted with right away," she said, half to herself. As I watched Maureen gliding her hand back and forth in front of the shelves, I saw her lips moving, and I had the uncomfortable feeling she was devising a whole series of books and lectures to educate me. Given time to think, it was becoming clear that Maureen had planned the feminist consciousness raising herself; there was no group of activist women and no woman—other than Maureen—who had nominated me. The whole thing was depressingly similar to a detective club, called The Secret Eye Club, which I had unsuccessfully tried to organize when I was eight. I felt a twinge of pity for Maureen. Well, now she had me and I was going to be an interesting experiment for her; she was going to be my same-sex Professor Higgins, or my mesmerizing Svengali. "Voila!" She pounced on a thin paperback.

"Ah," I said when she handed me it. Reverently I cradled the book and nodding, backed onto a canopied bed. It was another bad choice for a seat; over and over, the pink silk duvet conveyed me downward. I nervously riffled The Bell Jar. In a series of furtive glances I canvassed her shelves for a book we might have in common. Why hadn't I read the entire contents of the world's great literary works the prior summer?

Things were quiet, too quiet. I sensed someone lurking outside the door, but no, I was only jittery. Then I heard something odd. A mew. Meowing sounds came from somewhere behind me. Glancing around, I saw a tortoise-shell cat in a cardboard box. The cat reclined in squint-eyed pleasure while six kittens lapped her pink, protruding nipples.

At last here was something I could relate to! Our two cats were grown, and it had been years since I'd seen kittens. "Goodness!" I exclaimed. I leaped up and instantly dropped down to scramble toward the box on my hands and knees. "Aren't they the sweetest most darling little things?" I knelt beside the box and chose one kitten. Laughing at the tiny claws that clung to the toweling, I draped the kitten over my leg. The small gray blind thing, hot under its soft fur, breathed hard and fought to return to its mother.

"I'm sorry today didn't turn out the way you planned," I said, letting the words out freely once I held two other kittens against my cheeks.

Maureen contemplated me as though I were subhuman. "You're sorry a lot, aren't you?"

"No, not really."

"You say 'I'm sorry' a lot, though. I noticed that about you. What do you have to be sorry about?"

"Nothing really."

"Then, may I suggest, you're feeling rage instead of sorrow? C'est vrai, n'est pas?"

"When I say I'm sorry? No. I think it's just a tick. An unconscious habit."

"Hmm, no. Frankly, I'm afraid your self-esteem isn't adequate."

I was about to protest strenuously when someone rapped their knuckles against the door, and Maureen's brother barged right in. "Oh, I see you're busy playing with the itty bitty kitties." He bounded across the room and, with an enormous hurdle, flopped on her bed. "Some big feminist consciousness raising."

"Get out of here," hissed Maureen. "I mean it. Mother said you were supposed to stay in your room."

"Listen, Maureen," I began, "I've got to go." I hastily shoved the three kittens in their box.

"Don't go. I'll get rid of him."

"Do you want to know why women can't achieve anything, won't every achieve anything?" said her brother, cocking himself up on one elbow, his strange glossy face grinning happily at me as he addressed me in a croaking voice.

"Get out of here," said Maureen.

"Get out of here. Get out of here," parroted the brother. "If you think that's going to make me go, you're more lamebrain than I thought, but then all women strike me as lamebrain because they're constitutionally..."

I didn't stay to hear his theory of female shortcomings. "Goodbye Maureen," I said with a weak, blundering wave.

"Don't go!" she shouted and turned upon her brother. "Once and for all, get out of here."

"Get out of here. Get out of here."

The last thing I saw was Maureen lunging at him.

Everything that had happened ran through my mind as I left that horrible house. I thought about kittens and Plath and big fat moths. But the farther I went—out the front door, out the thick garden walls, out into a squalid patch of desert—the freer I felt. The humor struck me. A feminist consciousness raising that no one but me attended where the host had badgered me? How bizarre! And I didn't believe the other women she'd invited had gone to hear Plath read; they'd simply stayed away. Why hadn't I been as wise? Oh, Maureen was an intellectual snob: the worst thing in the world. She lacked charity, humor, grace, and humility. Her irritability with the mistakes of others betrayed her own insecurities. I never wanted to be like her.

I lashed a creosote bush with one hand. Then I noticed the damn book. I still had her copy of The Bell Jar. With a mighty hand I squashed the thing, rolled it up tightly and choked the life out of it. Under a scabby, black mesquite and quite near an overturned barrel cactus, I jammed the book in a snake hole. It fit exactly. But for good measure, and in a parting gesture, I kicked dirt on top and stomped it down with my foot.

I never again spoke to Maureen. She was in a different French class the next year, and in the hot noisy halls of our school I studiously avoided her. Her brother, I gleaned from various newspaper accounts, ended up in the Florence Penitentiary. And once someone casually mentioned that Maureen had become an experimental psychologist, no doubt performing vivisections on chattering, unsuspecting monkeys.

As I look back on it, I now know that was not the end of the story; God or his grim ilk had a surprise hidden up his capacious sleeve.

Two years later I graduated from high school and enrolled in our local university. In the spring of my freshman year I signed up for the required second-semester English course, the section I chose having been given the cheerful title "A Journey to the Heart of Darkness." Late one January afternoon, with the lowering sun full upon the palm trees, making crisp elongated Mickey Mouse heads out of the shadows of prickly pear cacti, I entered a chilly classroom at the top of a windowless concrete cube only to find it packed already with angry and aggressive marketing majors, agricultural students who were doodling on the desk tops (cartoonish bulls mounting cows), and bored nurses who appeared to be fantasizing their impending marriages to handsome doctors. I squeezed into a seat, and immediately the door swung open. In strode our professor.

At the podium Morris Mitchell commanded attention. He was tall, sandy haired, with a droopy blonde moustache and a scholar's oversized nose. Dressed in a rumbled khaki suit (the style of an English gentleman tomb robber), markedly pale and proud, he looked a great deal like a large mobile marble statue—with just as much personal warmth. From the first day he impressed me with his great intellect, reading us passages from Beowulf, slipping in and out of Old English, showing slides of battle axes and various Grendel-like monsters rendered in gold.

In the next month my admiration grew. While the other students read Absalom, Absalom with absolute disinterest, and wrote appalling extemporaneous essays on Antigone, I worked hard and cherished every moment there. I felt superior to my classmates and I am horrified to say I enjoyed the ways he skewered them for their disinterest. He was magnificent when he humiliated some unsuspecting undergraduate who had failed to complete his reading assignment. He was merciless, unrelentingly confrontational, smug and comfortable in his self-assured mastery. Did it ever occur to me that he lacked respect and kindness? Did I see the flickers of cruelty so reminiscent of Maureen Maywood? The same glimmers of laughter under half-closed lids before he attacked his victim? How quickly I had forgotten my big conclusion, my natural abhorrence to cruelty. Morris' course became my favorite and at the classes' conclusion I knew I was his prized pupil.

One summer afternoon, two weeks after the semester's end, I sat at a glimmering oak table in the second story of the college library (near the old archives of Arizona's past, the deprecations, lost gold mines, and gunfights) lost in an odd reverie, tracing and retracing the lined margin of my notebook, thinking episodically, and very romantically of Morris. An azure sky and the wispy indistinct green of a palo verde tree had amalgamated on the table top in front of me when all of the sudden another element entered the picture. Something white and blurry. A face. I was all agog when I glanced up and discovered Morris, smiling rather coyly, seated directly across from me.

"At work again, Brenda?"

"I had a few things... I was interested in some things."

"Not coursework? You are an exemplary student. Will you allow me to buy you a cup of coffee?"

"Of course you can!" I said, springing up and hurriedly disposing of a pile of books beside me. As I nervously stacked the volumes on a nearby cart, I turned the spines away so that Morris wouldn't notice that every book related to his class.

"I think, Brenda," began Morris, rising and coming around the table to take my elbow, "mine was a question of permission, not ability or possibility, therefore 'may' would be preferred. In everyday life, however, such informal uses of 'can' now occur all the time. But in any context in which politeness or formality is of overriding consideration, 'may' is still the better choice. Perhaps formality is not at issue here. Perhaps. Politeness, however, certainly is."

I sputtered. Looking back on it now, I see how thoroughly he iced the situation. Speaking more plainly, I see what an amazing asshole he was. Though I didn't then. "Well then—of course you may!" I said, correcting myself.

What was wrong with me? How I wish two years earlier at the consciousness raising that my consciousness had truly been raised! I'll always wonder if that strange consciousness raising of Maureen's hadn't lowered my resistance to intellectual snobs. Had her odd personality distracted me from the importance of what had happened? Had I simply forgotten my conclusions about her while remembering the humor? At any rate, two years later, it was as though God had set in my path an exact double of Maureen Maywood, albeit in male get-up. How did I miss it? But if the similarity between Maureen and Morris occurred to me then, it must have been deeply subconscious for it did not govern my heart. His self-assured superiority thrilled me. I hung on his every word—his every, measured, and irritatingly precise word, and he, in return, incessantly corrected my speech. Morris and I dated; we were lovers; I moved into the apartment he was renting. Pygmalion, that was what I was living, and Morris was my crusty Professor Higgins.

At my insistence he compiled ponderous lists of books for me to read; my goofy reactions to the classics were met with amused and tolerant forbearance. I enjoyed his superiority to his fellow graduate students, and his uncharitable assessments of professors. I remember we attended a certain party together, and I can see the salt-rimmed margarita seas tilted precariously over piles and piles of small plates, each smeared with black guacamole. At poolside, in a circle of leather equipales, we cornered an old western author and under a black, starry sky Morris feigned interest in his work and flattered the silly old fool telling him his pedestrian works were shadowing some unheralded brilliance which Morris alone had seen. A red ristra, a string of dried chili peppers, hung on a mailbox and rustled an eerie clitter-clatter. Afterwards Morris sat in his chair giggling about how he had destroyed the old gentleman whose ridiculous novel of innocent maidens and honorable cowhands enflamed Morris' critical sense.

The next year I married him and we left Arizona for his new faculty appointment in Mississippi. How I was to suffer in Morris' rigid academy.

I put the onus for the first incident on the rather mournful way the saguaro cacti saluted Morris and me as we left Tucson and drove east early one summer morning. Those saguaros had been my childhood friends, and the visceral pangs of sorrow I felt leaving them seemed to be mutual, reflected in the saguaros' stiff farewell. The sight of hundreds of cacti standing at the side of road, their many arms raised in a tragic goodbye, caused the reality of what I had done to sink in. I suppose I harbored suspicions even then that I had entered into a joyless marriage. I reacted by becoming giddy and carefree; Morris, however, grew silently sullen.

That night we reached Carlsbad, New Mexico. We pulled into the motel parking lot near the famous caverns beneath a neon sign of an Indian jumping through hoops, the colors changing each time he jumped, his many unlit legs waiting to be lit. The hoop colors kept coming down, red, yellow, green, purple. After dropping our luggage we drew open the curtain in anticipation of the nightly spectacle: bats leaving the cave. We were quickly rewarded; the vortex of bats made me squeal with delight. With his back to the window, Morris eased himself into a tatty armchair.

"Do you know the author I really, really hate?" I tittered once I was seated atop the bed.

"No, who would that be?" he said testily. A huge spiral of bats began blackening the air above his head; they seemed to be flowing directly out of a secret egress at the top of his skull.

"Oh, that guy, you know, who wrote..oh...the...ah...you know, the one who punched his wife?"

"I think you might be referring to—"

"It doesn't matter." I dismissed him with an airy, absent-minded wave of one hand. "You know who I mean. The one who wrote the autobiography of Marilyn Monroe and claims they're soul mates because they have the same initials or something." I laughed at my opinion, so certain was I of my new husband's agreement.

