The Almanac of the Dead

BOOK ONE. TUCSON UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

THE OLD WOMAN stands at the stove stirring the simmering brown liquid with great concentration. Occasionally Zeta smiles as she stares into the big blue enamel pot. She glances up through the rising veil of steam at the young blond woman pouring pills from brown plastic prescription vials.

Another old woman in a wheelchair at the table stares at the pills Seese counts out. Lecha leans forward in the wheelchair as Seese fills the syringe. Lecha calls Seese her “nurse” if doctors or police ask questions about the injections or drugs. Zeta lifts the edge of a sleeve to test the saturation of the dye. “The color of dried blood. Old blood,” Lecha says, but Zeta has never cared what Lecha or anyone else thought. Lecha is just the same.

Lecha abandoned Ferro, her son, in Zeta’s kitchen when he was a week old. “The old blood, old dried-up blood,” Ferro says, looking at Lecha, “the old, and the new blood.”

Ferro is cleaning pistols and carbines with Paulie at the other end of the long table. Ferro hates Lecha above all others. “Shriveled up,” he says, but Lecha is concentrating on finding a good vein for Seese to inject the early-evening Demerol.

Zeta stirs and nods: “Old age.” The day a woman put on black clothes and never again wore colors. The old-time people had not gotten old season by season. Suddenly, after eighty-five years, they’d catch the flu later in the winter, and by spring their hair would be almost white.

The old ones did not believe the passage of years caused old age. They had not believed in the passage of time at all. It wasn’t the years that aged a person but the miles and miles that had been traveled in this world.

Lecha is annoyed that Zeta is being so dramatic about their sixtieth birthday. Lecha keeps the black dye for her hair, not her nightgowns. “Who said anything about getting old?” Zeta answers without bothering to turn from the stove. “Maybe I don’t want to be visible at night.”

“Like a witch!” Lecha says to Seese. They are all laughing, even Zeta. Ferro laughs but watches Lecha intently as he rubs the barrel of the 9mm pistol with a soft rag. Paulie goes months without saying more than yes or no. But suddenly his pale rodent face widens with excitement. “In the joint they don’t allow dark colors. No handkerchiefs or socks dark blue. Nothing black. No dark brown.” Paulie pauses. “Night escape.”

“If you’re quiet, Paulie, no one will know you’re here,” Ferro says, shoving an empty rifle case at Paulie. But Paulie’s face has already settled far from the reach of human voices.

Paulie came home one night with Ferro years before and had never left. He asks for nothing but to work for Ferro. What Ferro says or does to Paulie makes no difference. Zeta, not Ferro, keeps Paulie around. He is utterly reliable because they are his only people. This is the only place Paulie can remember except prison.

Seese gathers up the dirty cotton and used syringe. The pharmacy has sent a box of small clear cups. They remind Seese of shot glasses at the bar. But no whiskey for Lecha. Not as long as she can get Demerol or codeine. The kitchen table is littered with paper wrappings from sterile bottles or rubbing alcohol and boxes of disposable syringes. Tiny bottles of Demerol line the dairy compartment of the refrigerator. Lecha gets chatty right before the dope makes her dreamy. She laughs and points at all of them together in the same room. No food anywhere. Pistols, shotguns, and cartridges scattered on the kitchen counters, and needles and pills all over the table. The Devil’s kitchen doesn’t look this good.

Sterling, the hired man, is standing by the dishwasher studying the instruction book. Sterling is in training for a special assignment. All of them are in the kitchen because of recent developments. Sterling has been told very little; Ferro is coiled tighter than a mad snake. Everywhere he looks, Sterling sees guns.

Ferro says the needle slips in like a lover’s prick and shoots the dope in white and hot. That’s why Lecha wants them all to watch her get off, Ferro says, but he doesn’t watch junky orgasms not even for his own mother. Zeta shakes her head, her lips tight with disgust. Ferro laughs, then jumps up from the table with the 9mm in its holster and bolts out the door to the garage. Paulie’s expression remains calm. He is alert in case Ferro calls him. But the remote-controlled garage doors and security gates light up the control panel on the kitchen wall. Paulie presses the display key on the video monitor screen: Ferro is skidding the big black four-wheel-drive truck down the driveway.

Seese looks at Sterling, who shrugs his shoulders as he hangs up a dish towel. Lecha has sunk back into her wheelchair, with her bliss dreams. Zeta runs the sink full of cold water to rinse the clothes she’s dyed. She has been dyeing everything she wears dark brown. No reason, Zeta claims, just a whim. But Lecha had warned Seese not to be fooled. Nothing happens by accident here. The dark brown dye stains the white grout between the Mexican tiles patterned with blue, parrot-beaked birds trailing serpent tails of yellow flowers. Lecha’s mysterious notebooks have drawings of parrot-beaked snakes and jaguar-headed men. Leave it to Zeta to have the kitchen counters redone with these Mexican tiles only two weeks before Lecha returned to transcribe the notebooks.

The first time Zeta had seen Seese, Zeta had told Lecha the white girl would have to go. No strangers around the ranch. Zeta still called it “the ranch” although the city was crawling closer month by month. But Lecha had lied to Zeta, claiming that Seese already knew everything anyway.

Zeta had stared at Seese for a long time, and then she had laughed. Seese could sense the old woman knew when her twin sister was lying. Seese had known very little then except that Lecha was a well-known psychic who was returning home to Tucson after many years because she was dying of cancer. Lecha had come home to get things in order before she died.

Seese could tell by the way Zeta had searched her eyes the first week that Zeta had suspected she was Lecha’s lover. It wasn’t true. Lecha had hired Seese as a secretary. Lecha wants to transcribe the old notebooks and needs Seese to type them into the word processor. There are two conditions of employment: two subjects that are off-limits, although a job was not what Seese had been searching for when she came to Tucson. What Seese is searching for is one of the forbidden subjects. The other forbidden subject is that of Lecha’s personal life, including that of her son, Ferro. As for her lost child, Lecha tells Seese she must wait. Seese must be careful never to ask Lecha directly to find her baby son.

Lecha cannot predict how long the wait might be. Well, Seese thinks, this is better than what I was doing in San Diego. Working for Lecha has got Seese off cocaine; still, she only feels secure knowing she still has the remnants of the kilo Beaufrey had given her as a “go-away” present. A suicide kit from David’s faggot lover. As long as Seese knows the gallon-size freezer bags wrapped in newspaper are safely in the back of her bedroom closet, Seese feels no craving for the drug. Seese had been an addict the night she went crying and pounding on the side of Root’s old house trailer, searching for Lecha. But playing nurse to a woman taking Percodan and shots of Demerol all day long had taken away her cocaine appetite. She had weaned herself down to glasses of burgundy and fat marijuana cigarettes. Seese likes to think the cocaine was part of another life. A life she no longer knows or remembers very well. She had wanted Lecha’s help more than anything, more than she had wanted the drug. Lecha was her last chance, or maybe the only chance she had ever had. That is how it had begun, with Seese so desperate for Lecha’s help, and so afraid to do anything that might cause Lecha to refuse to help Seese find her baby. The cocaine hidden in the back of the closet was her rainy-day account, as good as cash, legal tender in Tucson.

Lecha had brought up Seese’s old connections with Tiny and the Stage Coach because Root, Lecha’s biker boyfriend, had recognized Seese as one of Tiny’s nude dancers four or five years before. All Lecha said was she preferred that Seese stay away from Tiny and the Stage Coach. Zeta would not like it. No other reason was given.

“Well, there are a lot of unanswered questions,” Seese told Sterling the first day he was there. She had noticed him wandering outside the house with a rake although nothing was growing there but the desert itself. The old ranch house is low and long, lost in the brushy foothill paloverdes, giant saguaros, and thickets of greasewood. Seese figures this location, this house, is no accident either, but part of the old woman Zeta’s secrecy about herself and everything she and Ferro and Paulie are doing.

Sterling looks too harmless to be working here. He is graying and chubby and brown. His eyes look a little lost and sad. He rakes the pebbles and smaller rocks, and she can tell he knows how to appear busy when there is nothing to do. He sees her looking at him and gets bashful, looking down at the rocks he is raking. “Hi.” Sterling looks up at Seese and smiles. He says he was hired to be the gardener. He gestures with his chin at the paloverde trees, jojoba bushes, and big barrel cactus surrounding them. He is a little bewildered at this “Tucson-style garden,” he says. All of it looks like rocks and sticker trees to him. They both laugh.

Seese had wanted to tell Sterling how much alike they were. That she had been hired to nurse an old woman who is not so much dying of cancer as she is addicted to Demerol. But Seese had said nothing then because Sterling was new, and part of the job here was minding your own business. Sterling had been anxious to talk that first day. The ranch was a lonely place. Hiring was based upon the employee’s willingness to pass weeks at a time without going into Tucson. Sterling says he doesn’t know anyone in town anyway. “Like me,” Seese says, lying a little because she didn’t want to talk about Tiny and the Stage Coach Bar or Cherie. Seese and Sterling like each other right away.

Seese follows as Sterling rakes small orange stones around the swimming pool. Sterling checks the surface of the water. Two small lizards float blue bellies up. “It’s mostly this pool of water that takes up my time,” Sterling says as he uses a long pole and net to skim the corpses off the water. Seese watches the dead lizards fly over the edge of the pool, down the embankment. Sterling says he thinks other creatures will eat them. “That way their lives aren’t wasted,” he says hopefully. Seese would like to tell him as far as she can see all lives are wasted, but she doesn’t want to scare the old Indian guy too much. And if she made a remark like that it would bring on that choking feeling in her throat. Sterling sees something is wrong. He tells Seese how nice it is to have someone around while he is working. Because all those years on the railroad section gang had got Sterling used to working with other people. “Then when I retired—” He starts to tell her something but stops.

“Retirement is a big change!” Seese says, feeling sorry for the old guy. “Changes are real hard.” Seese closes her eyes and shakes her head. Right then Sterling had decided he didn’t care if they fired him for talking to the young blond woman. He hadn’t had anyone to talk to for such a long time.

“Well, this is mostly easy work,” he says, “these drowned lizards don’t weigh very much.” Seese laughs and is surprised to feel the laughing go deeper than she can remember feeling it for a long time. “And everyone wants to retire to southern Arizona,” he continues. Seese laughs some more and Sterling can’t help stealing a look at her breasts when she is laughing. He hasn’t even had the heart to look for such a long time. He remembers his Reader’s Digest magazines—“Laughter, the Best Medicine.” So maybe this job wouldn’t be so bad with a pretty blond nurse to joke with.

Seese asks questions then. Is he an Arizona Indian? Why did he come to Tucson? How did he ever get hired by Ferro? Sterling had been carefully following advice printed recently in a number of magazines concerning depression and the best ways of combating it. He had purposely been living in the present moment as much as he could. One article had pointed out that whatever has happened to you had already happened and can’t be changed. Spilled milk. But Sterling knows he’s one of those old-fashioned people who has trouble forgetting the past no matter how bad remembering might be for chronic depression. Just then the woman Lecha, twin sister of the boss lady, had called out the patio door for Seese. Sterling had seen Lecha in the wheelchair, yet the strength of her voice that day was remarkable. Later on he had learned Lecha only used the wheelchair occasionally. From the start there, Sterling had known to watch his step with the women. Because Sterling had seen older women and younger women too, in action, and the lessons had not been lost on him.

It was just as well that Seese had been called away because he had not been sure where to begin his story or even if he should disobey the magazine advice. What had happened to Sterling was in the category of things magazine articles called “irreparable” and “better forgotten.” Water under the bridge.

Seese returned before long. While Sterling was pouring chlorine pellets into the pool filter system, she had pulled a wrought-iron deck chair to the edge of the pool. As Seese stared into the deep end of the pool, Sterling suddenly realized she probably would not understand about the Pueblo and the village officers and the Tribal Council. “I would like to tell you about it,” he began in a voice so faint she had to say, “What?” Sterling repeated himself and then said, “But it’s sort of complicated, you know.”

Her blue eyes swerved away from him back to the surface of the pool churning from the filter jets. “You could tell me part of it. I might understand more than you think.”

“The part I will tell you some other time is the part where I am forced to go.” Seese nods. She understands that one firsthand. “I just took what I could carry. Right now I’ll just tell you how I ended up working here.” They both laugh together. “Some story, I bet — for both of us!” Sterling adds.

EXILE

STERLING HAD NOT intended to go to Tucson. He had bought a bus ticket only as far as Phoenix although he didn’t know a soul there either. Somehow he had been sleeping when the bus stopped in Phoenix, and the driver had not bothered to count the passengers who got off. At home in his own bed, Sterling had tossed and turned, unable to sleep. Yet now he had managed to sleep through roaring bus engines and diesel exhaust fumes as well as the loudspeaker announcements of departures and arrivals. Somewhere in the past, his life had taken a wrong turn, and Sterling had awakened to find himself surrounded by small rocky hills thick with what had first appeared to be utility poles. When he had put on his glasses, he saw they were giant cactus you always saw in cartoons with Mexicans in big hats sleeping under them.

In the old cowboy movies Lash La Rue and Tom Mix had chased outlaws among the giant saguaro cactus. It had been near Tucson that Tom Mix died when his convertible missed a curve. Sterling thought of himself as modestly self-educated through the magazines he subscribed to. He had never been interested in television except to watch the old movies. Though it was very sad, Sterling thought it would be interesting to actually see the historic Tom Mix death site. It would be nice to look at a giant cactus close up. Sterling had been trying to emphasize the positive aspects of life and not dwell upon the terrible things that had happened at home between himself and the Tribal Council.

Since the trouble any thought about anything that had gone wrong or might go wrong left him exhausted. There was nothing he could do now. The bus was approaching Tucson. He might as well sleep while he could.

In the dreams Sterling is always running or chasing after them — sometimes he rides a bicycle or horse, but usually he is on foot. The Hollywood people — the producer, the director, and the cameraman — are always driving a big four-wheel-drive Chevy Blazer. The convertible top of the Blazer has been removed so they ought to be able to hear Sterling’s shouts. But this is a nightmare, and the director is leaning over the seat conferring with the cameraman and the producer in the backseat. They take no notice of Sterling racing behind them, yelling as loud as he can.

The Chevy Blazer is racing toward the restricted area of the tribe’s huge open-pit uranium mine. The gate guards at the mine are armed with.38-caliber police specials because the Tribal Council is fed up with journalists writing scare stories about their uranium mine. The gate guards’ orders are “Shoot to kill. Ask questions later.” Journalists are no better than foreign terrorists as far as the Tribal Council is concerned. Sterling is yelling, “Stop! Stop!” when the old black man in the bus seat beside him gently touches his arm. “Mister, mister, are you okay?” Sterling feels sweaty all over despite the bus air-conditioning and tinted windows. The black man goes back to his newspaper. It is a Phoenix paper with headlines about the Middle East. There is killing everywhere. Jews and Arabs. Sterling doesn’t understand international killing. But he has made it his hobby to learn and keep up with the history of outlaws and famous criminals. Sterling will ask the man if he can just read the headline story. But right now the dream has left him sick to his stomach. He peels open a new roll of Tums. The big SceniCruiser is the fastest bus on the highway. Maybe it is the bus’s swaying as it passes cars that makes him feel sick. He closes and opens his eyes. Up ahead there is a white Arizona Highway Patrol car parked by a skinny tree with no leaves and green skin on its branches. Sterling expects to feel the bus driver brake suddenly to slow to the legal speed limit, but the driver takes no notice, and the big SceniCruiser zooms on to Tucson. Since it had all happened, Sterling couldn’t help thinking about the law, and what the law means. About people who get away with murder because of who they are, and whom they know. Then there were people like him, Sterling, people who got punished for acts they had no part in.

Sterling had been interested in the law since he was a kid in Indian boarding school. Because everything the white teachers had said and done to the Indian children had been “required by law.” Reading his magazines, Sterling had made a modest study of the law on his own, the way Abraham Lincoln had. The Police Gazette and True Detective magazines gave the most detailed explanations of the law. Sterling had bought subscriptions to both magazines so he would never miss a single new development in the law.

As near as Sterling could tell, injustice had been going on for a long time. Pretty Boy Floyd had struck back at bankers who were taking small farms and leaving Floyd’s people homeless during the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression. When Pretty Boy Floyd came through small Oklahoma towns, even local sheriffs waited until he was on his way again before they phoned state authorities to report his sighting. Sterling had studied photographs of Floyd and he could tell right away that Pretty Boy Floyd had been part Oklahoma Indian. Floyd’s stronghold had been in the brushy oak hill country of Indian Territory. Ma Barker had been part Creek Indian, and John Dillinger’s girlfriend, Billy Frechette, had been a Canadian Indian. Of course Sterling did not go along with what Ma Barker and her boys had done. All the people from Southwestern tribes knew how mean Oklahoma Indians could be. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had used Oklahoma Indians to staff Southwestern reservation boarding schools, to keep the Pueblos and Navajos in line.

Sterling woke up in the bus outside the Tucson depot. All the other passengers had already got off. Gathering up his shopping bags and bundles at the back of the bus, Sterling tried to estimate Tucson’s heat by looking out the bus’s tinted windows. It was the last day of July.

In the air-conditioning of the bus, Sterling found it difficult to estimate the outside temperature. He did not think it would be too bad, but when he stepped down the bus steps into the blinding white sunlight, he collided with a wall of desert heat. An instant later, like a cold beer bottle on a hot day, Sterling felt himself covered in an icy sweat. The dampness lasted only a matter of seconds before waves of heat sucked away the sweat, and with it, Sterling’s breath. What he needed right then was someplace cool to sit down to think. He pushed down the contents of both shopping bags to resettle anything that might have shifted on the bus ride. Then he took both bags, threw back his shoulders, and went into the bus depot.

Sterling looked around for the old black man he’d sat with, but the old man was gone. At least the lobby was air-conditioned. It was two o’clock and the benches were full of people who didn’t look like travelers but refugees from the heat. He didn’t see any depot employees behind the ticket counter. Everyone seemed to be dozing or staring off into space. The effects of the heat. He saw a couple of Indians, but they were the ones stretched out on the benches.

Sterling pushed his suitcase into the locker with his foot and squashed the shopping bags on top and slammed the door. No siestas for Sterling. He wasn’t going to be like everyone else, he was going to have a “take charge” attitude. He was going to walk around and see the downtown area. There must be hotels. There must be places to buy a cold drink.

Crossing the street, Sterling could feel the asphalt sink a little under his tennis shoes. All surfaces — concrete and plate glass — radiated heat. But at the end of the first block, Sterling wasn’t even sweating. Because the heat was so dry, moisture could not even form on his body. The thermometer on the bank building read 103, but Sterling decided he was feeling pretty good considering.

Downtown Tucson looked pretty much like downtown Albuquerque before they had “urban-renewed” it — and tore down the oldest buildings with merchants who had catered to Spanish-speaking and Indian people. Sterling walked up and down the streets. He liked Tucson’s bright pink courthouse. He put his fingers in the fountain; its water was not as hot as he had expected. He walked past the Santa Rita Hotel and decided it looked too expensive. He rested awhile on a bench in the shade at a park across from the city library. There were a lot of flies. Sterling fanned them away with his hat. A few of the hippies dozing on the grass opened an eye when he approached. But they pulled newspapers over their heads against the flies and went back to sleep again. Hippies in Albuquerque or Barstow pestered Indians with questions about Indian ways. In Tucson hippies were more like regular white people, who ignored Indians. That was all right with Sterling. He had learned his lesson with white people who had questions about Indian ways. A Tucson police car cruised by the city park. The cop looked sleepy, but Sterling was careful to avoid the cop’s eyes. Even if he was well dressed in his black-and-white-checkered slacks and blue short-sleeve shirt, Sterling knew some cops didn’t need any excuse to go after Indians.

The only other sign of life Sterling found downtown was in front of the blood-plasma donor center. Two white men were loading insulated containers into an air-freight truck. The containers looked like ice chests for cold beer. Of course Sterling knew they were full of blood. That was one thing he had never done and hoped never to have to do. Sell his own blood. The donor center was probably why the little park was so full of hippies and run-down white men.

A cold beer was what he needed. He walked north again, past the music store and the wig shop. Then he saw it: the Congress Hotel. Suddenly he remembered. This was the place John Dillinger’s gang had made their worst mistake.

Sterling started to feel better. Tucson was going to be an interesting place. It had history. Where else could he have a cold beer at the same place Dillinger and his gang had been drinking beer in 1934? He opened the bar door and a gust of cold air-conditioning hit his face. Going from bright sun outside into the dimly lit bar left him blind for a moment. Even if they didn’t like Indians in this bar, Sterling wanted to have one drink there, for John Dillinger. When he could see again, he found the bar almost empty, except for an old woman on a stool talking to the bartender, and two old white men arguing over a video game. Sterling watched the bartender’s expression, to see if Indians were unwanted. But what he saw was relief. Maybe the bartender had wanted an excuse to get away from the old woman. Of course Sterling was well dressed. Even in the heat he was wearing his bolo tie made with a big chunk of good turquoise. The bartender was even friendly. He set the mug of beer in front of Sterling and started talking. “She’s trying to get me up to her room,” the bartender said. He was a small, balding white man with tattoos up and down both arms. The old white woman was wearing a dark purple dress with little white dots all over it. She wore open-toed, white high heels she had hooked around the bottom of the barstool like a pro. Her white hair was carefully waved in little curls around her face. She had drawn careful circles of rouge and used just the right amount of lipstick. Forty years ago she had probably been a beauty. “Don’t be fooled by the bartender,” she said to Sterling. “I’ve had him up to my room plenty of times.”

Then she went back to her drink — something pink in a tall glass. The bartender moved away from Sterling then, wiping the bar and rinsing glasses. The two old men were no longer sitting at the video game. They were pouring beer from a pitcher and arguing over pinball machines and video games. How could you trust a video game? It was all electronics, all programmed like a computer to beat you. You had no chance. But at least with the pinball game, you could see the effects of gravity — the edge of the flipper with just the right leverage to fling the steel ball up the ramp and ring the bells and buzzer.

Sterling could begin to see how the place must have looked in Dillinger’s day: the seats in the booths and the stools were covered with red plastic now, but he could see they had once been done in real leather. Only the bar itself was still dark mahogany. All the bar tables had been replaced with red Formica. The floor was covered with red indoor-outdoor carpet pockmarked with cigarette burns. But at the doorway an edge of black marble tile could still be seen. It had been a classy place in its day. Sterling paid for another beer and asked the bartender if it was always that quiet. “Oh, this is about average for a Tuesday,” he said. “At happy-hour time they come in.” He nodded in the direction of the two old men and the old woman. Retired people living in the cheap rooms downtown. The old woman was hanging off the stool by her high heels, leaning toward the old men, who were still arguing about pinball machines and video games. Occasionally the old woman would leer at the bartender or at Sterling. “You’re not an Arizona Indian,” the bartender said. Sterling shook his head.

Just then two men had come into the bar. Both wore dark glasses and were nervously scanning the room, for somebody. The men wore identical white jeans and pale yellow polo shirts, and big gold wrist-watches. The Mexican with the cruel face was staring at Sterling. The young white man with him stared at Sterling too. Sterling smiled at the bartender uneasily. The men were looking for old Fernando, who worked as a gardener when he wasn’t getting drunk, but nobody had seen the old man for weeks. The Mexican with the cruel face stepped closer to Sterling. “You,” he said. “What about you? Can you work?”

“Gardening?” Sterling suddenly felt light-headed from the beer and the heat. “Ah, yes!” Sterling said. “Yes!” Trying to come up fast with the answer the men in dark glasses wanted to hear.

“Oh, yes!” Sterling heard himself answer. “Big lawns! All kinds of lilac bushes — dark purple, lavender, pink, white, blue!” Before Sterling could go on about the pool full of giant goldfish — all of it made-up — Ferro had turned and pointed to the door. “You’re hired. Let’s go.”

The Mexican had the young white man drive the four-wheel-drive truck. No one spoke during the entire ride. They drove north and then west from downtown Tucson. The dry heat had parched the leaves of the desert trees pale yellow. Even the cactus plants had shriveled.

Sterling had never seen dogs like these before — leaping high against the chain-link fence — snarling, barking guard dogs. They were either black or reddish with short coats and brown or black markings on their faces like masks. Sterling had noticed the dogs each wore heavy leather collars mounted with tiny black metal cylinders.

THE STONE IDOLS

“WELL,” STERLING SAYS, pushing the broom back toward the shallow end of the pool. He pauses and stares at the Catalina Mountains to the east. “I hope I am going to be here awhile, because I don’t have any other place to go.” Sterling has to clear his throat to keep the tears back. Seese wipes the back of her hand across her face but never looks up from the water. Her sadness startles him, and Sterling is seized by memories and lets down his guard. Remorse, bitter regret.

The stone idols had got Sterling banished. How many times had the theft of these stone figures come up during the hearings and Tribal Council proceedings? So often his brain had gone numb and lost track. The stone figures had been stolen eighty years before. Yet at Laguna, people remembered the crime as though it had just been committed. But the incident involving the Hollywood movie crew and the shrine of the great stone snake was no crime; it had been the result of a simple mistake; a small misunderstanding, a total accident.

The theft of the stone figures years ago had caused great anguish. Dark gray basalt the size and shape of an ear of corn, the stone figures had been given to the people by the kachina spirits at the beginning of the Fifth World, present time. “Little Grandmother” and “Little Grandfather” lived in buckskin bundles gray and brittle with age. Although faceless and without limbs, the “little grandparents” had each worn a necklace of tiny white shell and turquoise beads. Old as the earth herself, the small stone figures had accompanied the people on their vast journey from the North.

Generation after generation the protection and care of the stone figures had passed to an elder clanswoman and one of her male relatives. She prepares cornmeal and pollen sprinkled with rainwater to feed the spirits of the stone figures, which remain in her house when they are not in the kiva. She lifts them tenderly as she once lifted her own babies, but she calls them “esteemed and beloved ancestors.”

The stone figures were stolen from a kiva altar by “a person or persons unknown” according to the official report. A ring of anthropologists had been crawling around the Pueblos all winter offering to trade for or buy outright ancient objects and figures. The harvests of the two preceding years had been meager, and the anthropologists offered cornmeal. The anthropologists had learned to work with Christian converts or the village drunk.

The people always remembered the small buckskin bundles with anguish because the “little grandparents” were gone from them forever. Medicine people at all the Pueblos, and the Navajos and Apaches too, were contacted. All those with the ability to gaze into still water or flame to locate lost objects or persons, all those able to gaze into blurry opals to identify enemies sending sorcery, began a search. The gazers had all agreed the stone figures were too far away to be seen clearly. Far, far to the east.

Years passed. The First World War broke out. The elder priests had all died without ever again seeing their “little grandparents.” Fewer and fewer remained who had actually seen the “little grandparents” unwrapped on the kiva altar, smooth stones in the swollen shape of female and of male.

Then a message came from the Pueblos up north. Go to Santa Fe, in a museum there. A small museum outside town. The spring had been wet and cold and only increased the suffering caused by meager harvests. The federal Indian agents didn’t have enough emergency corn rations to go around, and reports came from Navajo country of people dying, starving, freezing. In Santa Fe the state legislature was two years old, and did not concern itself with Indians. Indians had no vote in state elections. Indians were Washington’s problem. A muddy wagonload of Indians did not attract much attention. The Laguna delegation had traveled to Santa Fe on a number of occasions before to testify in boundary disputes with the state for land wrongfully taken from the Laguna people. The delegation’s interpreter knew his way around. A county clerk had told them how to find the museum.

The snow had melted off the red dirt of the piñon-covered hills except for the northern exposures. It was early afternoon but the sun was already weak as it slipped into the gray overcast above the southwestern horizon. An icy breeze came off the high mountain snowfields above Santa Fe.

At the museum, the interpreter for the Laguna delegation left the others waiting outside in the wagon. The old cacique was shivering. They built a small piñon fire and put on a pot of coffee. Museum employees watched out windows uneasily.

“Yes, there were two lithic pieces of that description,” the assistant curator told the interpreter. “A recent acquisition from a private collection in Washington, D.C.” The interpreter excused himself and stepped outside to wave to the others by the wagon.

The glass case that held the stone figures was in the center of the museum’s large entry hall. Glass cases lined the walls displaying pottery and baskets so ancient they could only have come from the graves of ancient ancestors. The Laguna delegation later reported seeing sacred kachina masks belonging to the Hopis and the Zunis as well as prayer sticks and sacred bundles, the poor shriveled skin and bones of some ancestor taken from her grave, and one entire painted-wood kiva shrine reported stolen from Cochiti Pueblo years before.

The delegation walked past the display cases slowly and in silence. But when they reached the glass case in the center of the vast hall, the old cacique began to weep, his whole body quivering from old age and the cold. He seemed to forget the barrier glass forms and tried to reach out to the small stone figures lying dreadfully unwrapped. The old man kept bumping his fingers against the glass case until the assistant curator became alarmed. The Laguna delegation later recounted how the white man had suddenly looked around at all of them as if he were afraid they had come to take back everything that had been stolen. In that instant white man and Indian both caught a glimpse of what was yet to come.

There was a discussion between the assistant curator and the Laguna delegation’s interpreter, who relayed what the delegation had come to say: these most precious sacred figures had been stolen. The museum of the Laboratory of Anthropology had received and was in the possession of stolen property. The white man’s own laws said this. Not even an innocent buyer got title of ownership to stolen property. The Lagunas could produce witnesses who would testify with a detailed description of the “little grandparents” as the people preferred to call them. For these were not merely carved stones, these were beings formed by the hands of the kachina spirits. The assistant curator stood his ground. The “lithic” objects had been donated to the Laboratory by a distinguished patron whose reputation was beyond reproach. As the head curator was out of the office, the Laguna delegation would have to return next week. When some of the members of the delegation raised their voices, and the interpreter had tried to explain the great distance they had already traveled, the assistant curator became abrupt. He was extremely busy that day. The Indians should contact the Indian Bureau or hire a lawyer.

The delegation led the old cacique out the door, but the war captain lingered behind, not to whisper to the stone figures as the others in the delegation had, expressing their grief, but to memorize all the other stolen objects he could see around the room.

Outside, the old cacique acted as if he had drifted into a dream. While the war captain and the tribal governor and the interpreter argued over starting another lawsuit, the old cacique was rocking himself on his heels in a blanket close to the ashes of the campfire. The governor was right. Of course they could not afford another lawsuit.

All of that had happened seventy years before, but Sterling knew that seventy years was nothing — a mere heartbeat at Laguna. And as soon as the disaster had occurred with those Hollywood movie people, it was as if the stone figures had been stolen only yesterday. Each person who had recounted the old story seventy years later had wept even harder than the old cacique himself had, and the old guy had not even lasted a month after the delegation’s return from Santa Fe.

There were hundreds of years of blame that needed to be taken by somebody, blame for other similar losses. And then there was the blame for the most recent incidents. Sterling had already gone away to Barstow to work on the railroad when uranium had been discovered near Paguate Village. He had no part in the long discussions and arguments that had raged over the mining. In the end, Laguna Pueblo had no choice anyway. It had been 1949 and the United States needed uranium for the new weaponry, especially in the face of the Cold War. That was the reason given by the federal government as it overruled the concerns and objections the Laguna Pueblo people had expressed. Of course there had been a whole generation of World War II veterans then who had come home looking for jobs, for a means to have some of the comforts they had enjoyed during their years away from the reservation. The old-timers had been dead set against ripping open Mother Earth so near to the holy place of the emergence. But those old ones had been dying off and already were in the minority. So the Tribal Council had gone along with the mine because the government gave them no choice, and the mine gave them jobs. They became the first of the Pueblos to realize wealth from something terrible done to the earth.

Sterling had not quit his railroad job, as many other Lagunas had, to return to the reservation and to work in the mine. He had no close family there except for Aunt Marie. Once Sterling had got settled into his railroad job, and his life in Barstow, he did not want to go to all the trouble of moving again to work in a uranium mine. So Sterling had avoided being caught up in the raging arguments made by the old-time people who had warned all the people would pay, and pay terribly, for this desecration, this crime against all living things. The few times Sterling had come home to visit at Laguna fiesta time, he had been relieved that his railroad job saved him from being involved in the controversy. Aunt Marie and the old clan mothers in the kitchen used to predict trouble because of the mine. Sterling had listened quietly while they talked on and on. The old ones had stuck to their predictions stubbornly. Whatever was coming would not necessarily appear right away; it might not arrive for twenty or even a hundred years. Because these old ones paid no attention to white man’s time. But Sterling had never dreamed that one day his own life would be changed forever because of that mine. Those old folks had been right all along. The mine had destroyed Sterling’s life without Sterling’s ever setting foot near the acres of ruined earth at the open pit. If there hadn’t been the mine, the giant stone snake would not have appeared, and the Hollywood movie crew would never have seen it or filmed it.

The film crew had not understood what it was they were seeing and filming at the foot of mountains of grayish mine tailings. To Sterling’s thinking this meant the secret of the stone snake was intact. But to the thinking of the caciques and war captains, the sacrilege had been the story of the stone figures all over again.

Sterling had tried to reason with the Tribal Council members. Nothing had actually been stolen or removed. Sterling had tried to argue a good many points. But nothing could be done. The Tribal Council had appointed Sterling to keep the Hollywood people under control. They had trusted him. They had relied on his years of experience living with white people in California, and Sterling had betrayed them.

Seese looked puzzled and shook her head. They had banished him forever, just for that one incident? Sterling had been coiling up the garden hose by the pool filter. He let out a sigh Seese could hear clear across the pool. “It was the last straw,” Sterling said, looking mournfully into the water. “But the other things hadn’t really been much—.”

THE RANCH

STERLING PROMISED to tell Seese the rest of the story another time. There was too much to tell right now, and Sterling had thought about it over and over. The magazine articles all seemed to be in agreement: to cure depression one must let bygones be bygones. Sterling unfolded the magazine clipping on mental hygiene from his billfold. Seese looked, but did not seem to be listening. She was intent on the lower left corner of the page, which wasn’t even the article on depression. Suddenly big tears filled her eyes. She looked at Sterling hopelessly, shaking her head, then shoved the magazine clipping back into his hands. Seese ran toward the house. Sterling felt all his strength drain away through his feet. His legs felt heavy. Maybe he would not be able to stay here after all. Some days he felt as if the atmosphere in the house was electric with tension. After years of working on the railroad section gang, Sterling knew better than to ask questions about the bosses. He fought off a wave of discouragement. He was still new to this place. Here the earth herself was almost a stranger. He could see the desert dip and roll, a jade-green sea to the horizon and jagged, blue mountain peaks like islands across the valley. When he worked in the yard with his rake, he was amazed at the lichens and mosses that sprang up on northern exposures after the least rain shower. The few times Sterling had ventured off paths that led to the corrals or water storage tank he felt he had stepped into a jungle of thorns and spines. Strange and dangerous plants thrived in these rocky hills.

For a moment the expanse of desert and sky was motionless. No hawks circled. The coyotes were silent. No sound out of the day dogs patrolling the arroyo and foothills or the night dogs in their kennels. Sterling had a great urge to stretch out on the chaise lounge by the pool.

But it would be no good for the new Indian gardener to be found asleep on the job, even if the old boss woman and her fat, strange nephew had more important business to tend to. Sterling felt safe in his room at the back of the toolshed. The small outbuilding near the corrals was easy to dismiss. But he had a space for his bed, and the other area contained a toilet with a tiny refrigerator and a two-burner stove. The shower was in the corner of the room near the tools and storage shelves. The pipe wrenches and screwdrivers had been lying untouched for a long time. Gallon cans of dried-up paint lined an entire wall of dusty shelves. Sterling was waiting to get nerve enough to ask Ferro or the old boss woman if they might want him to clean out all the no-good stuff in the shed.

His bed was comfortable, although Sterling thought the mattress was probably softer than the experts and doctors had recommended in their magazine articles. But whenever Sterling sank into the softness, he always slept without waking until morning. Yet that afternoon, by the time he had got to his room, the drowsiness he’d felt by the pool was gone. He could not stop thinking about the poor blond girl who had suddenly got so sad, who seemed even more alone than he was. She had started crying when she saw an article below the report on depression. The article was about a woman who had murdered three of her own babies. The police detective who had finally cracked the case had noticed a silky, white, stuffed toy dog sitting on a shelf in the nursery. Silky, white fibers had been found in the dead babies’ nostrils and mouths, and snagged on their tiny fingernails. The woman had persuaded everyone — husband and relatives, doctors and police — that her babies were victims of crib death. Sterling could understand how such an article might have upset a young woman such as Seese. Sterling himself had not been able to read the article without imagining a poor helpless baby struggling to breathe while its own mother pressed a toy dog over its face. Sterling had never liked dogs of any kind — stuffed or alive. He got chills each time he remembered those poor babies and the ugly glass eyes of the stuffed toy dog.

Paulie was in charge of the dogs at the ranch. Sterling had only been instructed once by Paulie, but with attack dogs such as these, Sterling vowed never to forget. No one was allowed to feed the dogs but Paulie. Sterling had to wait until Paulie opened the kennels, one by one, for Sterling to sweep and hose down. If for any reason Sterling were ever to find himself in an outer perimeter where the dogs patrolled, he was to stand perfectly still when they spotted him. If a dog attacked, Sterling was to lie facedown, motionless, knees drawn up to his belly, with his hands and arms protecting his neck and head. Paulie had rattled off the instructions in a low, mechanical voice as if he couldn’t care less if Sterling got torn up by dogs or not. Later on, Sterling had asked Seese what she thought about Paulie. Sterling himself thought Paulie would really like to see the dogs get somebody. Seese did not answer, but Sterling could tell by her expression she had noticed Paulie’s contempt for her and Sterling. “Yeah, the dogs. Well, just think about their names,” was all Seese had said. The only names Sterling could remember for the attack dogs that patrolled the property were Cy, Nitro, Mag, and Stray; and there were eight other dogs whose names were too hard to remember. Cyanide, Nitroglycerine, Magnum, and Stray Bullet were the day-shift dogs.