A stony silence followed during which Morris pressed his fingertips together and ominously tapped his lips here and there as though he were trying to contain the awful oncoming outburst. Bats practically boiled out of his brain.

I was mystified. What offense had I perpetrated? Was it something about Marilyn Monroe? Was the author whose name I'd forgotten his favorite?

"Autobiography?" blurted Morris vehemently. "An autobiography is the written history of a person's life narrated by himself. Marilyn Monroe did not write an autobiography. Therefore you must be mistakenly referring to her biographer."

I was horrified by my gaffe, but decided to be honest. "I don't know why, but I often confuse the two—autobiography and biography—when I talk. Not in my mind, but when I speak."

"Out loud," I said.

"To people."

"Occasionally."

"I'm sorry."

That night in the hotel bed Morris made certain our bodies never touched.

Like most marital fights, this one was short-lived; by eastern Texas we were friends again. Although I felt a slight change in Morris' attitude toward me when we arrived in Mississippi, beautifying our new home in Oxford became my principal preoccupation. Should the small bathroom above be papered in blown red roses? Or gardenias and gaudy butterflies? These vacuous concerns filled my head and in my spare time I made the friends whom I amused with my stories of life in Arizona, including the consciousness raising. I still enjoyed my husband's superiority to his colleagues and graduate students.

I can still see us at the tenure party I gave him four years after our arrival in Oxford. Never had any little professor's wife more proudly planted her sensible heels in her crowded kitchen. Boiling a colossal pot of worm-like spaghetti, my hands held captive in large red lobster claws (pot holder wedding presents), I tried to stop our son from dashing about, and steadied our second, unborn child who whirled in my big belly under my apron. Several of my husband's colleagues who had gathered there shouted "Speech, speech!" meaning me. But Morris intervened. "Brenda give a speech? Believe me, this girl hasn't produced a witty thought in her entire life!" He hugged my sagging shoulders.

What a blunt blow that was. I plastered a broad, inane grin on my face. And the rising steam from the spaghetti masked my tears.

At this point in our marriage his once gentle chiding changed into a continuous, short-tempered scold. If I were so bold as to ask to read the articles he was working on, he would disconnect from me with quick derisive snort. And Brenda attend faculty seminars? Even quailing in a darkened corner? What would be the point, he'd scoff.

By the eighth year of our marriage it had become clear that this superior being's opinion of me was largely derogatory! Like some hideous oversized crow, he picked at me while I was imprisoned in an intellectual gibbet, a situation likely to continue for the rest of our marriage. Contumely: there's the word for the dish he served up daily, though I can't be relied on to pronounce it correctly twice.

Cocktails dulled my pain. In my drunken state Morris made jokes at my expense in front of our children, belittled my attempts at self-improvement, criticized my every action and expression. He berated me with voluble streams of denunciatory Old English; I never quite knew what he was saying.

What my husband thought of me became tangled up with the scent of magnolias and traveled throughout the big house. Dreadful were the ways Morris mimicked me, lampooned my feeble attempts to improve myself or take an interest in anything scholarly. Finally, one night after our eleventh anniversary, and for the first time in our relationship, I objected, rather mildly, to his reproach. Morris reacted by exploding out the front door, pacing our grassy green lawn, and slicing the night air under the ghostly, blooming magnolias with flailing, angry arms. "Master modern English!" he roared over and over. "Master modern English!" "Master modern English!" he shouted again and again until the terrier next door was driven into a yapping frenzy. From our second story bedroom I listened as this continuous, terrifying tom-tom gradually addled, and became: "Monster, monster English. Monster, monster English."

I can't say I was terribly surprised when Morris moved out the next morning and subsequently sued for divorce. After eleven protracted and unpleasant years of marriage, he dumped me for Rowena Rood, a graduate scholar of his, now the preeminent authority on Saxon syllables. Their joint articles pile up, citations upon citation, and together, like dusty paper silhouettes, they pertly pirouette in some lofty sphere of wretched academic excellence.

I'm back in Arizona now and Morris and I share custody of our grandchildren. For six years I've been sober. On the way to my dentist I skirt the Davidson Addition and the desert where I rid myself of Maureen's book. So much has happened since that triumphant act; it makes me wince to think of the girl who stuffed The Bell Jar into a snake hole. That's one of the world's great literary works I'll never have the heart to read.

# # # #

THE END

# # # #

Metamorphosis of Me

What was it about those shoes that frightened me so? The mysterious pair of well-cared-for oxford wingtips appeared, without explanation, sitting alone on the curb outside my home one broiling June afternoon six months ago.

I made it a habit in the late afternoon to fix myself a single cup of coffee, dipping my favorite blue plastic measuring spoon in the coffee can to measure it precisely and to pour it into the filter of the coffeemaker (it's an idiosyncrasy of mine that I am careful when measuring things) and then to roam about the house twiddling the venetian blind cords so as to get the late afternoon Arizona sun streaming in at just the right angle; how gorgeous it looked making a celestial glowing spot, like the red spot on Jupiter, on my Grandmother's armoire in the corner of my bedroom. Of course, for the rest of the day the Arizona sun wasn't so pleasant, let me say that, and I had to close all the blinds around the house entirely by nine in the morning and live in a modern version of the old Natives' desert cavern, or you could say I was estivating like the animals here, but late in the day, the sun shined benignly enough. After the blinds were angled perfectly, I would ordinarily have turned to power up my laptop and it would have glowed and beeped in response: welcome to the blog-o-sphere. But that day something about the unrelenting and despondent nature of the mourning doves' call from the drive made me linger at the front window, and I adjusted the blinds so that I could look out at the sunny scene on the street. I scanned the bottom of the cactus hedge where there were several old commercial flyers inside pink plastic bags, those were folded like huge, party-sized tortillas, and I was thinking that I really need to get out there and use a rake to pull the unsightly old advertisements out of the hedge, when I spied, through a gap in the cacti, those abandoned shoes on the curb.

No, I'm rushing ahead with my story. I'm telling it wrong. Firstly, I didn't think they were shoes at all. I took them to be somethings. Unknown somethings. Perhaps, I thought, what I was seeing out there on the curb were some of those hunks of bark which the wind is forever stripping out of the palm trees around here, and the reason I thought that is because the spot where the things appeared lay directly under my tallest palm tree, the one that overhung the curb. The rich brown color and glossy polish of the objects was just like the palm bark that blows down and sits wherever it wishes. Two pieces of palm bark sitting there on the curb wouldn't have been unusual, no, I have seen that before and could have easily dealt with it. Those things come down all the time and never frighten me. Maybe palm wood is a little light, like a prop from a movie, I've often thought that before, nevertheless I've never been frightened by pieces of palm wood. Curious would be more like my reaction in that circumstance. Had it been palm wood, but it wasn't.

Through the blinds, I studied the supposed palm chunks more carefully and came to the conclusion that those shapes were too small and too oblong to be pieces of my tree. Could the thing on the curb be one shape—a dead animal?

Oh, the desert spits out horrible things from the ground: snakes, tarantulas, lizards, scorpions. You have to get used to that when you move here, which I did about a year ago, buying an old railroader's bungalow for very little money. I was downsizing, you see, preserving every bit of my retirement funds, a pension from an aerospace company where I was an engineer, and preserving my social security, fleeing to the desert from my home in Everett, Washington because of my severe rheumatoid arthritis.

If it were a dead animal there on the curb, I reasoned, I might need a shovel. I kept one for just such a contingency in a small tin shed in the backyard, and I was moving away from the front window and planning to retrieve the key to the shed from the labeled envelope in my dresser drawer when I realized that it would be strange if one of the horrid live animals in my neighborhood hadn't already carted off this dead one draped on my front curb. Then I peered at the curb one more time—intensely—and I recognized the curvy shape of the dark blots as human in origin. Probably shoes.

I came out, first checking the porch with the peephole, then unlatching the deadbolts, and finally slinking out onto the broad porch. I stepped a ways along the walk and looked back. My little dark house had a comforting look behind me. The eaves came down as if they were sheltering wings or loving arms; I hated to leave the protection of the broad concrete porch and its thick pillars to go out there and look at those weird things that had housed another person's feet at some point in time. What were they doing there in front of my house anyway?

The late afternoon concrete baked the soles of my bare feet. The sun broiled my skin and blinded me.

By the time I had reached the cactus hedge, I knew for certain what rested there on the curb.

Shoes! Dress shoes. A man's pair of dress oxford wingtips made from reddish saddle leather. Who in the world would have done such a thing to me?

Their precise, careful positioning disconcerted me, scared me. There, I said it, the shoes scared me; each shoe sat so pertly on the curb as though they had a message to deliver to me. The arrangement which someone had made with the shoes looked so methodical, each an exact twinning, and yes, I'm methodical myself, persnickety my grandmother Althias Kerrigan Grayson always called me. I know you guessed that problem of mine.

I knew at once that those were no innocent shoes that had tumbled out the door of a parked car nor could they have jostled out of the packing box on the bed of a pickup. No, someone had carefully aligned both toes so perfectly, they overhung the street without a centimeter's difference. The laces draped identically. It was as though I had stepped into the bedroom of an uptight banker.

But why was I getting so upset about the arrangement of these silly lost shoes? It wasn't the first instance of strange things at my house. When I moved into my little adobe bungalow, it was winter, and I had made a fire on the first night. I arranged the mesquite logs perfectly and used a long match to light a carefully wrapped bundle of twigs and newspaper. I settled back into my armchair to enjoy the aromatic scent of the desert wood burning, but in a few minutes I noticed the edge of one flame jiggling. Then my entire mesquite fire began shaking, dancing, and sparkling! That was a shocking mystery, but the whole thing turned out to be easy enough to explain. Being so near the Southern Pacific railroad tracks meant the passing trains actually jostled the earth and therefore my hearth. You've never lived until you've seen an animated fire.

And being close to the railroad tracks meant something else. It meant that the railroad attracted vagrants; I got used to finding peculiar things dropped in my yards by passersby.

The first week in my house I picked up a baseball hat and a jacket from the street. The next week I found a dirty T-shirt dropped in my hedge. I wrestled a teeny folded pink mitten from where it had been stuffed in a gap of my rusty chain link fence a month later, it was aged and the inside still bright pink and the outside the color of canned salmon. A child had put that there on a cold morning, no doubt. And a few weeks later a grubby tube sock, with several knots in it, drooped over my house numbers, though I thought about that for a whole day and eventually explained it as the forgotten plaything of a distracted dog. That was fairly obvious to anyone.

Something about those shoes made them different, though. I couldn't explain them as belonging to a vagrant or a child or a dog. And no other piece of abandoned clothing appears to be waiting the way shoes do. Perhaps it is because they sit up and contain a three dimensional space, like expectant dogs. You see them at the foot of a bed, at your beck and call. So how did those shoes get there?

Was it a macabre practical joke? A malicious joke? Did someone intend to mock me for my intense precision? Occasionally, other engineers at the plant in Everett had done things like that to me, leaving joke items on my desk to disturb me. Once someone had even left a pen made to look like a syringe with red ink for blood in my desk, but I never mentioned it to anyone in case they were hoping it had bothered me. You can see I had reasons to be suspicious of the shoes. The question I needed to address was did the arrival of these shoes and their careful arrangement mean someone was trying to leave a message for me?

I began peering around at the other houses to see if anyone on the street was watching me find the shoes.

But the street was deserted.

Why didn't anyone come home from work? If someone drove in, I reasoned that I could stroll over casually and ask them about the shoes without having to ring their doorbell or knock on their door. I hated ringing the doorbells of neighbors.

A part of me knew no one was going to come home right then. I had realized that people in the desert southwest return to their homes late in the day during the summer. They stay late at work and continue on to restaurants with coworkers, in order to reduce their air conditioning bill.

Had the person who left the shoes known that I would be alone when I found them?

What an odd thought. I reassured myself that no one meant those shoes to be there. No one meant to bother me in particular. The whole thing had to be some kind of accident. I had not met any of my neighbors, and therefore they couldn't possibly hold a grudge against me. I was letting the late afternoon heat and the creepy brightness distort my view of reality. Something about the heat in the afternoon here does make things creepy. It's sometimes hard to even locate another person. Everyone is busy estivating, as I explained, because the streets are broiling in early June.

I dared not touch those shoes, but I examined them closely.

They had been polished. The grooves and holes of the wingtip patterns were carefully cleaned, but still held teeny amounts of polish. New laces hung neatly arranged, not tied, but left draping nicely over the shoe sides. The tongues hadn't buckled inside the shoe, the inner liner was clean. The creases on the sides showed how often the wearer bent himself to his tasks.

Signs of resolve—new silver taps on the toes and newly resoled heels? I hadn't touched them yet, but the heels did look as though they had been replaced recently.

Had the owner moved recently to the southwest and found the conservative leather uppers unbearable? The prior day's temperature topped one hundred and ten, which isn't all that unusual. Had their owner been crossing town and simply slipped them off and gone on, I supposed, sock-footed, barefooted? Who could imagine such a thing? The image was absurd.

I left them there and retreated to the safety of my home. Several times in what was left of the daylight I parted the venetian blinds to peer at them. Could shoes set in front of a house be a sign, an evil omen from another culture? Had I offended a neighbor who practiced cult threats?

I ran through my idea of the various neighbors. An elderly man next door. A young woman and her child across the street. They weren't particularly friendly, but none of them seemed threatening. None of them seemed the type to practice voodoo.

I came back outside, cautiously, when it was dark and approached the mysterious shoes again. I bent over and got up the nerve to slip two fingers into their backs—I was horrified to think of some stranger's foot having been in there where my fingers were—and I lifted them. They were well-made shoes, and quite heavy. I glanced around furtively and took them inside. How foolish I felt to be behaving as though I were stealing them from someone. Those shoes had been dumped on me. They had imposed on me enough!

First, I put them on my couch and sat down next to them to look at them closely for a while. While I wasn't afraid of them, I didn't relish the proximity. Next, I moved them to the hearth. I sat studying them to see what they could tell me, like Sherlock Holmes does in all his stories. Then, I grilled them aggressively in my mind, probing them for signs of weakness, hoping to elicit confessions of what they were up to on my curb. Next, I interviewed them, asking them many pointed questions and considering them from various angles with less venom. Finally, I conversed with them openly and freely, searching for their experiences in an honest forum, exchanging views, so to speak.

Frankly, they seemed too much like unwelcomed company after an hour or two.

They became less menacing and annoying once they were shoved inside a grocery bag. Finally, I was able to take them outside and stow them in the trunk of my car; I did that hurriedly. But when the deed was done and the shoes were out of sight, I hesitated in my thinking–should I really donate them to a charity the next day? Were they someone's, someone who wanted to come back for them? Someone who would be expecting me to be their caretaker?

I left them in the trunk of my car overnight, though when I was in bed I began thinking that my neighbors would surely come over the next morning and ask about the shoes, if they were lost. Not that I knew any of my neighbors. Maybe they didn't know that I lived in the house now? How strangely horrible it seemed to me that the shoes could have stayed there all day and no one would have thought to come over and ask me about them. And no one took them. It made me feel isolated. Had I made no better friends with my neighbors than to have a strange pair of shoes sitting there and have no one ask about them, even in humor?

After breakfast I resolved to change the intolerable state of my isolation. I got my keys again and took the shoes out of my car trunk.

I placed the shoes back on the curb exactly as they had been and stood beside them and studied them. I acted out the scene of discovery from the day before.

No one even noticed me. The morning was already hot again and no one was outside their house.

Nothing bothered me more than contacting neighbors and I hadn't done it once since I had moved from Washington, but it was now or never. I picked up the shoes, put them in the paper bag again, and strode across the street to the house with the young woman and child. I rang the bell, though my heart was beating frantically.

She had a little girl child on her hip—the lady who answered the door. The girl was sucking an orange Popsicle and she tried to lay it against her mother's cheek. Her mother flinched and held the child's hand away. "What is it?" she asked me.

She didn't recognize me.

"I live across the street in the little green adobe bungalow. My name is Monty Grayson."

"Yes," she said. "I am Jean Gonzalez, and this is my girl, Sammy."

"Hi," said Sammy, waving her Popsicle at me.

"I'm sorry to bother you like this," I began, "and I know this is coming out of the blue, but I found these shoes, a pair of nice dress shoes, sitting on the curb outside my home just now." I had decided to lie about when I found them so as to seem natural. I showed her inside the bag where the mysterious shoes were. "I was wondering if you know anything about them?"

She came closer, opened the screen, and I was shocked when she came right out and stood on the porch with me. "No. Probably somebody just left them."

"Probably," I said.

"They're such nice shoes. Strange," she added.

"I thought that," I said. "I thought the same thing. These are very nice, expensive shoes. It says they're made in Chicago and I looked up the company and these are very expensive shoes, actually."

"Too nice for leaving," said my neighbor.

"Yes," I said.

"Funny though," she laughed.

"Yes, it's funny," I agreed happily. "I thought it was funny, too."

"It's funny," crowed the little girl.

"But you don't know anything about them?" she asked.

I was surprised she was taking any interest at all and talking to me. It was quite pleasing to talk to someone even about something so trivial. "No. I don't. I can't imagine how they got there. They are nice shoes."

"They might be my neighbor's," she said, frowning and growing concerned.

"Do you think so?" I tried to imitate her concern. I looked around me in confusion. "Which neighbor?" I asked.

"Tito. Next door to you. He has dropped things in the street before. Accidentally. He has palsy sometimes. But mostly he drops groceries and receipts."

"Do you want to ask him?" I suggested. "I can leave the shoes with you."

"Well, let's walk over together now. You can explain about them. And you can meet him."

"Okay, if you think so," I said.

Jean and Sammy and I strolled over to the little pink railroader's bungalow next door to mine and I was glad when Jean stepped forward and rang the doorbell. A man of about my age answered the door.

"Hi, Jean," said the man, stepping out from behind the screen onto his porch with us.

"Tito, this is Monty Grayson. He's living next door to you."

"Oh, I didn't know it. I don't see you out. How nice to meet you," he said. We shook hands and his handshake felt a little shakier than mine. Of course, that was the palsy.

"A little while ago Monty found these fancy men's shoes just sitting out on his curb like they didn't have a care in the world. I wondered—you didn't drop them, did you?"

"No, they're not mine. That's very strange."

I worried that Tito might have seen me replace them on the curb just then. I couldn't tell if he was only pretending to go along with my story. I was assured by his words, but I couldn't believe in them entirely.

"Kind of grand shoes for vagrants," said Tito. What a surprise it was to me that he was taking an interest in my predicament. I had felt certain that I would be the only person to think the shoes sitting there had been strange.

"I thought so too." I said, practically yelping. "But maybe that's why they left them?"

"That's a good idea. The shoes were too good. But why not sell them?" said Tito.

"I suppose they tried, but with this heat no one wanted them," Jean joined the fun of imaging scenarios that could explain what had brought the shoes there.

"They got too heavy?" Tito suggested.

"They were set out to air after being polished and someone stole them, but they got too heavy!" said Jean.

"Well, if you say you don't know anything I'll have to do something with them myself," I began. I immediately regretted saying that as I seemed to have put a damper on the conversation, the speculation, which we were so merrily engaging in together, but Tito didn't skip a beat.

"Let's donate them to our community center, Un Rincon de Los Amigos. Unless you have a favorite charity," he added.

"No, that's fine. I don't know any charities here. I'm too new in town. You take them." I handed them to him.

"Oh, no. Why don't you come to the club to see it? We need some new members."

"I don't speak Spanish," I confessed.

"That's all right. Anyone can come. There aren't only Spanish speakers there. And the Spanish speakers all know English."

And so that very next day my good neighbor Tito walked with me down to that clubhouse of his, which happens to be close by, and he let me donate the shoes in a section of the clubhouse created for just such a purpose. I think those shoes I had found were gone within a few days, but to tell you the truth I didn't pay much attention to them again, my focus was diverted from them and their eventual fate, because I was too excited to have a place where I belonged and people with whom to speak.

Tito introduced me to everyone there and I was very nervous to meet new people. I told Tito I thought I would make a lot of errors (this has been my experience up until now), but he reassured me that I wouldn't. People at the clubhouse, he explained, were nonjudgmental. So that is how I first went to his clubhouse, at the back of a local barbershop, which is my own clubhouse now, where I can stay, and also the club of many of my neighbors, who are now my friends, though some of them tease me by saying "why don't you stay at home once or twice, Monty?"

I have to brag that I have really become a different person due to the influence of Tito's wonderful club. I have undergone a miraculous metamorphosis, and I know it is difficult to believe, but I have actually made an awfully lot of friends there, and I go there every single day without fail and stay nearly the whole day until they have to throw me out on my ear almost. What do I do there? Well, I read magazines and visit with the people who show up. I sometimes play chess. Would you believe it of me? The lady at the desk always joshes me about the fact that I am the last one there and almost always the first one to arrive, and she likes to tell others about how they have to throw me out to get me out. She's an amusing woman.

Her boyfriend's name is Cisco. He is a refined gentleman who works as an auto mechanic and he likes various kinds of dancing. He does not want me to meet them where they go dancing.

I've had a few of them at the club say they wonder why I don't go out on my own somewhere sometime, but I don't want to be lonely anymore now that I have found friends for the first time in my life. Besides, I like them, I tell them. I like them all. There's nothing wrong with a man letting people know he likes them.

I am getting to know details about them, the people at the club. I have begun this project in a methodical manner, being persnickety again, I suppose you could say. For example, I know many of the members' birthdays and their anniversaries (if they are couples) and I have even noted their patron saints. I am making a spiral notebook for all the information I gather. If they were originally from another country, I make sure to know facts about their country. This alone is quite an undertaking. The club has two Peruvians and three Cubans. There is a lady from Germany, too. She's Bavarian. I know where most of them live and what they used to do, because most of them are retired like me. Oh, and if they work, I try to give them small gifts which I know an employed person would appreciate, like a gift card to a restaurant nearby their work.

Tito reminded me that some people might like to retain a great deal of privacy, the way that I was before I had the club in my life. But I can't worry if they are sensitive; I like finding out about them.

Tito mentioned this subject again the other day and I had to remark that he was getting repetitious. He said, "Monty, are you really listening to what I'm saying?"

I laughed. "I'm a detail-oriented person," I told him. "That's something that hasn't changed about me. It's the engineer in me. You can't repress it, when you're a detail-oriented person, even if you wanted to."

If the clubhouse is closed, I phone the members. I phoned them all on Christmas Eve and then again on Christmas Day this year. Every last person who went to the club. I have all their phone numbers, cell and land lines, and I checked in on how they were doing for their holiday, what they received, any interesting impressions that they had of the holiday. On most regular days, if I don't see them in the club, I might call them. I have noticed some people aren't there as often as they were when I first started attending. I wish they would come back.

Things have changed, and I'm a different person now, and the point of my lengthy story is to illustrate that shoes, any strange shoes found in front of your house, could be the shoes of anyone, and any stranger could bring you to any friend, and it's a freer way to think. All right, maybe it sounds a little crazy, but it works for me and I think it would work for anybody. Lonely people must always think that way, the way I learned to think from the shoes left in front of my house.

# # # #

THE END

# # # #

Snake Dance Disaster

A teenage boy fled out the backdoor of a rambling desert mansion. The instant he was outside, he locked his angry gaze onto the ground and muttered madly to himself while his feet shuffled him forward on a trail through saguaro cacti and dense desert brush. He shuffled for a long way without glancing back, but when the trail split on either side of a barrel cactus, he wheeled around and squinted at the mammoth adobe edifice silhouetted against the dawn. He was in time to see a light yellowish sky stroked with cloud wisps like the petals of an enormous daffodil.