Sterling had asked Seese if she was afraid, but she had only shrugged her shoulders. “Those collars are electronic,” Seese told him. “They have radio transmitters in them. Lecha says one of them wears a bigger, heavier collar. A TV collar.”

Seese laughed. “She says they can stop the dogs by remote control. Give them little electric jolts. Give them signals and commands.”

Later Sterling had watched Paulie adjust and tinker with the dogs’ collars. The only time Sterling had ever seen Paulie’s face relax and soften was when he was handling the dogs. Paulie had whispered to them in a low, baby-talk voice and had stroked them before he commanded them in or out of the kennel. He stroked them while he completed the transfer of a collar from a day-shift dog to a night dog.

The dogs were Dobermans with ears cropped so short their heads looked more snake than dog. Even so, the dogs came off their shifts with cactus spines in their ears, and between the pads of their paws. Paulie, who usually moved so fast, worked with infinite patience to remove the spines and dress the wounds. Paulie had caught Sterling watching him and had given him a glance so murderous Sterling had stepped in a big pile of dog turds in the kennel he was cleaning. Paulie did not want anyone to see how carefully he probed and examined each dog. As time went by, Sterling began to realize Paulie was perhaps more strange than anyone, more strange even than the two old women or the man, Ferro.

It had been around Ferro that Sterling had felt the strangeness of Paulie most clearly. Paulie’s pale blue eyes avoided all faces, yet never left Ferro’s face even for a moment. Ferro had a habit of abruptly turning away from Paulie’s gaze. Sterling always felt a load lift off his chest when Ferro and Paulie drove away. The day dogs barked and howled at the four-wheel-drive truck as it passed through the succession of electric gates. Even the old boss woman and her sister did not make Sterling as uneasy as the two men did. The old boss woman had not cared about anything except that he was not an Arizona Indian. She would not hire somebody who would have hundreds of relatives nearby, dozens of in-laws who would make the ranch their second home.

Zeta had looked pleased when Sterling said he was alone in the world since his aunt Marie had died. Ferro had even asked what mail Sterling expected to receive. Ferro’s expression was indifferent as Sterling began with his railroad pension check. He did not expect letters. Then Sterling rattled off his magazine subscriptions. Ferro turned away abruptly before Sterling had finished. There was no mention of days off or trips into Tucson. After Sterling had got settled in his new job, it might be nice to go to town once in a while. He wanted to get a library card. He was curious about the town itself because Tucson had a notorious history. Besides Tom Mix, other famous people had met their downfall in Tucson. Geronimo and John Dillinger to name two. Old Mafia godfathers and their loyal lieutenants retired to Tucson where they waited for strokes to carry them away in their sleep. Sterling would like very much just to stand on the sites of these historical events.

Sometimes the Police Gazette ran specials on famous crimes of yesteryear. These had been his favorites. He had been most excited the time they had the special on Geronimo. Geronimo was included with John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Billy the Kid. Sterling had often heard Aunt Marie and her sisters talk about the old days, and Geronimo’s last raids, when even a platoon of Laguna “regulars” had helped patrol New Mexico territory for Apache renegades. Somehow Sterling had never quite imagined old Geronimo in the same class with Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Geronimo had turned to crime only as a last resort, after Mexican army troops had slaughtered his wife and three children on U.S. territory in southern Arizona. Despite the border violations by the Mexican army and the murder of Apache women and children who had been under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of War, no U.S. action had ever been taken against the Mexican army. Geronimo had been forced to seek justice on his own.

But it had only been a matter of a few years before Geronimo’s second wife and another child were killed. They had been part of a small band of women, children, and old folks who had voluntarily come in from the mountains for the safety and peace promised on the grounds of Ft. Grant. Alerted to the approach of a mob of deranged white people driving buggies and wagons from Tucson, the army officer in command had sent frantic appeals to cavalry units away on patrol. But help had arrived too late to prevent the slaughter of the defenseless Apaches.

Thanks to his magazines, Sterling was aware that many famous criminals had similar grievances with the governments or communities that had failed to deliver them either protection or justice.

Of course Sterling knew there was no excuse for crime. But for Geronimo it had been war in defense of the homelands. He liked the way the Police Gazette specials took an understanding view of the criminal’s life. Still it was clear that the law did not accept any excuses. They had all died violently. Got the gas chamber or the electric chair. Or got shot down. Except for Geronimo. The specials always ran a whole page of inky, fuzzed photographs showing them after they’d been gunned down; halos of black blood around their heads; then later propped on snow-white marble slabs.

It was clear that crime did not pay. Geronimo had been one of the few famous American public enemies who had not died in an ambush or at the end of a noose. But Geronimo had been sentenced to live out his days a prisoner at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma — punishment worse than death. Geronimo and the great warrior Red Cloud had both been condemned to the gallows in their day as savages and murderers. But both had been masters of guerrilla warfare; one fighting the U.S. cavalry on the upper Great Plains, the other outrunning five thousand U.S. cavalrymen in the impenetrable desert mountains of northern Sonora. But some years later, elected for a second term, President Teddy Roosevelt had scandalized his political adversaries by inviting Geronimo, Red Cloud, and Quanah Parker to ride in his inaugural parade. To critics, Teddy Roosevelt said all a new president owed voters was a good show — precisely what he had delivered to them!

Sterling was pretty sure Cole Younger and some of the Jesse James gang had been part Indian by their looks in old photographs. Sterling knew the Starrs had been Oklahoma half-breeds. Sterling thought he was probably one of the few Indians interested in famous Indian outlaws. He knew tribal leaders and so-called Indian experts preferred that Indians got left out of that part of American history too, since their only other appearances had been at so-called massacres of white settlers.

What Sterling knew about the Great Depression of 1929 he had learned from his detective and crime magazines. The government boarding-school history teachers had seldom ever got them past the American Civil War. Sterling had been a boy during the Depression, but it had made little or no impression on people at Laguna. Most, especially the old-timers, had said they never even knew a depression was going on, because in those days people had no money in banks to lose. Indians had never held legal title to any Indian reservation land, so there had never been property to mortgage. But winters those years had been mild and wet for the Southwest. Harvests had been plentiful, and the game had been fat for the winter. The Laguna people had heard something about “The Crash.” But they remembered “The Crash” as a year of bounty and plenty for the people.

Seese got up from her lounge chair by the pool and helped Sterling unload colored rocks from the wheelbarrow. She didn’t know anything about any kind of garden, and especially not rock gardens, whatever they were. “Where did you grow up?” Sterling was on his hands and knees arranging little orange stones around the base of a jojoba bush. He was afraid to look in case Seese did not like his question. But there was the quick little laugh she gave when she was nervous, and then she said, “Oh, I grew up in a lot of places. Military family.”

“No gardens,” Sterling said, clearing away some weeds that had died since the last rain. “No gardens. Not much of anything to remember.” Seese was smoking a cigarette and staring off in the distance toward the city. Sterling could see she had one thing she never forgot, one thing always very near. “I was telling you about my magazine articles,” Sterling said. “You know, we can go see the place Dillinger’s gang got caught.”

Seese turned all the way around to face him. “Here?”

Sterling felt a big grin on his face. He nodded.

She laughed. “Okay. We’ll go tomorrow when the rest of them are gone.”

BOOK TWO. SAN DIEGO TV TALK SHOW PSYCHIC

THERE IS CONFUSION in her dreams and memories of the child. First there is the odd dream of the snapshots of a boy, twelve or thirteen. In the dream she knows the boy is dead by the remarks others make as they look at the photographs. She is seized by the loss of him and awakens crying. She is stunned because in the dream Monte had been older, as he might look years from now. Monte would be almost two years old, wherever he was; David had kidnapped Monte when he was six months old. Seese refuses to believe he is dead. The dreams are her contact with him. She feels she has actually been with him after these dreams. She awakens crying because the odor of the baby lotion and his skin are immediate and she feels she has only just set him down in his bed. Because of these dreams she is certain he is not dead. At other times she reasons that the child probably is not alive since David spent thousands hiring detectives and paying informants. She has read about the anguish one feels as the memories of the beloved gradually recede. She knows this is to be expected. Still, she shuffles the baby pictures like a deck of cards, trying furiously to deal up just the one that will bring her back to a moment with him. She is determined to be the first not to forget. One of the few for whom the memories never dim.

As long as she is able three or four times a year to dream about him and to awaken feeling as if she has actually been with him, holding him close, she thinks the memories are holding. She had been afraid she might become too satisfied with these dreams. She had dreamed him newborn again in her arms. The ache of the loss that woke her did not recede as the day went on, but increased with every sniff of coke, with every hit off the joint, until she was tearing open cupboards looking for any kind of alcohol, any bottle of pills. She was staying in the penthouse on her lawyer’s advice. The lawyer wanted Seese. His wife had injured her back in a sailing accident. That was what he told her. Seese had never trusted him. Beaufrey once said the best lawyers were the best crooks. The lawyer liked the idea of a young mistress in an elegant penthouse overlooking a stretch of private beach outside La Jolla. Of course from the kitchen breakfast bar he could point out the high rise where the senior partners were preparing appellate briefs and corporate articles. She had quit opening his bills months ago. Beaufrey had taken David and left her with the apartment and enough money and drugs to kill herself. Beaufrey had left the country in a hurry with David. Before David could change his mind. She knows she had sex with the lawyer, but can’t remember a single time, nothing they did.

She tells Sterling she does not have much of a past or much to remember, but they both know she is holding out. He isn’t what she thought an Indian would be like. You don’t think of Pueblo Indians reading the Police Gazette and knowing all about John Dillinger. When Seese said this to Sterling, his wide face had been all a big smile, and she said, “That’s what I mean too,” pointing at his face and his mouth. “Oh,” he said, “you thought Indians didn’t ever smile or laugh,” and they were both laughing. Suddenly she stopped to remember how long it had been since she had laughed without a weight pulling from somewhere behind. With the lawyer she had laughed but knew that the feeling wasn’t true. He did not love her. Things would not work out.

Seese wonders how far back these things go. She has nightmares about diving into a pool that is too deep. Before she can manage to surface she is out of air. High above her she can see the sky and round, puffy clouds as she drowns. She remembers having the nightmare only twice before she had the baby. Both times it was the night before a math test in college. She got lost in the lines and equations; she could imagine any number of possibilities from all the signs and symbols. She read many things into them, many more than mathematicians had anticipated. Now she knows that all of it is a code anyway. The blue sky and puffy clouds seen through the deadly jade water of the nightmare pool was a message about the whole of creation. The loss of the child was another, more final message, or at least that was how it was translating — she was only just finding out that this was a translation, that the last morning she had held little Monte in her arms loving him perfectly — that had been an end too. When the drugs affected her in a certain way she was able to study the message calmly as if watching pebbles at the bottom of a stream; she could not feel the temperature of the water. She could feel nothing after that last morning. Dark green water had closed over her head.

Beaufrey and David had taken Monte or hired someone to take Monte, but then something terrible had gone wrong. This was the story she now believed because David had had her followed, had the phone tapped and had even telephoned himself, asking to hear his son cry. The lawyer had taken the call because she knew she would break down. But David had misunderstood, and next there had been the gunman; the reasoning, the lawyer later explained, was that once Seese was dead, the court would award custody of the baby to the father. But Seese did not have Monte.

In La Jolla she had been in the habit of standing for hours in front of the glass walls facing the ocean. But it could have been a blank wall. She stared and saw nothing — not the waves rising and falling on the beach or the banks of clouds on the southwest horizon. The wind had riffled the waves so they glittered like thousands of tiny mirrors — blinding reflections that left white afterimages before her eyes. The afterimages were in the shapes of teeth — incisors, canines.

After Monte had been kidnapped, Seese could not bear to look at shadows or shapes of clouds, patterns the dampness made on the beach sand, because instantly her brain gave them definite forms. She would see the toy giraffe in a cloud. She would see the print of a small hand left by the splash of a wave.

After the gunman had fired through her bedroom window, she had called the lawyer. She was not surprised he wanted her to go away, to start a new life. He was afraid of what might happen to himself and his marriage if she remained alone in the glass penthouse above the sea. He was right of course, and her doctor had suggested it too. She had seen the doctor about her eyes, and the problems she was having with the bright reflections almost blinding her. It was the cocaine mostly, he said, and as her psychiatrist he was prescribing a change. She had to leave the surroundings so familiar and once part of her life with the child. But she could not seem to leave the place although everything reasonable and sane told her she must. She could feel an animal circling inside her, pacing around and around in her stomach and chest. It was a fierce animal; it would not stop waiting or searching the place she had last seen her child.

She had not heard the shot. The gunman might have been four hundred yards away. Broken glass had streamed across the unmade bed like water. For an instant she had confused this with the blinding afterimages on her retinas. She had been too drunk and too high to be afraid. The lawyer came and searched but could find no bullet. For an instant he was about to accuse her of breaking the windows herself until she pointed out that the glass had collapsed into the room. A fury she had never known swept over her at that moment, and she turned on the lawyer. “Even as drunk as I am, I’m not that stupid,” Seese said. The lawyer had never suspected she was capable of such anger. He moved under the blow like a boxer trained to keep moving mechanically no matter how hard he was hit. Later Seese decided he’d come for a last fuck, that little gesture of comfort for a hysterical woman.

“It might not be Beaufrey and David,” he warned her, still recovering his balance. If he could have frightened her, he might have regained the advantage. “It could be the others,” he continued.

“We are even,” she said. Her voice was loud. She wanted them to hear that, so if it was them who had kidnapped her baby, Monte, them who were shooting, they would stop.

The lawyer began to say that he had it from reliable sources that X, Y, and Z had still not been paid for Beaufrey’s last big delivery from Mexico City. Seese stared at him while he made his pronouncements. He worked for all of the big players. She wanted to shove her.380 automatic into his mouth and pull the trigger until the clip was empty. “You know better than that!” she had screamed at him. “I’m out of it! I left before I had my baby!”

The lawyer was picking up slivers of glass from the pale lavender sheets. “I’ll stay with you tonight.” He was sitting on the edge of the bed still searching for bits of glass.

“No.”

“Come on, Seese, you aren’t being quite fair with me. I love you, and I want to help you.”

Seese knows what the Cuban maid is thinking. The Cuban maid had worked for the lawyer’s father for years. The old judge is connected with powerful people. The maid resents being there. She knows they kill hired help when they come to get the big cheese. The maid does not think much of this skinny blond woman. Small cheese. She does not think anyone will get killed except Seese. But the maid hates missing her evening television shows.

“What’s that?”

“One of those shows — they get people — people doing things — you know — swallow pennies, hold spiders.” The maid speaks English without an accent. Elena knows that if she were blond and that skinny, she would be living here. So the hatred, Seese reasons, is not of me. Elena hates all skinny, blond women. Seese rolls another joint and pours more whiskey. “What’s she doing?”

“Oh, some old Mexican Indian they claim—she claims she can see the past and tell the future.” Elena is from Cuba where they don’t have any Indians. Anyone can see Elena is descended only from white ancestors.

Seese is drunk. She can see women lining up to speak into a microphone. The television studio audience. “What? What?” Seese is too high and too drunk to hear what the woman from the studio audience has said to the microphone. The face of the talk show host fills the screen.

Elena’s tone is impatient. “She asked her things!”

“What things?”

Elena is not afraid to show this bitch the truth. She is spending the night with the white trash only as a favor to the boss. The boss already has another one. This one is on her way out. Elena is tired. She has no patience for this silly blond bitch who is so stupid she lost her own baby, then cries about it when she gets drunk.

“Just watch!” The maid enjoys snapping at her. She enjoys commanding: “Watch! And you’ll see. People who have lost things — that man there had a winning lottery ticket, then he lost it.”

“How?”

The maid grits her teeth. She hates people who want to talk while the television is on. Elena is almost yelling now. “I don’t know! It blew out the window of his car! Watch! Just watch!”

The marijuana and whiskey feel like lazy updrafts of warm ocean air the gulls ride. Seese lets herself be carried far from the angry Cuban woman and from the scattered glass slivers. Seese begins watching the television screen intently. The Mexican Indian woman seems to be speaking only to her. The woman’s hair is coal-black, but the skin of her face is brown and meshed with fine wrinkles. Seese giggles. The Mexican Indian woman dyes her hair.

According to the show’s host, the woman finds missing persons. The TV camera comes in for a close-up of a newspaper clipping: “Mass Murder Site Located.” The old woman’s face fills the screen. She is smiling but her eyes are not friendly. Her eyes know many things never meant to be seen. The contents of shallow graves. The thrust of a knife. Things not meant to be heard; the gurgling cough the victim makes choking on his own blood while a calm voice on a tape recording narrates exactly how the execution must be performed. Her eyes said, plenty of women have lost babies and small children. They die of dysentery and infections all the time. They starve, get shot, bombed, and gassed.

Seese could feel the weight rising up in her chest, but the old woman’s eyes continued: In villages in Mexico and Guatemala they lay out little children and babies every day. Their little white dresses and gowns are trimmed in blue satin ribbon. Seese was crying, but like the television, she seemed to make no sound. The maid ignored her, intent on the television show.

Now the old woman’s eyes were closed and her head had fallen back as if she were dozing, but Seese could see her lips were moving. Seese could not stand it. She reached for the volume knob. When Elena started to protest, Seese pointed at the door. “Get out! I’m better off alone.”

Seese did not bother to watch Elena storm out the door. She was watching the old Mexican woman. The old woman was some sort of clairvoyant. She was rattling off what she was seeing: trash cans are stuffed with newborns. Garbagemen in Mexico City find four hundred fetuses and dead newborns each day, not counting the ones found floating facedown among the water lilies in fountains outside the presidential palace.

At this point Seese had lost track of what was happening on the screen. The talk show moderator was trying to calm a woman standing at the studio audience microphone. The psychic had opened her eyes and was wiping her brow with a large white handkerchief. A woman’s voice from the television says, “The dead rest just fine — it’s only your mind that keeps them alive and lost,” but Seese can’t see who is saying this — unless the talk show host has suddenly got a woman’s voice. Seese gets up quickly and turns the television off. She does not like the idea of hallucinatory voices talking about the dead. She has had too much to drink. She has to get to bed. She is going to track down that old Mexican Indian woman and get her to help.

That night Seese dreams she finds Monte’s corpse in a fountain at a shopping mall. He is tiny, reduced to the size of a fetus. But all his features are those of the six-month-old child he was when he disappeared. She cannot reach him and wades into the pool. Crowds of shoppers gather to stare at her. Their faces are blank although she hears angry men’s voices telling her to get out. She yells back she must get her baby. Her own voice wakes her just as the sky is beginning to lighten in the east. The air pushing in the shattered glass is cold and wet and smells like kelp. She pulls the sheet and blanket closer. The psychiatrist believes she must give up hope of finding him alive, that all she needs is to know what had happened. But watching the talk show psychic the night before has made Seese realize the doctor is wrong. She refused to give up. She had to get out of there. Before more bullets came flying.

The local TV station could only give her the phone number of the cable network in Atlanta. Seese could feel her strength begin to drain away, and her feeling of purpose dissolve into need for a drink and a sniff of coke. But when she reached the Atlanta number, a woman with a soft drawl knew all about the clairvoyant Mexican woman. “Because she helped me out with a problem,” was all the cable TV station woman would say, but she did tell Seese the woman’s name: Lecha Cazador. The woman in Atlanta was not sure, but she thought that from Atlanta, the old woman was flying to Tucson. “That was over a week ago, you know. We do all our program tapings at least seven days in advance. This phone just won’t stop ringing. On account of her.” The woman in Atlanta belonged on a talk show herself, Seese kept thinking. Daytime rates, long distance. Seese kept trying to break in to thank her for the information. Finally Seese just hung up. She didn’t want to hear any more about the long-distance calls that had come in about missing persons.

Seese was certain the TV psychic could help her. It was the strongest feeling about getting help she’d ever had. She didn’t know if it was the heat of the sun on all the glass or the four fat lines of cocaine she had just snorted, but sweat was running down her jawbones. After all these months she was ready to move, ready to get something done. She went through all the desk drawers for birth certificates, passports, and safety-deposit keys. She packed the extra box of cartridge shells for her gun. Sweat was breaking across the bridge of her nose. She was feeling good — she was going toward something. She felt sure of it. She had not felt anything like this for a long time. The phone started ringing, but she would not touch it. No one and nothing would stop her this time.

MEMORIES AND DREAMS

MUCH LATER Seese had realized not only had David lied about having sex with Beaufrey, but Eric had been lying too. Seese had not figured that one out until after she had been crushed with Monte’s loss, and she had consumed grams of cocaine, then quarts of vodka and capsules of doxepin until her vision finally blurred and her eyes felt dried up in mummy sockets. One afternoon Seese woke up in the empty sunken bathtub. She had lain shivering, dreaming she had gone skiing with her father. In the dream he wore his dress uniform, but Seese had somehow lost sight of him in the crowd at the chair lift. She had wanted to find him because he had her jacket and gloves. In her dream, she pushed her way past the skiers, who did not seem to notice that she was naked.

She got out of the tub and sat on the toilet to pee. Out the smoky glass she could see the blaze of the sun on the sand. She checked the thermostat and found at some point she — or someone — had reprogrammed the thermostat for all the rooms. “Refrigerate, sixty degrees.” Seese found a half joint in the ashtray by the sink. She took a glass of orange juice out to the roof garden. The warm ocean air folded around her on the chaise lounge. She closed her eyes, but she wasn’t sleepy. She had been thinking that turning down the thermostat to sixty and lying on the cold porcelain nude could kill you. She and Cherie had known a girl from Phoenix who’d died like that. Not an OD, just asleep in the cold so long her body could never get warm enough again, not even in the hospital. Sometimes coke made her feel feverish. She had been alone in the apartment, so only she could have turned down the thermostat. Maybe her unconscious had remembered the girl from Phoenix, dead from the cold tub, because something inside Seese did not want to live anymore.

Beaufrey had gone days, and sometimes weeks, without speaking or in any way acknowledging Seese’s existence. Eric could see when she was beginning to crack, and they would make a game of her invisibility around Beaufrey. Seese would dip into the silver sugar bowl with a teaspoon, taking Beaufrey’s cocaine right under his nose, they’d laugh later, and still Beaufrey had never glanced down or made eye contact with Seese. Beaufrey’s only comment had been about Eric’s being a coke whore. Cocaine was a matter of indifference to Beaufrey. He kept cocaine because the young boys always liked it.

The group Beaufrey worked with had stockpiles of cocaine in warehouses packed floor to ceiling, in sealed drums. Eric said Beaufrey never stopped anyone from pigging out on the cocaine in the silver sugar bowl because Beaufrey got aroused when someone overdosed on the drug. “Beaufrey would love to watch you and me both OD,” Eric had said, laughing. “He gets it for nothing. An OD was a lot less expensive than a bullet.” Eric had been right on that point. When Beaufrey got rid of Seese, he had paid her off with a kilo of coke, assuming she would dispose of herself automatically. And Seese might have done that except she had never forgotten how Beaufrey had talked relentlessly about suicide. Most assholes in this world would obligingly kill themselves for you. No need for hired assassins. You might have to supply a woman, drugs, or a fast car and a gun. Beaufrey was watching Eric’s face as he spoke. Eric had smiled: “Oh, yes, the power of suggestion. Let’s all have a cup of poison Kool-Aid. Someone push the launch button of the big bomb.”

Eric had driven Seese to the doctor’s office, but waited in the car where he could smoke dope and play loud music. Eric had guessed it the minute he saw her face. “Test positive. And you want to keep it.” Seese felt a sinking in her chest because Eric had said “it.” Her throat was tight, but she tried to sound bouncy. “Him or her — it’s him or her, not it.”

Eric threw the car into reverse, then burnt rubber leaving the parking lot. Seese had not expected Eric’s reaction to be so negative or powerful. They had discussed babies and children many times. She and Eric had even discussed how they might collaborate to conceive two children — one for him and one for her. This had been their scheme to tap into all the family trusts available to Eric the minute he married and had children.

Eric had taken the long way home, driving slowly and methodically down the winding coastal highway. They were near the apartment complex when Eric reached over and held her hand in his. Traffic was light but he didn’t look away from the road. Staring straight ahead, he said, “I can’t believe I’m behaving this way — faggot, sissy, queer, I never imagined or dreamed—” Eric had burst out laughing, but Seese could see tears. He did not turn into the entrance to the parking garage but drove to the beach. They sat in the car and watched the tide come in. Eric was still gripping the steering wheel, staring straight ahead at the blazing wake of light from the setting sun.

Seese slid down in the seat and hunched against the wind off the ocean. Eric was motionless, frozen to the wheel. The wind flattened his thin, fine hair tight against his skull, and for an instant Seese saw how Eric would look when he was an old man.

They did not talk until they had parked in the basement garage. “I don’t even know where to begin,” Eric said, pulling Seese across the seat to hug her. As his lips brushed her cheek, Seese could hear his heart pounding. His hands were wet and cold on hers. “We have always talked and talked, you and I. And now when there is so much, I can’t say anything. So many things, so much all mixed up together.” Eric fumbled under the front seat for his brandy flask. “I want this baby to be mine and not his.” Eric passed the flask to Seese and fished around in his pocket for the vial of cocaine. Seese took a big swallow of brandy, but shook her head at the cocaine. “Here’s a change already,” Eric said, smiling brightly. “I’ve lost my comrade-in-dope.” The brandy burned all the way down. Seese reached for the flask and emptied it. The burning and coughing brought tears to her eyes.

“So now we know gay men are just men after all,” Eric said. “Irrational and piggish like all the rest. I thought I had already whipped that demon back to the underworld.” Eric paused and glanced around the basement garage for security people, then spooned more coke to his nose. “What I have to tell you now is even uglier.” Seese knew by his expression Eric meant Beaufrey. “He’ll go crazy when he finds out you’re pregnant again.”

Seese looked at Eric, shaking her head slowly. “How do you know? I’m keeping this one,” she said softly. “David—” Seese began, but Eric interrupted her. Suddenly he was angry. “David? David? Jesus fucking Christ! Seese! Don’t you understand about David?”

Again and again Seese had thought about that night in the basement garage. She and Eric had always been able to tease one another when one or both of them got on their “high horse.” But that night, neither of them had been able to call the other back down where they could talk. Eric had been gloomy and depressed for six weeks. He had even cautioned Seese not to take the really black moods too seriously. Eric had once been David’s lover. David had wanted a child, a son. Eric had watched her eyes and lips and knew Seese would not believe him. Eric suddenly felt exhausted, almost too weak to push open the huge Cadillac door. He wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Maybe he had the whole story wrong the way most of the rest of his life was all wrong. He was the odd man out. How could his feelings or judgment be trusted?

“I throw up,” she had told him. “Morning sickness,” Beaufrey said, building a case against the pregnancy. “No, not that. The morphine does it.” Seese had stood her ground. No abortion this time. The pregnancy had put her on a different footing with Beaufrey. Pregnancy worked to her advantage. Beaufrey was uncomfortable. He kept looking at David. He was trying to determine how much David really wanted the child. But David was intent on photographing Serlo, who posed sullenly next to a large pot of orchids trailing long sprays of yellow blossoms like a peacock tail. David wanted the blue of the ocean and the sky through the glass wall. Serlo pulled some of the long yellow spikes of flowers over his shoulders like a cape. At home, Serlo either went bare chested or did not button his shirt.

Seese has other dreams that haunt her. Dreams in which she is in the hospital again, only Beaufrey himself stands near the bed holding a white porcelain basin. A surgical procedure has been completed. There is a sanitary napkin between her legs. A nurse helps her swallow more pain pills. As she drifts, Seese can feel nothing below her neck. Beaufrey had paid doctors to reach up inside her belly while she was knocked out, and they had cut the little tendril. In her nightmare, dozens of yellow rosebuds have been scattered over a hospital bed with white sheets. The rosebuds have wilted, and the edges of the petals have dried up. She dreams she is awake, but numb below the waist—“As usual,” she thinks she hears one of the doctors say, but then realizes it must be the effects of the injection the nurse has given her.

The chrome-yellow hue of the light had been all that Seese could remember clearly about the abortion she had had before she conceived Monte. The light that afternoon had been creamy yellow, the color and texture of roses. She had never met Beaufrey, but Beaufrey had made all the arrangements. Seese had been so high and so happy in love with David and delighted with her friend Eric she had not wanted pregnancy to spoil it. Still, Seese had been disturbed by the urgency with which Beaufrey had got rid of her and David’s embryo.

FLYING

SEESE ORDERED a double shot of rum at the San Diego airport bar. There had been two hours before the flight left for Tucson. “Anything from Haiti,” she told the bartender. “This is an airport, remember?” was all the bartender said. Once they had got drunk together — her, David, and Beaufrey — on 180-proof Haitian rum. Beaufrey had been in Haiti on business. They never talked business around her. With Haitian rum Seese saw “apparitions.” “You mean hallucinations,” David said. But apparitions had been the term the nuns used. Apparitions were full of beauty and wonder and holiness.

On the flight to Tucson there was a guy who looked so much like Eric that she had felt a pounding in her ears. Once the plane was in the air, she made a trip to the lavatory so she could take another look, so she could make sure. As she sat on the cold lid of the commode, her hands had been shaking so hard she could not get the tiny spoon to her nostril. She had to tell herself to breathe deep and to relax. The cocaine helped. When she moved down the aisle past the man, she saw that his face was not nearly as handsome or kind as Eric’s had been. When the flight attendants brought drinks, she bought two rum and Cokes although they warned the flight to Tucson would be short.

Seese could not remember seeing the hills and trees or the ocean after Eric’s suicide. They had done a lot of traveling after that, but she had no memory of it. She had tried to distract herself with new landscapes when they traveled, but after Eric died, Seese had been unable to remember anything except disjointed arrivals and departures in international airports.

She had not actually seen Eric’s body. Only the photographs. David’s photographs, but somehow that had been worse. All she knew was that something had happened to her eyes, something had diminished her vision.

In air turbulence the jet airliner alternately bucked and shuddered. Seese thought of children’s books with storm clouds illustrated as big horses — wild-eyed, tails streaming down into rain and mist. From the blue and black storm horses it was only a flicker of thought to Monte. The doctor had said it was better not to dwell on him — especially not to imagine him at times or in activities that had never happened. Of course it was all right to remember Monte as he had been. Seese let go of the idea of the children’s books. She did not think she had ever seen a book that turned thunderclouds into galloping wild horses. She looked around at the other passengers and at the back of the head of the Eric look-alike. She was proud of only a few things, but one of them was that she was as fearless as her father had been about flying in jets. He had flown navy jets and had been gone on carriers for months at a time. On his visits home, he rented single-engine planes and took her with him. He had to fly every day, he said. He didn’t care what kind of plane. He loved flying. What Seese remembered best was the moment the two of them had returned to the house. Her father had bragged to her mother, “Seese is a born flyer, just like her daddy.” Her mother had only shaken her head. Seese’s mother never liked to fly.

The thunderclouds near Tucson had caused turbulence. The other passengers were restless and some were airsick. The flight attendants were finally able to move through the cabin to take airsick bags to the lavatories. The captain was on the PA soothing the passengers. They had passed the storm. The captain used the slow, easy tones her father had used with her to announce his new assignment to the biggest, newest carrier in the Pacific fleet. That had been the good news. The bad news was the divorce. Everyone at her high school, well, nearly everyone, had had a divorce in the family. The school counselor said it was because their school had so many pupils from military families.

Out the window Seese saw long lines of blue landing lights outlining the runways. In the dim light she could see the grass and weeds between runways bent to the ground by strong winds. Ah, Tucson. What a nice welcome, she thought as she swallowed the last of the rum. The only places that had worse dust storms than Tucson were Albuquerque and El Paso. Her father used to tease her about going up and never coming down. Just flying and flying forever, so whatever bad weather there was down below, dust storms or even earthquakes, you wouldn’t be touched.

He had been flying bombing missions over the South China Sea when she asked him about the war. He said it wasn’t really a war. She asked him what it was like. They had been at a lobster restaurant in Orange County. He always came to see her when he was “back in the States,” as he put it. He described what it felt like flying very high and very fast. No earthquakes or dust storms could get him. Her father had laughed then, proud to have remembered one of their little jokes together. Seese had wanted to ask him questions so he could give her answers that would help her feel better. Every evening-news show had television coverage of U.S. planes and pilots shot down over enemy territory. Even after it happened, Seese imagined he was only away on a long cruise. Seese imagined him flying and flying forever: the aviator’s vision of heaven.

From the baggage claim area Seese paused a moment in front of the sliding glass doors. Traveling with David, Beaufrey, and Serlo had taught her not to appear anxious to leave with the luggage. It was also not good to rush to a rest room either. What she was carrying with her was actually a lot more cocaine than she had ever carried alone. It was the kilo of coke Beaufrey had used to “settle up” with her. Seese knew Beaufrey would have preferred to settle up with a.44-magnum slug, but Beaufrey had David to think of.

Tucson was only one of a number of Southwest hick towns that the drug enforcement people watched relentlessly. Peepholes in toilet stalls at the Tucson International Airport were one of the airport police’s big pastimes. Seese and Cherie used to flip fingers at the invisible spies in the toilets. That was when they had been traveling just for fun — her and Cherie — carrying nothing on them. Tonight Seese just wanted to get to a motel room and sleep. The automatic sliding glass doors opened, and she let the weight of the two suitcases and the heavy shoulder bag propel her out into the night where a cold, dusty wind surged in dark waves.

She told the cabdriver “Miracle Mile.” She’d decide which motel when they got near there. The cold wind had cleared the rum from her brain. The four years she had spent with Cherie had taught Seese about cheap motels. The cab went to the end of Miracle Mile and she still couldn’t decide. She had to be sure she didn’t stay at a place she and Cherie had ever stayed, even if it had been years ago. It was patterns they used when hunting for you. Your habits and routines.

Seese wasn’t taking unnecessary chances. She asked for a room that would be “quiet,” meaning far from Miracle Mile, behind the other units. The night clerk was reading a textbook on basic chemistry. He was marking significant passages with a pale yellow marker. Seese hated people who marked books. But the clerk had given her the key without questions or hassle, something unusual for night clerks on Miracle Mile when a woman alone checked in. So Seese did not wisecrack about students who defaced books with yellow markers or mutter that writing in books should be against the law. Rum and cocaine always loosened her tongue, but now, she would have to take it easy for a while. She needed to lie low.

STORMS

THE ROOM SMELLED faintly of stale cigarettes, but that was all. Seese counted herself lucky the room didn’t reek of urine or sanitary napkins too long in the trash. She rolled a joint and propped herself up in the bed. The wind was whining along the eaves of the stucco bungalow. The gusts splattered sand against the sliding glass doors. Nights like these when she was a girl, she had pulled the covers up to her chin and had gone right to sleep. The sound of the wind had made her feel so snug and safe inside. The sound of rain did the same for other people. Eric had been the only other person who had liked the sound of the wind and sand. Because he had grown up in Lubbock, where, he said, West Texas sandstorms stripped the chrome right off the bumpers of new cars, and windshield glass was so badly sand-pitted it appeared to be fogged.

Eric had talked about the hailstorms they had out on the West Texas plains. That was what she and Eric had done when David was gone with Beaufrey: they had talked. Because they had both been in love with David, and they liked each other too much for there to be hurt feelings. Eric had had a grand way of setting up a story. He claimed he’d learned it growing up with cowboys, but it turned out his father had had a Ford dealership. The cowboys Eric had listened to were ex-cowboys hired as car salesmen when the ranchers went broke.

The hail, Eric said, was first recorded by the Spaniards with Coronado. Hailstones the size of turkey eggs had dented Spanish helmets and shields. The Spanish horses had bolted and scattered, and a few horses were never recovered. Here of course was where the Plains Indians first got horses. Seese loved to hear Eric go on and on. He knew many wonderful things. He had so much going for himself. It had always been difficult for Seese to imagine Eric with Beaufrey. A few months before it happened, Seese had asked Eric if going home for a visit might cheer him up. Eric had managed to laugh, then shook his head. West Texas was the source of his depression in the first place.

Seese’s mother had worked out an arrangement years ago. She had always known how to spend the salary a lieutenant commander flying combat received. Seese had asked about that too, but her father had laughed. What he liked to do the navy paid him to do. He told Seese she should not be critical of her mother. “She can have whatever she wants. Because she married me, then didn’t get a marriage. That’s grounds for a lawsuit the way I figure it. I’m not the marrying kind.” So her father and mother had gotten even with one another; but Seese did not feel the score had been settled between herself and either of them. Her mother had remarried immediately after the divorce was final. Another military officer, this time air force. He was gone as much as her father had been. He even looked like her father. The last year Seese spent at home, the year she had turned sixteen and they had fought, Seese had screamed at her mother, “What’s the point in being married to him? He’s not even as good as Daddy!” Later Seese thought her mother’s remarriage might not have upset her if her father had lived.

In her grief, Seese had hated that Al was alive when her father was not. She substituted Al for her father in the downed jet fighter whenever she visualized her father’s last mission. One night she and her mother had had a terrible fight over what to cook for Thanksgiving dinner. They had no near relatives. The guests would be couples from the base or friends of Al’s. Seese’s mother had remarked how much Seese’s “late father” had disliked turkey. Now that she was married to a man who ate turkey, that’s what she intended to cook.

Seese had left the house that night, with a suitcase of clothes and $80. She had hitchhiked as far as Santa Barbara the first night. Then, as she had later told Eric, she had got lucky. She ran into Cherie and some other girls. It was a hop, skip, and a jump to Tiny and all the rest. It wasn’t true that she had never seen her mother again. She had stopped in San Antonio once after Al’s transfer.

She had never thought she would be tracking down a psychic. Eric would have laughed if he were alive now. Eric had thought psychics were only for the ignorant or superstitious. Seese had laughed then because that’s what she had thought too. But catastrophe had changed her feelings. Seese turned off the light beside the bed, but she could not sleep. When she closed her eyes, mental images out of the past kept running through her brain like a high-speed movie. She tried to keep the focus only on those scenes or images that felt happy or good, because she had suffered breakdowns in the past. Two of her breakdowns had occurred before she had ever tried cocaine. Still, coke was probably the worst drug to use if your nerves were shaky, unless you really wanted to risk your sanity with LSD.

Seese tried to visualize Monte laughing and playing with other children in a park or school playground. Seese was convinced that a child so beautiful and intelligent as Monte was being reared by people who were loving him as much as they could love any child. Seese had asked the psychiatrist if he agreed that here was the logical way to look at it: her child had been taken because he was valuable and beautiful, and it was not likely any harm would have come to him.

DECOY

SOMETIMES A VOICE inside Seese’s head cried out to Eric, “Why did you kill yourself? Is that what you do to the people who love you?” But she understood exactly why you might do that to the ones you loved. So then gradually, from the grief and the anger Seese had come to feel that she was no more alive than Eric was. That in death she and Eric would always be bound together — sister and brother. There did not seem to be a vocabulary for what they had felt. Or if there had been a vocabulary, she hadn’t understood it.

Eric would start talking and mention names of books. The first few times he had done this, Seese had felt a panic — a sudden need for another beer. But later on, Eric told her he admired the people — women especially — who had gone out on their own when they had just finished high school. He had not done that, exactly, but when he had turned fourteen, he had asked the Baptist minister to remove his name from the church roster of baptized Baptists in what was a small town, Lubbock. Seese had been a little stunned. She had never belonged to any church. Her mother had not bothered to have Seese baptized.

Eric had never told Seese the whole story about his years with Beaufrey. Eric said it had been because he had been so young then, and fucked up on drugs to boot. “Those were the years before I finally came out”—Eric had smiled faintly—“before I came out and told them I fell in love with guys, not women. But it was all anticlimactic. My father had identified me years before. I had the big fight with them over my art history major. He called me queer and swish and fairy. ‘Faggot.’ Never just ‘fag.’ ”

David was ashamed for anyone to know. Of course, David had been seeing Seese on the sly for some months before. But David had also started spending afternoons swimming nude with Beaufrey.

Beaufrey was always delighted with the quarrels. Beaufrey was always looking for new players. Eric confessed to Seese he had cried himself to sleep the night Beaufrey and David went driving alone in the Porsche along the coast highway. Later Eric said, he had realized how provincial, how stupidly narrow, he was, despite the years away from Lubbock. Wanting David all for himself was just a stupid version of the Bible Belt bourgeois Eric rejected. Seese could rely on Eric to be her friend and ally. After all, they both loved David, didn’t they?

Seese was the decoy. Because Beaufrey was as anxious as David was about his masculine image. Eric had laughed the first time he and Seese had ever met at G.’s gallery. “Oh,” he had said, “I was afraid I would hate you!” Seese had been too high to say more than, “Yeah, me too.” They had ended up alone at the punch bowl. David was doing the rounds with Beaufrey on his left arm and Serlo on his right.

Seese could see it in Beaufrey’s eyes, the great hunger, the greed to have all of David. Beaufrey had only kept Seese and Eric around to humor David. Beaufrey had been intent on weaning David from them.

Before Beaufrey had taken him in, before the gallery picked him up, David had worked for an exclusive Malibu escort service — live-in stud, for three to six months maximum, cash in advance, all medical and dental and incidental expenses extra, cash on the barrel head. Rich old queers in Bel Air, their withered vines and grapes shrunken to raisins; layers and layers of grayish, crepelike skin dropping off, flat asses covered with black hairs. David never lost the gag reflex at the sight of dewlap skin on turkeys and lizards. He’d seen too much loose skin during those years. David had a long list of sights he had to avoid. Another had been the thick, yellowish-stained toenails old men had. He had awakened screaming one night in Eric’s bed, wet with sweat, crying because he had been half-buried in great mounds and fields of old men’s toenails.

David had bragged about the old men who had actually taught him “his art” by begging him to pose with them in front of their video and fancy 35mm cameras and lights. David had turned the tables on them. He had gone from art object to artist. He preferred to say he had been a live-in companion. What mattered was that it was clear he was the “companion,” not the male nurse or chauffeur and not the butler.

TEXAS

ERIC HAD CALLED SEESE. His voice sounded choked and hesitant, as if he was so sad he might cry instead of speak. David had given him the word, Eric said. “The straight stuff. Finito. Finished. The end.” “Oh, Eric,” Seese had said. “Don’t try to talk now. I’ll come over right away.”

Eric had always said only the vibration and motion of the automobile around him calmed the roaring, surging feeling in all his blood vessels. He needed to see the southern-California coast at sundown with lovers parked at every scenic-view loop. At the edge of the water an old man had been walking an arthritic Great Dane and watching intently as the dog shit a load the size of a wedding cake. “Wedding cake?” Seese had said, starting to laugh. “Yeah, a wedding cake,” Eric had said, and then they had both laughed and laughed, and Seese was glad Eric had telephoned her.

They had not talked about David or about the pregnancy. Eric had been thinking about leaving. He had lived on the West Coast — San Francisco then San Diego — for twelve years. He had been thinking about Texas again. Seese was not sure what to say because even when they had been laughing and joking together, Eric had seemed restless and distant. Seese had suggested a walk along the edge of the water. They could watch the sun go down. As the sun slid through colored bands of coastal clouds into the sea, Seese glanced at Eric, but he had been intent on his own bare feet, watching the thin sheen of seawater that oozed up between his toes and around the edges of his feet.

The marijuana they’d smoked in the car was coming on full force. Seese had laughed and run to meet the waves. “We came here to see the ocean and the sunset, and by God, we will!” They broke into a run then, and raced all the way back to the car. Eric had put a hand on her thigh and pretended to roll his eyes from the thrill. “Marry me. We’ll have a great time!” Seese was laughing. She shoved her head out the window to smell the low, damp ocean smell before the heat of the freeway and exhaust buried it. But when her face was turned into the rush of air, Eric had said, “I’m serious. I mean it.”

Seese turned to him suddenly to see if this was another tease. She pushed away the strands of hair blowing around her eyes to get a good look. Eric wasn’t joking. Waves of dread, cold, night-sweat fear had churned up from her belly to her chest and throat. Seese fumbled in the dark trying to light the joint. Eric had known both Beaufrey and David far longer than she. Eric assumed David was finished with her too.

Eric had detected trouble from her silence and pulled the old Cadillac into an empty bank parking lot.

Seese had nodded as she took a long drag on the marijuana cigarette and glanced over at Eric. He was watching her. “I wish you would come. We talked about it before.” Eric’s voice was calm as he added, “David’s with Beaufrey now.”

The mercury-vapor lights around the parking lot gave their skin a bluish-silver glow. They passed the joint back and forth without talking. Seese had seen how David glowed when he talked about the baby when they were together alone. Eric had no way to know any of this about David. Eric had seen only what a man might see. The dark surge of fear in her chest and throat began to recede a little, like the tide going out. Dry and safe again soon. Seese had patted the car’s dashboard.

Eric was watching her. Seese wanted Eric to take over, to begin telling his West Texas sandstorm stories, his West Texas grandma stories, his ’67 Cadillac Fleetwood stories. But when Eric kept his eyes on hers, Seese could feel herself floundering, then sinking. Eric wasn’t going to let her change the subject.

“David never loved you. He made Beaufrey jealous with you. That’s all.”

After the outburst, Eric had seemed to shrink, to sink into the peeling blue leather seat of the Cadillac. In the dim light, Eric had suddenly looked much older. Nearly as old as Beaufrey. Seese suddenly felt the sensation of falling inside herself. She fumbled in her purse for the vial of coke. While Eric took heaping spoonfuls up to his face in the rearview mirror, Seese glanced around, from habit, to be sure no cops were passing by. Eric let his head fall back on the car seat with his eyes closed. He nodded and smiled at her. While she leaned over to shove the little spoon in each nostril, Eric started talking. “When I was in high school, I used to imagine or pretend — yeah, pretend. I liked to pretend I was an orphan. No living relatives anywhere in the world.” Eric paused and sat up, flexing his shoulders, reaching for the key in the ignition. The streetlights had been on for fifteen or twenty minutes.

• • •

They had spent the rest of the night side by side on chaise lounges by the penthouse pool above Mission Bay, and the city lights. They had finished off a quart of tequila, talking about how they would go back to Lubbock as husband and wife and pick up Eric’s inheritance from Granny, drawing interest these past four years until Eric “came around.”

In one version they had concocted that night, they stayed in Lubbock long enough to get married, picked up the cashier’s check and left town before the sun set. She and Eric had settled on that version as the one that would make everyone — from the Baptist preacher to Beaufrey — the happiest. Eric would have the money, and they would go on together as they had before, except they’d have money. Money might give them a better chance with David.

But a week later, when Seese had mentioned the trip to Lubbock, Eric had shaken his head and laughed. “Oh, I never told you the whole story, darling,” Eric had said, waving a mock limp-wrist at her before he flipped the blender switch on their frozen daiquiris. Eric had seemed cheerful, and he’d been full of jokes the last week. Seese thought he was over his sadness. They had spent almost every day by the penthouse pool where they had enjoyed laughing about having a pool fifteen stories above the Pacific Ocean. Eric pointed out that a pool might be more confining, but at least the sharks couldn’t get him. “Oh, yeah?” Seese said, diving under to grab at his legs. Then David and Beaufrey had returned. David came and stretched out on a lounge chair. Seese could not see if his eyes were closed behind the dark glasses. Beaufrey had stood in the doorway only a moment and then turned away. Serlo slid the glass door shut.

MIRACLE MILE

SEESE LISTENED to the toilet flush and refill in the dark. The motel was quieter than any of the cheap joints she and Cherie had ever stayed in. She was getting anxious about Cherie. As far as she knew, Cherie was still in Tucson. Cherie sent Christmas cards no matter how broke she was. Seese had tried to tease her about it once, but Cherie, who was usually easygoing, did not see any joke in Christmas cards. But Seese thought it was hilarious that Cherie, who had performed the most bizarre sex acts for paying customers and sometimes their women, that same Cherie never dreamed of neglecting to send Christmas cards. Cherie did not merely send Christmas cards. Cherie always wrote what she termed a “personal note.” Now Seese was going to cash in on Cherie’s Christmas cards. If Cherie herself was not living in Tucson, then Cherie was “keeping in touch” with people who did live in Tucson. Seese would be able to track her down, and then Seese would be able to collect on an old favor she had once done for Cherie.

It was only ten to midnight. Seese put on jeans and a gray sweater and tore through the suitcases for a nylon windbreaker. Mostly the suitcases were full of the “settlement goods”—cash and cocaine. It didn’t matter. She just had to get from the door to the taxi. There was still time to catch Cherie at the Stage Coach. If Cherie was still dancing there. The possibility that Cherie had quit, had left town, brought a surge of the dark, hollow feeling Seese had long connected with coming down from cocaine. But it had been hours since she had had any coke, and even the marijuana she had smoked in bed had worn off. What she was feeling was the plain old jones — all nerves and her own guts reading false prophecies to her. So a little coke would readjust the world. She scattered a tiny spoonful across the peeling night table by the bed. Being around Beaufrey had got her into any number of bad habits, and wasting cocaine had been only one of them. She and Eric had always joked about the Mexican maids who cleaned the penthouse. How the maids put clean bags into their Electroluxes before they did the penthouse, and later all got high in the basement just from the sweepings off the carpet.

Seese told the cabdriver the name of the bar. He had stared at her in the rearview mirror, and she knew what he was thinking: “Cheap whores, bikers, and small-time drug deals.” The wind had died down, but the air was dusty. A double shot of brandy would help. Her heart was racing with the anticipation of finding Cherie. The cocaine made her tongue numb, made her clench her jaws, and made her want to go, to move, to do something. She took a deep breath and settled back to look at the town where things would be settled for her once and for all. Miracle Mile had a heyday once. The motel bungalows, blue kidney-shaped pools, tall palm trees, and hedges of pink oleander sprang up. Winter havens for house trailers stretched for acres. But years before either Seese or Cherie had ever seen Tucson, something had changed. The drought had left no green. In the dust-haze any lawns or grass that might have been alive was indistinguishable from the cement of buckling sidewalks.

Even the so-called desert “landscaping” was gaunt; the prickly pear and cholla cactus had shriveled into leathery, green tongues. The ribs of the giant saguaros had shrunk into themselves. The date palms and short Mexican palms were sloughing scaly, gray fronds, many of which had broken in the high winds and lay scattered in the street. One frond struck the underbelly of the taxi sharply, which broke loose a tangle of debris. Tumbleweeds, Styrofoam cups, and strands of toilet paper swirled in the rush of wind behind the taxi. Running over the palm fronds, even if they were grayish and dead, had reminded Seese of the Catholic Church and Palm Sunday. She laughed out loud and the cab-driver had looked hard into the rearview mirror. “I was just thinking,” she said, avoiding the eyes.

She could endure it no longer. She had to know where Monte was — what had happened to her baby. The old psychic was somewhere in Tucson. Seese had to get help soon. In the desert life might evaporate overnight. The dead did not rot or dissolve. They shrank into rigid, impermeable leather around their own bones. Inside the cracked stucco bungalows and rusting house trailers, people got poorer as they got older. What had once been a winter getaway eventually became permanent. One year when the heat arrived in late March, they did not return to Ohio or Iowa. Instead, they retired. They sat motionless by window coolers or floor fans with the curtains and shades drawn until November. They were only passing time, waiting.

Eric would have liked Tucson. Too bad they had never quite managed to get here. He would have liked the northwest side the best because he had been fascinated with decay and death. Eric would particularly have liked the idea of the old “retiring” to await their extinction on the edge of a desert. Eric had been excited about a certain desert somewhere in Peru. That had been before Eric had realized that Beaufrey had no intention of allowing him to accompany them to Colombia. Eric had read all about the Spanish explorers because, he said, it was good to understand the history of a place. All Seese could remember was this place in the Peruvian desert where the Indians had taken their dead. The mummies were kept in an extremely arid place. Relatives and loved ones could go there to talk to those long deceased. Seese wished she could talk to Eric tonight. She understood now what was wrong with cremation. She had never understood what the Catholic Church had against cremation before. Now Eric was scattered across the West Texas plains pushed by the same winds that gusted through Tucson.

The cab ride was taking forever. Was he trying to fool her, to cheat her? She leaned forward to see where they were. The railroad tracks. She was almost there but felt something was about to overtake her — She had to know where Monte was, and what had happened to him. The old psychic lived somewhere in Tucson. Seese had to find the woman or she would be like all the others there, suspended in one endless interval between gusts of wind, and waves of dry heat.

THE STAGE COACH

THE STAGE COACH was on the frontage road to the freeway. The semis were parked north of the truck stop where the drivers showered and ate before hitting the bar for the strippers’ show. Tiny didn’t want the bar parking lot clogged with tractor-trailer rigs. Truckers didn’t drink enough to suit him, and what Tiny wanted to sell was booze. Tiny had also sold pills to the truckers. He couldn’t beat them, so he joined them, he liked to say. But the sale of a few pills didn’t mean Tiny had to have giant semis a block long congesting his parking lot.

Big Harley-Davidsons, chromed and customized, were parked in perfect rows. Seese laughed. Cocaine was behind the bikers’ mania for perfect rows of bikes, perfectly spaced. Biker perfection went no further than the motorcycle. Bikers themselves tended toward beer bellies and dirty T-shirts with jeans slipped down to expose their hairy cracks.

Seese did not see Cherie, but told herself don’t panic — breathe deep. Even if she wasn’t dancing here, chances were good Cherie would still be in town. Cherie’s oldest girl was eight or nine now. Cherie wouldn’t move around so much with a child in school. A tall redhead was bobbing and weaving out of a tiny fringed cowgirl skirt. Her breasts pushed open the white cowgirl vest. She had two toy pistols she aimed from the hip at the men leaning over the edge of the narrow stage. “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” the jukebox played. The bikers at the pool tables ignored the dancer on the platform. She had kicked the skirt out of the way, and was now doing deep knee-bends, legs apart, with the men out of their chairs at the edge of the stage whistling and yelling. The noise got one of the bikers to glance at three or four men reaching onstage to tuck dollar bills in the redhead’s G-string. The other bikers had only bothered to turn their heads briefly. Seese could imagine the contempt the bikers had for the other men.

Tiny waddled out of his office when he heard the yells and whistles. He had gained a lot of weight since the last time Seese had seen him. He had to keep watch on the girls constantly. They’d show any little thing to get big tips from the audience. Being outside the city limits still didn’t make it legal to spread her legs that wide. Seese laughed. Tiny had always been scolding her when she danced, complaining that she was going to get the Liquor Control boys down on him. But that had been when Tiny was hot for her, and the scolding had been his way of letting her know how sexy he thought she was. Tiny made a sudden cutting motion with his fat hand across his throat and swore at the redhead. As she closed her legs, Seese saw a sequin flash from deep within the folds of her flesh. The men at the foot of the stage booed Tiny and gave catcalls, but they didn’t want the Stage Coach shut down by the Liquor Control Board either.

Tiny had turned to go back into his office, but caught sight of Seese. She took her double shot of whiskey from the bar and walked over to him. “Seese,” he said as if he were seeing a ghost.

“Hi, Tiny.”

“I heard you left,” he said, still surprised. Tiny meant the rumor that Seese was dead meat. “Ancient history, those rumors,” Tiny said, warming up, stepping closer.

Seese took a big swallow of whiskey. “Yeah, just rumors.” She was scanning the barroom for Cherie. Dancers in garter belts and no bras, dancers in baton-twirling skirts, and dancers in bikinis circulated past the tables, passing the hat for tips before they danced.

Tiny had been in love with her once, but then David had come along. Seese finished the whiskey and Tiny nodded for the bartender to bring her another. Sweat was forming in the folds where his chin met his neck. Tiny was living proof that snorting cocaine didn’t always cause weight loss. “I heard about your baby. I’m sorry.” Tiny sounded sincere. He patted at his neck with a handkerchief and made a motion toward his office, but Seese shook her head. “I have a little something,” Tiny said, meaning drugs.

“No. I’m looking for Cherie.”

Tiny seemed short of breath. He wheezed. She would not have fucked him even if David had not come along. Tiny gave up too easily. Despite everything that had happened between Tiny and Beaufrey, Seese knew Tiny would not help her because he was afraid of Beaufrey. But Cherie owed her one.

Tiny nodded his head at a table against the far wall. Cherie was hunched over the table, her head close to a man in a worn denim cowboy shirt and scuffed cowboy boots. She was trying to convince him of something. She looked startled when she saw Seese. The cowboy was suspicious. He studied Seese intently. She tried smiling but he had already sized her up. “Seese!” Cherie scuffed the chair back from the table and hugged her. She was dressed for her act. Baby-blue, see-through, shorty pajamas and blue satin high heels. “This is my husband, Teddy. Teddy, this is Seese. Remember, I told you how she helped me that time.” Seese could see that Teddy didn’t like to remember anything he knew about Cherie’s past.

Seese didn’t know where to begin. Cherie was nervous. Probably because the husband got jealous when she danced. “I guess you heard what happened — about Monte, I mean.” Seese was surprised at how quiet her voice was, almost a whisper. She felt nothing when she said “Monte.”

“Did David—?” Cherie stared down at the ashtray where her cigarette was burning into the filter. The husband reached over and squashed the butt. His jaw was set hard. Cherie was trying not to cry, but Seese saw big tears. Seese hardly cried anymore except when she woke up dreaming she was holding Monte in her arms. “Seese — it’s just so sad — not to know—”

Seese nodded at Cherie. The husband had relaxed. He leaned back in his chair and watched a tiny flat-chested blonde bump her way out of a belly-dancer skirt. Women’s tears or sad talk didn’t seem to interest him.

“You been back in town long?”

Seese shook her head. She finished the whiskey. Cherie signaled the barmaid for another round. Tiny let dancers have all they wanted. It kept them loose and limber. “I waited for a long time. I thought David took Monte.”

Cherie became alert. “You mean it wasn’t David?”

Seese could not shake her head or reply without something breaking wide open inside herself. She took deep breaths and sipped the whiskey. “There’s a woman who can help. I have to find her.”

Cherie glanced at her husband watching the stage. She was rolling the hem of her shorty pajama top between her fingers. Seese could see Cherie was nervous, afraid something from the old days might slip out.

“Listen. I saw this woman on TV. She finds missing persons.”

Cherie had looked puzzled. “I don’t know anyone like that.”

“Look,” Seese said, raising her voice, “the only thing I have to go on is something about a crippled biker — a guy who works—”

At the mention of a man, Cherie’s husband sat up with both elbows on the table making a barrier between the two women. Cherie shook her head.

“The old woman is with this biker—” Seese began, but Cherie had pushed back her chair.

“I’m up now!” Cherie looked at her husband, then glanced at Seese. “Ask Tiny!”

Seese nodded slowly and leaned back in her chair. The husband moved forward in his chair, gathering himself like a rodeo cowboy. His turn next. For eight minutes he had to stay in his chair while the men at the edge of the tiny stage leaned over to pry their eyes into his wife. Cherie selects her music on the jukebox. Roy Orbison. Chubby Checker. She dances staring straight ahead, her eyes miles away from this place. Neither of them were ever really dancers. But the men never cared as long as they got an eyeful. Cherie’s husband looks down at his hands. He’s a blond cowboy with a pretty face. Green eyes. Hands and fingernails stained with motor oil. There never has been quite enough money for Cherie to quit dancing. The husbands and boyfriends come and go on account of this.

Cherie holds the filmy blue nylon in both hands and flips it over her face to reveal her breasts. Mangoes — golden flesh served peeled — Beaufrey’s morning meal in Puerto Vallarta. Metallic-blue sequins glitter on each nipple. The husband finishes his beer and motions for another. He ignores Seese. He ignores everything but the men reaching up on the platform, with both hands grabbing for her crotch or her breasts. An old man in white painter’s coveralls grins so wide his false teeth slip. He’s tucking five-dollar bills in the front of the shorty pajama bottom. Next to him, two men in identical work khakis huddle together, company logos and their first names embroidered on the front pockets. The black lights overhead make the scar and stretch marks on Cherie’s belly glow uranium blue. Cherie has never lost a baby. Cherie can’t stop getting pregnant. Still, the stretch marks only show under the black light. It doesn’t seem fair. Cherie has four, can have five more, and Seese could only have one.

“Mama’s got a squeeze box — Oh, my love, darling, I’ve hungered for your touch a long, lonely time — Daddy never sleeps at night”—off comes the blue pajama top. Cherie drops it casually, oblivious to the whistling and clapping. She stretches her arms up and can almost touch the purple tubes in the light fixture. Her breasts jut out. She turns away and shakes the cheeks of her ass, then spins back around. They want the bottoms off. They want the G-string now. The old man is standing up. He’s got a twenty-dollar bill in his hand. She smiles and tosses him the pajama panty. He tucks the twenty into the blue satin G-string. For a moment the attention is on him, not her. The old man lifts the shorty pajama bottom high over his head, then brings it down to his beer glass. He stretches the crotch across the rim of his glass and downs the last of his beer. The others applaud and laugh. The cowboy is sweating. Seese smells it — hard labor. Sweat, great exertion. His hands clenching and unclenching fists. Seese wonders how Cherie manages to always find men who will eventually want to kill her, but remembers the bullet through the penthouse window and has to laugh at herself. Cherie’s cowboy gives Seese a murderous look. She starts to explain that she is not laughing at anything here, that she is, laughing at herself, but the cowboy has already turned his head away. It takes a certain kind of man to watch his wife or girlfriend striptease in front of a crowd of drunk, grab-happy men and not blow up and kill them all. This pretty little cowboy was the wrong kind. The right kind would have been proud, would have had contempt for all the other men who did not have a beautiful woman — the right man would have enjoyed parading his wildly sexual woman in front of the needy and deprived. Seese had seen men who gloated over how badly the leering, shouting crowd wanted what was theirs, what the crowd could look at but never touch. But Cherie’s blond cowboy did not appear confident that the others were only going to look.

Seese was drunk enough not to worry whether Tiny really did have the information she needed. If she had to, she could press Cherie in front of her cowboy, and Cherie would get it. Because Seese knew that Cherie didn’t want her new husband to know any more about the past than he had already guessed or suspected. The favor Cherie owed Seese actually wasn’t much. It had happened a long time ago when they had been so much younger and under Tiny’s thumb. Cherie had gotten set up by some undercover cops. Seese had noticed that “the college boys” always had money for their grams, and each time they had pressed Cherie to sell them more. Seese kept telling Cherie to be careful of people who didn’t beg you to front them three or four grams. Narcs always had money. But Cherie hadn’t worried because they had always snorted or shot up in the kitchen, right in front of her. After that the tall one who had played pro basketball always wanted to take her to bed; then he’d always leave $50 or $60. Cherie was sure undercover cops didn’t do that even when they were undercover. They hadn’t been anything but babies then, and Cherie never liked to tell Tiny what was going on. Tiny didn’t ask as long as the cash rolled in and the girls weren’t snorting too much themselves. So Cherie had set up a half-ounce sale.

The arrangement had been that once Cherie had the money, she would tell the guys to step out to the alley behind the apartment to get the goods from Seese, who would wait in the car. Cherie had wanted Seese to keep the half ounce right beside her in the car, but Seese had been wary. She had hidden the plastic bag with the cocaine inside a cardboard milk carton, which she left next to a trash can in the alley.

When Cherie’s ex-pro basketball player and his buddies had pulled their guns, and then their badges, and pushed Cherie outside into weeds and old dog shit in the backyard, Seese had not panicked. It occurred to her this might be a heist, and if it was, then they might both be killed. But Seese knew if it had been shooting they planned, the gunmen would not have marched Cherie out the back door in broad daylight. It might only have been an alley, but the alleys in the neighborhood were well populated with university students. Gunmen would have shot Cherie inside, then come out to get Seese in the car. So Seese did not move, although she could see Cherie’s eyes urging her to run. One cop had stuck a.44 and a badge in her face while the other slid into the front seat beside her. Seese had pretended to glance at the cop as he opened the door on the passenger’s side, but what Seese had really been looking at was the old milk carton lying in the weeds and trash next to a trash can.

“What’s going on?” Seese had asked Cherie just as the ex-basketball pro had opened the car door and pulled her out. “Can’t these guys take a joke? Hey, it was a little joke, that’s all.” The cops did not like the word joke. The ex-pro squeezed the handcuffs around her wrists so tightly tears came to her eyes.

Tiny had got them both out of jail before the evening shift at the Stage Coach. The interior and the trunk of the car had been torn apart by the ex-basketball pro and his pals. Seese had never bothered to have the door panels or rubber floor matting replaced afterward because as long as she owned that car, she wanted to remember the April afternoon she had outmaneuvered the narcs. The cops had searched everywhere, but they didn’t notice the old milk carton lying on the ground. Without the goods, Seese had only been charged with conspiracy to distribute or sell. Cherie they hit for the sale of the grams in the past, and for prostitution. But none of the charges were big enough to interest the DA’s office. “Goddamn it,” Cherie said, “I wish we would have gone to trial. I wanted to testify about all those grams the scummy niggers shot up and snorted. Taxpayers’ money buying toot for nigger cops.”

Tiny had been furious. He had slapped Cherie so hard that she fell to her knees in the parking lot outside the city jail. Seese had tried to stop him by telling him not to worry, the half was safe. But Tiny had spun around, fast for a fat man, and the murder in his eye told Seese it was about sex with the black narcs, not the half ounce of coke. Tiny had not even thought of the half ounce yet. Cherie had, though. She started crying while she was still on the ground, promising to make it all up to him, promising to borrow the money and pay it back right away. Tiny had kicked Cherie in the ribs, and only Seese, pointing out a patrol car approaching on Stone Avenue, had stopped Tiny from really hurting Cherie.

Cherie had curled up in the backseat of Tiny’s big Buick and sobbed and moaned about broken ribs. All Tiny kept saying was, “Bitch! Dumb cunt bitch!” He had repeated it again and again. He told her he should kill her for it. He told her anyone else in his place would. He told her that she owed Seese, not him. She owed Seese because the half ounce was safe. If the half ounce had been lost, Tiny told Cherie he would have killed her.

• • •

Cherie comes off the platform breathing hard. She wraps a red-flowered cotton kimono around herself tightly. At the table she takes both her husband’s hands in hers and squeezes them while she kisses him so that all the others can see them. The last girl has Pink Floyd on the jukebox, and they watch her adjust the crotch of her leotard as she comes onstage. The husband relaxes and pushes his glass of beer across the table to Cherie. She is still breathing fast and the hair around her face is dark with perspiration. “Pretty good for an old lady,” Cherie says to Seese, and they both laugh. Tiny would have beaten Cherie bad, but probably not have killed her. Not in those days. They had all been much younger. Actually all Cherie owed Seese was for stashing the cocaine in the milk carton. Seese had started to say she didn’t like to have to ask favors when Cherie finished her husband’s beer and said, “Look. I think you can find them on the south side — South Park Avenue. Almost to the airport. Look for a real old house trailer with a wrecked motorcycle outside.” Seese finished the whiskey. She gave Cherie a hug and smiled at the husband, who turned away rudely. The bartender had already yelled “Last call!” Seese told Cherie to take it easy, she’d be in touch, and they would have to get together for a beer sometime. But Cherie had glanced nervously in the direction of the blond cowboy, then back at Seese. They both knew they probably would not see each other again for a long time.

Tiny had watched Seese from the doorway of his office but she had pretended that she was too drunk to notice. The whole taxi ride back to the motel she was glad she hadn’t had to ask Tiny for help. Tiny calculated the loss of her baby as the price she had paid for fucking with David and Beaufrey. Tiny was right of course. But Seese didn’t have to give him any more satisfaction than he’d already got.

BOOK THREE. SOUTHWEST FAMOUS CRIMINALS

FERRO HANDED the truck keys to Seese with a sullen expression. He had already lectured them about doing Lecha’s errands and then coming back. He kept asking Seese why Sterling had to go, and Seese kept telling him that she’d need help with the lifting.

“Lies, lies, lies,” Seese said, laughing as they zoomed down the drive, past the toolshed and corrals, past the kennels where the night dogs slept in the shade of the big paloverde tree. Sterling was concerned about getting into trouble with Ferro or Paulie or the boss woman. Seese shook her head. Lecha wants all this weird stuff — a wing back chair with peacocks on it, a typewriter table, even the typewriter!

Sterling nodded. He decided he would let Seese take over. “Relax,” she told him. “We are on important business. No one is going to bother us.”

Sterling thought she took the dirt road a little too fast because the rear wheels slid a little on the curves. A roadrunner had to take to the air to avoid being run over. So he made a joke hoping Seese might slow down. He said he thought she’d make a good driver for a getaway car. But instead of laughing, Seese nodded seriously and said she had actually done that once.

“In my other life,” Seese said, making Sterling feel a lot better. “It wasn’t a bank or 7-Eleven holdup at least. It was a rip-off. Drug deal. You know.”

Sterling nodded, although he did not know. He had read a great deal in his magazines about the drug tsars and huge drug deals worth hundreds of millions. “It would make me too nervous,” Sterling said as they sailed onto the paved road, and he glanced behind them at the dust cloud the truck had kicked up, a dust cloud the size of a tornado. Sterling was thinking probably Ferro was watching them in the telescope he kept in the front driveway.

“I was too young and too high to be scared,” Seese said; she was driving slower now and watched for cops in the rearview mirror. She felt happy and confident taking Sterling on errands. While she and Cherie still worked for Tiny, she had always joked that she’d be lost if she had to go out in Tucson during the daylight because they slept most of the day and usually went out only at night. Then she had left with David after only six months. Still, she felt as if she knew the town enough to get them to a shopping mall.

The plan was to do the errands and eat and then drive around. Sterling was glad to have a chance to see some points of interest in Tucson. Of course they were only places that had been mentioned in the “Yesteryear” articles of the Police Gazette—the Congress Hotel downtown where the Dillinger gang had been staying, the bungalow not far from University Street where Dillinger himself and his girlfriend had been captured. Just in case, Sterling had brought along copies of the magazine with two of his favorite “Yesteryear” articles: the John Dillinger and Geronimo profiles. Of course, when Sterling really thought about it, he had other favorites too, but these were the articles in which Tucson played an important role.

Sterling wandered behind Seese in the department stores. They had already bought the typewriter and typing table. They were searching for the wing back chair with peacocks on it. Sterling had realized these stores were full of furniture, but it wasn’t until they started looking for this certain chair that he understood just how many sofas, end tables, and armchairs there were. Seese reached deep into the big purse hanging from her shoulder and paid cash for everything. Sterling had had a little trouble getting used to all those hundred-dollar bills. But after a few hours of going up and down escalators, wandering through mazes of sofas and beds and still no lunch, Sterling had adjusted to the fistfuls of hundreds. Sterling decided it wasn’t nearly the shock that Geronimo must have had when they loaded him and the rest of the Apache prisoners on the train to send them to the prison camp in Florida. At least Sterling had spent time in Barstow, California, and some weeks outside of Bakersfield repairing the track torn up by a hundred-car freight train derailment. He had also vacationed at Long Beach and had ridden the big roller coaster that swooped and swerved above the ocean.

What a shock it must have been. Geronimo would have come from riding with his warriors, sleeping on the bare ground, and eating bits of a venison jerky and parched corn. Then suddenly all the Apaches, including the women and kids, had been loaded on a train. Most of them had probably never been inside a train and never seen such things as train seats or train toilets. Sterling had been wondering how the soldiers guarding the Apaches had taught them to use train toilets when he saw the chair they had been looking for. Seese had somehow overlooked it because she was poking and pressing sofa pillows. The chair was high backed and “winged,” and it was even blue. “Blue is her favorite color,” Seese said while they were eating tacos. The back of the pickup was too full of purchases to leave unattended. Sterling secretly preferred drive-ins because he had not been sure of the proper clothes for indoor restaurants since the time, years ago, in Long Beach he had been turned away from a place called the Surf Cafe. He had been wearing his black-and-white-plaid sport coat and new tennis shoes. It might have been a case of racial discrimination, but Sterling was not sure. A sullen man with a stack of menus had told him he must wear a tie. Sterling had been so horrified to be turned away that minutes passed before it occurred to him that the sullen man himself wore no tie, only a sport coat and slacks.

Seese had not felt so happy or chatty for a long time. It was this funny old guy Sterling who put her in such a good mood. He always kept his eyes open for funny things and tried to make jokes. And he had found the peacock chair, which she might never have seen. Seese wanted to get every item on Lecha’s list to prove she was organized and responsible. Seese knew, however, that it was the last purchase that concerned Lecha most. Lecha might have hired any number of competent people to buy what was in the boxes and bundles in the back of the truck. On the other hand, only a few people knew how to conduct the transaction planned for after lunch.

Seese announced they had an hour to kill. Sterling said that would be fine because all of the places on their tour were near downtown. He asked Seese again if she was sure she really wanted to go see these places. “They might not even be there. Or they might be sort of boring,” Sterling said hesitantly, “like the Congress Hotel.”

“I told you — I really want to. You have to tell me all about what happened at these places — all the history and stuff.”

“I guess we might start at the Congress Hotel.” Seese wheeled the heavily loaded pickup through downtown. Tucson’s downtown had been stunned by shopping malls, so it seemed sort of deserted. It was easy to park across the street so she could look and concentrate on the old building while Sterling talked.

“You can’t even tell there was a fire,” Sterling commented. “It was the fire, see. It was an accident they ever caught Dillinger. Because he was a lot smarter than they were. But the weak link was the rest of the gang. See, Dillinger sent the others ahead to Tucson. He had this girlfriend. She was part Indian, part Canadian Indian. She was real pretty. They were visiting his relatives in Florida. So Clark and Makely had this woman named Opal Long with them. There might have been a couple of other guys, but they had just tagged along with Makely and Clark. Which wasn’t a good idea and was part of how they got caught.”

Sterling was pleased to see Seese smiling and listening so closely to his story. It was easy to imagine all the things happening when you were parked right there on the actual site.

For a moment he considered simply reading a paragraph or two out of the magazine. But Sterling had visualized it so many times in the years since he had first read the article that he thought he would tell Seese just the way he pictured the demise of the Dillinger gang:

Clark had been tall and thin with dark hair stuck close to his head. His eyes didn’t seem to match. Makely was short with sandy-brown hair. Sometimes he wore a mustache, imitating his boss, John Dillinger. Sterling imagined Opal Long looked a little like Greta Garbo. It was January when they got to Tucson. They rented rooms in the Congress Hotel. And then this is where accident and luck sort of come in. One night not long after Makely and Clark and Long had moved in there, the Congress Hotel had caught fire.

Sterling paused for emphasis and to look again at the three stories of windows, imagining the Tucson fire department’s arrival. “A fire,” Seese said. “Accident and luck. Yeah.” Her face got sad. “I know about those two.” Seese had tried to make the last few words sound like a joke, but Sterling could tell that accident and luck had not dealt any better with Seese than they had with Sterling or with John Dillinger for that matter. She noticed how Sterling had left off the story because of her sudden sadness. So she reached across the pickup seat and patted Sterling on the arm so he would continue.

The firemen had saved all the gang’s suitcases and things. They had had quite a number of trunks and suitcases. Of course they were full of the cash from their last robberies. And they did have a couple of submachine guns. So after the firemen had brought down all their things — it was quite a lot — Makely pulled out this big roll of bills and gave the firemen $50 for their trouble. The Dillinger gang locked their luggage in the car and went across the street — right here, to the Manhattan Bar — and bought drinks for other guests driven out of the Congress Hotel by the fire. Makely was smooth and a natural show-off, but Clark knew only one way to get people’s attention; that had been the reason Clark had started armed robbery at age sixteen. So, as the evening went on and Makely got so much attention with the roll of bills, Clark cornered a tourist. They were all drunk. He made the tourist step outside with him. He opened the huge trunk of the ’33 Packard touring car and pulled out a big suitcase. Clark had to show the tourist one of their machine guns.

“Let’s see,” Seese said, smiling, “I think I can guess this one — the firemen couldn’t forget the face of the stranger who gave them such a big tip.”