He was safe. No one was coming out of the house after him. Although it had seemed unlikely, he'd probably, actually, escaped.

Along with eleven other boys, Tim Delfs, the boy who was running away, had arrived that dawn at the Katherine J. Bolls mansion. The home was owned by old Missy Bolls, an heir of Katherine J., a fierce woman who had made her fortune in Bolls Penetrating Cold Cream. Missy Bolls never stayed in her Arizona home in the sweltering summer; she preferred the family mansion on the Hudson River, and she generously donated the use of a wing of the house and the meandering trails of her vast desert grounds to the local Red Birds and Sparrows for their morning programs and overnight encampments.

Tim, who was a Boy Scout, ran along one of these trails wearing the costume of a Hopi Snake Priest, or–as he called himself–a Naked Fake Holy Roller Priest. His bare chest, arms, and face had been smeared with black greasepaint interrupted with white zigzag lightning symbols. An arc of white paint flowed from the corners of his mouth to his ears. A suede kilt, poorly decorated using the newest crafting craze, liquid embroidery, hung loosely on his hips. At the back of the kilt an eyeless and moth-eaten fox pelt dangled in resignation, its vacant eye sockets gawking, its flattened snout dragging in the dust. While real Snake Priests danced barefooted, Tim tripped along in canvas basketball sneakers. Of all the costume, the only authentic parts were the fox pelt and the buckskin strings which held a real turtle shell to each of Tim's calves. Inside the shells, dried deer hoofs tumbled with a noise like coconuts pummeling someone's head in a goofy Saturday morning cartoon.

Tim was expected, while in that ridiculous costume, to replicate a Hopi Indian Snake Dance; at least, that was what they had been practicing for three whole weeks under the stern tutelage of Mr. Holt Himmelstein. But the phony dance was going badly. None of them understood how to make the rattles on their legs work, and they couldn't keep track of the steps in the dance sequence. Tim hated the whole fiasco and he was dead-set against dancing it.

Tim had wanted to quit scouts for six months, due to his decreasing interest and his terror of Mr. Himmelstein, but he'd always lost his nerve. Try as he would, Tim couldn't get up the courage to write the letter and confront his father who romanticized his own time in scouting, and who worshipped at the altar of Baden-Powell. This inability to quit tormented Tim. Would he go on forever in scouting? Exactly how long, maximum, could they keep him? If he continued in scouting, Tim feared, one day he might be displayed with other scouting projects in an upright case at the county fair. He figured he'd be the nation's oldest, completely deranged scout, and his only friends would be squirrels, small boys, and people who liked to whittle.

Angry words floated about in Tim's head, words describing all the monstrous shams of the world, the fakery of the adult empire, its artifice and insincerity, its ridiculous requests of youth such as forcing them to replicate a Hopi Snake Dance, and how shams like this were perpetrated on teenagers such as him all over the world in the name of culture. How many poor Hungarian boys were parading around in ribbons? How many Oceana youths straddled logs and were coated in mud or were forced to swallow fire or toads? While he pitied these poor kids, Tim knew he wouldn't put up with these shams anymore, anywhere, anyhow from a father who wouldn't listen to reasonable objections, who sat at his desk twiddling a pen while smiling faintly as he relived his experiences in the world of acrid smoke, the distant campfire world of Eagle Scouts and his boyhood, some sham world of marvelous fishing camps by sparkling rivers in the Michigan woods. According to Tim's father, he had forged lifelong friendships in these camps with people he'd apparently never seen again. He had learned from the ways of the stoic Indian and yet knew nothing about modern Indian life. Hearing his father tell it, he had braved many things, taken on challenges which he couldn't describe adequately to Tim. Tim, who had noticed all his life that he was not living in Michigan, but in the Arizona desert, knew scouting and being an outdoors man, didn't have the same meaning to him as it did to his father.

That morning in June at dawn, he shuffled forward, jabbing the toes of his tennis shoes into the dirt with each step so that little puffs of dust shot up ahead of him. Puff by puff he made plans to leave the fake Boy Scout world. The dirt he made fly coated his legs as he trotted along, his clenched fists pounded the air beside him, his mouth mumbling words. Damned Boy Scouts, cursed Baden-Powell. That morning, at his friend Andy Shipman's urging, Tim was running away, if only temporarily, from the stupidity.

Tim stopped on the trail. "Andy?" he called in the direction of the arroyo that was now paralleling the trail. "A-A-Andy, I did it. I got away." He crouched down in some tall weeds, peering into the arroyo and around the barbed girth of another barrel cactus. Andy had promised him he would hide in the arroyo at a spot after the trail split. "Where are you, old buddy?"

"Over here," said a mesquite tree beside the arroyo. "Get over here before somebody sees you."

Tim doubled back, skirted a bed of purple-hued prickly pear cacti, and charged into the low branches of the mesquite. With his hands snapping the brittle black mesquite branches, and his tennis shoes crunching the old mesquite litter that covered the ground, he made his way into a small clearing. Once there, he hunkered down beside his friend.

Andy Shipman's slender chest, his face, and arms had been painted pink and he wore a white kilt, as poorly decorated as Tim's chestnut one. Andy was an Antelope Priest. In contrast to his friend's blonde crew-cut, Andy's hair was long and brown and parted low, so that it swept thickly over his forehead and one eye, surfer-boy style, like Brian Wilson on the cover of one of the latest Beach Boys' albums. Andy was a head shorter than Tim and more agile; they'd met in the Viet Nam Combat Club at Chaparral Junior High School when Andy had jumped on Tim's back unexpectedly. The next semester they'd joined the Rocketry and Airplane Club together.

"Andy, old buddy, old boy, we're free," Tim said.

"Yeah," said Andy, "Scratch one Antelope Priest and one Snake Priest."

"They're back there practicing right now," said Tim.

"Still?" asked Andy in disbelief.

"Mr. Himmelstein's making them work on their fluid, basal notes," Tim explained with a groan.

"Those poor idiots," sighed Andy. "If I hear about fluid, basal tones one more time I'll puke."

"Thank God we're out of that fiasco," said Tim.

"What's a fiasco?" asked Andy.

"It means a big mess. My sister Sharon, she's in college, she taught me that."

"That's a good word for it—fiasco. Mr. Himmelstein's flippin' fiasco."

"I'd sure like to get this greasepaint off and some clothes on," said Tim, wiping the black paint on his shoulder with his thumb.

Andy glanced at Tim's legs and noticed the turtle shell rattles. "Take off your rattles," Andy said, nodding toward two shells he'd hurled into the weeds. "I threw mine over there."

Tim obediently untied one rattle and handed it to Andy who chucked it aside. The second leather tie was more challenging; Andy watched Tim's clumsy hands struggle with the knot.

"Let's find the girl's camp," said Andy, clambering down the crumbling back of the arroyo. "If we stay in the arroyo nobody will see us." He sauntered away awkwardly, his sneakers sinking in the arroyo's deep sand.

"Wait," called Tim, "I'll come with you. Let me get this stupid thing off." Red-faced, groaning, Tim stretched the leather until it snapped. He tossed the rattle and scooted down the embankment.

"I'm quitting scouts. I've made up my mind," said Andy when Jim caught up with him. Following his momentous announcement, Andy climbed a boulder and leaped into the sand.

Tim aped his friend's leap off the same boulder, but landed sideways, barely checking his fall with a wild wave of his arms. "I wish my dad would let me," he said, straightening up.

"Let you?" said Andy through clenched teeth, "Don't ask him. Tell him. Tell him afterwards, after you've done it. Tell him you're through making a fool of yourself with these moronic Indian rituals."

"I can't," said Tim, trudging along with his head down.

"You've got to get the guts to do it."

"I don't know how."

"You've got to get mad. That's all."

"I never really get mad," Tim explained. "Only in my head."

"Think about something that will get you mad."

"Thinking never gets me mad enough."

"Think!"

Tim hiked his sloppy kilt higher on his hips. "Well, I know one thing that's sort of getting me mad. If I stay in scouting, Sharon says she won't teach me to drive her Volkswagen and she won't let me work on it. I want to do a brake job on it with her, but she says she won't give me a chance to help her because she doesn't want to be associated with an Eagle Scout. She says it's too uncool."

"That should do it. That would be enough to make me mad," said Andy, "if I wanted to do a brake job on a Volkswagen, I'd make sure I could do it! I'd be mad if I couldn't."

"Well, it does make me mad...kinda. Also, she says it's disrespectful for us to be doing these Indian dances. Heck, we're not even Indians! If we try to be authentic like Mr. Himmelstein wants, it's even dumber, because we can't be authentic 'cause we're not Hopis! American weren't even nice to the Hopis, ever, I mean not even once probably! Sharon's taking American History Revisited—this cool course at the university—and she says there's going to be protests against the kind of dumb stuff we're doing for Mr. Himmelstein. Protests. Protest marches. People are having sit-ins where they protest junk like this thing we're in today. They just show it to be the sham it really is. It's great. Heck, she might even protest us the next time, she said, even if she has to go by herself and gets arrested. She's real brave. She doesn't even care what my dad would think. Not at all. Not if a thing is a big sham like this thing."

"See, that's what you need. I wish she was protesting today, because they might call this thing off. Being part of a dumb thing like this makes me so mad."

"Yeah. It does me too."

"You don't sound convinced," Andy observed.

"Ah, well, you know, I told you I never really get very mad."

"Oh, man," said Andy, rolling his eyes. He veered to the side of the arroyo and scaled the bank for a glimpse above. Tim came up beside him and popped his head and shoulders over the top.

"Down!" said Andy, yanking him back, "Himmelstein."

Tim barely raised his head and saw Mr. Himmelstein, a former Marine, six foot three, with cold blue eyes and a glossy reddish face, pounding past.

"Do you think he's searching for us?" asked Tim in horror.

"No. I don't think so," whispered Andy. "I'll bet he's going down to the clearing." Andy, and then Tim, raised their heads tentatively; Mr. Himmelstein had vanished, and in the distance they spied a colony of young girls crawling over the peak of a boulder, scrambling up the crest on all fours, their hands and feet splayed on the rough stone surface, their bottoms thrust into the air so that they looked, against what was now the yellow of the still-rising sun, like a swarm of darkling beetles.

"The girl's camp," said Andy, jumping down from the side of the embankment. "Come on."

Tim plunged through the sand after him. "What about Himmelstein?"

"Forget him. We're going to see girls."

"Okay." Tim charged ahead of Andy. "Hey, maybe they're in their nighties."

"From now on, stay near the bank," said Andy, running up to Tim's side and sweeping an arm out to restrain his friend and herd him into the cover, the desert broom bushes, boulders, and overhanging mesquite trees, that the nearness of the bank afforded.

For the rest of their trek, they traveled along this verdant edge. The sun seemed to haul itself over the mountains and the cool morning air was rapidly being replaced by the scorching feeling on your skin of June in Arizona. Using the exposed roots of the mesquite trees for handrails, they crawled halfway up the steep bank several times in search of the girls' overnight encampment.

Eventually, Andy stopped. "Listen," he said.

"What?" asked Tim. Cicadas buzzed in the trees overhead; it was difficult to hear anything else.

But when Tim paused, he could hear it.

Shrill shouts rang out in the distance. "We're almost there," said Andy.

Ahead, under a brilliant green palo verde, flood waters had carved out a perfect hollow. "Up here," said Andy. Together they crept to the brim of the arroyo for a clear view of a peculiar scene.

Girls squatted around a ramada, each equidistant from the others. They were solitary, tending upturned red or green coffee cans. The sides of each can had been punch with holes; smoke puffed from some of the openings and there were eggs, sunny side up, sprawled on the upside down coffee can bottoms. Next to the lit coffee can stoves, there were tuna fish cans; they had been filled with paraffin poured over spirals of cardboard. Wax-dipped strings protruded from the center of the tuna fish cans like bombs and the girls with the unlit stoves wailed, "Light mine next!" A harried lady lit the bombs and place them under the stoves. Beside her a small glum girl doled out eggs from a carton.