“Right!” Sterling answered. They had been reading the Police Gazette at the fire station. The back section featured pictures of the most wanted, and one of the firemen thought he recognized a face. “Pretty dumb to show your machine gun to a stranger,” Seese said as she turned the truck from Stone Avenue to Second Street. Sterling had the exact address, but they still had to creep along to see the house numbers.

“Oooh!” Sterling said, comparing the fuzzy magazine photo with the house they’d parked in front of. Seese had looked at the photo a moment, then laughed so hard she leaned against the steering wheel and made the horn honk. The bungalow on Second Street looked almost the same, down to the peeling white paint and a battered trash can sitting on the porch by the front door. Even the position of the trash can was identical, down to a vertical dent that ran its length. “It couldn’t be! No!” Seese was laughing. Right then Sterling had noticed a man across the street suspiciously eyeing them in the pickup truck loaded with boxes, bundles, and a blue wing chair. He and the blond woman were making a spectacle of themselves, which was exactly what Dillinger’s gang had done, and look how they had ended up. Sterling cleared his throat. “Maybe we should go ahead and try to find Geronimo’s house.” If they got questioned by the police, Sterling knew that would be the end of both their jobs.

“I’m sorry,” Seese said, wiping her eyes across the sleeve of her white blouse. “I couldn’t help laughing! It’s the trash can.”

“Well, I am amazed myself,” Sterling said, carefully closing the page of one Police Gazette before picking up the other issue that had the Geronimo article in it.

“We can’t go yet. You didn’t tell me what happened here.” Sterling had glanced across the street nervously but the man was gone.

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, I saw this man looking at us.”

Seese had laughed again.

“You’re right,” Sterling said. “I must be getting edgy because we are going to Geronimo’s house next!”

Sterling joked, but he got on with the Dillinger story quickly. In late January the big red bougainvillea was thick and blossoming all across the front porch and around the sides of the house too. It had been easy for the Tucson police to hide in the backyard. “What a nasty surprise to find in your bougainvillea branches!” Seese had not felt so carefree and silly for a long time. She was beginning to believe a little more in what Lecha had said: that soon many things would be resolved.

“When Geronimo came by this way, it looked very much different,” Sterling had commented, staring down at a page in the Police Gazette.

“No kidding,” Seese said, driving down University Boulevard, lined with palm trees. “Geronimo might have been the lucky one,” she said, tilting her head at the yellowish-brown palm fronds the trees were shedding; the piles reminded her of dead locusts, although she could not remember where she might have seen the insects.

“Well, it was the last time Dillinger and his gang ever saw any of this. They got Dillinger and Billy Frechette, his girlfriend, at the house too. They sat in the backseat of the police car with their legs and hands in shackles. The police were reluctant to let them roll down the windows in the backseat. Dillinger made a joke about it — the end of January and he was sweating. That was the worst of it. All of the Midwestern states wanted him, and their high temperatures were in the teens. So Dillinger hired this woman lawyer, and just as they were waiving extradition to Indiana or someplace like that, this hotshot DA with plans for higher office flew in. The Tucson police let the DA take Dillinger away in the middle of the night. They drove to Douglas, Arizona, on the border. There was an airstrip there. The DA flew back to Indiana with Dillinger. It was four above zero the day they arraigned Dillinger in Terre Haute. The rest is history.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you know. Dillinger escapes the Terre Haute jail. But there is the lady in red and the movie in Chicago. The FBI shot him down outside. The extradition from Arizona was illegal.”

“Well, the lesser of two evils,” Seese says, but she can see that Sterling is troubled by her last remark. She senses that it has to do with whatever has sent him to Tucson.

“Well,” Sterling begins cautiously, watching Seese’s face for a reaction, “what concerns me is that sometimes judges and courts break their own laws or they decide something completely wrong.” Sterling is thinking about the tribal court judge and the Tribal Council again. He is thinking there are instances when the law has nothing to do with fairness or justice.

Seese says, “I’m sorry. I guess I’ve spent too many years around scum — people that when they get caught, they deserve everything the judge can give them and then some.”

Sterling nods, but now he is looking at the large old house on Main Street. It appears to be empty. There is a real estate company sign in front of it.

“Geronimo’s house is for sale,” Seese says, smiling.

“Actually, it is just the place they took him to sign the papers declaring he and his warriors had surrendered.” Sterling follows Seese up the steps to the long territorial-style porch. They press their faces against the windows. The big room is lined with glass cases made of oak. Whatever antiques were once displayed are gone except for the remains of a skull collection. Seese identifies dog and wolf skulls. Sterling sees a pronghorn-antelope skull and that of a horse. Otherwise the big room and the smaller rooms off it are empty.

“I wonder what Geronimo thought,” Seese says, sitting down on the front steps staring straight ahead at the pickup loaded with all the purchases.

“He thought he and his men would be allowed to go back to the White Mountains and live in peace.”

“You mean he had to take their word for what he was signing?”

“Well, look. The U.S. army had kept five thousand troops in southern Arizona and southern New Mexico in the 1880s and ’90s trying to catch him. They never did catch him. The only way they could do it was by tricking him. They sent word General Miles just wanted to talk to him. And General Crook had promised Geronimo the Apaches could go home to live in peace. But the territorial politicians and the Indian agents didn’t like Crook. General Crook was on his way out when he met with Geronimo. None of the promises were ever kept.”

Seese got up suddenly. “I don’t want to be anywhere near this place.” She drove slowly through the “historic district’s” old mansions.

“They made money off the Indian wars, did you know?”

Seese felt a sinking sensation in her chest. She shook her head. “I even went to college for a while and I don’t know the things you do.”

Sterling smiled modestly. “I only happened to learn it from this magazine article. There was money to be made by getting the government contracts to feed all those soldiers. Somebody had to sell them horses to ride.”

“Oh,” Seese said, “I get the picture.”

“I don’t know if this was ever proven, but there was something here called the Indian Ring,” Sterling continued. “Tucson merchants who did not want to see the Apache wars end. So they paid off a whiskey peddler. They sent the whiskey peddler to get Geronimo and his men drunk. The peddler showed Geronimo newspaper headlines from Washington, D.C., and warned Geronimo if he or his men ‘came in,’ they’d all be hanged. The newspaper headlines were quotes from U.S. congressmen who wanted Geronimo dead. The Indian Ring in Tucson kept the Apache wars going for years that way.”

“I like that!” Seese said fiercely. “I really like that! All these fancy houses, all these Tucson family fortunes made off war — the way all money is made!” Her sudden shift in mood made Sterling uneasy. Before he could reassure her that things had not ended as badly as they might have for Geronimo and his people, Seese said, “Now I know what you meant a little while ago. About judges and courts.” Sometimes her anger frightened her; it was leftover anger that surfaced while Sterling was talking about the Apaches. She had to get rid of the feeling that Monte had been lost because of anything she had done. The old Tucson mansions along Main Street were the best proof that murderers of innocent Apache women and children had prospered. In only one generation government embezzlers, bootleggers, pimps, and murderers had become Tucson’s “fine old families.”

They parked in an alley not far from Geronimo’s house and Dillinger’s stucco bungalow. Lecha had arranged everything. All Seese had to do was follow the instructions at the appointed time and place. At three o’clock exactly, the tall redwood gate swung open to the alley. Seese got out of the truck holding the purse close to her body.

After she stepped inside, the gate closed again without Sterling ever seeing anyone. Somehow her reaction to the mansions and rich people in Tucson had made Sterling feel uneasy. He had misjudged Tucson. He had never learned much about Barstow, but as far as he knew, Barstow had no mansions, old or new. Winslow certainly had no mansions. So this might be the first time Sterling had ever lived anywhere near a place founded mostly by criminals.

Sterling rolled up the window partway although it was very hot. He was glad that he had spent all those years keeping up with each issue of the Police Gazette and the True Detective. He seemed to recall there had been something about the Mafia in one of the more recent issues, something about the Mafia in the Southwest. Sterling was a little ashamed he had skipped over that article. But he had never found articles on the Mafia nearly as interesting as articles about Chicago trunk murders or the white-slave trade conducted in Wyoming boomtowns. Sterling was beginning to like the fact that the old ranch house was high in the foothills. He thought the fences and gates and even the guard dogs might be a wise precaution around people who had got rich off the suffering of Geronimo and his people.

BUSINESS WITH CALABAZAS

LECHA SPOKE FONDLY of the “old man,” and she had used sweet tones when she talked to him on the phone. Seese saw he wasn’t that old. He might not have been as old as Lecha. Lecha had gone out of her way to explain she and “the old viejo” had never “been involved.” Lecha had acquired all the correct expressions for sex on the regional TV talk show circuit.

Seese had smiled and politely reminded Lecha that she of all people did not have to worry about those sorts of things. Instead of smiling back, Lecha had suddenly launched into a harangue about a dying woman. “A dying woman,” she lectured, “must above all put her reputation in order. Before all other business affairs, a woman’s reputation must come first!” Lecha saw Seese was frightened. She had not meant anything by it, so Lecha lowered her voice. “Poor thing! You have to hear all of this from me. But if you only knew all the lies that have been told against me!” Lecha had lowered her voice more. “Even in my own family.” Then she abruptly changed the subject to her “medicine.” Her last warning had been “old man” Calabazas liked to have compliments on his cactus and his burros.

Calabazas was not any taller than Seese. She knew she had Geronimo on the brain because the face Seese saw resembled Geronimo’s, although Seese realized Calabazas was a Mexican Indian, not an Apache. She felt as if Calabazas’s eyes had her pinned by the shoulders. She could not return his glance, so she looked around the yard.

The cactus garden was intricately planned. Smooth, light-orange rock bordered a vast collection of little pincushion cactus covered with purple-pink blossoms. Other cactus plants were bordered with small white stones. The largest and most formidable varieties of cactus had been planted next to the walls of the house. Snaky night-blooming cactus plants climbed around all the windows, and it occurred to Seese that Calabazas’s cactus also created an elaborate barricade around the house. He startled her when he said, “Yes, you would find it rough going.” Seese wanted to deny he had read her thoughts, but instead said how beautiful the garden was. He seemed not to hear her and disappeared through a door in an adobe wall. He left her standing there a long time. Seese could see the corrals and the burros shaded by big cottonwoods. John Dillinger might have done better if he had rented this place. It was too bad Sterling couldn’t see this. He could have gotten ideas for his landscaping around the ranch house. The old man returned with a small brown paper sack with the top twisted rather than folded shut. He handed it to her and opened the gate without saying anything. Just then a United Parcel delivery truck pulled up behind the pickup in the alley. Calabazas’s expression did not change, but Seese sensed he was uneasy. She knew Calabazas didn’t want her or Sterling to see what the parcel service truck had come to pick up. Seese started the pickup engine quickly, but then pretended to have trouble getting it into gear. As they drove down the alley, Seese watched in the side mirror; the deliveryman was loading boxes. Calabazas’s shipments. In the truck mirror, Seese saw Calabazas’s sharp eyes on hers. She figured she would hear about it from Lecha when she got home. “What was that, I wonder,” Sterling had said when they turned onto the freeway access road. He had the paper sack on his lap, holding it carefully so that the twist did not come undone and cause any suspicion of tampering. Sterling was learning quickly that Ferro and Paulie and the old boss woman watched closely for any signs of tampering. Sterling figured the old twin sister would do just the same.

IN THE BACKSEAT OF A CHRYSLER

“CALABAZAS DIDN’T LIKE either one of you,” Lecha said, laughing. “He got right on the phone to complain to me!” Seese and Sterling had just carried the blue peacock chair into her bedroom. Lecha was sitting up in her bed with the paper bag in her lap. Sterling hurried out of the bedroom. Bedrooms of women not related to him had always thrown him into a panic. He had always preferred motel rooms or the backseat of a big car. While he had been living in Winslow at the railroad section-gang compound, an amazing thing had happened. A white woman passing through Winslow on Route 66 had had car trouble. The only mechanic in Winslow told the woman it would cost hundreds of dollars because the car was one of those huge ’59 Chrysler Imperials. Later, the mechanic told how he had advised her to sell it for scrap and to catch the Greyhound to California, which was where she had been headed. But the woman would not hear of it. The mechanic was nervous about a down payment for all the parts he’d have to order from Phoenix or Los Angeles. So she had opened up the huge trunk of the black Imperial and had started unloading suitcases. The mechanic said later he thought she might have been a little crazy or something. They all knew the mechanic because the rail-lifter machine they used for laying new track had never worked right, and one of them, usually Sterling or one of the Mexicans, had to take the mechanic a message from the foreman to come fix it. So they knew the mechanic, they knew he wasn’t exaggerating or lying later on when he told them what had been inside those suitcases: mink coats, fox stoles, and leather jackets. And shoes — every color and kind of high-heel shoe — even those platform shoes with clear plastic heels so you could see the plastic goldfish swimming inside them. When she started to open the fifth or sixth suitcase, the mechanic said he had waved his hands at the pile of furs and shoes and told her that was enough down payment.

Sterling had not gone to her while she was in the room at the Painted Desert Motel. But he had heard stories from the Mexican guys who had. They said she was expensive, but that she knew things they had never ever heard of, let alone had a chance to try. Then, right before Sterling got up enough courage to stroll by the Painted Desert Motel, Room 23, a very strange and exciting thing had happened. Right at quitting time at the big Sante Fe Railroad maintenance yard, and on payday too, the big black Imperial had come gliding up to the gate. Sterling had been a little shocked at how many of the married men who had families living with them in Winslow also seemed to know Janey. She was smiling and laughing more to herself than with them as she showed off the car. “This is my baby,” she said over and over. “Now I have to get my beautiful wardrobe out of hock.” She swung open the door and Sterling thought he had never seen such a huge backseat. Later he realized the car had been a special model, something less than a limousine, but “big as a bedroom,” someone joked. Of course they all started making jokes, laughing and pushing one another toward the luxurious black leather seats. Then they had grabbed Sterling. All of them — Mexicans and Indians and even the white foreman — thought Sterling spent too much time reading. He told them he had a weak stomach and any more than three beers made him sick. But they had not quite forgiven him for not drinking and carousing with them anyway. They had shoved Sterling into the backseat to get even with him for all the nights he had eaten alone at the section-gang cafeteria then gone to his room to read magazines. “Give him the deluxe!” they yelled to Janey as she drove away.

Sterling could feel the grime on his hands. The odor of the motor oil on his coveralls competed with the wonderful smell of Janey’s perfume. This was about the worst thing that had ever happened to Sterling. Janey had pulled onto Route 66 and they were zooming in the direction of Holbrook until she took a turn onto a dirt road. The road wound through small outcroppings of yellow sandstone and up into the juniper forest. When she stopped and turned off the engine, Sterling thought he had never heard such silence in all his life. He must have looked scared because Janey started laughing when she opened the back door.

The backseat of the black Chrysler was so big that they could do the entire “deluxe” with the doors closed. But Janey put all the electric windows down, for the gorgeous clean air, she said, and Sterling had thought the juniper and sage in the breeze did smell good. Open windows also prevented the smell of motor oil and a day’s worth of sweat from spoiling things.

Janey stayed around Winslow for two more weeks performing “the deluxe” in the backseat of the Imperial. The mechanic said later she had been able to pay the repair bill the day he had finished with the car; so the extra two weeks in Winslow must have been Janey’s insurance policy. All of them were a little amazed that Janey had made enough in five days to pay for eight Chrysler valves and a camshaft.

After that, when the section-gang guys wanted to go carousing, Sterling told them he would settle for nothing less than “the deluxe.” So many nights he had lain awake remembering how Janey had undressed him and how she had told him to close his eyes and leave everything to her. For Sterling that would always be “the deluxe”: to lie naked on soft, plush cushions with his eyes closed so he could simply feel her hands and mouth moving over his skin. He had decided years earlier that the trouble of getting ready to have sex spoiled the sex once you ever got to it. With the deluxe it all happened like a dream — feeling the sensation spreading from his balls and cock outward, and then that last sudden squeeze that brought all the sensations rushing back to the tip of his cock, leaving his fingers and toes numb.

Sterling tried the deluxe three more times after the first go. The guys badgered him to tell them about it, but he told them he had his eyes closed. That had really horrified the Mexicans and the Hopis. They were incredulous. What had been deluxe for them had been Janey’s powder-blue eyes and her white-blond hair, and the way her breasts almost pointed up — some of them swore the nipples curved up. And the pink — bright pink. You didn’t get any of that with the Winslow whores even as teenagers. Well, how could a Navajo or Mexican or Negro, even as a teenager, ever give you that bright shade of pink? All dark meat to begin with.

“Oh,” Sterling had said. Because he had never thought about colors with sex before, but that could be blamed on going to high school at an Indian boarding school where any sort of sexual act had to be performed in the dark of the basement or a handy broom closet. They had talked so much about the part of Janey that was so pink and how much they had enjoyed pulling it all open to look, finally the foreman got mad. All morning they had only pulled and reset two rails. After the foreman left them and they were yelling at each other to haul ass, a big Hopi from Third Mesa said bitterly, “Easy enough for that bahana to scold us. He’s been sucking little pink titties all his life.”

Sterling tried a couple of times to get a “deluxe” in Barstow, but the women working there weren’t a whole lot different from the whores in Winslow, who not only wanted to take your money first, they wanted you to get the motel room, and worst of all, they expected you to tell them what to do. You had to tell them everything. Take off your shoes, get on the bed, take hold of this — no, not like that — it was so much trouble Sterling decided it wasn’t worth it.

Living away from Laguna all the years the other men his age were marrying had saved him from his old aunts, who did question him when he visited home at fiesta time or at Christmas. He was not against marriage or women. He was devoted to his old aunts, who were always cooking and sewing for him and sending birthday cards. He got them free passes to ride the train anywhere they wanted. His main trouble with marriage was that he was not used to telling anyone else what to do. He supposed that might be traced back to the way Aunt Marie had raised him when his parents were both gone. Sterling didn’t even feel he needed to trace it back anywhere. He was very happy going along on his own. He liked a simple life with his magazines, visits home to his old aunts, and the occasional vacation to Long Beach to ride the big roller coaster.

The years had gone along like that and there had even been young widows set up by his dear old aunts, who worried a great deal about who would care for Sterling after they were gone. But it didn’t take a genius to see that the young widows and their children would expect Sterling to tell them what to do next. Finally when all his old aunts assembled at one table for a deer dinner, Sterling had given them each long-fringed silk shawls of brilliant jewel colors. And then he had told them that unless they could find a woman as able, as wise, as strong as they were, they should not bother. Each of the old sisters spoke in turn, and by the time Aunt Nora had performed the ceremonial eating of the deer eyes, and Aunt Marie and Aunt Nita had finished the brains, Sterling was relieved and happy to realize that they agreed with him.

From that time on they pampered him even more, and Sterling was left in peace to enjoy dreaming “the deluxe.”

STERLING’S ROOM

SOMETIMES IN THE MIDDLE of the night the sound of Ferro’s four-wheel-drive truck would awaken Sterling. They came and they went at all hours. Fortunately, Ferro and Paulie were seldom at the house for very long. The old boss woman was more difficult to figure out because only occasionally did she go with Ferro and Paulie. Yet sometimes she was gone for days. Her absence wasn’t something Sterling could have proven, but when he walked down the hall past her office or outside the bedroom windows with the shades pulled, he could sense the rooms were empty. Sterling finished a second cheese sandwich and helped himself to more potato chips. He had enjoyed the errands and the drive with Seese very much. He thought if everything would continue along this way, he might be content to stay here for a long time. He carried an extra can of 7-Up down the hill to his room. The sun had almost set. The desert birds were calling and moving the way they did before darkness. The wind off the mountain peak smelled fresh, almost as if rain might be coming. The sky to the west was clear, but clouds could be smelled long before they were seen. He remembered Aunt Marie teaching him that. Around sundown Sterling sometimes felt his mood change. He would begin to think about his life. He would think about all the dear old grandaunts now gone on to Cliff House where they had planned a great many of their favorite activities for all eternity. He missed all of them around a table teasing each other, joking about old lovers and sexual escapades. The younger generations of women had not really matched the likes of Aunt Marie and Aunt Nora. But Sterling was certain that he had not matched them either, although they had loved him and spoiled him so much their own children, his cousins, had become terribly jealous of him. And in the end, the jealousy had been what had worked against Sterling when it came down to the vote of the Tribal Council over the decision of the tribal court judge. Sterling knew that sending the children away to boarding schools was the main problem. He and the other children had to learn what they could about the kachinas and the ways to pray or greet the deer, other animals, and plants during summer vacations, which were too short. Sterling might not have been sent away so young if his parents had not died. Still, that had been the policy of the federal government with Indians. Aunt Marie used to say there was no use in getting upset over something that had happened fifty years ago. Education was the wave of the future.

Well, the wave of the future had carried him clear down here, to the Sonoran desert. Sterling tried to tell himself it wasn’t the end of the world. Look at Geronimo, who got tossed clear to Oklahoma.

The twilight was luminous pearl-gray. Sterling sat down on the five-gallon gas can by the corner of the toolshed. Something about ending up down here at this place was causing him to think more. Something really had happened to the world. It wasn’t just something his funny, wonderful, old aunts had made up. It wasn’t just the scarcity of eligible brides or dependable women. People now weren’t the same. What had become of that world which had faded a little more each time one of his dear little aunts had passed? Sterling dabbed at the tears with his shirttail. They ran down the tip of his nose and caused an itch.

The short time he had been in Tucson, Sterling had begun to realize that people he had been used to calling “Mexicans” were really remnants of different kinds of Indians. But what had remained of what was Indian was in appearance only — the skin and the hair and the eyes. The cheekbones and nose like eagles and hawks. They had lost contact with their tribes and their ancestors’ worlds.

Inside, he piled up pillows and pulled his reading lamp closer to the bed. He needed to get his mind off such thoughts — Indians flung across the world forever separated from their tribes and from their ancestral lands — that kind of thing had been happening to human beings since the beginning of time. African tribes had been sold into slavery all over the earth.

He needed to get his mind off this subject. All the magazine articles he had ever read on the subject of depression had urged this. So he rummaged under the bed for some magazines that he had found when he first moved into the room. The good thing was they were full of pictures. The not-so-good thing was the words were all Spanish. But he only needed something to look at until he fell asleep. The pictures were grainy and blurry black-and-white, and on some pages the smear of the ink on the newsprint gave them the appearance of cartoons or drawings. He could make out the date and the place; 1957, Culiacán, Sinaloa. Sterling could not make out who was who or why, but a beetle-back, gray ’49 Plymouth was skidding around a corner on two wheels in pursuit of a black ’51 Ford coupe sideswiping parked cars all along a narrow street. On other pages there were victims lying where they had fallen, but the blood looked more like motor oil or tar spreading under the corpses. Sterling fell asleep wondering if Mexico had produced any criminals as outstanding as John Dillinger or Pretty Boy Floyd. His knowledge of Mexican history was sketchy, but Sterling did not think they had had anyone like Geronimo since Montezuma. And then it got very confusing because it seemed as if the Mexicans were always having revolutions, and he knew that although the winning side usually executed and jailed the losers for being “criminals,” both Police Gazette and True Detective magazines disqualified crimes committed during wars and revolutions.

HOLLYWOOD MOVIE CREW

IN HIS DREAM Sterling was running after the big white Chevy Blazer, yelling for them to stop. And that was when the Mexican gangster magazines toppled to the floor and Sterling woke up with light bugs all over his pillow. He shook the collection of moths and flying ants and tiny hard-shelled insects onto the floor and snapped off the reading lamp. His heart was still pounding. He felt around on the floor by the bed and found the 7-Up. He didn’t care if it was lukewarm. He sat up, sipping 7-Up in the dark. He wished the Hollywood producer and his snotty cinematographer had gotten their heads blown off by the gate guards at the mine. Sterling’s sheets were soaked with sweat. At least the nightmare had truth in it: the entire incident was the fault of the dumb shits from Hollywood. Stupid assholes! He had learned a number of new cuss words during the weeks he had been around them. What horrible white people! Some of the worst white people on earth was what Sterling had concluded.

It had been a setup, from the start. Even if he had managed to get old Aunt Marie to talk about the last time the tribe allowed a Hollywood movie company to film on tribal land, he would probably not have been saved. Because all the officers from all the villages had conferred with the tribal councilmen, and they had decided Sterling must do it. The whole Tribal Council had voted to appoint Sterling Laguna Pueblo film commissioner, and he could not say no. Sterling had tried in the most gracious way to decline the honor but no one on the Tribal Council seemed to want the position of tribal film commissioner. That should have been the tip-off, his warning that he had been set up.

Four hundred dollars a month. It hardly seemed worth it now because he was paid almost that much each week in Tucson. All he had to do was skim dead lizards off the surface of the swimming pool and hose dog shit off the kennel runways. For four hundred dollars a month, Sterling’s job as a film commissioner had been to keep the Hollywood film crew away from sacred places and from stepping on sacred land. The first week had not been difficult because all the filming was done on sets built down by the river. But Sterling was only one man, far outnumbered by the Hollywood film crew. The second week Sterling had not been able to maintain control. Although Sterling had explained and explained which areas were “off-limits” and why, the movie crew people seemed only to understand violence and brute force. Reports came that prayer sticks left for the spirits at sacred shrines had disappeared. The third week an assistant director attempted to snap photographs inside the kiva, three actresses sunbathed at the sacred water hole, and the script supervisor squeezed a Volkswagen convertible through the northwest entrance to the main plaza — all on the same afternoon.

Sterling had seen the production manager throw the best boy into the front seat of the big Winnebago one morning when the crew was running late. His head had left a little halo of crackled-glass stars on the windshield. Everything was rented, so no one cared. As far as the movie people were concerned, the reservation was rented too. When the prayer sticks had been recovered, the nude sunbathers driven from the water hole, and the Volkswagen convertible removed from the plaza, Sterling told the producer Snell he was going to the tribal headquarters to resign. Snell had been on the phone arguing and pleading with his executive producers long distance, but when Sterling said this, Snell had put the receiver down dramatically and said, “Sterling! You can’t do this to me!” “I have to live around here after you’re gone” was all Sterling had said. But later, as he looked back, Sterling shook his head bitterly. Because even as he had been resigning, and trying to explain to the tribal governor the impossibility of controlling a Hollywood film crew, it was already too late. Out the windows of the governor’s office they could see the exit ramp from the highway, and the dirt road to the river where the movie company had pitched their tents. A steady stream of New Mexico State Police cars, official government cars, were skidding and careening toward the film crew’s headquarters with sirens and lights flashing.

But worse than the raid by state and federal drug-enforcement agencies, and the incident that had actually determined Sterling’s fate, had been the attempt by the cinematographer to film the giant stone snake. The governor, the tribal officers, and the tribal judge had all criticized Sterling, although he was actually an elder to many of them. “Living as long as you did in California,” one of the younger men asked, “how come you didn’t catch on to all the drugs those movie people had?” That had been the moment when Sterling had come the closest to tears. Standing in front of the tribal governor and the Council and the tribal judge. “I don’t know why you are blaming me,” Sterling began. “You act like I should have known everything just because I lived off the reservation. But I was working for the railroad. I was living in towns like Winslow and Barstow, not Hollywood. How was I supposed to know why they all had runny noses?”

The older men who served on the Tribal Council admonished the young governor and his colleagues to go easy. Some of them had worked for the railroad and had been acquainted with Sterling then. The older men agreed no one, not even Sterling, could have been expected to know that conspirators in Hollywood had been sending vials of cocaine with the reels of “dailies.”

Sterling knew the answer he had given the Tribal Council was feeble, but by that time it had been six-thirty at night, and Aunt Marie was probably worrying and angry because dinner was getting overcooked. Sterling felt defeated and weak. He said, “I didn’t have any kind of experience with that sort of thing. I thought they were all just friendly with one another.” One of the elder councilmen had then remarked that someone had better explain to him why Sterling was ever appointed film commissioner in the first place. A terrible silence fell over the Council Chamber. Then another old councilman saved them from that question by raising the fatal issue of the giant stone snake.

THE WATER BED

AFTER THE GIANT STONE SNAKE had been discovered, medicine people from many tribes had hurried to the site. There had been a great deal of controversy over the interpretation of the stone snake. The concern of the Council and the elected tribal officials had been focused on the theft of the stone idols eighty years before. What was to prevent such a loss of the giant stone snake now that the Hollywood people knew where to find it — now that the whites had photographed it? Sterling looked down at the feet he knew were his, but which did not feel connected to him at that moment. He didn’t have an answer, and one after the other, all the old-timers recounted the story of the loss of the stone idols. The Tribal Council building, instead of emptying at dinnertime, got more crowded. The old women were beginning to show up, and one of them launched into the story of how, one night, many years ago, jealous neighbors had smashed open the beautiful lake that gave Laguna its name. The giant water snake that had always lived in the lake and that had loved and cared for the Laguna people as its children could not be found after the jealous ones had drained the lake. Mention of the lake, or stone idols or the painting of St. Joseph, always brought out a great deal of anger, and Sterling wanted to say they should not blame him or get upset with him over deeds others had done. But just then someone had started talking about the wrongful detention of the oil portrait of St. Joseph, and the angry feelings buzzed around Sterling like wasps.

Even then, Sterling had realized he might have escaped with only severe reprimands, years of community service and a heavy fine, if it had not been for Edith Kaye. She rose up from the one and a half chairs she occupied in the visitor section of the Council Chamber. Edith Kaye was a widow three times. The joke that was told in every village was how Edith Kaye had killed those husbands through overexertion as they attempted to satisfy Edith’s sexual appetites. Edith Kaye had had her eye on Sterling when he first returned to Laguna to enjoy his retirement. She had had her own ideas about exactly how he should enjoy retirement. But Sterling had made a serious error with Edith Kaye, and as Aunt Marie had warned him, again too late to do any good, Edith Kaye was one of those women you did not want to cross.

Sterling was still horrified to think what a narrow escape he had had from Edith Kaye’s king-size water bed. She had gotten very ugly when Sterling tried to explain that he didn’t know very much about water beds. Actually the matter was allowing her to get on top of him. But Edith Kaye had flown into a fury because he was hesitant about her riding him.

“The water bed,” Edith Kaye had yelled at him, “the water bed, you stupid man! This water bed sinks down! It isn’t like a hard mattress! It sinks down! I won’t hurt you!” But the way she had been yelling and the hatred in her face had terrified Sterling. When he tried to crawl away from her and escape off the other side of the bed, he remembered reading an account of combat soldiers who described how endless ten or twelve feet were. He floundered and sank like a horse in quicksand. The water bed really did sink down, and Sterling could never quite reach bottom to brace a hand or leg to get out. In the end, all that had saved him was Edith Kaye’s fury and her feverish maneuvers to reach him. Great waves began tossing Sterling until suddenly he found himself free, lying on the floor. He had carefully avoided all possible encounters with Edith Kaye since that night. In fact, one of his motives for taking the film commissioner position had been so he would have some excuse if she insisted he come over to the house for dinner again.

So Edith Kaye had ranted and raved, waving both hands, pointing out to the Council it was sacrilege to allow outsiders to make an image of the snake on film. Why, this sacrilege might even be worse than eighty years ago when the stone idols were stolen. Because once outsiders saw the great stone snake, they would want to steal it or destroy it. Sterling was consoled a little by the discomfort the others in the Council Chamber displayed as Edith Kaye raged on. He saw he was not the only one who feared saying no to her. Finally, after she had for the fourth time stated her belief that Sterling had conspired to steal the giant stone snake, Edith Kaye sat down panting.

OLD AUNT MARIE

STERLING HAD limped home in the dark. He had always developed a mysterious limp whenever he got too tired. Aunt Marie had gone to bed and turned off her light to express her displeasure with him. But the warming oven in the old wood stove was full of warm plates of food wrapped in clean cotton dish towels. He rummaged around in the drawer for a fork and spoon. Aunt Marie had called from her bed “Is that you?” and he had managed a miserable “Yes, Auntie.” He had meant to sound weak and sad, although he realized she was very old now and would not last much longer. He was happy and relieved when she came slowly into the kitchen, carrying her glasses in one hand, blinking and rubbing her eyes with the other. She was in her long flannel nightgown and her long white hair was in a single loose braid down her back. As long as he lived, he would remember how much he had loved her at that moment and how much he was going to miss her when she was gone. He wanted to throw his arms around her and have her hug him close as she had when he had been a child and she had whispered “Ahh moot” over and over again softly. But he was fifty-nine years old and he could tell she was upset about something.

“Sterling!” Aunt Marie began. “Everyone is saying that you were using drugs with those Hollywood people!” Sterling had been buttering a piece of bread. He groaned. He had forgotten that the worst that would be said about him would not be said in the Tribal Council Chamber. The worst charges traveled in wildfire gossip propelled from village to village by imaginations so uncontrolled and so vivid that ordinary and innocent actions were transformed into high intrigue. Sterling himself had never cared much about television because he had grown up with village gossip for entertainment. Sterling had never seen anything on television to match Laguna gossip for scandal and graphic details. And as for speed, Sterling was one who could never understand the need for telephones in Laguna houses unless it was for long-distance calls.

“Auntie, I never used drugs. I never even saw any of the drugs. All I ever did was ride around and tell them where they could or could not make their film.” Aunt Marie continued. She said the story was going around that he had been involved in the love triangle involving the young man who claimed he was an Indian. The story alleged Sterling had known the young man previously in California. “California! California! Why does everybody on this reservation get so worked up against California?”

If only Sterling had not mentioned the giant stone snake to Snell. Sterling hung his head. Aunt Marie poured two cups of tea and set one down in front of him. She stirred sugar in hers and said, “They say you were going to help the movie people steal the stone snake so you and the movie people could buy more drugs with the money.” Sterling didn’t speak. He just sat there shaking his head, tracing little patterns with his finger on the oilcloth table cover. Sterling had only mentioned the stone snake because it was relatively new to him too; it had been discovered only a few months before Sterling had retired and returned home. On the other hand, as Sterling had tried to argue earlier before the governor and Tribal Council, there had been a number of young Laguna people employed by the film company. One of them might even have told the cinematographer about the stone snake and where to find it. The answer, of course, had been that regardless of how they had learned of the sacred shrine to the snake, Sterling had been appointed tribal film commissioner to prevent just this sort of incident from occurring.

“Well, don’t worry about it too much, dear,” Aunt Marie had said as she put a stack of sugar cookies next to his teacup. She knew they were his favorites, and all the years he had been away she had sent him a two-pound coffee can full of the cinnamon-dusted cookies each month. Sterling could not bring himself to talk about the attack by Edith Kaye because Aunt Marie had warned him about accepting any sort of dinner or lunch invitations from her. Sterling knew Aunt Marie would hear all about it the next day anyway. He suddenly felt terribly weak and tired halfway through his fourth cookie.

When Sterling got to bed, he could not sleep. He could feel himself shaking. Aunt Marie was snoring in the next room. Although Sterling had been telling himself not to worry, a voice deeper inside told him there was bad trouble on the way. The voice told him mostly it was due to his long absence from the village — first, going away to boarding school so young, and then going to work for the railroad right after high school. Then, the voice continued, there was the fact that except for Aunt Marie, his close family and clanspeople had died out over the years. Who was going to plead his case for him? It was considered shabby to stand up and defend oneself. It amounted to bragging. It was far better to have friends and in-laws vouch for your good deeds and truthfulness. He lay there in the dark and regretted that he had not done more socializing in the six months he’d been back. He had taken things easy when he first retired because he had thought he’d have plenty of time to go around renewing friendships from the past. He had taken a couple of months working on the roof of Aunt Marie’s little house because it was starting to leak pretty bad, especially in the corner where his bed was. He had been careful to stop hammering or brushing tar on holes whenever anyone passed by and greeted him. In fact, that had been the reason the repairs had taken two months to complete. When Sterling had finally got to sleep, the sky was beginning to turn light gray.

BANISHED

THE CONCLUSION of the Tribal Council had been reached behind closed doors while Sterling was at the clinic with Aunt Marie. The doctor had checked her out completely and announced she had the heart of a woman half her age. But her mind was made up. She had pointed to her eyes and said, “Well, a heart of a forty-year-old isn’t much good when all the rest is ninety years old. I have seen too much lately. I have begun to dislike what I see, and what I hear.” The doctor did not understand her reference to the Tribal Council proceedings against Sterling. The decision came out of the Council about four o’clock, and the governor sent word for Sterling to come. The messenger was an old man who did janitorial chores around the tribal office building. He announced that the decision had not been good. He said the Council had concluded that “conspirators” could not be permitted to live on the reservation because, in their opinion, all of the current ills facing the people of Laguna could be traced back to “conspirators,” legions of conspirators who had passed through Laguna Pueblo since Coronado and his men first came through five hundred years ago. Sterling shook his head. This was terrible. They had probably confused “conspirator” with “conquistador.”

Aunt Marie called out from her room. Sterling brought the messenger to her bedside. “Well, Auntie, I sure am sorry to have to be the one to tell you. But the Council decided they have been too easy on conspirators all along. They really didn’t want it to be Sterling, but they decided they had to begin somewhere.” Aunt Marie tossed herself on the pillow and moaned. The messenger looked hopefully at Sterling. “They say you’ve got your railroad pension. They figure you know all about living off the reservation.” Aunt Marie turned her face to the wall. She said she had decided she might as well die. Sterling pleaded with her not to say that, but she kept her back to him too. He tried to reason with her, he needed her more than ever right now. “Yes,” she said weakly, “I know, dear. But I am just too upset at everyone to stay around any longer. I am ready to go on to Cliff House where my sisters are. They’re all waiting there for me, you know. Oh, we will do all kinds of things together again — tamales, the first thing, because tamales require many hands.” Her voice had sounded so happy and strong that Sterling was reassured. He had patted her shoulder as he left for the Council Chamber, and she had turned and kissed the fingers of his hand as she had when he was a child. “Oh, Sterling,” she said, “this is all wrong. You have always been the best one. Remember, no matter what happens, I always love you.”