"There aren't many older girls," said Tim after they had studied the scene for a while.

"Yeah, they're mostly Sparrows, not Red Birds," said Andy.

"Young Sparrows."

"Oh, there's the older ones." Andy pointed to a mesquite tree.

"I think the fourth one in line has boobs," said Andy, squinting.

Tim studied the line of girls carefully counting back four from the front. He stared at the subject's chest. "I guess so. She's pretty far away, though."

They reviewed the line again.

After a few minutes, Andy nudged Tim and pointed at a large white-haired woman in green shorts who was guarding a cauldron of boiling water. "Look at that," he said in awe. "It's Huemac's four-hands-wide woman."

"What?"

"Remember in honors Spanish? That nutty Aztec king who was looking for a lady with a big rump? Four-hands-wide?"

"Oh–really? We actually had that in class?" said Tim.

"Sure. Mr. Grandillas laughed a whole bunch about it."

"I don't remember that. I shoulda been paying attention to that. You were a lot better in Spanish than me."

The large woman squirted pink dishwashing liquid into the pot and stirred it with a ladle. When she finished, some of the other the girls who had eaten took turns dipping bags made out of dishrags sewn together with shoelaces and holding aluminum camp ware into the boiling soapy water and then into a rinse tub. They hung the dripping bags on the mesquite tree's limbs and flocked to another, more remote ramada.

Andy and Tim watched the younger girls eat their fried egg breakfast and mill around slapping hands and singing songs. When they sang about a chalet in Switzerland, Tim noticed a pretty girl who kept turning her sneakers inward, pointing her toes together in a dainty fashion. She wore a beaded Indian belt which held up an oversized pair of shorts. With the belt tightly cinched, the big shorts gaped in the back. Tim observed another girl collect something from under the picnic table and slip it down the gap.

"What was that?" asked Tim when he realized Andy had been watching the same girl.

"I think the girl found one of those cicada bug husks. She put that down the other girl's pants."

"Oh, gee," said Tim. He wanted to slap the sneaking girl who'd done that. With an infuriated gaze, he followed her movement about the camp. He was enjoying this stir of protectiveness when Andy suddenly fell on him, squashing him down.

"Hey," said Tim, "what's going on?" He tried to throw Andy off his back, then froze.

A woman sprinted down the arroyo, her boots thrashing the sand, shooting it everywhere. "Get back here!" she shouted to a small girl in front of her. She grabbed one of the girl's hunched shoulders and pulled her backwards. The girl's feet sank into the sand and one foot came out of its shoe. With her anklet drooping down, the girl posed for a moment like a little pony with an injured hoof. Then she fought to escape, ducking and bobbing at the waist. While coming up once, she glanced into the hollow.

"Oh," she said. "Oh look." The lady, who had a firm hold of the girl, bent down. She looked directly into the hollow at Andy and Tim.

"Damn," said Andy softly.

"Hell," said Tim.

"What are you doing in there?" asked the woman. "Are you scouts?"

"Damn," said Andy again, licking his lips. "Yes, ma'am," he said, coming out with Tim behind him. "We're cutting more cottonwood for the bower. For the Snake Dance." He looked frantically about him for the white trunk of a cottonwood tree. "You don't happen to know where any cottonwoods are, do you?"

"No, but I've just seen Mr. Himmelstein coming down the trail and I intend to ask him about this. Our agreement was that scouts would not come into this part of the camp."

Andy and Tim backed away in the direction they had come from. "He knows we're here, ma'am. He does. He asked us to come down and cut more cottonwood, muy pronto," Tim said.

"Stay right there," ordered the woman, moving up the side of the arroyo, pulling the small girl with her.

"Go!" said Andy and he shoved Tim the instant the woman turned her back on them.

They ran, ignoring the lady's shouts, and they might have gotten away, if Tim hadn't turned around.

Mr. Himmelstein stood on the arroyo's bank. "Andrew Shipman! Timothy Delfs! Get up here right now!"

They stopped.

"Damn," said Andy, blowing out his breath.

"Oh hell," said Tim. He bounced the toe of his sneaker off another rock that was buried in sand in the middle of the arroyo.

"Sir?" called Andy, buying time.

"Get up here!" Mr. Himmelstein hollered.

Andy sighed and squinted back at Mr. Himmelstein's tall figure.

"Now!" he yelled.

"Oh brother," said Tim to Andy. "I'm sorry." He hurried away toward Mr. Himmelstein.

"We're doomed," groaned Andy, following more slowly.

They climbed out of the arroyo with their heads hanging low.

"Where are your leg rattles?" roared Mr. Himmelstein.

They had expected him to ask them what they had been doing.

Andy opened his mouth, preparing to invent an explanation.

"Never mind," said Mr. Himmelstein, who was completely preoccupied. "Get back up the trail. We're about to make our entrance."

Side by side, Andy and Tim tramped back to the mansion with Mr. Himmelstein at their heels. The sun was a brilliant yellow orb, well above the horizon, beating down on them mercilessly, broiling their grease painted chests.

"It's got to be ninety degrees already," said Andy quietly.

"We're going to die," replied Tim simply.

In a longing backward glance, they watched the girls lining up and marching away. They'd see them next during the absurd Indian dance, when Andy and Tim were certain to be objects of derision. With Mr. Himmelstein behind them, escape now was impossible.

Soon the Bolls mansion appeared through the thickets of cacti, palo verde trees, and towering saguaros that surrounded it. Andy and Tim's troop had gathered outside the mansion under the scant shade of a mesquite tree.

When the prodigals approached, they saw two boys, one painted pink, the other black, fighting for possession of a small bowl of water. Several of the black Snake Priests skipped around the mesquite tree, their chestnut kilts slipping down on their narrow hips, their fox pelts flopping in the dust. One somber antelope priest clutched a green plastic bowl against his flabby stomach. He glanced into the bowl at a heap of yellow corn meal and rolled his eyes upward, sighing.

A boy darted to Andy and Tim and thrust gourd rattles into their hands. "Where'd you guys go?" he asked. "We kept looking for you in the bathrooms."

"Oh, it's a long story," said Andy. He noticed several of the boys listening. With Mr. Himmelstein out of earshot, he added, "We didn't want to do this dumb thing."

"Nobody does," one boy claimed. "Except for that weirdo," he whispered, "the one who plays with snakes."

"Mr. Himmelstein's pet," said Andy. They all looked for the tall boy in horn rims. He was new to their troop and they didn't know his name.

"There he is," said someone, "El Freako Plenty." They regarded him, their nemesis, where he sat with his back leaning against another mesquite. Earlier, he had bragged about someone from the newspapers being there to take pictures of him handling the milked rattlesnakes.

"He looks kinda sick," said Tim, cheerfully.

"He always looks that way," said Andy.

Mr. Himmelstein approached. "All right," he said, "I want the Antelope Priests first." He made a chopping motion with one arm to tell them where to queue.

Tim fell back and Andy shuffled into his place in the line of pink painted priests. Andy glanced over his shoulder and gave Tim a feeble wave of his rattle. Mr. Himmelstein inspected the boys in the gruff manner of an ex-Marine and gave the command that sent them forward. The Antelope Priests trotted off, their fox furs swallowing dirt, their jittery rattles completely uncoordinated.

"Snake Priests!" bellowed Mr. Himmelstein. The blackened boy, including Tim, blundered into a line where the others had stood.

"We're going to mess this whole thing up," moaned someone in front of Tim.

"It's going to be ugly," said someone else.

Mr. Himmelstein watched the Antelope Priests depart. When the last of the stiff pink figures had disappeared around the bend, he sent the Snake Priests forward.

Tim felt a wave of sickness tear through him when he jogged ahead; he'd forgotten the whole dance. How many times were they supposed to circle the clearing at the beginning? And what came before they jumped on the stupid plank?

After traveling a short distance, Tim realized Mr. Himmelstein wasn't directly behind them. Others in the line, sensing Mr. Himmelstein's absence, relaxed, slowed down, and even turned around to share morbid jokes about their fate.

"Wipe those silly grins off your faces! Your faces need to be taunt, as I have told you a thousand times!" shouted Mr. Himmelstein, dashing in upon them from a side trail. They cringed and sped up, their expression as 'taunt' as teenaged boys painted black in such extreme temperatures could manage.

They were almost to the clearing. One bend of the trail remained. Mr. Himmelstein shouted more orders, but Tim couldn't hear any of them anymore.

As the line of boys rounded the last bend, a horrid wailing cry and rattling noise met them. Tim was shocked to hear how poorly the Antelope Priests sang. Then he saw the line of pink priests, surrounded by hundreds of shrieking and laughing Sparrows and Red Birds, standing in a circle and sitting on two bleachers. Every girl's face seemed to turn up the trail to see the black Snake Priests arriving.

"Here we go," said one boy sadly.

In postures outlandish and with much squirming and twisting, the blackened boys danced into the clearing to join the pink boys. They tried to maintain the correct form–to raise their feet and bring them down loosely with the heel barely striking the ground–but many of the leg rattles slipped toward the boys' ankles as though the turtle shells wanted to slink away as much as the boys did. Other leg rattles made weak rustling noises because the hoofs inside had jammed. In desperation the boys with the noiseless rattles resorted to jiggling their legs up and down, or, in a futile attempt to free the hoofs, they did a twist with the turtle shells whipping from side to side.

There was a frightened hopelessness, a terror rising in them all, which made them continue when they should have quit. They willed the turtle shells to rattle correctly. They beat themselves to make them do so. They flung themselves, jived, jumped, shivered and leaped; but the rattles omitted only slight clattering, chattering noises.

One by one, their chests heaving from the tremendous effort they had made to make their feeble rattling, many of the Snake Priests, including Tim, adopted dramatic postures in a line across from the pink Antelope Priests. A small number of boys kept going. They tried in a surreptitious manner to urge those who had stopped to resume. Finally every boy but one had stopped. The lone dancer flounced about the clearing in a rapt, seizure-like fashion, quaking, quivering. He was a liquid body of thump and bounce, his eyes closed, his trembling, jellified body moving forward to some very wrong inner beat. The audience snickered.

The dancer's eyes shot open, and he halted in the middle of the hideous contortion with one shoulder high and the other low, his hips pushed out, arms and rattles akimbo. In one corner of the clearing, Tim noticed Mr. Himmelstein glowering at the boy with a look capable of singeing a hole through steel. The boy dashed to the end of the Snake Priest line.

What was next? They shook their gourd rattles meekly and stared ahead, thinking. A bower of cottonwood branches had been placed in the northeast corner of the dirt clearing; a heavy plank lay nearby. In a panicky manner a Snake Priest with greasy black hair bolted to the plank. En mass, the other Snake Priests tripped after him; Tim felt himself moving forward with them, then being swept along, jostling for position in the line. Halfway across the plank, the lead boy stopped, jumped up awkwardly and came down with a tremendous stomp. The retort when he landed sent a white-winged dove rocketing off the top of a nearby saguaro cactus and made the circle of girl applaud. Passing over the plank, they each stomped it mightily. At his turn, Tim did his best to crush the plank, but he blushed to feel, under his kilt, the Y at the front of his underwear yawn open at the effort.

A large boy crossed the plank last. He marched to the center and stomped and jumped and stomped and jumped and the crowd of girls applauded until he lost his footing and fell off sideways. When he scrambled up and limped away, the girls howled. Mr. Himmelstein's furious blue eyes locked on the exuberant boy.

"Oh God," said a Snake Priest beside Tim, "I feel so hot."