Sterling still could not believe it had all happened so fast. Only a month before he had been tribal film commissioner in charge of permissible locations for the movie people. Now the Council had voted to expel Sterling from the reservation forever. A few people had come up to him after the adjournment to ask how his auntie was feeling and to whisper that “forever” might not be for always — in five or ten years he might petition the Council to reconsider. But Sterling could feel his heart stabbed with a pain that ran straight from his throat. He had dreamed of spending the years with his poor little decrepit auntie, keeping her company until she returned to her beloved sisters and her own dear aunties at Cliff House. He decided he would try to stall as long as he could, just to be with Aunt Marie a little more. Sterling had no illusions about waiting five or ten years to attempt to return. The time he had spent away from the reservation had been a big factor against him in the first place.

Sterling would always believe that Aunt Marie had done it for him, and not for selfish reasons. He believed Aunt Marie had calculated her death to shame the Council into reversing its decision. But the shock of having killed an old woman had been so great the Tribal Council had felt compelled to point the blame elsewhere. Or as one councilman had put it, “There is more reason now than ever to get rid of this kind of man. He has no ties or responsibilities here any longer. His behavior upset our dear sister so much she is no longer with us.”

WORKING FOR LECHA

THE DRIVING had worn Seese out. But it had been fun to drive around with old Sterling telling all about Geronimo and Dillinger. She had not thought about it much, but since she had found Lecha and had been “working for her,” Seese had weaned herself off cocaine. She had not even been trying to cut back because she had never wanted to know how badly hooked she really was. Beaufrey had always wanted her to try heroin. She did not know what she might have done if David or Eric had offered it to her. But with Beaufrey the answer always was no. She had not thought about it before, but watching Lecha with her pills and her injections had had some effect upon her own drug use. She thought it must be animal instinct, as with horses shying from a carcass on the trail. Not anything conscious or reasoned. Of course she had a job now, and she didn’t want Lecha to have any reasons for sending her away. At least not until Lecha had been able to help find Monte. Seese had to stay alert so that Lecha herself did not overdose.

And the house Lecha had brought them to was not exactly brimming over with hospitality. The afternoon Lecha and Seese had arrived by taxi had been memorable on a number of counts. Ferro had not believed Lecha when she said who she was. The cabdriver was already in a panic because two crazy women had lured him farther and farther away from pavement into the rocky and impenetrable foothills of the Tucson mountains where, as far as he could tell, only four-wheel-drive vehicles ever escaped with oil pans intact. Ferro had refused to open the main gate and had let the guard dogs out of the inner fence so they were flinging themselves at the chain-link below the intercom button, snarling and barking so loud no one could hear anything that was said. Then suddenly the six Dobermans had moved away from the fence and stopped barking. It had been then that Seese noticed they wore bulky collars that began to make crackling static sounds. Paulie’s voice came over the intercom asking Lecha to step out of the taxi and stand in front of the dogs. Lecha had shouted to the cabdriver to tell them to call her sister, Zeta, but then Ferro interrupted and said he could hear. “It is not necessary to shout,” he had added coldly. Lecha refused to get out of the taxi. She said she was a dying woman. Finally Zeta’s voice came over the intercom. The hair on the back of Seese’s neck had stood up at its sound. Their voices were identical. Zeta was calm in a way that Seese had never seen Lecha, not even after one of her injections. Zeta merely said they should have called first. She asked that the taxi driver and “the girl” please get out and stand briefly in front of the dogs. By this time the driver was very upset. Seese waved the fifty-dollar bill Lecha had just handed her in front of the dogs, who raised their hackles but never moved or made a sound. Seese heard a faint click-click from one of the dog collars and saw a clear plastic globe enclosing a smaller globe that followed their motions like an eye. Then Zeta’s voice told them to proceed through the gates.

They gave the taxi driver another fifty on the driveway, and Paulie had waited until the cab was out of the first inner gate before he stepped out of the wrought-iron gate from the patio. He was holding a twelve-gauge riot gun casually in one hand. His pale blue eyes registered none of the ferocity that had been in his voice. He had an odd, almost military, stiffness to his walk. Paulie carried in the luggage while she and Lecha stood in the patio with Zeta and Ferro. Lecha had not mentioned that she and Zeta were identical twins. The resemblances were stunning. They must have weighed the same. The wrinkles around the eyes were identical. Both had teeth that were broad and white and too close, so that the incisors on the bottom were pushed forward. The one difference had been that Lecha dyed her hair black, while Zeta had left the wide streaks of silver untouched. Zeta’s manner seemed relaxed and casual. She had glanced a time or two at Seese, but did not seem particularly disturbed or interested. It was Ferro who had pounced forward, demanding to know who Seese was. Lecha had put both arms on his shoulders as if to embrace him, but Ferro had pulled away. “Oh, is this how you are going to be?” Lecha said softly. Seese noticed immediately a trace of a sway in his walk that made the heaviness in his lips and waist appear distinctly feminine. But his jaws were clenched and his words came hissing fast. “I am a grown man. I’m thirty years old.” “Oh, Ferro, I want it to be a reunion,” Lecha said. But Ferro had turned away abruptly and gone to help Paulie carry in the last big trunk.

“Oh, thank you, darling,” Lecha said as they passed by with the big trunk. “Be careful with it — it has so many of my dearest things!”

Ferro had stiffened; he looked over his shoulder at her, his face full of rage. But what Seese found more remarkable was the look that Paulie had given Ferro at that instant; she had seen the same expression when Beaufrey looked at David.

Lecha had insisted on going to bed immediately. But while Seese did the unpacking, Lecha lay back on the pillows with her eyes half open and talked about her sister and Ferro. Lecha was dozing in and out so there wasn’t a lot of clarity in what she said. She talked about her career. At first Seese had taken that to mean the clairvoyance, but later Lecha had talked about her career as a pilot. “Oh, I was going to run my own little flying service between all the little settlements and villages. To help with the sick and injured. I planned to take Ferro along with me. He would sleep on his Indian cradleboard — through takeoff and landing! Of course I would be one of the best — I would land an airplane like an angel! But all that had only been daydreams,” Lecha told Seese. “I’d get these great ideas all by myself, but I would never get around to doing any of them. Right afterwards someone else would do the same exact thing as I’d told everyone about. Zeta was right. That’s all I was — talk, hot air. Zeta said, ‘Bullshit walks,’ and that was when I decided to go. To get out of the Southwest, to explore new territory.” Lecha’s voice trailed off and she started snoring. For whatever reasons, Ferro had not spent much time with his mother while he was growing up. Seese felt sad for Lecha and for her son; she went to the bedroom that was to be hers and she had smoked herself into oblivion, with marijuana.

After Seese had been at the ranch for a while, she was less afraid of Ferro and Paulie. They both behaved as if she were invisible, and she was a little horrified when she realized the invisibility was almost identical to the nonbeing that Beaufrey and Serlo had assigned to her while she had been with David.

• • •

Seese tried thinking of it as it was or as Lecha said it was: pain from the cancer required these injections. Seese knew too much about the street life to be fooled by the bottles of Percodan with a legitimate doctor’s name on them. Seese never asked any questions about the cancer because she thought sooner or later Lecha would mention a specific location or a past surgery. But all Lecha could talk about now was the work ahead of them and how when the work was properly completed Seese would have the answers she wanted.

Seese closed the door to her bedroom and closed the door to the bathroom she shared with Lecha. It had been a long time since she had performed everyday, ordinary routines.

BOOK FOUR. SOUTH ABORTION

BEAUFREY TALKED LOUDLY about the best doctor he knew. Neat, quick job and totally painless because if you specify, the doc always comes through — the very best of the painless — morphine. “You’d lap it up! You’d like it just fine!” Beaufrey said suddenly, his hot breath in her face. The stink of Beaufrey’s breath and his words had felt like a fist in her stomach, and Seese knew she would puke. She felt cold sweat break out across the bridge of her nose and under her arms.

Beaufrey wants Seese to have another abortion. “Morphine will be sooooo goooood to you!”

“I throw up,” Seese told him.

“Morning sickness,” Beaufrey had said, building a case against the pregnancy.

“No. I mean morphine makes me puke.” Seese had held her ground. Even before her belly had bulged out, Seese had been on different footing with Beaufrey. David wanted a child. Seese saw Beaufrey’s pale blue eyes dilate black with anger. Beaufrey turned away from Seese and shook the ice in his scotch. “All the dope and booze will kill it anyway.” Beaufrey never said “baby” or “child.” Beaufrey was uncomfortable and kept looking at David, as if to calculate how important a child was for David.

After Seese had refused all mention of abortion, Beaufrey had become obsessed with the child. Because of course it was David’s child. After Seese had seen a doctor, Beaufrey had suddenly decided to acknowledge her existence. He began to ask her questions about the pregnancy. Beaufrey talked about fetuses and fetal development. Researchers had done a great many more experiments on fetuses alive in the womb and had filmed the experiments. Beaufrey was in partnership with a rare-book seller in Buenos Aires with a complete line of dissection films and videotapes for sale.

Beaufrey said where abortion had been legalized, the films of the fetal dissections and experiments seemed to lose their peculiar fascination for “collectors.” The biggest customers for footage of fetuses was the antiabortionist lobby, which paid top dollar for the footage of the tortured tiny babies. Beaufrey watched the creatures grimace and twist away from the long needle probes and curette’s sharp spoon. Million-dollar footage. He liked to watch it again and again to see the faces of the lobbyists’ assistants. Lush, doe-eyed things that hadn’t yet had their damp, pink rims and swollen, purple petals violated by stainless-steel rods and warty pricks. Beaufrey only laughed because he could imagine himself as a fetus, and he knew what they should have done with him swimming hopelessly in the silence of the deep, warm ocean. His mother had told him she tried to abort herself. She had never let it happen again after she had him.

Beaufrey had started by hating his mother; hating the rest of them was easy. Although Beaufrey ignored women, he enjoyed conversation that upset or degraded them. He said he liked to imagine the fetus struggling hopelessly in slow motion as suddenly all the pink horizons folded in on him. Films of the late abortions were far more popular than those of early embryo stages. The forceps appeared as a giant dragon head opening and closing in search of a morsel. By the tiny light of the microcamera, the uterine interior resembled a vast ballroom that had been draped all around in glossy-red silks and velvets of burgundy and lilac. The best operators got it all in one piece by finding the skull and crushing it. Beaufrey had viewed hundreds of hours of film searching for atypical or pathological abortions because the collectors who bought films of abortions and surgeries preferred blood and mess. There was a steady, lucrative demand for films of sex-change operations, though most interest had been in males becoming females. For videotapes of sodomy rapes and strangulations, teenage “actors” from a local male-escort service had “acted” the victims’ roles.

Beaufrey wondered if while they were beating their meat, the “connoisseurs” and the “collectors” ever noticed something lacking, some animal chemistry missing. Could they sense what had only been theatrical devices — from the fake blood to slices of plastic skin and flesh? The first few times they might write off this diminishment of pleasure to stress or getting over a cold. But later would they again begin to feel as if something had been short-circuited? Beaufrey liked to think so. He liked to think how the “collector” would begin to fret over his limp cock, never suspecting the movie scenes had not been the real thing. Beaufrey spent hours daydreaming about the torture of leaving enough of the man or the woman that they still had the cravings and the urges; but fix them so they can never get off again no matter what they do. Beaufrey had known a number of punks who got their balls chopped. The doctors make implants that released male hormone — more testosterone than any of them had — ever got before from their own scrawny testicles.

Beaufrey disliked films of women’s sex changes; there was no pleasure in seeing how fast doctors gave a woman a cock and balls. Women needed brain transplants before they’d ever be “men,” but the ignorant public saw a movie like that and believed the woman suddenly “became” a man.

Beaufrey preferred to specialize in the surgical fantasy movies, but those customers generally had other kinks, and Beaufrey was there ‘’ to please,” he used to tell them, with a smile.

The real weirdos became even more obsessed with the “real thing”—they claimed they could detect fakes — an utter lie since Beaufrey had yet to sell an actual “snuff” film. Beaufrey had got a good laugh out of the “real thing” freaks who had paid him hundreds and even thousands of dollars. The queers couldn’t get enough of those flicks of the steel scalpel skating down the slope of the penis tip, a scarlet trail spreading behind it. Asian faces under white surgical masks and caps glisten with sweat as the penis is peeled like a banana and is turned inside out like a surgical glove, so that the penis skin becomes the lining of the artificial vagina. A companion sequence in which a woman got implants of balls and a dildo sewn inside to folds of specifically prepared skin had been a distribution failure, which had convinced Beaufrey he knew far more about the market than his Argentine business partners. The demand for films of ritual circumcisions of six-year-old virgins had doubled itself every year. There were waiting lists of creeps who got weak at the mention of hairless twats and tight little buds. Massaged and teased into its first and also its last erection, the little girl’s clitoris in close-up looked like a miniature penis. It was a great relief to see the dark, thick fingers of the operator pressing the wet, quivering organ into full extension for the blade of the razor. The offending organ was removed and the wound was washed, then packed in gauze and bandages that were changed repeatedly as they became soaked with blood.

SUICIDE

BEAUFREY HAD AWAKENED HER. Seese had slept all night outside on a chaise lounge. A wind had come up. The sky was overcast with storm clouds. The skin on her upper thighs had goose bumps. She sat up on the chaise lounge next to the pool and rubbed her legs and arms, without looking up. Seese asked where everyone was. Beaufrey had given a strange little laugh. The hairs on her thighs and the top of her head prickled; she felt icy drops of sweat down her back. Beaufrey had not bothered to warn her sheriff’s deputies and the coroner were completing their reports inside. Seese started to look for another towel or robe to cover the bikini. But Beaufrey had already pushed her firmly through the sliding glass door into the living room. The deputies stared at her and for an instant Seese thought this had to be one of those dreams where everyone else is wearing clothing, but you are naked. But in her dreams she was the only one who had noticed her nudity. This was crazy: she was wearing a bathing suit by a pool but still they were staring at her. The faces of the deputies made it clear the blame had been pinned on Seese. She tried to remember everything they’d done earlier that day. All the places she and Eric had piloted the “Big Blue Bedroom” car. Seese tried to remember if there had been any accidents. “What?” She repeated the word, looking from face to face until finally she came to David, who refused to look at her or answer; he pretended to read the statement the deputies had asked him to sign.

She did not feel drunk or high, but she was shivering and sweating. She pushed past Beaufrey and went into the hall bathroom. Seese wrapped herself in a terry cloth robe she pulled out of the laundry closet. The robe smelled sour. Seese sat on the edge of the big sunken tub and stared out the window at the swimming pool. No one stopped her when she went outside again and dived in the pool.

She wasn’t feeling anything. She wasn’t feeling that Eric was dead. She was feeling that he had gone back to Lubbock to visit his mother. She was feeling that this was what was true. It had to feel true or it wasn’t; even if another part of her consciousness told her she had heard the doorbell and then voices. Eric was dead. She knew it was a fact. But what was a fact? Eric was gone, but did that mean he was dead? Eric had gone to Texas for two weeks when his grandmother died. The other voice persisted. “Dead” meant he wasn’t coming back in two weeks. Seese lay on her back and floated in the pool with her eyes closed until the police and the others had gone. She still didn’t feel anything. The cocaine had dried out her mouth. Her tongue felt thick enough to choke her. She tried to catch her upper lip between her teeth, but teeth and lips seemed a long, cool distance from her throat. The first place David had ever taken her was the gallery where his photographs had just been hung. She had met Eric there. He knew everything and she knew nothing. But Eric had liked her, and in the weeks when she had gradually figured out that Eric and David had been lovers, she felt calm because she liked Eric so much. David never showed any particular affection for her or for Eric. With both of them he acted the same. He had always been offhand and aloof with her. Now she saw him do the same to Eric.

Then Eric blew his head off. Just like that. Still that might have been bearable except for what David had done. There were many things he’d done, to all of them. Seese realized that she and Eric were what David “had done” to Beaufrey. Aha! Of course!

The next day Seese could still feel the buzz from all the champagne she had drunk. David was not in the apartment. Seese went to find David at the darkroom. Seese had knocked, but the only sounds were clattering pipes in the wall — water running to the darkroom sink — print washing. David was not there, but he had not gone far because the door was not locked. She wandered through the snarl of extension cords, reflectors, scrims, and rolls of background paper. She felt like a cartoon figure with a human body, but with a camera where her head should be. For a face she had a wide, glassy lens that brought all she saw into focus so cold and clear she could not stop the shiver. None of it could be real. This had to be a drug hallucination or a long dream. The walls were all painted flat soot-black, which gave them a strange quality of undulating velvet in shades of midnight blue and black. Eric’s last pull at the trigger must have felt like this: Seese hesitated then dove into the darkness, past the long, black curtain dense with odors of acid and chemicals. The darkroom was warm. The murky orange-red safelights were soothing. Seese felt hidden and safe in the darkroom. Eric used to tease David. Eric said the darkroom was clearly a womb and the best photographers never grew beyond the earliest stages of personality development.

Seese was so high her head swayed like an under-ocean flower. She watched the rushing water and let her eyes follow the colored spirals of the prints swirling in the stainless steel wash tank. The color prints moved like fish of the deep; all the colors glowed phosphorescent in the orange safelight. Seese held the edge of the sink with both hands and let her head hang back, rolling it slowly shoulder to shoulder with her eyes closed. Where was David? Eric was dead, but David had been developing film and color prints all night. Probably he had gone out for coffee. David worked in the darkroom when he was too upset to sleep.

Seese cupped a hand under the cold-water spout next to the stainless steel tank. She swallowed the water and felt the spinning and swaying subside. She stared down at the eight-by-ten color prints in the rinse tank. Among the spatters of bright reds and deeper purples, reddish browns and blacks, over a pure white, Seese caught a glimpse of the whole image. David had been playing with double exposures again. In the center of the field of peonies and poppies — cherry, ruby, deep purple, black — there was a human figure. Seese could make out feet and legs. She thought it was a great idea — the nude nearly buried in blossoms of bright reds and purples. The nude human body innocent and lovely as a field of flowers. Seese reached in and caught a print at one corner the way David had taught her.

She didn’t know if it was the shock or if somehow the champagne and dope had lasted that long but she had been able to look at the color photographs of Eric’s suicide without flinching. She could see how his body had fallen across the double bed with his long legs angled at the pillows. Death had not been any more peaceful for Eric than his life had. The extreme angles of Eric’s limbs outlined the geometry of his despair. The clenched muscles guarded divisions and secrets locked within him until one day the gridwork of lies had exploded bright, wet red all over. Only a few weeks earlier Eric had helped David carry the roll of glossy-white backdrop paper into the studio. David had wanted the backdrop for an “all-white” series in the bedroom. “But white shows everything, darling,” Eric had teased. David had stared back silently. “Shows all the dirt, shows all the nasty!” Eric had laughed until there were tears in his eyes. David had not smiled. Later Seese had realized the warning had been out in front for her to see, only she had not recognized Eric’s despair.

David had probably not called the authorities for three or four hours to be sure both the color and black-and-white film had turned out. David had photographed Eric’s corpse Police Gazette style. The black-and-white prints David had made were all high contrast: the blood thick, black tar pooled and spattered across the bright white of the chenille bedspread. Was that why she didn’t feel anything, not after she’d realized David had photographed Eric’s body? David had focused with clinical detachment, close up on the.44 revolver flung down to the foot of the bed, and on the position of the victim’s hands on the revolver. Or did she feel no horror because she had already been filled with it, and no photographs of brains, bone, and blood would ever add up to Eric? Eric who loved her and whom she loved was not the corpse in the photographs. Eric would have been the first one to have pointed that out to both her and David. How many times did he have to tell them? The photograph was just a photograph. The photograph was only itself. No photograph could ever be him, be Eric. That was when Eric was drunk that he lectured her and David. David was a year or two older than Eric, but David had never got over Eric’s graduate degree from Columbia. The worst fights Seese had seen between them had started because David thought Eric looked down on him. David had studied art and photography in a community college in Indiana, but Eric had an MFA in art history from Columbia. Eric always said art history was what you did when you weren’t good enough to paint.

David had always denied that Eric had made a last-minute call to him. But how else to account for David’s arriving at Eric’s apartment so soon after the suicide?

White on white: the pure white background of glossy paper; white cat in a snowstorm, white Texas fag boy naked on white chenille. “Feverish with love and need” was a part of Eric’s letter Seese would never forget. The cops and the coroner had even joked about the length of Eric’s letter. The “three-page suicide note” had been Beaufrey’s big laugh for weeks afterward.

Beaufrey was drunk, snorting gram after gram, and rambling on, so witty, so rich, but noticeably oder than his glamour photos due to all the scotch and cocaine and all the young boys in Rio de Janeiro. Beaufrey complained when Serlo forgot and bought harsh white light bulbs instead of the soft rose bulbs. Days before the show was to open, David was still clutching the proof sheets of Eric’s suicide. David could hardly bear to look at the prints for his show, so G. and his gallery assistants worked closely with the color lab technicians who printed all David’s work. Beaufrey had stayed drunk since Eric’s suicide. He was obsessed with Eric’s secret life with David and Seese. Beaufrey accused David of being there. Of watching Eric do it.

David had left the room after Beaufrey said that. Seese followed David outside to the pool. There was a hot, wet wind off the bay, and the city lights were blurry in the mist. David pressed his fist against his chest. David had lied at first about Eric. David told Seese they had been friends since grade school. A lie. Later Eric had told Seese when and how they had become friends. After Eric was dead, Seese had found out he had lied to her too. He and David had not stopped being lovers when Seese first moved in.

Eric had lied. Under the corpse, speckled with bloodstains, the coroner’s assistant had found the envelope. “All those afternoons you didn’t call, I cried,” the letter to David began.

ART

AFTER DISCOVERING Eric’s body, David didn’t just snap a few pictures. He had moved reflectors around and got the light so Eric’s blood appeared as bright and glossy as enamel paint.

Later the critics dwelled on the richness and intensity of the color. One critic wrote of the “pictorial irony of a field of red shapes which might be peonies — cherry, ruby, deep purple, black — and the nude human figure nearly buried in these ‘blossoms’ of bright red.”

The core photograph was a close-up of the face or what remained of it. By and large, the critical as well as the public reaction was one of outrage. “Photographs that belong in the Coroner’s Office and the police file.” “Punk comes to photography.”

A steady parade of buyers had filled the gallery a week before the opening. Everyone wanted to see. Private collectors expressed concern over the lawsuit. If the negatives were later awarded to the family or destroyed, the prints would increase in value. G. was blunt. David’s success was assured. Influential international critics agreed; at last David “had found a subject to fit his style of clinical detachment and relentless exposure of what lies hidden in flesh.”

A critic at the opening noted the crowd stood a peculiar distance from the photographs “as if they had arrived within a few minutes of the suicide.” G. knew how to sell it. He had issued a press release when Eric’s family went to court for the injunction. The lawsuit had erased any doubt there had been theatrics with greasepaint or beef blood. Eric had been David’s model for three years. The modeling agreement was not written, the attorney for the gallery explained delicately; nonetheless, the terms of the agreement had been well-known to friends and “intimates” of Eric’s. Of course, any agreement or contract had died with Eric, but arguably, the family was obliged to honor the contract.

The tabloids on the East Coast had caught wind of it and had called it “The Last Picture Session” and “The Modeling Job From the Grave.”

When the district court refused to delay the opening of David’s show, Eric’s family had dropped the lawsuit. Beaufrey had taken credit for the press coverage that had softened up those hick Texans.

Seese did not remember much about the weeks before or after David’s show. She did not care if she was pregnant, she just wanted to die. She used cocaine and champagne every day to float herself above the chrome and glass rooms where conversation was perfectly charming but Beaufrey and Serlo looked past her as if she had never existed.

Beaufrey blamed Seese for Eric’s death. He blamed her pregnancy. Their situation would have worked if she had not come along. Men could manage arrangements and accommodations. Seese had not been surprised by Beaufrey’s accusation.

Seese should have known right then that Beaufrey was out to get her and the baby. But he had to play by special rules. David gave him no choice. Seese always understood both David and Beaufrey used others — such as Eric or her — to taunt and to tantalize. David had wanted to break Eric’s heart. But she knew David had fallen in love with her after all.

Seese had thought about it again and again; she had gone over each hour, each minute, before they took Monte. Why had she stayed in the same apartment after David left? Beaufrey had no ex-employees. You were in or you were out. You were alive or you were dead. But Seese had stayed in the penthouse after David left. She had not even bothered to change the locks.

KIDNAPPED

SEESE WOULD NEVER FORGET the instant she had seen the playpen was empty. Her confusion had caused her to stumble. Stupidly she had crawled on her hands and knees, from room to room searching for him, crying out his name. He was gone. Monte was gone. Her heart had pounded loudly and she felt icy sweat all over her body. She had argued with herself: David would not take a baby still in diapers, a child Beaufrey could not tolerate.

The first few hours after she discovered her baby was missing, Seese had been so high and so scared the police detectives would find the kilo of coke that she had not told them about the other motives. Beaufrey had double-crossed Argentines as well as Colombians. The Argentines might have taken the child in retaliation.

The police had lost interest once they determined the baby’s disappearance was merely a domestic incident. Child-snatching by a bitter father. Police saw it all the time.

Seese could not tell the detectives where David was. Photographic assignments; the only one she can remember is the rum ad he went to Puerto Rico to shoot. Beaufrey and Serlo had arranged to meet him later in Cartagena. But that had been weeks ago.

As long as Seese remains at the apartment, Beaufrey’s lawyer “looks in” each week. Beaufrey’s lawyer locates a medical doctor who is not averse to prescribing barbiturates for emotional collapse. The lawyer brings hashish with him, and two rubbers so he won’t catch anything. He is anxious to comfort her. He promises they will hear very soon from David. The child is all right. Seese raises her voice until the dry membranes in the throat choke her. She feels something terrible has happened to her baby. Not just David stealing the child. But that her baby is in terrible danger. The lawyer spouts words; he assures her all mothers of lost children have the same feelings.

The lawyer was pissing in the toilet and casually asked if she had told the cops anything about the “import-export business.” He got no reply. Seese was lying in the center of the bright white sheet of the king-size bed. All feelings, all sensations, had gone from her skin and the surface layers of her body. Her eyelids were open and motionless. She was floating free of gravity. The child was gone as if he had never been born. If you simply looked at the everyday surroundings — palm trees outlining the beach at Mission Bay — nothing had changed.

Seese had been numb since Monte disappeared. Seese is still numb ten nights later as the lawyer punches his cock into her. She would have killed herself the first night, but she does not want to die until she knows for certain Monte is dead. The lawyer pumps above her as if he is doing push-ups, a brief down-curve and thrust before he rises back up, and all Seese can imagine is being fucked by a strange machine. Seese remembered it had all happened as if on cue: David’s phone call before the lawyer had rolled off her. David shouting. He demands to see the baby. Seese shouts back; she is in tears. If David doesn’t have Monte, then he is lost. Her baby is lost.

The lawyer is already straightening his tie. He can dress rather quickly into a three-piece suit. The lawyer could tell something was up with the child because Seese was screaming, “Then where is he? Who has him?” over and over into the receiver. Seese accused David of lying, but David’s voice was strangely quiet and a little halting. He almost whispered to her, “I swear I don’t have him. Jesus, Seese! Don’t do this!” Seese screamed back, “You took him! I know it was you, David! You took him! Where is he? Where is my baby?”

The lawyer sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to wrinkle his trousers or shirt when Seese reached out for him. He lit one cigarette after another while she cried. Finally Seese had screamed at the lawyer, “What the fuck is this? Whose side are you on? You’re supposed to help me!”

Later Seese told the detectives David had called asking for Monte.

Seese could feel the detectives’ contempt for her; she had got what she deserved. They weren’t interested. The file on Monte was turned over to the Missing Persons Bureau. Seese knew once a file was sent there, hope was all but gone.

Afterward, Seese had drifted as if she were a sea-green ribbon of kelp caught in a current with a voice that accused her over and over. A less distinct voice said she had done the best she knew how. Her baby had not drowned in his bathwater. He had not been born addicted. But she could find no consolation for this loss.

When she tried to cry, she felt no relief, only greater pain from her anguish. She recited to herself endlessly all the ways she might easily have protected him, how she might have saved Monte if she had not been high that day; if she had not worked with criminals such as Beaufrey. Her breasts had been swollen and hot. The slightest contact with the silk kimono sent stinging to her nipples. Her milk began to soak the rose silk in wide moons. She had been too high on pot and coke to know if the wetness came from the tears off her chin and cheeks or the flow of milk leaking from her breasts.

Gradually Seese realizes she had been fooling herself for a long time. David had not been able to love the baby any better than he had loved her. It was Beaufrey, not David, who was obsessed with the baby. Beaufrey had feared David might love the child, that the child might somehow interfere. Week after week Seese had waited for a phone call or letter.

After the bullet had shattered the bedroom window, Seese realized David would never telephone about Monte. David would never let her see her baby again. Seese had been seized with a compulsion to jump, to smash through the glass and fall thirty stories into the Pacific. Shaking and sweating, Seese filled the sunken marble tub off the master bedroom. She rolled fat marijuana cigarettes and set them on the edge of the bathtub. She slid under the hot water and imagined glittering-blue salt water filling her lungs, sucking away her breath. But a voice inside her head argued she wouldn’t die yet. Because her baby might still be alive. Her baby might need her.

Seese awakened when the bathwater was cold. Outside, a yellowish wedge of moon hung low over the ocean horizon. She wandered from room to room dripping water, leaving faint damp footprints on the pale-gray carpet. She kept the door to the baby’s room closed. The kidnappers had stolen the white leather album filled with Monte’s baby pictures. They had also removed a framed photograph of Monte from the wall. All Seese had left were snapshots she’d kept in her purse. David had taken all the negatives with him. The police seemed to want proof that she had really had a child in the first place. But the neighbors did not recognize her or remember Monte in the stroller.

Seese had suddenly been aware that her own words sounded thin, and the details of her story did not seem convincing even to her anymore. She could imagine how she must sound to the police detectives. Seese threw herself over the lowered side rail of the empty crib and buried her face into Monte’s blanket, to breathe the sweetness of her baby.

The day he moved out, David had argued that Monte would be better off living with him. Seese never forgot Beaufrey standing in the background where only Seese could see his smirk. “Smirking, sucking mouth!” Seese had screamed at Beaufrey. Afterward David never came alone to see Monte. Usually Beaufrey came, but sometimes David brought Serlo. “Are you afraid?” Seese taunted. Beaufrey had answered for David. Their lawyers had suggested a witness be present at all times. Seese felt Beaufrey’s presence far more strongly than David’s. “Your fairy lawyers?” Seese had burst out laughing, spewing a mouthful of vodka on both of them. Beaufrey had tensed so rigidly Seese thought he might slap her face, but David only turned for the door. He had not even asked to see Monte. At that instant, despite the vodka and cocaine, Seese realized it was Beaufrey who was interested in her baby. “You can buy anything else, can’t you? But you can’t have babies. You can’t do that, can you?”

Beaufrey had stopped in the doorway and stared at her as if he dared her to continue. Beaufrey had panicked after Monte was born. Later Seese remembered his clenched fists and the unblinking eyes that seemed to pierce through her and the child. Beaufrey had misread David’s interest in the baby. David was only interested in the child so long as he saw his own image reflected. Seese had been too stunned with cocaine and vodka to think clearly about Beaufrey. She had assumed Beaufrey would take David to the other side of the world to keep David away from Monte, but she had been wrong.

BOOK FIVE. THE BORDER CHILDHOOD IN MEXICO

YOEME HAD APPEARED suddenly. Lecha and Zeta had been playing with the other children on the long wooden porch. From a distance the twins had both spotted the rapidly moving figure no taller than they were, a black shawl pulled tightly around her face so only her blazing dark eyes were visible. They all felt the eyes examining them.

Instinctively the children had huddled over the sunflowers they had picked and were arranging in old tin cans. They had waited for the strange figure to pass. Out of the corner of her eye, Zeta had seen it was a very old woman, dressed in a long black dress and black shawl. She had whispered to Lecha the old woman was an Indian. At that instant the tiny figure in black had turned into their gateway and stopped. In a clear voice as strong as Auntie Popa’s, the old woman had said, “You are Indians!” Zeta had never forgotten the chill down her backbone. Lecha had cowered closer to her. Their cousins had jumped up screaming and fled inside.

But the girls did not run because the old woman was laughing, and she was not very big, and they both were. “Don’t beat me up!” She laughed some more. “Dumb girls! I’m your grandmother!” Zeta and her sister had never heard anyone talk the way Yoeme did. But they had heard their uncles and aunties discuss a certain someone. Zeta had overheard them wishing the old woman had died. The discussion had been how many years had passed since the she-coyote had run off leaving the smallest ones, Ringo and Federico, sobbing and running down the road after her.

Yoeme’s name often came up with the subject of cottonwood trees. Somehow the morning she had abandoned her children, the long drive-way from the big house to the mine shafts had been blocked by the huge cottonwood trees felled across the road.

Auntie Popa had ordered the others to lock all the doors and windows, despite the summer heat. Yoeme sat on the porch swing and talked to Zeta and Lecha. What she did not understand was how her own children, conceived and borne in pain, could behave so shamelessly to their flesh and blood mother. Yoeme had said “flesh and blood” so everyone inside would hear it. Popa screamed, but the sound was muffled through the window glass: “Run! Run for your lives!” The girls laughed with the old woman. They would not get rid of her, so the girls should not worry. Yoeme could not be stopped. See? Already, she had the two of them on her side. If she wanted water, it was right there. She reached for a can full of sunflowers and drank the water. Both girls had squealed, and the windows of the house were crowded with suspicious, sweating faces. Yoeme was back and there was nothing any of them could do to get rid of her. Yoeme had slept on the porch glider until the winter rains came, and then she had moved into the old cook-shed behind the big house.

Late at night Zeta had awakened to loud voices in the rooms below them. Popa and Cucha wanted the dirty Indian out of there. Yoeme liked to lie to them all the time, but very quickly the twins had realized that what was important came true. The morons would not be able to drive her away from the big house, Yoeme told the girls, don’t worry.

Yoeme teased the girls, telling them she had advised their mother to get rid of one or the other of them right away. Twins were considered by some to be bad luck. If she had been around then, Yoeme said she would have taken care of the problem. She had watched both girls’ faces for reactions. Zeta had asked, “Me or her?” and Lecha had said, “You kill me when I’m a baby and they’ll hang you!” which had caused Yoeme to clap her hands together and laugh until their mother had come out to see what was the matter. Amalia had already been ailing awhile when Yoeme had reappeared. Like the others, Amalia seemed powerless against Yoeme. “I was just telling them how I urged you to get rid of one of them.” Their mother had looked away quickly. “You’ll scare them talking like that,” she said, but Yoeme had paid no attention. She had even coached the girls to ask Amalia who had given birth to her. Their mother had given one of her deep, hopeless sighs. “Yes, she is my mother, although I do not remember her well.” Amalia had clasped both hands to her stomach because the pains had come again. The twins had jumped back in awe of the pain. Yoeme had told them the pain was actually a jaguar that devoured a live human from the inside out. Pain left behind only the skin and bones and hair.

Amalia had leaned back in the wicker rocking chair on the big porch and managed to tell them more. There had been a terrible fight. A fight involving big cottonwood trees. “She left you and all her other children and her husband because of trees?” Zeta had wondered if her mother’s pain was also confusing the facts. Amalia had not been able to do any more than shake her head at her twin daughters. And then Lecha had said, “No, it was because she is an Indian. Grandpa Guzman’s family didn’t like Indians.”

“Who told you that?” their mother had asked them. “Yoeme, I suppose.”

“No,” Lecha had said, “I just know. Nobody likes Indians.”

Later, when the twins were less frightened of the old woman, Zeta had asked, “Why did you leave your children?” and Yoeme had clapped her hands together and cheered the question so loudly even Lecha had blushed. They knew their mother’s accusation that Yoeme was a bad influence on them was true. “Our mother told us it was trees, cottonwood trees,” Lecha said. They had been sitting on the ground in the garden next to the house pulling weeds. Yoeme stopped the weeding and tilted her head back slightly and squinted her eyes. “Yes,” she said, “trees. The fucker Guzman, your grandfather, sure loved trees. They were cottonwoods got as saplings from the banks of the Rio Yaqui. Slaves carried them hundreds of miles. The heat was terrible. All water went to the mules or to the saplings. The slaves were only allowed to press their lips to the wet rags around the tree roots. After they were planted at the mines and even here by this house, there were slaves who did nothing but carry water to those trees. ‘What beauties!’ Guzman used to say. By then they had no more ‘slaves.’ They simply had Indians who worked like slaves but got even less than slaves had in the old days. The trees were huge by the time your mother was born.”

“But why did you fight over trees?”

“Hold your horses, hold your horses,” Yoeme had said. “They had been killing Indians right and left. It was war! It was white men coming to find more silver, to steal more Indian land. It was white men coming with their pieces of paper! To make their big ranches. Guzman and my people had made an agreement. Why do you think I was married to him? For fun? For love? Hah! To watch, to make sure he kept the agreement.”

But Guzman had been only a gutless, walking corpse, not a real man. He had been unwilling to stand up to the other white men streaming into the country. “He was always saying he only wanted to ‘get along.’ ” Yoeme slid into one of her long cackling laughs. “Killing my people, my relatives who were only traveling down here to visit me! It was time that I left. Sooner or later those long turds would have ridden up with their rifles, and Guzman would have played with his wee-wee while they dragged me away.”

“But your children,” Zeta said.

“Oh, I could already see. Look at your mother right now. Weak thing. It was not a good match — Guzman and me. You understand how it is with horses and dogs — sometimes children take after the father. I saw that.” And so Yoeme told the twins. It had been a simple decision. She could not remain with children from such a man. Guzman’s people had always hated her anyway. Because she was an Indian. “We know,” Lecha said. “We know that. But what about the trees?”

Oh, yes, those trees! How terrible what they did with the trees. Because the cottonwood suckles like a baby. Suckles on the mother water running under the ground. A cottonwood will talk to the mother water and tell her what human beings are doing. But then these white men came and they began digging up the cottonwoods and moving them here and there for a terrible purpose.

COTTONWOOD TREES

“I STILL SEE THIS,” Yoeme said. “Very clearly, because I was your age then. Off in the distance, as we were approaching the river. The cottonwood trees were very lovely. In the breeze their leaves glittered like silver. But then we got closer, and someone shouted and pointed. I looked and looked. I saw things — dark objects. Large and small, swaying from the low, heavy branches. And do you know what they were — those objects hanging in the beautiful green leaves and branches along the river?”

The two little girls had shaken their heads together, and when they looked at each other, they realized they knew what Yoeme was going to say.

Bullets, she explained, cost too much. “I heard people say they were our clanspeople. But I could not recognize any faces. They had all dried up like jerky.” Lecha had closed her eyes tight and shaken her head. Zeta had nodded solemnly.

“So you see, when I decided to leave that fucker Guzman and his weak children, your mother was the weakest, I had one last thing I had to do.” Here Yoeme clapped her hands and let out a little shout. “It was one of the best things I have ever done! Sooner or later those long turds would have ridden up with their rifles to hang me from the big cottonwood tree.”

Lecha and Zeta had looked in the direction the old woman pointed in the yard near the house. Only a giant white stump remained. “What happened to the big tree?” Zeta had wanted to know.

“Well, you don’t think I was going to let that tree stand next to this house as long as I was alive, do you?”

Yoeme had waited until Guzman had gone off to buy mules in Morelos, and then she had ordered the gardeners to get to work with axes. At the mine headquarters they had only cut down six of the big trees before the foreman had called a halt. Fortunately, while the foreman was rushing to the big house to question the orders, the gardeners had been smart enough to girdle the remaining trees. Yoeme had paid them to run off with her, since in the mountains their villages and her village were nearby. She had cleaned out Guzman’s fat floor safe under the bed where she had conceived and delivered seven disappointing children. It was a fair exchange, she said, winking at the little girls, who could not imagine how much silver that might have been. Enough silver that the three gardeners had been paid off.

Guzman had later claimed he did not mind the loss of the silver, which a week’s production could replace. But Guzman had told Amalia and the others their mother was dead to them and forever unwelcome in that house because she had butchered all the big cottonwood trees. He could never forgive that.

The twins were solemn.

“I did not let myself get discouraged. All these years I have waited to see if any of you grandchildren might have turned out human. I would come around every so often, take a look.” They were on the porch now, and Dennis, their pinheaded cousin, the son of Uncle Ringo, was sitting on the step, eating his own snot. Yoeme waved her hand at Dennis. “They had all been pretty much like that one,” she said, “and I was almost to give up hope. But then you two came.”

“But you wanted to get rid of one of us.” Lecha had let go of Yoeme’s hand in order to say this.

The old woman had stopped and looked at both of them. “I wanted to have one of you for myself,” she said.

“But you didn’t get one of us.”

“No.” Yoeme had let out a big sigh. “I didn’t even get one of you. Your poor mother was too dumb for that. And now do you see what I have?”

The twins had looked at each other to avoid the piercing eyes of old Yoeme.

Yoeme laughed loudly. “I have you both!” she said in triumph, and from the bedroom inside they could hear their mother fumble for the enamel basin to vomit blood.

THE FAILED GEOLOGIST

WHEN ZETA WAS ASKED about her childhood or her family, she replied only that it was all vague and uninteresting to her. This was the truth. But she also realized that she had come to be where she was through a strange and long series of events that were her childhood and youth.

They had arrived in Tucson in the early summer of their fourteenth year. From the train in Nogales they had taken a taxi to the bus depot. Their father had been waiting. They had talked in low voices, all the way from Hermosillo, about Uncle Federico’s “big finger.” They had avoided any discussion about what would happen next. Their father had not come to their mother’s funeral, but then they had been separated for over ten years. He had sent a telegram immediately, by way of the mine at Canenea, announcing that the girls were his daughters, and he was now claiming his legal right to them.

Lecha had easily identified their father in the waiting room of the bus depot. He was standing apart from the rest, in starched khakis, polished half Wellingtons, reading The Wall Street Journal, Far East edition. Lecha had laughed. He did not disdain the poor Indians in the bus depot so much as they simply did not exist for him. He had never associated Amalia with the Indians; as far as he was concerned, she had been white. Lecha had always joked that if their mother and they had been chunks of iron feldspar, he would have been far more engaged, far more excited than he had ever been. Zeta was not so sure. Their father had been almost sixty when they were born. When he came to Potam to survey the ore formations and new shafts, he always took the girls along. That had been their visit, their time together with him. Lecha had been the one who had gone running to him with the chunk of iron feldspar in her hand. Zeta had watched from a distance.

He had taken the dark, heavy rock and had pretended or perhaps had examined it, but without any interest. Lecha had not let his lack of response interfere with her excitement over the glitter and sparkle in the stone. But Zeta had realized then nothing there mattered to him — not the shafts or the ore samples red-tagged for him by the mine foreman, not Lecha’s excitement; though Zeta did believe he was concerned with relieving his sense of duty. After the separation, their grandpa Guzman had maintained the mining engineer had married their mother because he had been worried the partners had become dissatisfied with him and were about to hire a new geologist.

The rumors and reports had arrived in Canenea that while the mining engineer could still name the formations and the ore-bearing stones and rocks, and could recite all of the known combinations for that particular area, his calculations on the maps for known deposits and veins had been wrong; he had directed the miners to nothing. When other geologists had been called to evaluate his projections and the samples and assay results, they could find no fault with his work. They could not account for the absence of ore in the depths and areas he had designated. They had of course been reluctant to pass judgment upon a “brother”; the geologists had discussed at length the “scientific anomaly.”

Yoeme said the veins of silver had dried up because their father, the mining engineer himself, had dried up. Years of dry winds and effects of the sunlight on milky-white skin had been devastating. Suddenly the man had dried up inside, and although he still walked and talked and reasoned like a man, inside he was crackled, full of the dry molts of insects. So their silent father had been ruined, and everyone had blamed Yoeme. But Lecha and Zeta had sensed the truth years earlier. They had both felt it when they walked with him and he had lifted them into his arms: somewhere within him there was, arid and shriveled, the imperfect vacuum he called himself.

Yoeme had been contemptuous of the innuendos about witchcraft. What did these stupid mestizos — half no-brain white, half worst kind of Indian — what did these last remnants of wiped-out tribes littering the earth, what did they know?

Yoeme had not wasted a bit of energy on Amalia’s ex-husband. The geologist had been perfectly capable of destroying himself. His ailment had been common among those who had gone into caverns of fissures in the lava formations; the condition had also been seen in persons who had been revived from drowning in a lake or spring with an entrance to the four worlds below this world. The victim never fully recovered and exhibited symptoms identical to those of the German mining engineer. Thus, Yoeme had argued, witchcraft was not to blame. The white man had violated the Mother Earth, and he had been stricken with the sensation of a gaping emptiness between his throat and his heart.

Zeta could feel an empty space inside her rib cage, an absence that had been growing even before their mother died. She felt a peculiar sadness when she remembered their father, the detached white man who smiled and spoke and who was a dead man already.

BOARDING SCHOOL

ZETA HAD HOPED she might be with her father long enough to learn something more about the emptiness inside her. But the day she and Lecha stepped off the bus in Tucson, Zeta had seen it was too late. Their father had already purchased their train tickets to El Paso. He had greeted them formally, holding them both to his chest awkwardly, his body and arms rigid. He was pleased to see them both looking so well. He did not know how to express his condolences to them at the loss of their mother, but they must not worry. That subject finished, he had directed the porter to a taxi with their trunks and boxes. Driving to the hotel, he had told them he regretted the boarding school in El Paso was run by Catholic nuns, but there had been no other choice unless the girls went East to school. He told them he thought God was of no use. They had rooms at the Santa Rita Hotel if they did not want to spend school vacations with him at the ranch west of Tucson. He preferred the Santa Rita himself. Money had been deposited for them in a bank in El Paso. The mother superior would see that they got their school uniforms and whatever else they might need.

They had waited three days for the next train to El Paso. Their father had not left his room until late afternoon each day when he met them in the hotel lobby. He had said nothing about restrictions, but the girls had felt shy about walking alone in downtown Tucson, which was so much larger than Potam. He never smiled or spoke, merely nodding in the direction of the hotel restaurant. His forehead was continually wrinkled and his pale gray eyes intent as if he were working constantly to solve a mathematical formula even while he sat with them and soaked bread in his coffee.

Zeta had tried to guess what it was that filled their father’s head so full. She began to awaken before dawn and hear small muffled sounds — the creak of a chair, the opening of a drawer — sounds of a man who no longer slept. He had not invited them to his room. Lecha wanted to see because she thought the clues might be there. She had ruled out women and love affairs immediately, but confided that strange philosophies or religions might be responsible. Zeta had felt a surge of anger in her chest at Lecha’s stupidity. “It isn’t anything. There’s nothing. You won’t find anything,” she snapped as Lecha had started for his room. When he had opened the door, Zeta saw he did not recognize them immediately. Lecha was looking past him into the room and did not see this. Zeta felt her heart fall in her chest. The bed had not been slept in. The pillows and spread had not been touched since the hotel maid. The black wire hangers in the closet nook were empty. He had been sitting at the small desk. The desk top was bare, although for an instant Zeta had mistaken cigarette scars along the edges for a pattern of decoration. “Where is everything?” Lecha said, walking around and around the small room impatiently. Their father had turned as if he suffered from stiffness in the neck and shoulders. He had begun to hunch under long, unkempt white hair. They had always spoken English with him since he had never been able to learn Spanish. But Lecha had had to repeat the question twice before he could answer. “Everything?” he had said in a steady voice. “I am trying to think about it,” he had answered. The farewell at the train station had been brief. Staring past them into the distance their father had announced, “You will never see me again. I am going to die. My life has never interested me much. I think about myself and this room. The longer I think the less I understand.”

Zeta had never forgotten the room. She had gone back, years later, to the desk clerk at the Santa Rita Hotel, to ask if she might look at a certain room on the third floor. She had been dressed in her business suit, hose, and heels carrying her briefcase. She could not remember the room number and had to take the elevator up to find it. The desk clerk had informed her the room was already taken.

But she had returned, and from time to time she rented Room 312. She did not care what the clerk or bellboy thought. She spent afternoons sitting at the desk. The wall behind the desk had been plastered and painted many times. She sat and stared at it and was soothed by the emptiness.

DRIED-UP CORPSE

THE NOTE HE left had said simply, “This should have been done years ago.” He had done “it” in this room. The mother superior refused to give them any details. The relatives at the big house in Potam had known nothing of his death until months later when Lecha told them. Zeta had to smile at the mystery. Her father had not used a necktie or belt. Zeta had searched old county records to know. The report said he had simply sat at his chair not eating or drinking. It had been as if he had consumed himself. When he had been discovered by the hotel maid, he was not a swollen corpse, nor was there a terrible odor. He had been as dry and shriveled as a cactus blown down in a drought. Zeta had laughed: “He sounds like one of those saints that don’t decay!” The report noted the condition of the corpse had been somewhat unusual. The corpse had begun to mummify, possibly, the coroner had theorized, because of the dry summer heat and the circumstances of the death. The report included autopsy results. Zeta could not make much of these technical notations, but the coroner’s assistant had noted the deceased’s body weight. “All that was left of him was fifty pounds,” Zeta told Lecha later.

Their father had left them a ranch in the Tucson Mountains. The land was worth next to nothing. Even in the best years, many many hundreds of acres were required to keep a few cattle from starving. The mountains were all that had remained of a giant volcano that had exploded parts of itself as far east as New Mexico and as far north as Phoenix. Every square foot of the remaining foothills was covered with rock — volcanic rock, ash, and combinations of volcanic material fused with molten limestone and sandstone blown up with the molten rock. At one time, he had told them, the area had interested him immensely, because the explosion had been one of the more rare sort — alkaline rather than acidic. The day he had hired a taxi and driven them to the site, he had had the look of an exhausted man performing a chore. He had not looked at the rocky ground though he was describing highly technical rock conglomerates created by the intense heat of the explosion. When he had pointed to the south and north, where old mining claims marked ore outcroppings, he had been looking at the sky, not at the bluish-gray veins of ore-bearing rock. The girls had gathered that he meant to make a study of the area and of the relationships between the particular sort of volcanic explosion and the deposits of silver, copper and galena. But it was also very clear that he had lost whatever interest he had once had in the geology of the mountains. Now he preferred his room at the Santa Rita Hotel.

“This will be yours,” their father had said as they walked back to the taxi. The driver had been under the car poking at the tail pipe and mumbling about rough road. “I did not buy it for ranching. Eighty acres isn’t enough to raise anything. But, I suppose, it is something. Or maybe it isn’t.”

COYOTE YEARS

THE INTERVENING YEARS was a phrase Zeta liked because it described nearly her whole life. She and her twin sister had turned sixty in March. “The month the wild flowers blossom,” their mother had said one day when old Yoeme was there. Yoeme said, “Yes, the same month the coyotes whelp,” and burst out laughing, anxious to see what the twins would say. Lecha had answered right back, “Well, Grandma, that means you yourself are a coyote with us!” To which Yoeme had clapped her hands, but their mother had looked upset because it had already become clear that her twin daughters listened far too much to the wild old Yaqui woman.

Coyote might best describe the intervening years — Lecha constantly traveling, from lover to lover and city to city. Lecha’s best stunt had been the birth of Ferro one Friday morning; by Sunday noon Lecha had been on a plane to Los Angeles, leaving Zeta with her new baby.

Lecha had sworn the trip was very important and she had promised to return no later than “Tuesday.” But Lecha had never said which Tuesday, and Zeta did not see or hear from Lecha again until the following year.

When Zeta had asked her why she did not at least call collect or send a postcard, Lecha had said that she was sorry and she knew that she should have but she just didn’t. “I thought maybe you might think about the baby,” Zeta had continued, interested in her twin’s excuse. “Oh, the baby!” Lecha had exclaimed as if she had completely forgotten. “Where is he? What do you call him?” By then Zeta had left town and had moved into the old ranch buildings to take advantage of the remote location for her work with Calabazas and the others. Calabazas had found an old widow from his neighborhood who wanted nothing more than to sit all day holding a baby and rocking in a chair as long as there was plenty of food and clean diapers. Later when Ferro was a fatty and suffered teasing from the other children, Lecha had blamed the old widow for always stuffing Ferro’s mouth with food.

Right then Zeta had told Lecha that unless she planned on staying around or taking the baby with her, she had better keep her mouth shut. “Well, you don’t have to get so mad!” Lecha had said, and from that time on they had not discussed Ferro again.

Coyote years certainly described Zeta’s time with Mexico Tours and Mr. Coco. When members of tour groups had asked Zeta why they did not run tours farther south or to other Mexican states, she used to look them in the eye and answer calmly that she did not know. She had begun to make it her business not to answer questions when the answers did not truly matter anyway. What difference did it make why Mexico Tours and Mr. Coco did not venture farther south than Guaymas or Chihuahua City? Lecha could have had ten different answers for that question: that Mr. Coco was running things other than just tours or Mr. Coco had committed crimes farther south and could not safely send his clients farther or the old Greyhounds he buys and repaints parrot yellow can go no farther without major breakdowns.

Mr. Coco had been a light gray color without his clothes. He had sat in the armchair in his office watching her undress. All Zeta had been able to think about were the staples, coarse sand, and other debris on the rug beside his desk. She had known when he promoted her to tour coordinator that this moment was somewhere on the horizon. Mr. Coco had only two suits: a winter suit of black flannel and a summer suit of blue, pin-striped seersucker. He wore one until the weather changed, and by then, the sleeves of the coat would be stiff at the wrists with oily dirt. The trousers would be blotched where Mr. Coco had compulsively wiped the palms of his hands across his own thighs. One sunny morning in March at the beginning of the hot Tucson spring, Zeta saw that Mr. Coco had changed suits. He had just promoted her from the diesel fumes, the chattering tourists, and the drunken bus drivers who stared at her breasts. But after she had undressed, Mr. Coco remained in the armchair merely staring at her breasts. Between his legs in its nest of white pubic hair, the penis lay like a pale grub or caterpillar. It did not move. Although this was to be her first encounter with a man other than Uncle Federico and his fat, dirty fingers, Zeta felt nothing. No fear, no embarrassment, no horror at standing naked in the dingy sales office of Mexico Tours, at five-thirty on a Friday afternoon. The swamp cooler droned in the window behind her and emitted periodic drips into a flat pan on the floor.

The sound of the water leaking out of the cooler seemed to arouse him. They had both known all day this would happen. He opened his arms in a gesture Zeta took as an invitation to sit in his lap. The armchair was ragged and filthy, but it had deep cushions. Zeta had never been a small woman, and when she crawled into his lap, facing him, he sank so low in the chair his lips barely reached her nipples. It seemed like a lot of exertion bouncing around on his lap, having to brace herself against the chair arms with both her knees and her elbows. Mr. Coco moaned and groaned and nibbled away at her breasts. Zeta thought she should feel some revulsion, but she did not. She felt sweaty and her legs were cramped, but nothing about the scene was remarkable. She had not expected it would be any different.

Lecha claimed sex put a new odor on you. Well, it had got the bus drivers off her. The drivers knew only Mexico Tours would employ them. They assumed Zeta belonged to the boss after that. Mr. Coco himself had been subdued. Zeta pretended not to notice. He had a wife. Zeta realized somehow she had emerged from the Friday-afternoon fucking with a considerable measure of new power. It had been the power that had attracted Calabazas. He said so. He said he had been waiting to see how the twin beauties of Potam were going to do in the big city of Tucson. Himself, he had gotten out of Sonora years earlier. “Because you are much older than us,” Lecha had teased. He was a clan brother who had invited himself to dinner. He was after both of them. They both looked at him as if he were crazy. Lecha said she had a date and she left. Over the years Calabazas had learned a great deal, but not about women.

Now it was only Calabazas and Zeta. “It’s about time your job worked for you,” he said, lighting up a Lucky Strike and blowing smoke rings as he spoke. “I know good people who want to make arrangements.”

“Arrangements?” Zeta looked closely at him.

In those days Calabazas had been handsome and wild. Calabazas had been working with their clanspeople and relatives in Sonora. His pants pocket was fat with cash. When Lecha had pointed at the wad, Calabazas laughed and pretended it was his cock. “You can get this for yourselves anytime,” he had joked, meaning the money as well as sex.

As soon as Zeta had become acquainted with the people Calabazas worked with in Mexico, she had saved up a bankroll to work a few deals of her own. Calabazas should have expected Zeta to pull a stunt like that, Lecha had confided later. Her sister was not to be trusted. Zeta had quit both Mexico Tours and Calabazas at the same time. She had taken two of the bus drivers with her, leaving Mr. Coco in his sour black suit, looking stunned as she told him she was bored with smuggling live green parrots and fake Rolex watches across the border in the bellies of tour buses.

AT WAR WITH THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

YOEME HAD GUESSED immediately what Zeta was doing with her tour bus business and her partnership with Calabazas. When Yoeme had exclaimed “You will be a rich woman!” Zeta had only shrugged her shoulders. Zeta realized old Yoeme was leading her on, setting Zeta up for a tirade. Old Yoeme had made a big point of shaming those who would sell the last few objects of the people who had been destroyed and worlds that had been destroyed by the Europeans. Yoeme had looked Zeta right in the eye when she said it. Yoeme said that the work that faced Lecha had been made more difficult because from time to time, weakhearted keepers of the old almanac had sold off pages here and there for frivolous reasons.

“Remember all this when Lecha is struggling to make sense out of the notebooks.” “Ask Zeta how many of the missing pages got sold off to her tourists from the United States.” Of course Zeta had never seen anything like the fragments of the manuscript of glyphs. All that had ever moved through the garages of Mrs. Mares had been pottery and figurines, with a scattering of carved stone or jade axes and knives. When Zeta had informed Yoeme that they were out of the antiquities business and “working in other areas,” old Yoeme had crowed, “Sold it all away! It’s all gone and now you move to something else!” Zeta nodded. She had seen no point in arguing either with her grandmother or her sister.

Old Yoeme had been in the mood to talk that day:

I have kept the notebooks and the old book since it was passed on to me many years ago. A section of one of the notebooks had accidentally been lost right before they were given to me. The woman who had been keeping them explained what the lost section had said, although of course it was all in a code, so that the true meaning would not be immediately clear. She requested that, if possible, at some time in my life I should write down a replacement section.

I have thought about it all my life. The problem has been the meaning of the lost section and for me to find a way of replacing it. One naturally reflects upon one’s own experiences and feelings throughout one’s life. The woman warned that it should not be just any sort of words.

I am telling you this because you must understand how carefully the old manuscript and its notebooks must be kept. Nothing must be added that was not already there. Only repairs are allowed, and one might live as long as I have and not find a suitable code.

I must always return to what the white men kept hanging in all the lovely cottonwood trees along the rivers and streams throughout this land. Swaying in the light wind, rags of clothing flapping the shrunken limbs into motion. They try to walk, they try to walk — the feet keep reaching long after the neck has broken or the head has choked. In those days the Mexican soldiers were not particular about whom they killed so long as they were Indians found near the mountains. Before dawn they fired upon a camp, taking it for Indian, and the Mexican soldiers killed a young American lieutenant and an American cavalry scout. They were all hunting the Apaches running with the man they called Geronimo. That was not his name. No wonder there has been so much confusion among white people and their historians. The man encouraged the confusion. He has been called a medicine man, but that title is misleading. He was a man who was able to perform certain feats.

I have seen the photographs that are labeled “Geronimo.” I have seen the photograph of the so-called surrender at Skeleton Canyon where General Miles sits in the shade of a mesquite tree flanked by his captains as he makes false promises and lies. But the Apache man identified in the photographs is not, of course, the man the U.S. army has been chasing. He is a man who always accompanied the one who performed certain feats. He is the man who agreed to play the role for the protection of the other man. The man in the photographs had been promised safe conduct by the man he protected. The man in the photographs was a brilliant and resourceful man. He may not have known that while he would find wealth and fame in the lifelong captivity, he would not again see the mountains during his life. The man who fled had further work to do, work that could not be done in captivity.

When the mountain people came down for salt or for other necessities, they came to bring the news and maybe some herb delicacy for me. This man accompanied them. He did not remain with the others talking on the porch or eating roast mutton inside. He walked down here, right to this place we are standing.

I had walked out on the second-story porch carrying one of the babies — it was Amalia, your mother. She was always crying and puking milk. I could see the man very clearly. The others had told me that he had certain work he must do, which was why they had brought him down with them. No one was to know who he was. It was a very dangerous time then. The soldiers were killing Indians left and right. I watched the man for a long time. Amalia fell asleep in my arms. He was watching the gulls ride the waves in and out. I began to remember my wonder at the rising of the waves when I first saw the sea. The sun was setting into the water. The tide was going out. The gulls were being carried farther and farther away into the bright gold light of the last sun across the water. I never moved my eyes from the man at the edge of the water. But in an instant he was gone. All I could see was a gull riding a wave, floating and stretching its wings in the lazy way the gulls have.

That is all. Take me back. I am tired.

They argued over what was easier. Lecha wanted to go back to the house and get the car, but Yoeme refused to ride in one. Zeta thought the deep sand made uphill with the old wheelchair impossible and said she could more easily carry Yoeme. But the old woman said her bones might poke through her skin if Zeta tried something stupid like that. So they took turns struggling up the sandy road from the beach, old Yoeme sleeping through the jerks and skids. They got too winded to talk. They never discussed the story Yoeme had told them on the beach, but Lecha had been careful to write it down in the notebook with the blank pages. After she had written it, old Yoeme had demanded to see it, and it was then they realized it was the first entry that had been written in English. Zeta waited for Yoeme to break into a fury. But she had rocked herself from side to side, sighing with pleasure. Yoeme claimed this was the sign the keepers of the notebooks had always prayed for.

It had been Yoeme in the first place who talked to snakes. She claimed to consult the big bull snake out behind the adobe woodshed. Zeta had learned it from her. What did the snake tell her? the two girls had wanted to know. Nothing the girls would be allowed to hear. Old Yoeme had never got along with churchgoers. She had her own picture of things. Snakes crawled under the ground. They heard the voices of the dead: actual conversations, and lone voices calling out to loved ones still living. Snakes heard the confessions of murderers and arsonists after innocent people had been accused. Why did Catholic priests always kill snakes? The twins nodded their heads solemnly at their grandmother. Snakes moved through the tall weeds, and under the edges of rocks and up through the branches of trees. They saw and heard a good deal that way: where husbands crept away, where wives embraced lovers. Snakes saw what illicit couples did, in turkey pens after dark, in the arroyo by the trash pile, all the sexual excesses the two girls had been able to imagine, but were not allowed to hear. Yoeme had the girls begging.

Lecha could not bear to face the big bull snake. She closed her eyes and tried. But she could not bear to see him thick and coiled in the shady spot by the hole in the wall where he slept. Lecha could not endure to watch his slippery, black fork tongue dart in and out, in and out. “Well, you go on back to the porch,” Yoeme had told her. “Not everyone can do this. Your sister can tell you what he says.”

Zeta had waited until Yoeme called her closer. The snake was not so stupid that he did not know a stranger. Although he does know you two girls because you play out here sometimes. But you can’t just go rushing at them. Bad manners. You can’t have a conversation right away. It is no different from with humans. Let him hear your heartbeat. Let him hear your breathing.

It was something Zeta did alone with her grandmother. In the fall, as the days were cooling off, they would find the big bull snake sunning himself on the south side of the woodshed. Yoeme had picked him up carefully, supporting his long body with one hand as she cradled him against her chest. “He likes the warmth, you see,” and it had been then Zeta understood that the big snake recognized Yoeme, because he lay quietly, only his tongue moving slowly in and out at Zeta.

Zeta had never mentioned any of this to Lecha because she could not exactly explain how it had worked. Certainly the snake didn’t talk. But looking at the snake as it curled in Yoeme’s arms and thinking how beautifully the light brown spots were with the pale yellow under it, Zeta had for no reason thought of Grandpa Guzman not as her grandpa, but as the “old white man,” which was what others, outside the family, called him. She had thought of him overturned and moaning feebly for help. And her aunt Popa was ignoring him because she figured there would be something dirty to clean up. All Zeta had ever thought was that she knew how it worked, how one talked to snakes. But it had not impressed her.

So, years later, when old Yoeme had given Lecha the notebooks to decipher, Zeta had been surprised that the old woman said, “Your skills lie elsewhere, don’t they?” Lecha had glanced at Zeta to try to figure out what old Yoeme had meant. But Zeta did not change her expression, and their grandmother drifted into one of her long naps — a long nap that finally one warm afternoon four days later had not ended.

THE INDIAN WAY

ZETA HAD NOT NEEDED Calabazas after the first loan from him was repaid, but she had played along for a while because she was interested in what he might do next. He said that the two of them could have the run of the town when it came to “commodities” crossing the border. This proposal had come shortly after he had visited the old ranch in the mountains and had realized the possibilities. Zeta thought this had also come about the time Calabazas was beginning to realize that she was not going to be swept into his bed as other women generally were.

Calabazas had gotten amorous at sundown while Zeta was explaining what her father had told them about the big volcano that had once been there and about the giant explosion that had destroyed it. Zeta had been showing him different rocks containing bits of volcanic ash melted into them. She had been explaining that her father had wanted to spend his retirement studying these rocks and the ore deposits of these mountains when Calabazas had tried to gather her into his arms for a big kiss. But Zeta had seen the move coming, and she had twisted away expertly, dropping the rock she had been showing him on his foot. “You are not like your twin sister,” Calabazas had said, shaking his head. “No,” Zeta had replied, “I’m not.” And a week later Zeta had arranged the biggest haul of gold coins yet, and Calabazas and his people knew nothing about it. She had not trusted a deal that big to anyone. She had loaded Ferro’s diaper bag, car bed, and toys into the backseat of a big Hudson Hornet. The old widow and Ferro had ridden in front beside her. Zeta purposely wore a full, loose blouse over her plain, dark skirt that might suggest pregnancy. At the border crossing in El Paso, the U.S. guards had made only a quick check of the trunk. The mighty frame and springs of the Hudson Hornet had not held their load without sagging, but they seemed not to notice. Or they had passed it off to the two large Indian women, the large baby, and the load of baby gear.

The old widow-woman had not asked questions, but from time to time she had made comments too low to make out, although once or twice Zeta had heard her mumbling something about “this” not being “the Indian way.” Zeta and Lecha had heard about the “Indian way” for years and years. Their aunties and dirty-fingered uncles despised what they called “Indians” until it suited them; then suddenly the “Indian way” was all-important if and when the “Indian way” worked to their advantage. Zeta did not want to hear about “the Indian way” from anyone who was her own employee. Zeta had stared at the old woman for a long time. What wasn’t the “Indian way”?

The people had been free to go traveling north and south for a thousand years, traveling as they pleased, then suddenly white priests had announced smuggling as a mortal sin because smuggling was stealing from the government.

Zeta wondered if the priests who told the people smuggling was stealing had also told them how they were to feed themselves now that all the fertile land along the rivers had been stolen by white men. Where were the priest and his Catholic Church when the federal soldiers used Yaqui babies for target practice? Stealing from the “government”? What “government” was that? Mexico City? Zeta had laughed out loud. Washington, D.C.? How could one steal if the government itself was the worst thief?

There was not, and there never had been, a legal government by Europeans anywhere in the Americas. Not by any definition, not even by the Europeans’ own definitions and laws. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land. Because stolen land never had clear title. Zeta could recite Yoeme’s arguments and crazed legal theories better and better as time went by. All the laws of the illicit governments had to be blasted away. Every waking hour Zeta spent scheming and planning to break as many of their laws as she could.

War had been declared the first day the Spaniards set foot on Native American soil, and the same war had been going on ever since: the war was for the continents called the Americas.

Calabazas said the widow did not think it was the Indian way to use an old woman and a little child as her “cover” for the business of crossing the border. He had been leaning against his pickup truck with a toothpick hanging out of the corner of his mouth, staring off in the distance at the highest peak in the Tucson range.

Zeta had laughed loudly — something she only did when she was angry or surprised. “Who said anything about the ‘Indian way’?” Zeta demanded.

Calabazas turned and looked at her and shook his head. “Hey, don’t get mad at me, I didn’t say it, she did.”

“Tell her she’s fired then,” Zeta said.

YOEME’S OLD NOTEBOOKS

ZETA GAVE UP on men after Mr. Coco. He hadn’t been the first, but she had decided he would be the last. She was not afraid to know the truth. She could feel what she knew. She was different from other women, just as she and Lecha had always been different from all the others. Zeta had begun to feel a wearisome repetition in the love affairs. Hot, awkward motions, foul breath, and the ticking of a clock in the room. She knew how the love would trickle away before the sweat dried on the bed sheets.

Around the same time Zeta gave up on men, she had come across the notebooks old Yoeme had left her. Zeta had begun examining the bundle of pages and scraps of paper with notes in Latin and Spanish. Lecha had all the notebooks but this one. Yoeme said it was to ensure Lecha did not try to hog the notebooks for herself; this had been Yoeme’s way of teasing Lecha, but also a reminder the old woman expected the sisters to care for one another throughout their lives.

Old Yoeme had given Zeta the smallest bundle of loose notebook pages and scraps of paper with drawings of snakes. Yoeme had warned Zeta not to brag to Lecha, but the notebook of the snakes was the key to understanding all the rest of the old almanac. The drawings of the snakes were in beautiful colors of ink, but Zeta had been disappointed after she began deciphering Yoeme’s scrawls in misspelled Spanish. This did not seem to be the “key” to anything except one old woman’s madness.

Pages From the Snakes’ Notebook

Maah’ shra-True’-Ee is the giant serpent

the sacred messenger spirit

from the Fourth World below.

He came to live at the Beautiful Lake, Ka-waik,

that was once near Laguna village.

But neighbors got jealous.

They came one night and broke open the lake

so all the water was lost. The giant snake

went away after that. He has never been seen since.

That was a great misfortune for us, the Ka-waik’meh,

at Old Laguna.

Spirit Snake’s Message

I have been talking to you people from the beginning

I have told you the names and identities of the Days and Years.

I have told you the stories on each day and year so you could be prepared

and protect yourselves.

What I have told you has always been true.

What I have to tell you now is that

this world is about to end.

Those were the last words of the giant serpent. The days that were to come had been foretold. The people scattered. Killers came from all directions. And more killers followed, to kill them.

One day a story will arrive at your town. It will come from far away, from the southwest or southeast — people won’t agree. The story may arrive with a stranger or perhaps with the parrot trader. But when you hear this story, you will know it is the signal for you and the others to prepare.

Quetzalcoatl gathered the bones of the dead and sprinkled them with his own blood, and humanity was reborn.

Sacred time is always in the Present.

1. almanakh: Arabic.

2. almanac: A.D.1267 English from the Arabic.

3. almanaque: A.D.1505 Spanish from the Arabic.

4. a book of tables containing a calendar of months and days with astronomical data and calculations.

5. predicts or foretells the auspicious days, the ecclesiastical and other anniversaries.

6. short glyphic passages give the luck of the day.

7. Madrid

Paris Codices

Dresden

Leave it to Lecha to show up with the remaining notebooks and the notion her transcriptions would be unique and never thought of before. Zeta had already completed the pages of the notebook Yoeme had given her. Zeta did not believe it was an accident Lecha had returned just as Zeta had finished typing the transcriptions of the pages into the computer.

Zeta feels a sudden sadness at the sound of their voices. She is not sure why. Maybe it’s because Lecha and the blond woman are friendly with each other, and she feels so alone. But she does not turn back from the bedroom door, which is ajar. Zeta knocks and the blond woman startles and moves away from her, across the room to an open window. “I haven’t killed and eaten anyone for some time now,” Zeta says to Seese, who blushes and returns to the chair by the bed. “It’s the color of clothes you wear,” Lecha says quite seriously. “After a while the dark brown color begins to shout something at all of us.”

“Superstition,” is all Zeta will say, dismissing the subject so that she can begin maneuvers to get the contents of Yoeme’s old notebooks into her computer.

“I have been thinking about the old notebooks,” Zeta begins. But Lecha is flying high this afternoon, and she grins at Seese as she says, “I’ll bet you have! I know just what you have in mind.” Now it is Lecha who is watching Zeta’s face for clues; Zeta has never quite known, and Lecha won’t tell her, exactly how much of the psychic business Lecha controls, and how much it controls her. Zeta believes Lecha mostly has the visions or “scenes” imposed on her and can’t control what she sees. Otherwise, why the remark that she “had to leave” the TV talk show circuit? Zeta has gathered it was because of something Lecha had said or described, and whatever it had been, the executive producers of the regional and cable talk shows no longer wanted to risk what Lecha might “see” or say. Zeta is pleased that the blond woman is learning to leave them alone. With Seese gone, Zeta can survey the work area they’ve made in the corner of Lecha’s bedroom. Lecha’s suitcases and travel trunk have been piled outside the closet that is crammed full of her televison clothes — mostly long black silk crepes with plunging necklines or blue satin kimonos with slits up the sides. A big blue chair with peacocks is littered with pill bottles near the bed. But in the center of the light-oak desk sits a new electric typewriter. The pale blue carpet is littered with what appear to be notes and old letters.

“What are you going to do once you get them typed?” Zeta asks.

Lecha scoops two fat white pills off the night table and swallows them with white wine. It is difficult to know how sick Lecha really is. Zeta looks carefully at her skin color and her hair and then at Lecha’s eyes. Lecha has sunk back on the pillows. Her pills are taking effect now. “Those old almanacs don’t just tell you when to plant or harvest, they tell you about the days yet to come — drought or flood, plague, civil war or invasion.” Lecha seemed to be drifting off to sleep. “Once the notebooks are transcribed, I will figure out how to use the old almanac. Then we will foresee the months and years to come — everything.” Lecha’s eyes are closed now, but as Zeta is leaving, Lecha calls after her. “I should’ve started this years ago — then we’d already know what’s coming. But I was having too much fun — there was no time for old notebooks and scraps of paper.”

BOOK SIX. THE NORTH LOCATING THE DEAD

IT HAD DAWNED on Lecha — the way the darkness gradually bleeds away and the light gains momentum, much as water seeps into low places in the garden. The awareness pulsed through her day and night. When it had first broken through, she had tried little tricks, little exercises, attempting to cut off the channel. She had sat adding long columns of figures, and although she was able to concentrate on the numbers and do a more accurate job of adding them than she had ever done before, a part of her brain was still spinning a voice that mocked her: They are all dead. The only ones you can locate are the dead. Murder victims and suicides. You can’t locate the living. If you find them, they will be dead. Those who have lost loved ones only come to you to confirm their sorrow.

Old Yoeme would have laughed at her. Would have laughed as Lecha began to go over the past twenty years and assembled the evidence. The crazed old woman would have made jokes: Lecha is a special contact for the souls that still do not rest because their remains are lost; somewhere fragments of bone burnt to ash, or long strands of hair, move in the ocean wind as it shifts the sand across the dunes. Lecha could almost hear Yoeme’s voice. The crazy laugh and then, “Where do you suppose you got that ability, that gift?” Because Yoeme must have known all along that Lecha would be the one; she might have guessed it when they were still little girls.

The power Lecha had seemed to be as an intermediary, the way the snakes were messengers from the spirit beings in the other worlds below. She was just getting accustomed to this fact and her link with the dead when she had been called to San Diego.

Police in this case knew they would not find the missing boys alive because the killer had been apprehended. On the night of his arrest, with the same cunning he had used on his victims, he had managed to kill himself. In a security cell, wearing only a flimsy paper hospital gown calculated to tear if the inmate used it for a garrote, the serial killer had choked himself with a ham and cheese sandwich. He had deliberately swallowed a wad of cheese and ham that caught just over his windpipe. “No, the queer can’t tell us what he did with them. His mouth’s too full,” a young detective said loudly when Lecha had been brought in. “No, that queer won’t be doing any more sucking either. You think he did sucking? I would have said—” The older detective looked at Lecha and let the subject drop.