The Snake Priests had reformed beside Tim, their gourd rattles quivering weakly. Was this when they were supposed to emulate the sound of a giant rattlesnake?

"Is this when we–" began Tim to the boy who had spoken to him.

"I don't know," said the other priest, shaking his head, "I can't think straight in this heat."

Just then, a weak whimper, like a child's wheedling impression of a ghost, emerged. As more boys joined in, some began swaying back and forth. Swaying and swaying and swaying. Hah. Hah.

That song petered out without anything replacing it. Some of the still-swaying boys frowned.

The Antelope Priest with the plastic bowl of corn meal staggered forward. Walking nervously in the clearing, he pinched a bit of the yellow meal between his thumb and forefinger and threw it out as though he were discarding a weevil.

Out of the Snake Priest line, El Freako Plenty stepped boldly. Startled to find himself alone, he rejoined the line. Words were exchanged, and two boys stepped out with him a second time. The three performed a strange, shivery, leaping dance. Around and around the circle, like a herd of pitiful, wounded animals, the boys milled, their gangly leaps and hops propelled them in unpredictable directions. During one especially dramatic lunge by the tall Snake Priest, the boy with the corn meal, stepped out. A full force smash between the two of them resulted. The bowl pitched forward and corn meal flew out in a yellow cloud. The whole ring of girls shrieked with laughter.

"This is awful," whispered the boy beside Tim. "I feel faint. And there are newspaper people here." The boy pointed his rattle to a spot where a man with a camera and another with a notebook stood.

Tim braved a glance at Mr. Himmelstein and saw that his head was bent forward and he was slowing massaging his brows.

El Freako Plenty seemed stunned by the accident with the corn meal bowl and he paused to shake himself. He then bounded into the boughs of cottonwood, which were heaped in a spot near the plank. Tim saw the boy bend down and open the door of a small cage. He came out quickly, holding himself strangely upright.

A rattlesnake wiggled in one hand.

From the crowd, there came several long, unconfined screams closely followed by a wave of nervous laughter.

The Snake Priest danced the circle with his snake. The Antelope Priests and the left-over Snake Priests chanted and vibrated their rattles. Tim couldn't remember the chant that went with this movement of the dance so he mumbled something. An Antelope Priest, brandishing a wand, whisked by. The tall boy placed the rattler on top of his head and then draped it around his neck.

Tim looked away, he couldn't watch anymore. The dumb dance was nearly over, but he felt defeated. If he stayed in scouting there were bound to be more of these humiliations. The next meeting Mr. Himmelstein might yell at him for disappearing with Andy. And Andy would be gone, having already quit. Andy was right; he ought to get mad. It was time to rebel. If he didn't like scouting, why should he stay in? But quitting–how could he get the nerve?

When he glanced back at El Freako Plenty, something seemed wrong. Like a sleepwalker. He had drooping arms and a strange sideways gait.

"What's he doing?" whispered the boy beside Tim who was noticing the change in El Freako Plenty.

"I don't know," said Tim. "I don't think this is part of the dance."

El Freako Plenty raised the arm without the snake slowly as though he were seeking permission to be excused.

"He looks kinda funny," said Tim.

A stricken look appeared on El Freako Plenty's blackened face when his knees buckled and he swooned, flopping to a seated position, leaning forward on the arm without the snake.

Every gourd rattle stopped. The circle of girls shaded their eyes with their palms and seemed to be saluting El Freako Plenty.

"It's heat stroke!" someone shouted.

"Don't panic," cried another.

"Raise his feet," shouted someone else. "And get him in the shade!"

From high in the bleachers came a long, piercing cry, "He's been bitten!"

Tim started at a sudden strange movement at his side. "I feel fa...fa...," mumbled a voice. The boy beside Tim sank to his knees. Tim tried to step away, but the boy seized the bottom of Tim's kilt and yanked it down, yanked it all the way to Tim's ankles. Tim was conscious that the eyes of many of the girls diverted to his predicament. Tim bent over and, wrenching the boy's hand off his kilt, he tried to snatch the waist of kilt up to his thighs while he hobbled away. Tim noticed another boy who had swooned and then another. Then the whole line of black Snake Priests were either on the ground or wobbling, only Tim stood upright.

Then El Freako Plenty fell to the sand, prone, his glasses underneath him pushed halfway off his face. The rattlesnake squirmed slowly away from his neck.

The rattler darted toward the bleachers and the circle of girls broke outward, and fell back screaming. A chaos of running legs, a hullabaloo of fallen hats, hollers, and general hysteria ensued.

"Help!" screamed three stationary little girls. The snake headed directly for them.

Mr. Himmelstein bellowed, "Get the cage!" A wild-eyed Antelope Priest hopped into the bower to retrieve it.

Tim blundered to the edge of the clearing. Everywhere there were people terrified by the imagined snake. A stooped-over man and woman surrounded a creosote bush. "I saw it go in there," said the woman.

"No, listen. It's over here," said another man, running past.

"She's right. It's the wavy thing in that shadowy part," said the stooped-over man, pointing with his stick.

Tim saw the four-hands-wide woman stumble up a trail in the direction of the Bolls mansion. As she ran she was circling her huge arms and whooping: "Move girls! It's coming!"

Andy raced over to Tim.

"Did anyone see me? Did any girls notice," asked Tim. "Did they see that guy beside me faint and pull my kilt down?"

"No. Everybody was looking at the snake. Come on. Let's get out of here. It's all over."

Tim let himself be dragged forward by Andy. Girls could be seen far down the side trails, running, screeching. Andy and Tim ran with them. In moments ambulance sirens shrieked onto the Bolls estate and someone spoke into a megaphone, repeating complicated commonsense commands.

"Jeez, are you absolutely sure no one saw my kilt go down?" said Tim.

"Sure, I'm sure," said Andy. "They were all looking at the snake and El Freako Plenty on the ground. Wasn't it great when he fainted?"

"Nothing was great!" replied Tim. "My pants were pulled down! I'm never going to be able to forget this. This is going to be the nightmare of my entire life. All I can think about is girls seeing my pants go down. A bunch of girls saw me in my underwear!"

"Don't sweat it."

"Don't sweat it? Is that all you can say? This is the worst thing that ever happened to me. This is worse than throwing up on Francesca Vasquez in fourth grade!"

"Forget it," said Andy.

"You know what?" said Tim.

"What?" replied Andy.

"I feel really mad."

"What, finally!" screeched Andy happily.

"Finally."

"Really?"

"I feel so mad about being undressed in front of people who were girls."

"And so?"

"I'm going to quit scouts. I'll come over to your house this afternoon. You get out your typewriter and I'll write my letter of resignation to send to Mr. Himmelstein."

"Wow!" said Andy. "We can send them in at the same time."

"I'm so mad. Some guy just pulled my pants off in front of a bunch of girls."

"I think you're mad, but say it like you mean it."

"I'm mad."

"Louder."

"I'm mad!" screamed Tim.

Just then two Red Birds in pigtails came along a path that merged in front of Tim and Andy and at the sight of the screaming priests in pink and black greasepaint they hugged each other.

"I'm really, really, really mad!" screamed Tim.

"He's been bitten," yelled one of the girls, pulling her friend back from Andy and Tim until they both got the courage to turn and flee.

The next afternoon, after the disastrous Snake Dance, Tim visited Andy's house and together they relished typing and sending their letters of resignation to Mr. Himmelstein.

The next weekend Tim's big sister congratulated him for doing something in what she deemed 'the progressive movement,' and one glorious Sunday she let Andy and Tim help her boyfriend do a brake job on her Volkswagen Beetle.

But, unfortunately for Tim, other, bad consequences emerged from the Snake Dance.

Tim's father refused to speak to him for weeks after he discovered that Tim had sent the letter to Mr. Himmelstein and quit scouting. Their eyes never met during that time and Mr. Delfs sniffed whenever he saw his youngest son, which was seldom because his scowling father avoided him. Then, a week later on a Sunday morning in early July, Tim's father called his son into his office.

Tim's father sat placidly at the desk, watching the monsoon rain drip from the eaves onto a small patch of Bermuda grass, and after the two of them had sat there quietly Mr. Delfs launched into a long, slow series of quiet, impassive questions, a line of subtle questioning, about Tim's intentions and motives for quitting scouts. He made Tim question his own inability to confront his father directly. He talked about the mistake of letting the fear of others rule your life, and he asserted that you could have fear even when you rebelled, that rebellion didn't banish fear and that the only way to banish fear was to accept your responsibilities and fulfill them.

He made Tim explore the true nature of quitting and discussed whether quitting was going to become a way of life. Was he going to start lots of projects and stop them? Tim felt horrified by the suggestion; he had always excelled in school. Besides, Tim objected, he hadn't started the Snake Dance project. The whole thing had been Mr. Himmelstein's idea. Tim explained that imitating Native Americans was no longer cool and he had liked many activities in scouting until the sham ceremonies began and then he objected on the grounds that replicating Native American ceremonies was silly and disrespectful. Tim's father was silent and then contrasted Tim's quitting with his older brother's integrity and will-power in becoming an Eagle Scout and later starting his own engineering firm. Did success in life mean sometimes compromising your high ideals and carrying through with something that you didn't agree with 100%? No matter where you worked wouldn't there be something objectionable about it? Would wives and children disappoint Tim later? Could he quit on them?

Then Tim's father paused and asked if Tim would be following his older sister's lead in his life choices? Where did he think following a sister, a female, would take someone? Did successful people ever take their ideas from women? When had he ever heard of a successful man taking his ideas and ideals from a woman, especially a young woman? Did Tim identify with females more than males, asked his father? Tim squirmed when his father said that. There seemed to be strange implications, weird side issues, branching off from his decision which Tim had never imagined, and which seemed absurd. Tim tried to contain and hide his apprehension for weeks after the interview ended.

That October, when Mr. Delfs planned the annual fishing trip to Aguabampo on the Sea of Cortez, he included his two older sons, but not Tim.

Startled by his father's ferocity and staying power over the silly issue of the Snake Dance, Tim felt himself being cautious and mistrustful around people and he withdrew more from situations. Though Tim remained close to his sister and formed a happy marriage and had children, time could never break through the divide, the cold fury and disfavor, which his father had built up against his youngest son. As the years went by, Tim's father never offered to help with college career choices or money. The bitterness remained palpable between them for all the years after and their relationship suffered, though, oddly, nothing more was ever said about scouting.

# # # #

THE END

# # # #

On the Rio Mayo

Someone was coming into camp. Half in, half out of a moving veil of white, the figure of a man advanced toward them.

Jack Tatum's dogs, which had spent the windy night under the truck, came to life in a mad scramble. The two dogs growled, shot sand every which way, and strained to pull themselves forward, their claws tearing deep grooves in the beach until they could duck under the rear axle of the '42 Ford. For a moment after they emerged, they retreated in confusion to the yard in front of the bungalow. There the youngest dog milled about stupidly, unable to reestablish the scent. Eventually, the venerable black Labrador lifted its muzzle in several directions and tested the air with trembling nostrils to find the scent again. Then, in stiff formality, partly arthritic, partly from an old dog's sense of dignity, its head held high to sniff the wind as though it weren't certain of its verdict, it led the younger dog in a trot up the path that was lined with volcanic rocks. Finally, the old dog lost command of its companion, and the younger dog charged past with its pink yapping mouth warning insistently of a visitor. It darted away toward the dunes.

"Back!" Frank shouted. "Call in the dogs," he yelled to Harry, his father, who had taken those dogs to Mexico before and who had more control over them.

"Barney! Mammoth! Both of you, come in! Come! Come in now!" Harry shouted. And then, when the very obedient dogs returned, rather sheepishly sniffing and throwing glances over their shoulder at the something they didn't like, Harry chastised them: "Hah! Hah! Get in there and stay! Get in there with you! What are you barking at so early in the morning?"

The beach became silent, except for that scouring wind.