As her connection with the dead had begun to surface in her thoughts, Lecha had felt anxious; her nerves were raw, and her patience with grinning, backslapping police detectives in their polyester suits was running out. She had been ready to take a long vacation or maybe to go out of business for a while so that she could think about herself and her work with this power she had. It might be a dangerous power to work with. It might be the sort of power that should be locked away, ignored, no matter the wealth or fame it might bring her.

The police detectives had just been funded to set up a special team. They had been able to offer Lecha twice her normal fee. The situation they had was similar to the one Atlanta had had a few years before, except here the boys that were missing were white and had disappeared from wealthy neighborhoods in La Jolla. The department was feeling pressure from all sides. The computer and the psychologists had located the killer, but the case could not be closed until they found all his victims. Parents and family had to know for sure.

Lecha nods. This is her specialty. The detectives are anxious to talk about the work she’d done in Houston, and the case in South Dakota. But Lecha makes excuses. Flying and traveling tired her. She just wanted to get to the hotel. She had heard all she wanted from these two assholes in the car, driving from the airport. Just some hints, the younger detective had said. This weirdo really was into some kinky shit. He rented this garage apartment behind a house in the oak-hills section. We figure somewhere in the wooded areas beyond there. State fish-and-game range. But there’s way too much area. Dogs are no good after a certain point, if you know what I mean. The older detective is driving and has to get his observations in too. They’ve had search teams comb the area. But it is so big. They could be buried anywhere. Under all those leaves. The creep was always wandering around in the forest, way back in the thick trees.

By the time they had dropped her off at the hotel, Lecha had a terrible headache. She went straight to the bathroom and prepared the syringe. The headaches had gotten worse lately, and tablets of codeine or Demerol did not touch the pain. This was going to be a rough job. These two cops had to be almost as weird as the killer, or maybe they were worse. Because the killer must have discovered his identity in much the way she was discovering her own identity as a psychic. The killer must not have known in the beginning where his fantasies and dreams would take him. The killer might not even have known the first time until after it had been done. Lecha was lying on her bed facing the sliding glass doors to the balcony. Below the balcony was the marina and beyond that the flat, blue bay, and from there to the horizon, the Pacific rising and falling to the rhythm of her own chest.

The Demerol was untying the fire knotted inside both temples. Her bones began to feel light; they floated, and then they had dissolved. She had hoped to sleep, but was accustomed to a middle ground the Demerol gave. It was a location where thought took on a more fluid quality, but unlike pure dreaming, remained more within conscious control. She kept hearing the voice of the younger detective. He reminded her of one of those tiny yappy Chinese dogs with bug eyes. “Trees! Trees!” He was certain the bodies were buried somewhere in a wooded area. She could not think about trees. The word had no meaning. She could hear the waves roll although she knew the hotel room was much too far from them. The ocean marked the motion of the moon. Up and down in the sky — higher or lower from the horizon, thin white curve of desert thorn swelled on consecutive nights to a fat white blossom. The disappearance and the returning. Over and over. The waves wash up the sand and fall back.

The dunes spread away in all directions. The white sand sinks under his boots like water. The sound is behind him. The ocean is the color of the sky. The eyes are gone. The sand fills the sockets. Now the boy has eyes the color of sand. Only the hair is lighter — the color of the sand in a wind that darkens the ocean, that darkens all.

He imagines the boys are trees that he must go tend from time to time. He uncovers them tenderly. To see how they are developing. They thrive best at the foot of the big dunes. Out in the flats they can’t take root. Rain washes them out. Exposes them where they might be found.

At first there will be an odor, but it is a sign they are growing. He remembers a baby brother long ago and the dirty diapers. But babies die. Other times the odor reminds him of fertilizer, which of course “the trees” provide for themselves.

He realizes they are trees while he is touching them. He fondles the boys between their legs, and a branch sprouts and pushes out. The tips are soft leaf-bud moist with sap. He never means to squeeze too hard or to crush. But they are tender, fragile. He plants carefully and prays for tall trees. He dreams of towering oaks and spruce that lean and sway but do not break in summer storms. He realizes his dreams are of the mountains, not the sea.

Lecha never tells how she does it, how she knows. They already mistrust the ability. One week they might hire her and the next arrest her for fraud. They like to think it is done with crystal balls and what is familiar to them from movies and TV. She is accustomed to dramatic announcements at press conferences. The high Indian cheekbones and light brown skin give her an exotic quality that television news desperately needs. But her contempt for the news media is too great to allow her to appear anymore flanking police detectives or bereaved families.

In the beginning it had been different, and Lecha had enjoyed the drama. The television talk shows were still her bread and butter. But when the detectives put the police chief on the line, she had politely declined. The beach had been closed for miles in either direction. Mounted police rode patrols to keep the curious and ghoulish out of the way of the search teams digging in the dunes. She told them she had urgent business elsewhere. She asked them to send a messenger with a check. But it was the young detective from the special squad who brought the check. She was trying to pack for an afternoon flight, she explained, but saw he would not go until he got to talk.

They always wanted to know how she knew. He said, “How did you figure the beach? His apartment was miles from the beach.” She held the doorknob. He had not stepped across the threshold because she would not move. “Congratulations, Detective Pearson, and please give my regards to Detective Connors. I’m glad I could help. Now I really have to catch a plane.” She refused a ride to the airport. He would have wanted to describe how they had found the remains of each victim. The jet circled over the ocean on takeoff, and as it banked and turned above the ocean, Lecha looked down. The waves glittered and flashed like fragments of a broken mirror. From the air the beach sand made a narrow white stripe down the back of a giant animal, and the ocean waves glittered and flashed — eyes of mirrors as the sun dips closer to the mouth of the beast that swallows it.

She had the full answer now. She had suspected the concept of intermediary and messenger was too simple. Lecha knew exactly how grave her condition was. After she gave the instructions to the police, she had to take the Demerol again, not for any pain in her head, but for the pounding of her heart, and that voice inside shouting. She ordered scotch and milk to take the tablets. Tablets sometimes upset her stomach before they take effect. As she drifts back and forth, she thinks about old Yoeme and what she would say. But old Yoeme has got her mouth packed with sand. Lecha remembers the ragged bundles of cheap paper and the old notebooks. “Mouths” and “tongues” old Yoeme had jokingly called them. Now that she knew how the power worked, Lecha was not so sure anymore it could be called a gift. It was about time to go back home. She had made Yoeme a promise. She had to take care of the old notebooks.

LOVER’S REVENGE

LECHA TAKES PRIDE in knowing when to fold her cards. She is no gambler. She only goes for the sure things. The TV talk show circuit had been one of those sure things. But nothing lasts forever; she laughs to herself. The fascination the United States had had for the “other”—the blacks, Asians, Mexicans, and Indians ran in cycles. She had started after word got around Denver about her successes with old lovers. It had been simple. Other women came to her to ask her to take revenge on lovers who had betrayed them or who were not as ardent as they had once been. Lecha had had an apartment right over Larimer Street in the downtown. She had settled in Denver after Tucson had got “too crowded” for her. The truth of course was otherwise, but Lecha had never felt she owed anyone the truth, unless it was truth about their own lives, and then they had to pay her to tell them. People heard about it from one person, and the next thing they were knocking at Lecha’s door.

Lecha traces the beginning to the work she had done for the cable-televison producer’s girlfriend. The producer’s girlfriend had come to Lecha for revenge. Her old boyfriend had been a cinematographer at the big CBS station in Denver. After the woman had asked the boyfriend to move out of her apartment, he had returned to douse it with kerosene and set it on fire. Lecha had tried to determine the extent of what the woman had lost in the fire, but the woman had never been able to get past the part about her cat and two dogs that had been trapped in the fire. The old boyfriend had also made anonymous phone calls to the Internal Revenue Service and to the woman’s employer, a conservative businessman who did not approve of drugs or extramarital sex. Lecha had had a difficult time discussing the course of action the woman wished her to take. At first Lecha had misunderstood the woman’s silences and hesitation as the weakheartedness Lecha often saw in people who came to her seeking revenge only to discover that they still loved the offender too much. Then Lecha had realized the woman’s hatred was so extreme that the woman was unable to speak. Lecha realized that although the woman was at the time without a job, without a possession to her name, the woman wanted to buy from Lecha the most brutal and complete revenge for sale at any price.

Lecha had proceeded with the woman in ways that closely resembled the work of a psychoanalyst or counselor. With the tape recorder running discreetly on the bed, Lecha had asked the woman to tell her as much as she could remember about the cinematographer. Lecha did not focus upon the failed relationship itself. People could never talk coherently about ex-lovers, not for fifty years as far as Lecha was concerned. Lecha wanted to know about the man’s closest family members and relatives. Where were they, what did they do for a living? In all, the work required nearly twenty sessions. Lecha had only required the woman to pay for the newspaper subscriptions to the dailies in the hometown of the cinematographer’s closest relatives. Otherwise, the agreement had been that the fee would depend upon the results obtained and upon the form of payment Lecha determined to be most satisfactory.

This had been Lecha’s first big case, and night after night she had rolled up big, tamale-shaped joints and sat propped up in her bed listening to the interview tapes. As Lecha laughingly said later, she had worked mostly “in the dark” on this first assignment. As she listened to the interviews, she had begun to see patterns in the lives of the cinematographer and his immediate family. Their lives were stories-in-progress, as Lecha saw them, and often in the middle of the night when she was awakened by drunks pounding on trash cans or sirens, she would realize possible deadly turns the lives of the cinematographer and his close relatives might naturally take. Lecha had merely begun to tell the stories of the ends of their lives. The producer’s girlfriend had been pleased to see results after only two weeks. The cinematographer’s mother had undergone emergency surgery for an intestinal blockage only to learn that snarled threads of cancer held her liver and pancreas in a tumorous web. Lecha had been a little surprised at how quickly the cancer had developed, since she had only just made up the ending to the mother’s story. Beginner’s luck, Lecha had confessed later, but the illness of the mother set off a chain reaction. The cinematographer’s older sister accepted the marriage proposal of a man who came to her house every evening not for her, but for her thirteen- and fifteen-year-old daughters. Both girls would set out to get their future stepfather into their beds before the wedding to prove their mother’s stupidity. After the wedding, their new stepfather took them and their mother to Miami Beach.

Lecha had carefully plotted their final summer together. It all hinged on whether the fifteen-year-old would become jealous of the attention her younger sister was getting. The hot tub thermostat at their rented beach bungalow had been set too high, according to reports in the newspaper. As Lecha had imagined it, the fifteen-year-old had gone into a pout one evening after the stepfather and the thirteen-year-old planned a dinner alone “to talk.” Her little sister and stepfather gone, and her mother drunk, it was a simple matter to get into the bottle of vodka her father kept in the refrigerator freezer compartment. The coroner ruled the death accidental drowning and theorized the girl passed out from the combined effects of the vodka, which had raised her blood alcohol to.02, and to the hot water. The stepfather and sister had returned home from dinner to find her floating facedown in the hot tub on the terrace.

In only a matter of weeks, Lecha realized the younger girl would become pregnant by the stepfather. While this girl would not die, the complications from the abortion would hospitalize her. The mother, now separated from her new husband, and distraught over the loss of a daughter, began to mix triple gin-and-tonics to take with her on evening drives to the hospital to visit her remaining daughter. Hers had not been much different from any other freeway accident. The triple gin had slowed her reaction time.

DAYTIME TELEVISION

LECHA SAT WITH the newspapers spread around her on the floor. She was getting to the point she hated the dinky apartment. She watched the woman’s face. She glanced at the producer-boyfriend’s face. The woman’s face was immobile, only her eyes followed the lines on the page of the newspaper. But the producer’s face had lighted up. He was nodding his head and grinning. “This is wonderful!” he began. “This reads like soap opera! How do you do it?” Lecha shook her head and said nothing. The producer babbled on. “This is really something — you know, like in the movies—Omen or one of those!” The woman had given her boyfriend a murderous look. “Sidney,” she said, “would you mind waiting down in the car?”

Sidney had left without another word, but later he had returned alone to discuss Lecha’s appearance on daytime television. The producer had tried to bring up his girlfriend’s revenge, but Lecha was reluctant to violate the confidentiality of their professional relationship. The producer wanted to know why, in all the dying, had they not gotten rid of the cinematographer himself? Lecha did not like visitors like this one — full of questions but with no money for her valuable time. “Business first,” Lecha had said. “I want to know how much this TV show will pay me.”

“Well, that depends on a number of factors,” the producer explained. “I’ve talked it over with my boss, and we’re thinking of bringing on a police officer from the missing person detail, and then someone who is actually looking for a lost loved one. A lost child would be optimum. Eighty-five percent of the viewing audience is female.” Lecha shrugged her shoulders. She told him she did not know if she could sit in the TV studio and find a missing person on command. She told him she didn’t work like that. But the producer grinned inanely and insisted it would be no problem, no problem. What he thought would really go over big were stories about people who consulted Lecha to exact revenge on ex-lovers and spouses or family members or business colleagues.

“I want to get out of this dump. I need to have some money for talking today and for preparations, you know, for the show.” Lecha knew he would come back to the question about the cinematographer. Lecha did not tell him until after she had got the $2,000 advance, and the producer had helped her relocate all her suitcases to the Hilton Hotel. “It’s simple,” she began. “I didn’t want to get rid of the old lover too fast. I wanted him to watch the people he loves die first. Your girlfriend’s old lover is forced to watch his mother’s guts split open from tumors. Straight morphine does nothing. The old lover is becoming familiar with the special packages and offers from mortuaries.” Lecha watched the producer’s face and decided he was too stupid to get it. “See?” Lecha concluded. “Killing off that prick would have been too good for him. This is much better. Let him bury them all.”

Lecha spent mornings shopping for the appropriate clothes. She had chosen the Denver Hilton because it was connected to the fancy department stores by a glass tube, so she did not have to step into the ice and cold of the Denver winter. She was not nervous about the first taping session, although the producer had warned her this would be a live audience and the show format called for questions from the audience. Lecha’s mind had been focused on the winter storms and the snow and ice, which she was not accustomed to. She had been strangely aware of the filthy banks of ice and snow pushed between the streets and sidewalks in downtown Denver. She had sat for hours, puffing a joint, gazing out the hotel window at the big mountains to the west barely visible through the brown smog over Denver. Later she remembered the mountain peaks had reminded her of the mounds of new graves covered with snow.

So the day of the videotaping before a studio audience, when the police lieutenant gave the particulars of a missing-person case, Lecha suddenly realized why she had paid so much attention to banks of mounded snow. Lecha looked right into the huge television camera lens and said, “The man is dead. He is buried in a snowbank. The snow is dirty from muddy water cars splash over it.” The studio audience had audibly gasped because Lecha seemed to forget the woman sitting beside the police lieutenant on the gold velvet couch was the dead man’s wife. Lecha had learned from this episode that while audiences and producers wanted a family member of the missing person present, they also wanted Lecha to break the bad news as gently as possible. It was all an act from then on — the way Lecha would lower her voice and say she regretted what she was about to say, then reveal the location of the victim; Lecha had never been sorry, not at that moment or ever. Lecha knew her abilities had been a gift from old Yoeme.

Lecha had been born for television talk shows. She had learned to read the reactions of talk show hosts and the audiences immediately. Even on that first morning, while the new widow at the end of the gold couch sobbed next to the confused police lieutenant, Lecha had silently burst into tears. Even that day the TV cameras had adored Lecha’s high cheekbones, and the chill of her grisly pronouncement had been lifted.

The talk show host had jumped up from his armchair to comfort the widow on the gold couch. He immediately reminded the widow, and the studio audience, that Lecha’s “vision” was only that. No body had been found, and they should not jump to conclusions. The show had been a producer’s dream — a dramatic announcement, a widow’s grief, and the talk show host thrown into deep water without the teleprompter and gestures he’d rehearsed to keep him afloat.

Lecha had analyzed her talk show appearance carefully. She realized the hostility of the general public toward people with abilities to “see” or “foretell” always lay near the surface. Lecha took a white linen handkerchief from the red leather purse that matched the red high heels of her televison-appearance wardrobe. It didn’t take a psychic to figure out she had a bright future on the daytime television talk show circuit. She wiped the tears from her eyes and primly smoothed the skirt of the simple white linen dress. Earlier in the show, Lecha had answered a query about her age with a plain lie. She had claimed that in the tiny Sonoran seacoast village where she had been born, no records of births or deaths were kept. “I think I must be about forty-five,” she had answered the woman standing at the studio-audience microphone. Lecha and her twin had a birthday approaching on March 1. As far as Lecha could remember, it would be birthday number thirty-five.

DOGSLED RACER

THE POLICE LIEUTENANT had pressed Lecha for more information — the police wanted the exact location of the snowbank concealing the corpse. Lecha tried to concentrate on the image of the snowbank, but there had been too many distractions. Try as she might, all Lecha had been able to visualize had been rural Alaskan snowbanks, memories from the year she had spent in Alaska. As far as Lecha was concerned, the only excitement had come in the spring when the big rivers, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim began to thaw and all night the earth along the riverbanks shook with the thunder of the breakup of the ice. At breakup time the newspapers from Anchorage and Fairbanks began to catalog grisly discoveries in melting snowbanks. Except for the 1,200-mile dogsled race to Nome, the body count of winter’s toll had been the only interesting Alaska news. The 1,200-mile dogsled race had been the whole reason she had ended up in Alaska in the first place.

Lecha thought this must be the tundra spirits’ way of taking revenge — to cook you for playing with another woman’s husband. Here she was sitting under the hot television-studio lights, a widow sobbing and the mood of the audience and host beginning to curdle, and all Lecha could think about was a Yukon River Indian and his dogsled team. She had watched the handsome racer bend over the tawny lead dog to talk in low, sweet tones; at that instant Lecha had fallen in love with him. Lecha had reasoned a man who was gentle and loving with his sled dogs might be depended on to treat a woman decently. Well, yes and no, she discovered, because the racer had a wife and four kids living upriver. The racer had been conditioning his dogs for the big race, and the distance between the village where Lecha stayed and the village of his wife and kids was just the workout his dogs required — eighty miles round-trip.

By the time Lecha managed to get the dogsled racer off her mind, the talk show host had quieted the widow and settled back in his matching gold velvet armchair. The host dramatically asked Lecha again if she could give a better description of this snowbank. Lecha closed her eyes. “Snowbank.” All Lecha could think of was the spring thaw in Anchorage when the body of an Eskimo man had emerged from a snowpile at the ambulance and emergency entrance of the hospital. Eskimos and Indians had joked that the man had died waiting to be examined by U.S. Indian Health Service doctors.

The talk show host and audience were quiet, waiting on the edges of their seats to hear more about the location of the corpse. Without hesitation, Lecha told them to search snowbanks near local hospitals. The show’s host had nodded at the police lieutenant and then at the director’s assistant, who had just flashed him the thirty-second signal.

In the women’s rest room outside the TV studio Lecha examined the huge half-moon perspiration stains on the new white linen dress. The tension had left her exhausted. No wonder old Yoeme had answered so bitterly when she was accused of being a fraud. Yoeme used to say not many would dare trade their work to perform hers.

Lecha had been relaxing in a hot bath back at the hotel when a radio news bulletin announced the body had been located outside a Boulder, Colorado, hospital. The first phone call had been from the television producer telling her they wanted to have her appear a second time for a follow-up. The second call had been from the police lieutenant to thank her, and to ask if they might list her with the other “psychics” the Denver Police Department contacted from time to time. Lecha told the producer she would have to think it over. She told the cop she would only be staying in Denver another day or two.

Lecha dozed in the hot water and bath salts thinking about the handsome dogsled racer. The best he had ever done in the big race had been fifth. Lecha’s handsome racer had carried one of his dogs while his other dogs pulled the sled across the finish line. A white man who followed the handsome racer across the line also carried a dog and had a dead dog lashed to his sled. What had been clear to Lecha that afternoon in Nome was that dogsled racers lived and traveled on a modest human scale. They sewed new dog booties at night along the trail and coaxed and cried over their dogs. Lecha wasn’t interested. Two days after the finish of the big dogsled race, she had gone. Lecha made it a rule to leave a place or person before she had any regrets. The dogsled racer had been ardent and gentle, but he had not been as important as the two Eskimo women Lecha had met there.

TUNDRA SPIRITS

THE RACER had been in a hurry to take his dog team and sled upriver where his wife was. He had complained jokingly that Lecha had worn his penis raw. The racer had been acquainted with Rose because she had gone to school “down below” in the lower forty-eight. Lecha could tell the racer had slept with Rose when he had come downriver. Rose had carried both Lecha’s suitcases and had talked nonstop. Rose had said the first thing Lecha had to understand, if she was going to be a boarder in her house, was this: a terrible thing had happened nine years ago, and nothing could ever be right again. Rose warned Lecha she might notice things in the house were not as they should be. But this was unavoidable, because of the terrible incident.

At this point in the story, they had reached Rose’s old log and sod house on a hill above the river. Lecha did not see or feel anything out of the ordinary when she stepped inside and put her things on the bed across from Rose’s bed. She did notice the clocks — the old-fashioned kind preferred by all the old folks in Sonora — big clocks that needed keys inserted in their faces to wind them. The clocks filled Rose’s little house with their ticking.

“They are set for different times,” Rose explained, “because this way I know how much time they would have had if they had lived.”

“Who?” Lecha saw no snapshots or graduation photographs. “My younger sisters and brothers. There were six. Three girls and three boys.”

The little children had been left alone many times before. The parents were across the river at the bootlegger’s house. Sometimes the parents stayed over there for days. All money went to the bootlegger. The children got cold. The house was only plywood and tar paper covered with tin. There was no stove. Only half of a steel oil drum where they burned kerosene. The oldest child had been a girl of nine. In the dark she went outside for the red fuel can by the father’s snowmobile. But the can she had picked up was full of gasoline, not fuel oil. The explosion had blown the plywood and tin shack apart. The village people saw the six children running. Through the dark in a line along the riverbank the children ran in halos of yellow flame that flared higher each time another limb or article of clothing caught fire. “These are your angels of fire. Jesus Christ of the white people!” Rose had interjected. But the children did not quite reach the river. They fell in the snow, drowning in the fluid of their seared lungs.

Rose had dreamed about the fire four consecutive nights in the girls dormitory of the school for Eskimos and Indians. This is what Rose tells Lecha the first afternoon they are together. Nothing could be done. Not even the Yupik dormitory matrons would place a radio-telephone call to the trading-post man. She had been a mother to her sisters and brothers since she was eleven but they refused to allow Rose to go home. Rose did not remember anything after the news of the fire had reached her. School officials had sent Rose south to the psychiatric hospital in Seattle.

“I finished up school down there. I was a day student. At night I slept at the hospital. I tried to talk to the children for a long time. The doctor would ask me what I wanted to say to them. I only wanted to tell them I was sorry. I would have taken care of them if I had been there. I did not want to go away. I never wanted to leave them. I used to cry at night in the dormitory. It took a long time. Finally, after the doctor quit asking about them and started asking about my father and my mother, I had a dream about them. I talked to all the children. They were standing together, smiling at me. They seemed all right and happy. Except they were all in flames, standing there on fire, but never being burned up. The old woman told me later she had seen them too — on that night, and then afterwards, right before dawn, playing together along the river. They were always in flames.”

Those nights the dogsled racer stayed upriver with his wife, Lecha had gone with the others to the village meeting hall where government experiments with satellites had brought the people old movies and broadcasts from the University of Alaska. Lecha had sat with her friend Rose. Everyone huddled close to the TV screen. Rose had translated everything that was said, all the wisecracks and remarks that were made in the Yupik Eskimo language. Teenagers who had been away to boarding school stood at the back of the hall whispering and laughing in English and in Yupik. Lecha realized Rose had befriended her because Rose was considered an odd one by the others in the village. Without Rose, Lecha might have been lonely in the downriver village where the older people had nicknamed her the Racer’s Workout, and the village teenagers familiar with television called it “Love, Athabascan Style.” The people had been polite to Lecha, considering the rivalry that had once existed between the racer’s people and the Yupik people downriver.

The broadcast was a home economics show from the University of Alaska. Even the men had watched closely. Everyone enjoyed making wisecracks and jokes about the Yupik woman who had been recruited from a rival village to become a “TV star.”

“If she had grown up in our village she’d have a better recipe for fermented beaver tails,” one woman remarked. All the women, even old, sleepy-looking women, had clapped their hands and caused the metal folding chairs to squeak and clang with their laughter. Lecha had looked at Rose and frowned because she was having difficulty appreciating the humor of fermented beaver tails. “Oh,” Rose said. “I forgot. You weren’t here when that happened.” Rose had smiled and patted Lecha’s arm. “It seems like you’ve always lived here.” Lecha nodded, although she had not planned to spend the winter in an Eskimo village eighty miles from the Bering Sea. But Lecha had met the handsome dogsled racer in the airport bar in Seattle, and he had offered just the change of scene Lecha had needed.

“The beaver-tail recipe is kind of a sick joke,” Rose said, smiling.

“She gave out the beaver-tail recipe one week. Three old women from a village down river tried the recipe, but instead of doing things as they had in the old days, when they used to wrap the beaver tails in seal bladder or wax paper, the three old women used plastic. They placed the beaver tails in a warm corner behind the stove, like you are supposed to. They let them ferment three or four days just like the recipe directed. But when they ate the beaver tails, they were poisoned because plastic encourages botulism.”

Now the television home economist was demonstrating a technique for making pie crust, but no one was watching. Instead people talked. Even the teenagers at the back of the community meeting hall were hunched over cigarettes and giggling and talking, waiting for “Love, American Style” to come on.

An old woman had begun to speak in a loud voice, and the other women turned to listen. Rose interpreted for Lecha. The old woman was saying she was not much impressed with television, except for movies with men on horses. The old woman repeated she was interested in horses; otherwise, television did not impress her. She had seen far more amazing acts performed right there in that very room. It seemed to Lecha the old woman was looking directly at her, so Lecha leaned closer to Rose to hear the translation. Lecha was careful not to move her eyes from the old woman, who reminded her of old Yoeme; not because of any physical resemblance, but because of the old woman’s command of attention. Even the men, planning hunts or discussing snowmobile repair, stopped talking and began listening.

“When we have visitors from far away, I wonder if they know why we live here,” the old woman said, and reached into a grimy canvas satchel by her feet. Out came a heavy, curved ivory tusk. The old woman held up the tusk for everyone to see. The voices and faces on the television screen could not compete. Two university professors were discussing American foreign policy in Southeast Asia. The old woman was swinging the big walrus tusk around and around her head like a lariat. Lecha glanced at the TV screen and imagined the tusk colliding with their white faces. The old woman was stronger than she looked. Then the old woman lowered the tusk, laughing.

“I know what cowboys do when they ride horses,” she said, this time addressing Lecha directly. Lecha nodded; she was not sure where this might end. Suddenly the old woman shifted all her attention away from Lecha and away from all the others in the meeting hall. With all of her might, the old woman began twirling the tusk around and around in both hands. She never took her eyes off the tusk, and Lecha realized no one in that room could move his eyes away either. Lecha did not even attempt to shift her eyes away because the old woman was watching her.

As the ivory twirled, it seemed to become lighter and lighter until the old woman twirled it easily with one hand. Then the surface of the tusk had begun to glisten and sweat; the old woman’s hands and the lap of her dress caught luminous drops. Then the twirling of the tusk began to make a sound. At first the sound was faint, and Lecha could still hear the drone of voices on the television. But the whirring sound became louder, and as it did, the shape of the ivory tusk began to change. It spiraled like a giant ocean shell; it spread flat into a disk and then wobbled into a fluted wedge the shape of a fan or a bird’s wing. Then the tusk had burst into flames. The whirring sound became very loud then, and Lecha wanted to raise her hands to her ears to block it out, but again she realized she would not be able to lift her arms. Just then the sound began to subside, and the old woman’s twirling began to slow, and the ivory tusk lay in her lap once more. Lecha looked up and was surprised to see the old woman had fallen asleep, with her chin pressing on her shoulder.

Rose stood up suddenly. The theme song of “Love, American Style” came on the television as loud as the whirring sound had been. Lecha got up. Her legs were weak. She was exhausted. They walked back to Rose’s house in the twilight of the winter sun. The old woman’s performance had upset Rose. All Rose could talk about was fire. “The old woman,” Rose said, “should not have done that with fire.”

Rose heard the voices of her little sisters and brothers.

“Rose,” they cried, “come back home and take care of us.” Lecha saw tears running down her cheeks.

ESKIMO TELEVISION

THE FOLLOWING DAY Lecha did not see Rose, and when she went back to the community house to watch the national news, there had been only a few people in front of the TV set. Lecha had to laugh at herself for bothering with the world news. Television took her mind off the anxious feeling she had when she was about to travel or move again. The shortwave radio at the priest’s house gave daily reports on the Iditarod Race. Her dogsled racer had been running fifth, but was only four hours behind the old Yupik man who had the lead. Lecha had promised to meet the racer in Nome.

The old Yupik woman came into the community hall alone. She did not carry the canvas satchel that had contained the ivory tusk the day before. The old Yupik woman did not seem to notice Lecha. The old woman got as close as she could to the television set, by scooting a folding metal chair across the floor with a terrible sound she seemed not to notice. Someone at the back of the hall laughed at the old woman. Lecha and the old woman both turned. It was Rose. “You should not play with fire,” Rose said, and Lecha did not know if Rose was talking to her or the old woman. The old woman spoke no English. Still, Rose seemed to be pointing her finger at the old woman. The few other people in the hall remained quiet. The TV screen flashed satellite weather maps one after another. Rose walked slowly toward the front of the room. She was staring at the television set. “They taught me all about this in school.” Rose spoke to the old woman in Yupik, then she sat down beside Lecha and gave a deep sigh. “The old woman wants to know if you want to see more before you go.” Lecha nodded. She felt as if she were under the influence of a power such as old Yoeme had possessed.

Lecha had watched the old Yupik woman do it. She stood directly in front of the television set sliding her forefinger over the glass as she spoke Yupik in a clear, low voice. With her eyes half-closed as they had been the afternoon of her performance with the ivory tusk. Rose whispered to Lecha, “Watch. Another plane will crash.” Lecha thought Rose might be teasing because she had been laughing. Rose’s laughter had become less and less predictable. Rose did not want Lecha to go.

The old woman had not stopped while Lecha and Rose were talking, but the wild laughter caused her to open her eyes. The old woman seemed pained and concerned. “Oh, no! I’m all right!” Rose said. “It’s for the little ones, not me!” Rose had been speaking in English, but the old Yupik woman seemed to understand. She narrowed her eyes again and pored over the satellite weather map under her finger on the TV screen. What the old woman had been able to do was quite simple, really. As Rose described it, the old woman had realized the possibilities in the white man’s gadgets. Rose had been adamant. “You think I am making all this up. But look at her. Look at where she is pointing on the map right now.”

BURNING CHILDREN

ROSE HAD EXPLAINED it using the closest words in English to what the old woman said in Yupik. They had been walking back from the village meeting hall. The old woman had gone off to a granddaughter’s house because she heard rumors of fresh seal oil there. Before she left, the old woman had insisted on shaking hands with Lecha. Lecha reached in the pockets of her heavy coat for her leather gloves lined in fox. They had cost $200 in Seattle. As Lecha offered the gloves, the old woman snatched them greedily. She had been smiling and talking to herself as she tried them on.

Rose laughed wildly and shook her head. “Fur and hair. That’s exactly what she said.” The cold, clear air seemed to calm Rose. “Natural electricity. Fields of forces.” Rose had looked closely at Lecha as if she were trying to decide how much Lecha really knew about the use of natural forces.

“They rub special fur pelts. Kit fox or weasel,” Rose explained. White people could fly circling objects in the sky that sent messages and images of nightmares and dreams, but the old woman knew how to turn the destruction back on its senders.

It had taken the old woman months to perfect her system. The first time the communications satellite transmitting to their village had failed, the village people were told by researchers its batteries were defective. Rose knew better, but kept quiet. The old woman had gathered great surges of energy out of the atmosphere, by summoning spirit beings through recitations of the stories that were also indictments of the greedy destroyers of the land. With the stories the old woman was able to assemble powerful forces flowing from the spirits of ancestors.

It had not been an easy matter to get to the village meeting hall and have the television set to herself. Almost always somebody had been sitting in front of the TV even if they were just staring at the test pattern. Sometimes Rose had helped the old woman by going to the meeting hall first and pretending to hear voices. Rose usually had been able to spook the two or three old men dozing in front of the television set, who did not take chances with angry ghosts. The old woman had to work quickly while she had the TV set and controls of the satellite dish to herself.

Many village people did not trust the old woman. The local Catholic priest had done a good job of slandering the old beliefs about animal, plant, and rock spirit-beings, or what the priest had called the Devil. In her childhood she had watched a medicine woman who took a small quartz crystal found at the edge of the river and used the crystal to see exactly what people living hundreds of miles upriver were doing. Medicine people had quartz crystals that performed like tiny tiny television sets, although lesser medicine people might see actions clearly but not hear what was being said. Although the old woman had tried to stop roaming about the village after midnight to prevent further accusations of sorcery, she could not resist. She had asked Rose to help her the night she perfected her plane-crashing spell.

Inside the meeting hall only the strange bluish light of the television screen lit the room. But the old woman could hear an old man snoring. He was slumped over on the metal folding chairs directly in front of the TV. All the better. Because no one could imagine she would dare perform her mischief with old man Pike sleeping right there. The test pattern was on the screen, but she had used the test pattern last time. It was good to try something a little different. Careful to turn down the volume knob, the old woman tuned in the channel with the satellite weather map and weather information in print below it. She reached into her grimy canvas satchel and pulled out the weasel pelt. Old man Pike kept snoring right along. Thirty years ago she had gone with him upriver to trap mink and beaver. Even then he could not be awakened unless snow was rubbed on his balls.

She rubbed the weasel fur rapidly over the glass of the TV screen, faster and faster; the crackling and sparks became louder and brighter until the image of the weather map on the TV screen began to swirl with masses of storm clouds moving more rapidly with each stroke of the fur. Then the old woman had closed her eyes and summoned all the energy, all the force of the spirit beings furious and vengeful. The old woman intoned the power of the story Rose had told Lecha the first day they met:

“My dear little Rose, you must not see them so often. The fire! The fire gives no warmth. What fire touches becomes brittle as ice. Touch the charred hand, it falls to ashes. Touch the faces. They peel away in your hands. You want to get warm. You are cold. Where are they? The little ones. You often dreamed and you knew. But you can not get there in time. Do they know or is it all soothing — all warmth and no fear to them. They melt. What you find flows in the ashes.”

Lecha had never forgotten what had appeared on the television screen at that instant: the junction of the big river and the sea. White steam rises off the river, but gray sea fog rushes over it, rapidly filling the river bank to bank. In the distance there is a sound that wavers in the wind and disappears in the slap of the river against the big rocks. The airplane-engine sound fades in and out with the gusts of wind. The engine strains under full power, climbing. The river presses higher and higher against the banks. The pilot descends, then climbs and descends again, searching for a hole, searching for a break in the fog he entered only a minute earlier. The needle of the compass whirls and shivers in magnetic fields of false and true north. The altimeter is frozen at 2,000 and nothing can dislodge it. The copilot works frantically. They twist the knobs and desperately try to calculate the distance to the ground.

Then the screen goes white. The old woman is doubled over in the chair, arms around herself, rocking slowly, singing to herself in a tiny voice. Years later when the ill-fated Korean Air flight went off course and was shot down in the ocean, Lecha had not been surprised to learn that the magnetic compass of the autopilot had malfunctioned twelve miles north of Bethel, Alaska.

PLANE CRASHES

LECHA AND THE DOGSLED racer flew out of Nome on the same flight. The racer had been too heartbroken to take the seat beside her. Lecha had been able to hear the faint barking of his sled dogs in the baggage hold below. The dogsled racer understood Lecha was leaving because he had not won the race. Earlier he had offered to leave his wife and kids for Lecha, but she had refused. She found it difficult to explain.

“I learned something while I was living up here this winter,” Lecha said. “I might never have found it without coming here.” The dogsled racer’s misery turned to anger. Lecha had thought about trying to reassure him. She did not want to see him sad, but there wasn’t any way to avoid sadness, so she took a seat next to a well-dressed white man with a briefcase. He was an insurance adjustor celebrating his return to the home office in Seattle, and he bought her drinks all the way to Fairbanks. After she had deplaned in Anchorage, Lecha realized her Athabascan dogsled racer had already gone to make sure the baggage handlers took care with his dogs and the sled. Anchorage was where the racer caught the mail plane to the villages, and Lecha got on a plane to Seattle. The insurance adjustor had a seat on the same flight to Seattle. He was getting seat assignments for both of them. Lecha could hear the sled dogs barking and whining, but she walked into the terminal building without looking back.

The insurance adjustor punched in his favorites on the airport bar jukebox. “Spanish Eyes” was for her, he said. He was very drunk on Black Russians. She wondered if she would be able to endure him all the way to Seattle. In those days Lecha had still got sad when she left a lover. The dogsled racer had been ordinary. Lecha didn’t know why leaving him made her sad. Old Yoeme would have said leaving a dull lover was cause for celebration. Look how happy Rose and the old Yupik woman had been as Lecha climbed aboard the little airplane. The old woman had shouted something, and Rose translated, “She says she won’t crash this airplane! Don’t worry!” Lecha had nodded and waved back to them. Yes. Lecha had seen what the old Yupik woman could do with only a piece of weasel fur, a satellite weather map on a TV screen and the spirit energy of a story.

After takeoff for Seattle, the insurance man started to talk about the wild and exciting life he led with his company. They were the largest single insurer of petroleum exploration companies in Alaska. Now that the big push was on, the energy exploration companies had hundreds of employees, and millions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated electronic equipment flying all over the frozen wastes. “Frozen wastes”—the insurance man really believed there was no life on the tundra, nothing of value except what might be under the crust of snow and earth. “Oil, gas, uranium, and gold,” Lecha said, nodding. She was beginning to think she wasn’t so smart after all because she had let this yahoo get a seat beside her. But just as she was about to move to another seat, the last Black Russian took hold of the insurance adjustor. Here comes the story about his wife, Lecha thought. But instead he wrestled his briefcase out from under the seat and opened it. It was full of forms and a stack of eight-by-ten glossy photographs. Before Lecha could make out the black-and-white images, he plopped a print into her lap. At first it appeared to be blank, but then she realized it was snow-covered tundra against a high overcast sky. White on white. The only figure in the field of white was that of a V partially buried in the snow. Lecha shook her head. She couldn’t make out what it was.