Frank crouched barefoot in the sand near the truck bed, his fingers rooting around in a tackle box. "I have a survival gear lure in here somewhere. I wanted to try it out in the surf. I painted a number on it. I'm sure I dropped it in here. Now the goddamned thing is lost. Shit, I'm disorganized."

"Ay, and I've lost the ham," said Harry from the bed of the truck. Somewhere in the jumble of boxes, Jack Tatum claimed to have packed a canned hickory-smoked Virginia ham. Harry slid several of the boxes that they'd left out overnight toward the tailgate. He opened the cardboard flaps and took out bread, and then eggs, and then a paper sack full of green chilies. "Oh," he said, "was the ham in the box with the shrimp dressed up as dancers?"

"Yeah, maybe," said Frank absentmindedly.

Harry straightened up and clambered over a net and a bucket, walking toward the cab of the truck where the pile of boxed supplies sprawled. Had the canned ham been packed in the red box with shrimps dancing on the outside (and Harry bent over to find it) or the small chiller parts box nearly hidden in a corner against the cab? The answer was impossible to determine without clearing half a dozen other boxes. The thought of shifting all that weight caused Harry to reconsider. Perhaps breakfast would suit him perfectly without slices of fried ham beside his scrambled eggs? Yes, it ought to, Harry decided, and he'd leave the ham for another breakfast, or a dinner, if the fishing were bad, though everything about the sea that morning pleased Harry.

He straightened up again and leveled his brown eyes on the horizon to enjoy again the sparkling profile of the Sea of Cortez. A ribbon of lavender and pink draped the wet sand and a matching, paler ribbon, worn low on the sky, stretched below thin gray clouds. And inland, inland was beautiful too, where the white tops of the sand dunes splayed in a stiff morning breeze.

His eyes drifted further up the estuary to the glittering Rio Mayo, but there he was surprised.

"Saaannn--ta Monica, Redondo Beach," said Harry in a drawl that stretched out the 'Santa' to a tremendous length and ran the rest of the words together. He said this, almost whispered it to himself, and then stood transfixed, studying the dunes where the sand blew thickly over the Rio Mayo. "Someone's coming into camp. He's running in the dunes."

Harry kept watching the shifting veil of blowing sand.

"He's still running," Harry said.

"I don't see anything. What is it?" asked Frank eventually in a disinterested, distracted voice. He sat in the sand now, one bent knee up and the other lying flat. He continued digging through a tangle of lures in the bottom of a large rusty tackle box. Frank's brown hair had been shaved into a crew cut and he wore a paint-splattered pair of jeans, a khaki shirt buttoned haphazardly, and a dark blue watch cap, the only item from what had been, until a few days before, his Navy uniform. He'd come home to Arizona, a year after Japan's surrender, having spent the war working in a hospital in Chicago. His father had promised a fishing trip to the Sea of Cortez when he returned.

"It's a guy running," explained Harry again, "I can't be sure though. The sand is blowing thicker than Aunt Gertrudis' caldo de queso."

Frank grunted. He didn't know any Aunt Gertrudis, or her cheese soup, either.

Harry looked and, sure enough, through the blowing sand, the man appeared again. Trotting on the dunes, springing from the smearing purple dawn beginning upstream on the Rio Mayo, the tiny figure of a man materialized. And yet not just an ordinary man, there was something odd about his shoulders and his neck.

"This man that's running -- he's got something over his shoulders. It's hard to tell what," Harry said.

Harry watched as the figure disappeared. "Well, maybe he's not coming our way after all," he said, and he remembered he'd decided to give up on the ham, but a last glance back at the dunes showed the same thing again. "Oh yes. There he is again. I think he'll be coming to see us."

Running in to see them it seemed.

"He's carrying something," said Harry. Realizing he had been talking to himself, he tried again, but louder. "It's a man with something strange over his shoulder."

Harry looked again and could now clearly see the man was barefoot and dressed only in torn pants. On his bare shoulders he bore a massive deer. A gaunt dog followed closely at his heels.

"Frank, please, are you seeing this?" said Harry to his son.

Frank ignored his father. He was throwing lures around, digging in the bottom of the tackle box and cursing as barbs snagged the tips of his fingers.

"Frank, you won't believe this."

"Pop, I'm too damn busy," said Frank, thrusting a pair of horn-rimmed glasses higher on his nose, bending forward as if something fascinating lay in the box in front of him. "I like some of these others better. These other spoon lures."

"Let's take them then!" shouted Harry back jovially. "But please look at this."

Harry shifted his weight. He was a short man, already in his mid-fifties, graying around the temples, though most of his brown hair was hidden under a pith helmet that morning. He had a benevolent squint in his kind brown eyes from the years he'd spent working outdoors on roofs in Arizona. His tan shirt and pants, the uniform he wore to repair air conditioners and evaporative coolers, were rumpled after a night spent sleeping in them and the prior day's drive from Arizona to this fishing spot, a bungalow owned by the family of another repair shop (for Harry was friends with all his competitors). Their camp lay where the mouth of the Rio Mayo emptied into the Sea of Cortez. "Come on, won't you please look up for me, my son. Come around the back of the truck. You've got to see this for yourself. It's really quite an incredible sight."

"I want to find that goddamn lure," said Frank, "I had it. Hell, I know it's in here. Somewhere. I threw it in last night."

Harry felt again the nagging concern he'd sensed, pushed aside, and reexamined again and again over the last few days and especially the last hours on this fishing trip, about his son, about the illogical anger he sometimes displayed, about his constant cursing, the way he conveyed his words in such a clipped, succinct and angry fashion. Maybe it was only language, thought Harry. Harry had spoken Spanish as a child, and he felt it was a much more fluid language. Frank had been brought up with his mother, and spoke only English. "He's carrying a marvelous buck," called Harry, "almost fabulous."

Frank quit rummaging in the tackle box and tipped his body over so that his shoulder and head cleared the side of the truck. This enabled him to see over the dark blustery dunes.

The man zigzagged around the scrubby bushes that dotted the sand. With each bounding movement sideways the dangling head of the buck swung and its tongue lolled out of its mouth. Frank dove back into the tackle box. "He's a Mayo, isn't he? What the hell does he want with us?"

Harry took a minute to absorb the way his son had said 'he's a Mayo'; there was a dismissive tone in his voice which Harry hated. "Coffee's probably what he's after," Harry said, swinging around and watching their smoke as it left the wide chimney of the bungalow. "He wants a cup. Our smoke's blowing inland."

Their visitor took the path marked with large volcanic stones straight toward the bungalow. His plans were unmistakable now; he headed straight for them, for the three trucks parked just outside the front yard and Harry's figure standing in the truck bed. At his approach, Harry lumbered awkwardly down off the tailgate, and walking up the path part way, called out an eloquent and munificent Spanish greeting, one that Frank didn't understand and never could repeat, though he knew the sound and could almost sing it. It was a pat phrase of Harry's, a courtly welcome that sounded ridiculous and splendid and inimitable with its sonorous señors and numerous por favors. His words were accompanied by a bow and a circular sweep down to his feet and back to his heart of that pith helmet he wore, like a turtle under its shell, whenever they were fishing in Mexico.

The man stopped where the rock-lined path began, outside the actual yard and beyond the trucks. He stopped as though he were too shy to approach any closer. He held the deer's limbs in his fists: four cloven hoofs together. His long smooth face, which appeared to sprout from the very belly of the dead deer, scooped inward like a strange shovel, and showed the barest suggestion of features, a slit of brown for a mouth, narrow nostril lines above, a pair of eyes and eyebrows being the darkest. He had a thatch of thick black hair and his lips were dried and cracked. He stood a long time before them without speaking, catching his breath, his nostrils fighting the fierce wind, or perhaps overcoming his shyness. Harry smiled at him with his head tilted, waiting, expecting. As Harry had predicted, the man, when he was finally able to talk, asked, in Spanish in a voice which barely broke above a whisper, for a cup of their coffee which he had scented in the wind. He asked if they would be so kind, if it wasn't too much trouble, if they could spare it for him, an unworthy stranger who had arrived without warning at their camp that morning.

Harry, agreeing immediately and effusively, walked the stranger closer to their door and went in to fetch the pot, passing Frank who had got up and was leaning sullenly against the tailgate. Harry sensed that Frank disagreed with his father's generosity.

When Harry left, the man bent forward and pitched the deer off his shoulders. The deer carcass plopped onto the sand, its eyes closed forever, a grim smile gracing its dark brown mouth. The man squatted and his dog stood behind, eyeing the deer, but not daring even to sniff it. In the early daylight, the hound's irises were glowing rings like those of a zombie-dog Frank remembered seeing in the Sunday comic pages. Its muzzle quivered and it whimpered from the scent of the deer or the fish bones and scraps buried in the sand around this fishing bungalow. The dogs under the truck whined back, but also didn't dare come out. Then, the visiting dog spiraled, nose-to-tail, down to its temporary bed in the sand.

Frank bent down and lifted the tackle case. He slid it into the truck bed. Grabbing the can of tackle and lures they had already chosen to use that morning from the truck bed, he tramped up the porch steps.

Frank began ripping a few strips of red and yellow flannel for a different kind of lure.

Harry reappeared struggling with three empty enamel cups, the coffeepot, a small bag of sugar and a spoon. He set everything in a row on the porch wall, poured a cup of coffee, scooped a generous spoonful of sugar into the black liquid and stirred. Steam trailed the brimming cup as he carried it down the front steps.

Their guest took the cup in both hands. "Gracias," he said after sipping.

Frank leaned on a porch pillar. He ripped the flannel for a while and then stopped to scratch his stomach. He studied the crumpled buck on the sand. Once death had been rare to him, the way it is to all children because they don't believe in it. But he'd seen a lot of it recently. He'd enlisted in the Navy at seventeen and left Arizona for training in San Diego. After that, because he was under eighteen and he'd expressed an interest in medicine, he'd been shipped to a North Chicago Naval hospital. At first they'd put him in the laundry, a warm place, something you needed in Chicago, despite the horror of working with blood-smeared sheets. But then, as the numbers of wounded increased, he'd become a night nurse in the wards, cleaning up after the parade of pieces called Marines when they were brought in from the islands of the Pacific. He'd seen every possible wound, everything a man could have torn off his body. The last year in the psychiatric ward hadn't been much nicer; the human brain could also be shredded by war and, as the era of psychiatric drugs had yet to arrive, it fell to Frank to wrestle those men into straightjackets.

"I'd like to know how he managed to fell the damn thing," said Frank finally.

Harry finished pouring himself a cup of coffee and held the pot over the third empty cup. Frank shook his head.

"Why don't you ask him?" Harry suggested. Harry took up his cup and drank.

"Oh, Pop, I forgot my damn Spanish." Frank patted his shirt pocket. "Dammit to hell," he muttered to himself, clumping down the steps to the truck. He yanked the truck door open and snatched a pack of cigarettes and a matchbook from the serape-covered seat. When he stepped out with the pack, he let the truck door fall shut behind him. "If I ever really knew any," he added, coming back up onto the porch. "Mom never spoke it. The counselor at school told me I ought to take Latin if I wanted to be a doctor. How was I going to learn Spanish?" He didn't add anything about his father not being around to teach him his native language. Sitting hunched on the porch wall against the side of a pillar that faced the rising sun, he yawned and shivered. He tore open the pack of cigarettes and shook one out. In an instant he struck a match and cupped his hands around it.

"Well, try," said Harry.

"What's the use? I wouldn't be able to."

"Offer him a cigarette at least," Harry responded with visible irritation.

Mutely, Frank extended the packet of cigarettes toward their visitor.

The man shook his head and said something in Spanish. "Not good for the air," Harry translated. The man thumped his chest and smiled.

The wind rose; sand pelted them. Frank looked out beyond the row of trucks at the choppy and dark ocean. Northward, over the slate water, gulls dove at the surface like indignant imps. Beyond the birds, bobbing lights, white, then red, showed the struggle of a vessel voyaging south. Hard breakers struck the shore repeatedly. They slapped down in quick collapse. High tide had brought the water to within a hundred feet of the bungalow, but it was moving out now. It was time to fish.

Harry cleared his throat. "Where did you find this marvelous deer?" he called to the squatting figure.

The man smiled. He was swallowing the coffee in long quaffs. "Near the mountain Ahuxlt."

"Ah," Harry said, nodding.

Frank frowned. He understood enough Spanish to know what the man's answer had been and he signaled his disbelief in what the man had said with a slight shake of his head in Harry's direction. Their guest blinked at the gesture, but said nothing; the dog lifted his head off the sand.

"That's very far from here," Harry said, glancing into his coffee. "Have you come all that distance on this hunting trip? After this deer?"

"Yes. Two days. Two nights." The man gulped the coffee and wiped his mouth on his arm.

"And you return there now with the deer?" Harry asked.

The man smiled. "Yes, God willing."

Harry tossed the dregs of his coffee out onto the sand and refilled his cup.

"How are things in your village?"

"We are in God's hands, probably."

"Sometimes it's hard to tell," said Harry with a laugh.

"Si, si. Gracias por el cafe, señor."

The man swallowed his last mouthful. He rose and placed the cup on the bottom step of the porch. Harry reached over and held up the pot, ready to invite him to share another, but the man shook his head and stooped over his deer. His mutt yawned himself to his feet. The man hoisted his catch over his head and onto his shoulders. When the animal came down, the man staggered with the weight, so much so that Harry started down the steps. But as Harry moved, the visitor held out a broad palm, smiled and turned away. Shuffling forward, he gained speed until all at once he dashed away.

"Adios!" Harry shouted.

The sun had begun to flood the wide expanse of beach with cold morning light and now every human footprint, every bird print or tire track, dappled the surface with cold blue shadows. The clouds, passing low, suddenly opened to reveal the light, a floodlight everywhere, bright and hot. Together Harry and Frank watched the man sprint swiftly away. The thick trunk of the deer completely covered the man's head yet the antlers could be seen jutting out from the man's side. The lean muscles of his back showed clearly in the morning light. The Mayo and his dog headed inland.

"Now, that was really something," said Harry, still standing halfway down the steps, his hands on his hips.

"Damn nonsense," said Frank quietly, but not too quietly for his father to hear.

"That's got to be one of the largest bucks I've ever seen," Harry said, shaking his head. He ambled down the stairs and across the sand to the truck, continuing to study the now vanishing form of the man. "And to carry it on one's shoulders such a distance." He reached into the truck bed and pulled out a cardboard box. Frank stood and stretched.

"Get our poles, will you?" Harry said with a nod of his head toward the bungalow, "And see if Jack's awake."

Frank carried the pot of coffee in with him past the row of cots that were draped with the sprawling forms of sleeping men. Jack Tatum's face on a cot in the corner reminded Frank of the death mask of a Mayan priest. Tequila had done that. The barren front room of the bungalow had a sheet pinned in the dusty front window. Their blankets hung off the cots. Several men were sleeping with bottles near them. From the arsenal of poles leaning against one wall, Frank picked theirs.

When he came out, Harry sat on the tailgate of the truck, the expansive top of a high rubber fishing boot spread in his hands. "Jack's out cold," said Frank. Frank quickly pulled on his fishing boots, took the can of lures and looped the long piece of twine that served as a handle around his neck so that the tackle can hung in front of him.

"Did you find that lure you wanted?" asked Harry, puffing at the exertion of hauling on the first rubber boot.

"Nope."

"What was it? Something special?"

"Not really. It was from a survival kit. A flyer at the hospital gave it to me. Before he died I told him about Mexico and the Sea of Cortez and I promised I'd try it out. I thought I'd try it out today. I'll look for it again tonight."

"Okay." Harry grunted his other leg into the second rubber boot and stood off of the tailgate. "I'll help you look for it. Anything you want to tell me about that guy dying?"

"No," said Frank curtly.

"No?"

"No."

"That man with his buck was really something. Jack won't believe us." Harry said, changing the subject as he lifted a bucket from the truck bed.

"Did he really say he came from Ahuxlt?"

"Yes."

"Well, Pop, I don't know. That's miles away, isn't it?"

Harry closed the tailgate. He took his fishing pole from Frank and swinging the bucket at his side he started toward the shore. "Don't you think he did?"

"No," said Frank, following along behind and then beside his father, "he was trying to impress us. In Chicago I heard all kinds of bullshit stories. Guys will claim any damn thing. I don't think he ever ran that far." He looked over at his father's face. "Not for two days."

"Do you remember me telling you once that I came down here in the nineteen twenties?"

"Yeah, maybe. Why?"

"I was sent down to fix those magnetos that were bad." Harry charged down a small dune ahead of his son.

Frank followed. "Yeah. You told me."

"Well, I don't think I ever told you that I went off into the mountains one weekend when I was there. I came into a village somewhere up in the mountains where some men were kicking a wooden ball. I stayed awake to watch them go by. The path they took was lit with pine torches. The villagers were standing in narrow crevices, in cliffs above, watching. They bet everything they owned on the race. Goats. Chickens. Blankets. The runners ran for two days and they wore rattles to help them stay awake. They'd run a lot longer if they were hungry. Or if their families were. That man we just saw was hungry."

"Well, maybe." The wind rippled Frank's pants against his legs and tore at his shirt. It sounded loud in his ears.

Harry stopped. The strong wind nearly pushed him over. He shifted his feet in the sand and plowed on.

They had reached the hard silver and pink shore. Waves came in with white caps. Harry left the bucket outside the reach of the surf and then plunged immediately into the cool November water.

"What did he shoot the damn thing with?" Frank asked, wading into the water. "Where was his gun? Or his bow?"

"He didn't shoot it, that's the point. He ran it down. Tired it out." Harry nearly shouted over the sound of the wind and waves.

Frank and Harry prepared their tackle without saying anything. They both chose spoon lures to start. Frank waded deeper into the water, shaking his head, and shouting back. "Jeez, Pop. I never realized you were so gullible. A guy could get you to believe any damn thing."

Harry finished tying his lure and attached a few small weights to the line. He double-checked the line while wading to a deeper spot where he leaned back and cast. Out the line spun, cleanly, freely into the spot slightly beyond the break of the surf. The fish would be there at the bottom waiting for food as it was stirred up by the waves. Once he'd put his line where he wanted it, Harry did nothing; he let the water animate the fly. "Does all this cynicism have anything to do with seeing too much death? With the war?" Harry looked over at his son sharply.

Frank recoiled slightly. "No. It's just my personality." Frank cast his line in a half-hearted manner; the wind immediately sent it back. Frank reeled in bitterly, cursing all the while.

He tried to cast his line a second time, and the result was even worse. "Damn it!" Frank shouted as he drew the line back in for another try.

He spent no time preparing the third cast, but lashed out furiously with his reel. The cast was abysmal; the line tumbled in the water at his feet.

"Oh hell!" he said, glancing sheepishly at his father.

Harry was smiling. "You need practice. A lot of practice. I recommend we come down here often."

"I do, too," said Frank.

They both laughed.

The gulls flocked closer. They came down screeching, crying, and swooping on the cool morning air. Frank recast. This time the line went where he wanted about fifteen feet away from his father's.

The sound of the wind and the birds' cries buffeted their ears. A wave swept past them and the water behind it rose over Frank's boots, dousing his pants up to his thighs.

"All I've been hearing since you've been back," Harry began, "is how Chicago taught you so much. How it taught you how damn, damn awful this world is. Where's the happy little kid who used to come down Saturdays to sweep out my shop? This world-weary act is wearing thin. May I remind you that you're only twenty-one?" Harry moved nearer his son and reeled in. He recast so that his line shot out past the churning water and slightly over the slick wall of a gray wave.

Frank reeled in his line.

The clamor from the birds was tremendous. They surrounded the water north of where Harry's line was and then came nearly overhead, diving all around, skimming the surface of the water and soaring away. When one bird snapped up something, it turned in the wind for the shore with a myriad of other squawking birds snatching at its bill, crowding close. "A school's coming up!" Harry shouted, pointing to a smooth spot moving differently from the tide.

"Damn birds everywhere!" Frank yelled back. He looked for an opening into the area where he thought the school would be when his line reached the water. He then cast rapidly past the pounding surf, through the flock of birds.

"Ah ha!" Harry shouted. His bait was taken. He kept his thumb on the grip and pumped the rod twice. The tip of the rod nearly reached the water each time before he drew it, slowly, back up. In the close shallows the fish bulldogged, but Harry took in every inch of slack the fish gave. Soon a cluster of weights appeared on the line. Harry dragged the fish toward the shore and waded out.

"I'll come out with you," shouted Frank.

Together they bent over the flopping fish. It was mostly brown, slightly spotted and had a protruding lower jaw. Harry yanked the hook loose from the mouth of the fish with pliers.

"I liked your letters," Harry said, "They were very interesting. Even with all the damns strung out in a row. And please I hope you understand that I'm not wanting to criticize you too much. And I want to sincerely thank you for taking your time when you were in Chicago to write back to me in Arizona. I know you must have been busy."

"That's all right, Pop."

Harry stood and displayed the fish, holding it by its gills. "I estimate this fish might be an eight pounder."

"Probably. But Jack will swear it's less."

Harry laughed. "He will do that, I think. And come to think of it, I don't believe we brought the scales, of all the foolishness."

"It's nice, though."

"Yes."

"Is it a Cabrillo?"

"Cabrilla," Harry said, spreading the slack fins with his fingers. "You can tell by the round fins here."

"It's damn nice anyway. Damn nice markings."

"Sometimes I see a fish like this, but bigger, in my dreams. It's down here in the bottom of El Golfo," said Harry. "A big fish gulping away and swimming up and down. I'm going to get him some day." Harry grabbed the empty bucket and strode to the surf. Still carrying the fish, he filled the bucket with sea water and eased the fish in the bucket's water. It thrashed for a moment and then swam in circles. Harry carried the bucket back to the shore. "There are a few things I've wanted to tell you," Harry said to his son, who was still standing in the shallow water.

"Yeah?"

"I want you to please stop calling me Pop. It sounds idiotic. I'd much rather you called me Dad." After setting the bucket with the fish on the dry sand, he waded in again.

"Okay." Frank shrugged. "Dad it is."

"And, if you're going to continue working with me and fishing with me, I want you please to stop damning everything that crosses your path. It bothers me. I don't do that. I don't have people who work with me who do that. If you're going to continue with me, I want you to stop."

"Okay. No more damning, Dad."

"I'm counting on it." Harry patted his son's shoulder.

That was it, Frank realized. That was some kind of breakthrough he'd wanted.

Harry forged out into the surf again, not turning back to see his son. His knees drove ahead through the sparkling water. With the pith helmet on his head, the khaki uniform and his big rubber boots, Frank thought he resembled an explorer, forcefully storming out of the cold depths where he'd hidden for a century. Or was he just a father, coming from cold obscurity, coming warmly into Frank's life? Frank strode into the surf behind his father.

"The world isn't so bad that it deserves to be cursed constantly," called Harry to his son when Frank had reached a fishing spot roughly parallel to his father.

Sunlight sparkled on the water. The sea around them folded into foam. An icy swell came and caught Frank at his knees, tugging his boots, hugging him snugly.

"No," Frank said, "You're right, Dad. It isn't."

# # # #

The End

# # # #

MEET THE AUTHOR

Lorraine Ray is an avid reader and writer. She lives in an adobe home in the center of Tucson, Arizona with her husband and daughter. You can download Lorraine's many other Smashwords editions from her author's page at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LoRay

Read newer works on Wattpad: http://www.wattpad.com/user/LorraineRay

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