“The tail,” he said. “The fuselage is completely buried.”

“Oh.”

“An airplane. What’s left of a Beachcraft Bonanza. We lost the pilot, one geologist, and a quarter-million-dollar sensor unit.” The insurance adjustor spread the other eight-by-tens on the fold-down trays in front of both of them. The corpses had been draped with blankets. The focal point of the photographs seemed to be the scattered, mangled electronic equipment. Against the snow, the bundles of wires torn loose from the shattered black metal boxes reminded her of intestines. Engine oil appeared like black pools of what might have been blood. “Do you have any idea of the cost of the claims to our company?” Lecha shook her head. He was fumbling with more photographs, and this time she could see the crushed propeller and nose of a plane that had broken in half on impact. In the close-ups, an arm dangled out of the front section of the wreckage. Lecha pretended to be squeamish, and the man gathered up the photographs hastily. But then he had unfolded a topographical map of northwestern Alaska and the Bering Sea. Red Xs were scattered between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. Red Xs clustered around the towns of Bethel and Nome. Before he spoke, Lecha knew what he was going to tell her. There had been dozens of unexplained plane crashes.

The insurance man was shaking his head, and Lecha was aware of the odor of alcohol on his breath. “Whiteout,” he said. “Blue sky and sunshine at five thousand feet and then thin clouds or mist. Suddenly a cloud bank or fog. A tiny storm front — not much more than a squall. But they can’t fly out of it. The pilot goes up and it becomes more dense. The pilot drops down and it becomes more dense. The pilot banks sharply to go back to the hole where they first entered and it’s gone.”

Much of Lecha’s life had been spent listening to people when she already knew the story they were telling, and more; more than she might ever reveal. So to break the monotony she asked about radar and altimeters and other sophisticated equipment. He was on the last Black Russian the flight attendant was going to allow him. He blinked dumbly at the map with red Xs, then slowly began trying to refold it. Then he remembered Lecha’s question about radar and electronic equipment. He drew himself up as straight as he could and shook a finger at her. “Electromagnetic fields! They raise hell with everything — the compass, all the navigational equipment! Instruments and radios malfunction. Like that movie, that movie, ah—” Lecha had to help him sit back in his seat. “The Bermuda Triangle,” she said. “Yeah, that’s it,” he mumbled. Lecha thought he had passed out, but he opened his eyes once more and said, “None of that stuff is true. It can all be explained.” Then he sank back in his seat.

SEVERED HEADS

LECHA HAD LIED to doctors in strange cities, telling them the pain was caused by cancer so they’d prescribe Percodan. As she rode in the taxi from the airport to the broadcast studios in downtown Miami, she realized the “gift,” her power to locate the dead, was the cause of her pain. The dream she had had on the plane had been a sort of narrative in code. She had dreamed she was tied and unable to escape. She knew there was no possibility of escape, and although she could not see her captor, she knew very soon he would begin to kill her slowly, first cutting away parts of her body, sexual organs, working slowly so that she would not die until he was nearly finished. But just as she was feeling paralyzing horror, there had come an awareness so sudden and terrifying that she had jerked herself awake. She was the torturer. She was the killer.

Suddenly in a rosy, clear light of sun just risen, a voice inside her had begun speaking. She was not sure how long she had. She only knew she could not go on much longer with this business of daytime television “psychic” and special assignments to police departments. She sensed the change as if the power were turning its face, and its eyes, to look toward the world that was emerging.

The assistant producers were running back and forth with pages of dialogue for the teleprompters. The television cameras were gliding and shifting over the bare concrete floor with a dozen camera assistants dragging cables to prevent tangles. Lecha was reminded of bridal gowns, long lace and satin trains requiring many attendants to keep them from catching in doorways or around corners. Lecha curled her feet under the armchair on the talk show set. Her feet were chilled. She had learned how to dress for television — short sleeves, cool fabrics against the heat of the lights, but her feet always got cold. TV studios were all alike — underground, cold concrete floors, and snarls of black cable thicker than her arms. Television was the same everywhere she had ever appeared. No wonder daytime television viewers were interested in all the bizarre and freakish ways one might be injured or fall ill, all the terrifying, hideous ways a psychopath might torture and kill his victims, all the possible and apparently innocent actions that lead up to the disappearance and loss of a small child. The lights they used in television studios must be related somehow to napalm: the light burns the air itself, burns anything it shines on.

Weeks on the regional daytime talk show circuit had prepared Lecha for the freezing feet and sweaty forehead, but she never quite got over the talk show hosts, who did not know what to say and had to read each word on the teleprompter. She had learned a lot since the first time she had appeared on a TV talk show. One thing was to get there an hour early to make sure the producers had her check, implying that otherwise she might not go on the air. Other than that, the work was easy. The hosts always asked her the same questions. Was she Indian and what kind? How did she learn she had this psychic power? And of course, which were the most important cases she had ever worked on? Lecha had three cases she cited, although she did not think it possible to judge “importance.” To the family or loved one the loss of the beloved was incalculable. Lecha used to talk about the cases that did not end in death, although these had always been rare cases, and in time, they had become even more scarce. But television audiences didn’t want to hear about those cases; TV viewers were mainly interested in death. Whatever had been in the news most recently was what they wanted Lecha to talk about. Today they were going to want to know all about the corpses of the fourteen young boys Lecha had located in the beach dunes of a state park north of San Diego.

The studio audience streamed down the aisles. Lecha closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see them and tried to relax before the show. She is still feeling faint aftershocks of the headache the two San Diego detectives had induced the day before. She feels a reluctance to talk about San Diego. She feels something inside her balking, and she pictures goats from her childhood in Potam, goats that spread the toes of their cloven hooves and dug into the earth refusing to be led or even dragged against their will.

The talk show host is an aging white man who wears heavy makeup. Lecha wants to close her eyes again. Ideally they would do the show with her eyes closed and tell the viewers and studio audience it was necessary in order for her psychic powers to function at their best. Talk show hosts are the television managements’ idea of what women want to watch. Watch doing what? is the question, Lecha thinks. She is good at imagining sex with men. Lecha has taken the time to check out some of her hunches, and although she never talks about it, her “powers” extend into the bed. She watches closely the way the host walks, stops to talk with one of the producers, and then disappears behind banks of long drapes. The keys to this guy are the carefully tweezed and shaped eyebrows. Lecha can’t get past his eyebrows to imagine herself in bed with him. So while the host with the perfect eyebrows and the rest of the crew stumble over jungle snakes of electrical cable, Lecha thinks about high voltage that causes brain tumors. She thinks about tropical lands. Giant dams in the jungles. Hydroelectric power. Guerrillas as quiet and smooth as snakes. Break open the dams and the electric motors of the machinery, machinery that belongs to the masters, stutter to a halt. She has images of these places, because she always reads her newspapers, she always has since she first took up her line of work. Tropical lands. Old tourism movies of Mexico City. The floating gardens of Xochimilco. Didn’t the priest in Potam always talk on and on about the heights of Spanish culture? And didn’t old Yoeme always say that priest was full of caca, with his lecher stories of devil-men shadowing young schoolgirls who wore even a touch of rouge?

The smiling host joins Lecha on the talk show set, and the studio audience is hushed by the teleprompters and sweating production assistants. The show rolls right along, until the host asks about San Diego and the body count still headlining news nationwide. Lecha smiles. She is wearing a conservative black dress, carrying a black kid purse that matches her high heels. She keeps her hair shoulder length. There is no gray. Lecha smiles and prepares to confound them. Her prim appearance makes her refusal to discuss the San Diego case more shocking to the host and studio audience.

“But the killer is dead. The case will be closed as soon as all the bodies are recovered,” the talk show host says, still smiling, not comprehending what is about to happen. This sudden twist means his teleprompter is of no use. He stalls and then takes a quick, desperate look at the teleprompter to see if the producers can get him out of this one. He asks why she won’t talk about it, and Lecha answers that she does not feel like explaining. Although she is speaking in a calm, level tone, her refusal brings scattered laughs and tittering from the studio audience. Fortunately, time is running out for this half of the show, and at last something scribbled hastily appears on the teleprompter. The host is angered now because he has been refused, and because there have been titters from the studio audience. “Well, then,” the host says in oily tones that barely smooth the sarcasm, “you can’t go leaving us empty-handed. We had our hearts set on—” He stops before he finishes that sentence. Lecha nods and smiles. She is familiar with ghoulish disappointment. They must have at least one thrill. At least one hair-raiser or spine-tingler.

“Well, let’s have a little demonstration here. How about next week’s headlines? How about you take a look into that crystal ball—” The host held up Lecha’s purse in a vulgar gesture, as if he were trying to determine whether it contained a crystal ball. Lecha had been watching the faces and reactions of the studio audience; she was also aware of the sweat beginning to erode the makeup on the host’s face. But while Lecha was seeing all of this, she had been aware of the voice that had recently raised itself inside her; the voice also had eyes. And while her eyes had been watching the audience and the host, these other eyes had been watching the mossy water of the canals of the floating gardens. Lecha describes the gardens of Xochimilco, with the water lilies, yellow and pink blossoms, and the reeds and cattails parting gently to the prow of the small flat-bottom boat. Then up ahead she sees a bright red and yellow woven-plastic shopping bag floating in the dark green water. There are two large objects visible through the plastic netting. But here the talk show host interrupts, afraid that the Indian woman is just killing time, setting him up with a dumb story about floating gardens and floating trash. “So far I don’t see this one making next week’s headlines,” he says, and is gratified when the studio audience laughs at his cleverness. But Lecha does not hesitate. She repeats the sentence he interrupted and immediately there is silence, and Lecha has them on the canal as the little boat draws even with the brightly colored shopping bag. Inside the bag there are two human heads, their blue eyes open wide, staring at the sky.

The studio audience gasps and breaks into applause. It is clear the Indian woman has won them from him again. He is forced to a last, desperate shot. Summoning his most mocking tone, he asks Lecha, “Who are these heads?” smirking at his clever phrasing. But again Lecha does not hesitate. “They are the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, and his chief aide,” she says, and this time there is a long silence before the host or anyone in the audience moves.

SUDDEN RETIREMENT

THE FOLLOWING MORNING while Lecha is packing in the hotel room a news break interrupts reruns of “I Love Lucy.” The U.S. ambassador to Mexico and his chief aide had been caught in an ambush by Indian guerrillas outside Mexico City. The ambassador and his aide were missing.

A cold chill swept over Lecha. The FBI and CIA would send agents after her for debriefing. The hair on her scalp and neck tingled. Lecha reached into the pouch inside one of her long kimonos and pulled out a small leather case from a special inner pocket. Her old standby. Birth certificate, Social Security card, and Arizona driver’s license. She does not cancel the plane reservations to New York, but she makes reservations for Tucson under another name. This had happened before, and days had been wasted with stupid questions by agents who wanted to connect Lecha with the crime she’d just helped solve. But this one, this time would be far worse, especially when they found out she was an Indian, born in Mexico.

• • •

She was out of business much sooner than she’d thought she’d be. She’d head for Tucson and get hold of Root. He managed to keep out of the way of the law. And there were always Zeta and Ferro, the two of them obsessed with security measures, dog packs, and laser alarms. Events were moving much faster than she had expected. The yield from the green water of the floating gardens was proof of that.

Lecha left messages for Root at three or four of the biker bars he liked. He traveled only by taxi now because of his disabilities, but he would always prefer the company of bikers.

Lecha has forgotten how cold the rain can be. Tucson for her has always been the dry heat in June. A hundred three degrees, six percent humidity, and the cicadas breaking into song over the good weather. The wind blows the rain against the metal panels of the house trailer Root rents. The gusts make the “green beast” shudder. Lecha had taken one look at the big old-timer and had named it that. Root was uncomfortable. Lecha wonders if he is afraid the name means she is moving in for a long time. She laughs at him. He looks at her with the blue eyes that seldom blink. He tells her he does not like to hear fun made at the expense of beasts, monsters, or anything ugly and big. They both know what he means. Lecha had hoped that as Root got older he might develop more of a sense of humor. The wind and the rain are pounding the house trailer. Lecha remembers the Midwestern storms that have such appetites for house trailers. She wonders if anyone in Tucson would have the imagination to anchor a house trailer against high winds as they do in other places. Probably not. Life has always been cheap in Tucson.

The pounding can’t be the wind. Lecha opens the narrow trailer door just a crack and gets a face full of rain from the wind. Then Lecha sees a person standing at the foot of the metal trailer steps. The woman is wearing a flimsy, clear-plastic raincoat, and under it Lecha can see a T-shirt and blue jeans. The woman has been knocking on the side of the trailer instead of coming up the steps to the door. Lecha thinks this also is typical of a town such as Tucson. People here can’t seem to do things in the ordinary fashion. The blonde is thin and probably young. Lecha can’t see much in the dark and the storm. The expression on the face seems desperate enough to belong to an old woman. Lecha assumes this is one of Root’s customers, one of those young women who swap sex for drugs.

But when the blonde sees Lecha’s face, her desperate expression breaks into one of disbelief and then joy. “Oh, Jesus!” the blonde says, trying to wipe away the rain and strands of wet hair from her face, stumbling toward the trailer steps. “I never thought I’d find you! I need your help.” Lecha hasn’t been in Tucson for more than forty-eight hours. Only Root had known Lecha was coming. Lecha keeps her eyes on the gringa’s red and swollen eyes; it is as if the blonde is a newborn creature of some sort, not accustomed to light above ground. Lecha had never been tracked down before by a client. She took pride in her control over her private life. One of the chief occupational hazards of clairvoyants and palm readers was to live under siege by the desperately lonely, and those so crazed it was impossible ever to learn what had been lost.

Lecha does not like the sudden appearance of someone looking for her. It might be the authorities. She might not have got out of Miami fast enough. “Anyone who tracks me down doesn’t need me. Go find it yourself!” Lecha yells this as she slams the trailer door in Seese’s face. Root comes out of the bedroom rubbing his eyes. “Who was that?” “I never saw her before.” Root pats the front pocket of his baggy jeans for his compact.380 automatic. He opens the trailer door slowly, only a crack, turning his face away from the blowing rain. Then he steps outside with bare feet and closes the door behind him. A minute later he comes back inside shaking the rain off his head; his white T-shirt is soaked and clings to the beer belly hanging over his sagging jeans. “I think she’s all right,” Root says, “one of those clients of yours looking for her kid. I told her to come back later. That you are busy.” Root limps toward the kitchen area and opens the refrigerator to get a beer. When he is tired, his right foot drags more than it usually does. The steel plate in his head had set off the airport security machine’s alarm. He had brought Lecha a dozen red roses. The airline employee pushing her wheelchair had thought Root was Lecha’s son. Lecha is proud of the age difference. The wheelchair is a prop. Lecha didn’t want to be caught walking with suitcases full of Demerol and Percodan. Root studies her. “I thought you were dying.” Lecha seldom bothers to look in mirrors anymore. Occasionally she does catch a glimpse of herself in plate glass windows or chrome trim on a car. For television she leaves the face for their makeup people to worry about. She hardly recognizes the woman she sees in the mirror, although she knows it is “herself,” whatever that means. Years ago Lecha realized she had never seen any person, animal, place, or thing look the same twice. Some mornings Lecha has awakened to find a haggard, wrinkled face with Korean eyes watching her from the mirror. Other mornings, just waking up with a man in the bed beside her gives her a face in the mirror like the one she saw in the mirror when she was nineteen.

“It’s cancer,” Lecha lies. “But I’ll last awhile.”

BOOK SEVEN. WEST TUCSON

ROOT’S GRANDPA GORGON

ROOT FINISHES one beer and opens another. He offers Lecha one but she says cold beer is no good in this kind of weather. “What kind of weather?” Root says right back, and Lecha has to smile at the deadpan delivery. She throws an arm around his shoulder and kisses his neck. They settle on the couch together and listen to the wind pound the rain against the trailer. Root always was moody even before the accident. She had been forty and he had been nineteen when she had first seen him with some of Calabazas’s young cousins. Lecha had always preferred short men with barrel chests on the stocky side.

They had been sleeping together only a few months when Root crashed his motorcycle. Lecha had known it would happen. It didn’t take a clairvoyant to see that Root with high handle bars on the low Harley chopper would not last. Before the accident, Calabazas had not paid much attention to Root. Calabazas would only grunt when Lecha brought up the subject. Calabazas had had a run-in with Root’s great-grandfather, the old Mexican Gorgon, years before. Old Gorgon had kept the whorehouses and gambling halls in Tucson. That was all Tucson had been in the 1880s, Calabazas liked to say. By the time Root was born, the family had shrewdly consolidated its holdings. Root’s grand-mother still owned all of the low-rent property south of downtown. “You know they got rich off the Indian wars,” Calabazas said. “That’s where the Irishman came in. The old man hired him to go out with a wagon and some mules to bootleg whiskey, which was illegal for the Apaches as well as U.S. troops on active duty.” The demand for Gorgon’s whiskey forever exceeded the supply. Corn, oats, or rye were too expensive to use for the brewing mash, so Gorgon had experimented with different recipes. Gorgon’s whiskey was distilled from a fermented mash of jojoba and mesquite beans with just a shovelful of cracked corn to suggest the bourbon flavor the U.S. troops, mostly scraggly Southerners, had come to expect. Once distilled, the liquor was given a last cut — two parts Santa Cruz water, one part formaldehyde — to prevent “spoil-age” in wooden barrels on Kirkpatrick’s wagon. Only an Irishman or a drunk would have taken that job, but Kirkpatrick was both. The job was to stay out on the desert trails, as close as possible to both the U.S. troops hunting the Apaches and the Apaches hunting the U.S. troops. Ideally, the old man told the Irishman, he should try to keep his wagonload of whiskey cut with river water and formaldehyde right in the middle of things. Stories about old Gorgon were full of clues about Root. Gorgon’s daughter married Kirkpatrick. Gorgon’s daughter had clearly married beneath herself, but she had also entertained high hopes that the children would distinguish the family name. Root’s mother had been a Tucson debutante. Root’s mother had forbidden him and his sisters and brothers to play with the children of military families sent to Tucson during the war. Root’s mother had not allowed Mexican playmates; Grandfather Gorgon, Root’s mother had explained, was of “Spanish descent,” not Mexican.

ROOT’S ACCIDENT

ROOT’S MOTHER had been engrossed in forcing her simple husband to live up to the name of the family he’d married into. Root liked to say that his father had lasted long enough to sire eight of them, and then he had dropped dead. Driven to death just as old Gorgon was supposed to have driven a team of mules to death, explaining later that the mules were worn-out and used up, and he had a chance to close a big business deal in Nogales if he was willing to press the mule team harder. Root was always bitter when he talked about his father and mother. Root preferred to say that all his family had died in his accident. That the instant his skull had bounced off the car bumper, mother, grandmother, sisters, and brothers died. When he woke up months later, each one had to be introduced to him, and the night after meeting his mother and the rest, Root had cried himself to sleep in the hospital room. “Because,” Root told Lecha, “I knew they weren’t really my family. All they cared about was how much I was going to cost them, and whether I was going to mean extra work for anyone.”

Lecha had noticed Root right away because he had looked at her defiantly as he kick-started his motorcycle and had then roared around Calabazas’s big yard in mad circles until the corralful of burros and mules threatened to stampede. Then, calculating just the point before Calabazas would come out of the house yelling, Root had turned off the engine and glided his motorcycle back to its place under the big cottonwood tree.

Lecha had let Root fuck her the first few times because he had a crush on her and he was wild and young. She told him he had a lot to learn. Meaning that he couldn’t get it in without its spewing all over the sheets. But after he got out of the hospital, six months after the accident, with slurred speech, a leg that dragged, Root had stayed hard no matter how long she fucked him. In those days Lecha had not thought twice about the men she was fucking. There were too many to think about. But the few times she had been in the mood, she had got his phone number from Calabazas, because Root worked full-time for him by then. Calabazas had hired him for many reasons as it turned out. One was old Gorgon had once hired Calabazas many years before. But the main reason was Root’s brain damage made a perfect front for them. Root took day and night classes at the community college. He carried gram packets of cocaine in the plastic pencil bag hooked inside his loose-leaf notebook. He used the pauses and slurs to his advantage. In the college snack bar joking with classmates after class, or with the narcotics officers who tried to shake him down. Root could deliver a punch line or an insult with mock innocence, to force strangers to realize that even with only part of a brain, he was smarter and quicker than they were. He was going to school to learn to read and write all over again, Root liked to tell undercover cops, to get them off his trail. He had enrolled in speech therapy class every semester but never attended. “I didn’t want,” he’d say, slowly forming each word, “I didn’t want to spoil a good thing like this with speech therapy.” Root would laugh, and Lecha realized he meant he had finished with the world where those things mattered.

Lecha let the blue silk kimono slip open to see what he’d do. But Root was intent on pinning down her illness. She’d called him collect from a phone booth at the airport in Miami. She had not intended to mention the illness, but Root had sounded short, a little irritated by the collect call. So she said, “I’ve got cancer, and I’m dying.” Root had only grunted, but then at the airport he met her with roses. Until then Root had never bought her anything except taxi rides. When Lecha left Tucson, she had not thought about seeing him again. She had not thought about Root at all, except when she saw cripples or people with palsy, and then she would merely wonder what he was up to and forget him again. But when she began making stopovers and short stays in Tucson, she found she could depend on Root. He had an account with Yellow Cab, and although he only rented house trailers, they were always clean and she had always had a place to sleep and more if she wanted. Root always took the mangled motorcycle with him when he moved and parked it outside the rented trailers. He said he kept it to remind him where he’d been and where he’d come back from. A Plymouth bumper two inches into his skull had not stopped him the message ran, so the punks better think twice about pushing him around.

“You can’t stay here,” Root says slowly, peeling at the beer label with one finger.

“Because of that woman?”

Root shakes his head. “Business,” he says, reaching over to pat Lecha’s bare thigh.

That was okay because Lecha had to see Zeta and Ferro sooner or later. It might as well be sooner. At the ranch she would not be hounded by hysterical blondes who had seen her on daytime television. “I wonder what she wanted.”

“Who?”

“That woman.”

“Someone who knows Cherie.”

“Cherie?”

“Cherie is all right,” Root answers. “She’s a dancer at the Stage Coach.”

Lecha looks down at her own tit dangling out of the blue kimono. She hefts it in one hand the way she’s seen strippers display themselves. “An old potato,” Lecha says. “More like an old cantaloupe,” Root says, taking her breast in both hands, pretending he wants to make a meal of it. She slides down on the sofa and the kimono falls away; even the long, full sleeves slide off. When Root was in his twenties, and even into his early thirties, he had been her slave. He would have done anything she asked. But now Root had said “business,” and he had meant it. Lecha had always made it a practice to avoid calendars and clocks except where business required them. Because they were not true. What was true was a moment such as this, warm sweat sliding over their bellies so smoothly that despite everything, the size of Root’s beer belly or her old full-moon ass, the connection was as hot as it had ever been, the charge bolted through like lightning. Let the years dry up the cantaloupes or potatoes as long as there’s still the electricity.

SHALLOW GRAVES

SEESE IS ANXIOUS to begin working with Lecha immediately to transcribe and type the old notebooks and papers. Certain answers lie within the ragged, stained pages. Answers to problems and questions Lecha must have before they begin the search for Monte. But once Lecha has settled into her big bed, she announces work on the old notebooks and papers must not interfere with work that “brings home the bacon.”

Seese learns to sort the mail into two categories: new business and old. Old business consisted of the successful clients still sending Lecha money orders and cashier’s checks with letters that thanked Lecha again and again. New business wasn’t so easy. Reading the letters had coiled the old sadness tight in her chest, and she had been shocked how easily she had returned to vodka and cocaine in her bedroom.

Nothing prepares Seese for the phone calls she must transcribe. A woman calls long distance from Florida. Her voice starts out clear and in control, but grief pushes to the surface, and when she gets to the color of the T-shirt, she gasps as if there is no more air in her lungs: “I know I should remember which one it was, but he was always changing clothes all day, you know. He liked to put on the Snoopy T-shirt, but then after “Sesame Street” he liked the one with the little Grover puppet on it.” The woman agonizes over the color of the T-shirt she can not remember, worn by the child she will never see again. The woman describes the sneakers over and over again — blue Keds — repeating details again and again as if to prove to herself she had been a good mother although her child is gone. They called. They sent cash and an article of the missing person’s clothing or a stuffed toy.

Even with cocaine again, Seese can’t bear transcribing the phone calls. Lecha claims she enjoys talking on the telephone. Seese grits her teeth and slashes open envelopes with Lecha’s Mexican dagger.

Seese had only read a dozen or so plea letters before she read the letter that stopped her. Without a greeting, date, or return address, a big manila envelope had come registered and certified first class. “Right there you know you got something happening,” Lecha alerted Seese. Happening meant a cashier’s check had also fallen out of a wad of typewritten pages. Anything over $500 American in new business had to be carefully considered. Every fragment, scrap, and dim memory the client might have must be meticulously reported. Lecha said they had to stop the telephone calls because no check or money order fell out of the phone.

The letters and messages Lecha got had been the exact opposite of nightmares or daydreams. The letters were invariably lists of facts, recitations of precise locations at hours and minutes of specific months and days: height, weight, eye and hair color, descriptions of birthmarks, jewelry, and clothes. From the facts Lecha’s task was to find the appropriate or accurate emblems or dreams. Lecha said the world had all it ever needed in the way of figures and facts anyway. Lecha admitted it was difficult to understand. A matter of faith or belief. Knowledge. Or maybe grace. Something like that. Lecha only had to slit open an envelope or listen to a recording of a long-distance phone message, and suddenly she would seize the tin ammo box full of crumpled pages and notes and sift them carefully until a single word or a short phrase revealed “the clue” to her.

Seese must remember it was only a “clue.” No one but the client would ever be able to understand fully the clue’s meaning. On occasion Lecha had reluctantly agreed to accept yet another fee to determine for the client the message or clue. More risk was involved in reading the clue. There were all kinds of reasons for this. Seese nodded. It was all right with Seese if Lecha sent clients weird or unintelligible messages. As long as everyone understood.

Any psychic worth her salt knew even before she opened an envelope the nature of the message inside. Words inscribed by terrified, haunted people in nightmare hours after midnight were useless and often misleading. It didn’t matter what the letters or messages said. Each story had many versions. Had Seese heard about Freudian theory? Seese nodded. Lecha had got herself warmed up. Freud had interpreted fragments — images from hallucinations, fantasies, and dreams — in terms patients could understand. The images were messages from the patient to herself or himself.

Lecha continued with her crackpot theories: Freud had sensed the approach of the Jewish holocaust in the dreams and jokes of his patients. Freud had been one of the first to appreciate the Western European appetite for the sadistic eroticism and masochism of modern war. What did Seese think Jesus Christ symbolized anyway?

Nothing had prepared Seese for the work on Lecha’s notebook. Lecha insists that Seese type up each and every letter or word fragment however illegible or stained. Lecha wants her personal notebook transcribed and typed because it is necessary to understanding the old notebooks Yoeme left behind. Lecha tells Seese not to be disappointed. The old notebooks are all in broken Spanish or corrupt Latin that no one can understand without months of research in old grammars. Lecha had already done translation work, and her notebooks contained narratives in English.

Lecha’s Notebook

After days of searing heat the Earth no longer cools at night. The wind carries away the heat for a few hours, and by dawn the air is motionless, and a faint warmth emanates from luminous pale ridges of limestone and tufa. The lower skirts of leaves of jojoba and brittle bushes are parched white and shriveled from drought.

What can you tell by the color of their eyes?

Dead children were eaten by survivors during times of great famine.

Late August afternoon wind stirs a blue wash of rain clouds over the edge of the southwest horizon. Humidity increases. The paloverde’s thin, green bark glows with moisture off the ocean wind from Sonora.

Meaning lies in the figures and colors of the killer’s tattoos. Meaning lies in the particular disarray of the victim’s underclothes.

The killer’s blue eyes dilate with rage so the victim sees only the empty blackness of her own grave. The killer keeps victims long enough to wash and curl their hair, and to clean and paint the victim’s finger and toenails with pink polish sold at thousands of drugstores.

The computer posits models of possible routes taken by the abductor and victim.

The abductor drives the victim west and then north into the desert foothills.

According to the computer model, the child killer acts within the first fifteen minutes after the abduction.

The abductor can wait no longer. In his excitement he accidentally makes a long, shallow cut in his own upper thigh. He has always savored the chill of steel alongside the shaft of his own cock while he pulled and beat it off.

A black, late-model sedan is parked at the mouth of a dry arroyo next to a dirt road.

The purpose of the shallow grave is twofold: to hide the shameful incriminating evidence, and to prevent the loss of the beloved corpse.

The photograph appears to be of a common grave scratched out of the Sonoran Desert gravel; scraps of cloth, bleached translucent by the sun, flutter in the wind above bits of hair and bones.

The Santa Cruz River has been running at low, summer flood-level for weeks. The mother sends the little girl a short distance, no more than two city blocks, to mail a letter.

The little girl rides off on her bike — and never comes back. Later, younger neighborhood children tell how a black car bumps her off her bicycle and a man lifts her into the black car. The small pink bicycle is found lying in the weeds on Root Lane near her home.

Computers posit models of possible routes taken by the abductor. Blue-pencil grids divide the map of the area west and north of the little girl’s home. Search teams are assigned blocks within the grids. Teams on horseback and all-terrain motorcycles comb the scrubby greasewood on the gray alluvial ridges that parallel the Santa Cruz River.

Plastic surveyor’s ribbons in white or light yellow are tied on branches of mesquite or jojoba after each of the twenty acre squares has been searched. After each square in the blue-pencil grid has been searched, a Sherriff’s Department volunteer draws a red X over the square.

On the morning of the third day of the search, family members bring the little girl’s favorite doll, a long-tail monkey sewed and stuffed with brown cotton work socks, and a pair of the child’s pink tennis shoes for bloodhounds brought from the state penitentiary.

Bloodhounds are not as effective in desert terrain. Damp-woods paths and lush foliage hold scents for hours, sometimes days. The dog handler estimates the dogs must be set on a trail within the first three hours or the desert’s dry, hot air obliterates the scent trail. It’s all scientific, the dog man explains. Heat expands scent molecules. Pushes molecules apart — scatters them. Desert gravel and sand for an hour, and the heat and the wind evaporate molecules into dust.

You don’t believe they can send you all of this in one or two letters — dozens of newspaper clippings and photographs — yet week after week they do. You don’t know them. Don’t know who they are. Still they imagine you may have some sort of power to bring their little girl back to them.

The child’s father joins the search, while her stepfather remains with her mother. They do not go to the temporary search headquarters near the bridge on the Santa Cruz River. The child’s mother waits next to the telephone with the reverend from the Church of Christ, Scientist. The call the mother waits for is from California or New Mexico. She has read about it before. Kidnappers who mean no harm to the child. Perhaps they have lost a child of their own.

Seese watched them together. The two old women. Identical twins who no longer resembled one another except when they spoke. Zeta had only to pause an instant before her wide, dark face relaxed into a brief smile. “Oh…,” Zeta had said. “You are going to copy her book….” “Well,” Lecha had said, her eyes dreamy and distant, “You could say ‘her book,’ but of course the book will be mine.”

ARMS DEALER

WHEN ZETA THOUGHT of her father, she liked to go walking down the ridge behind the ranch house where he had walked with her and Lecha that day so long ago. She had been adamant about the security systems and fences. She did not want them to interfere with the trails she took for her walks. Because the trails were far older even than the ranching and mining that had gone on in those mountains. The trails themselves extended out of another time, and Zeta had found that walking along them enabled her to reach insights and ideas that otherwise were inaccessible.

When she walked, she always carried the 9mm in the deep pocket concealed in the fullness of her dark brown skirt. She had been surprised one day to notice that the long full skirts and dark blouses and suit coats she wore were much like a religious habit. She was able to affect the appearance of an old woman, but was also able to dress as Lecha did and give the impression of a woman barely past forty-five. Lecha did it to attract men. Zeta did it to throw the others off her trail. If Zeta wore pants, they were the English riding pants for women, and she would have had the sewing lady sew a deep pocket in them too for the 9mm. Ferro had given her a two-shot.38-caliber derringer for Christmas that year and a boot holster for it, but she preferred not to wear boots during the hot season.

She did not have to walk far to escape the presence of the house and the guard dogs and other people. She wondered if her father had felt the distance that could be gained by walking there. The desert shrubs, cactus, mesquite, and paloverde grew lush from the steep sides of the hills and ridges, which were only the debris, the ruin, of the great volcano that had once presided over the entire valley.

When she came to the large flat stone the size of an anvil but four times as heavy, Zeta used to wish her father had taught her about meteorites. Late at night, when she and Ferro had waited on the ridge or had ridden horseback into the steep canyons to wait for a drop, she had watched the meteor showers. They would begin shortly after midnight and continue until two A.M. On those nights it seemed as if the sky had overtaken the earth and was closing over it, so that the volcanic rocks and soil themselves reflected light like the surface of a moon. At those moments she could not think of any other place on the earth that she would rather be. She thought about the old ones and Yoeme and how they had watched the night skies relentlessly, translating sudden bursts and trails of light into lengthy messages concerning the future and the past. Yoeme claimed it had all been written down, in another form of course, in the notebooks, which she had waved in their faces almost from the beginning.

Now Lecha had returned with the notebooks and claimed she was ready to begin the work Yoeme had entrusted to her years ago.

“We must be getting old if Lecha is coming back complaining about a little thing like cancer,” Calabazas had said a few weeks before. He had been talking retirement, but Zeta knew him better than to believe it. Calabazas would never abandon what he called “the war that had never ended,” the war for the land. He wanted to call every successful shipment or journey a victory in this “war.” Zeta had not argued with him, but she had her own ideas about “the war.”

What did they say about fairness and love and war? What did they say about strange bedfellows? The older Zeta got the less she could remember the English expressions. They had smuggled truck tires during the Second World War. They had begun to get requests for ammunition and guns of any kind; there was a growing demand for explosives — Dyalite^© with blasting caps. Guns had always moved across the border, in a southerly direction, unless they were illegal weapons — Chinese automatic rifles or sawed-off shotguns. Zeta and Calabazas had finally parted company. Calabazas had wanted to stay strictly with dope. Because with guns there was politics, right off the bat. Zeta had argued with Calabazas for years. They had always been at war with the invaders. For five hundred years, the resistance had fought. Calabazas might avoid it for another five years, at most ten. But sooner or later politics would come knocking at his door; because dope was good as gold; and politics always went where the gold was.

Zeta was the only Mexican or Indian who would deal with Greenlee. Zeta had never liked to look at Greenlee’s face, which was pasty white and had no chin. His pale blue eyes had always had the shine of a true believer in the white race. Arizona had been overrun by poor whites like Greenlee. So while Zeta had avoided looking at his face, she always studied the rest of him, and of course the first thing her eyes caught was the.45 automatic.

The holster he wore in the store was bulky leather and closed with a heavy police-style snap. There was nothing his.45 automatic couldn’t stop, including a Mack truck, Greenlee liked to brag when he was first introduced to people, especially women. But Zeta had always known as long as the holster was snapped, Greenlee was a lot of hot air. She also knew that Greenlee paid little or no attention to a woman unless he was fucking or hoping to fuck her. Zeta had her.44 magnum in her purse. She wasn’t afraid of Greenlee. Greenlee’s jokes were the most dangerous thing about him because sometimes they had nearly caused Zeta to lose self-control.

Zeta tried to keep the conversation on weapons. She talked about her.44 magnum. Greenlee said he’d been looking for one. If she ever decided to sell it… Greenlee had waved his hand vaguely in front of himself, smiling as if he might be recalling a joke.

“What do you have when you have twelve lawyers buried to their necks in dirt? Not enough dirt.” Greenlee was preparing to move into the big warehouse building he had just bought downtown. Greenlee hinted that he had become vastly rich from secret dealings. Greenlee could not resist bragging about his money to a woman, any woman. Any brains he had were hanging between his legs.

Greenlee hinted that approval for his export permits and his federal security clearance had been given priority because certain of his friends were now located in “high places” in the U.S. government.

Zeta could have spelled it out for him right then: CIA.

Greenlee was not a man who did much thinking. If she said she wanted carbines or pistols to sell to rich Sonoran ranchers, that was that. She had always paid cash and she had never made trouble. Greenlee did not take Zeta seriously. She was a woman, a Mexican Indian at that.

LUST

FERRO SINKS BACK in the floating cushion, fingertips only on the edge of the redwood. Jamey wants to go “diving.” Jamey likes to find it floating like a sea cucumber, he says. When he gets hold, Ferro grabs both his shoulders. Jamey nibbles like a fish. Ferro reaches for the little glass vial and twists the top. He taps a hit into the glass chamber and holds one nostril while he inhales. The rush through his head then down all veins explodes in waves he imagines in shades of pale pink — the color of Bolivian flake, the color of Jamey’s tight little hole; a rose, a delicate little rose. Jamey has surfaced and is drying his face and hair. He is always grinning — those perfect rich-boy teeth beg to be smashed. He puts the towel on the shelf and searches for the glass vial. Ferro makes a fist around the vial. It takes a full minute before Jamey realizes Ferro is watching him with amusement.

“Oh! You’ve got it! Man! I was scared it fell in the water.” But when Jamey reaches for the fist, Ferro pulls it away, still staring at Jamey intently. “Hey! Come on, Ferro!” Jamey shifts into his pleading tone more and more all the time. Ferro holds his arm high and outside the hot tub. “Keep away!” Ferro says, remembering how much he hated the boys who took his lunch pail and threw it back and forth and around the circle while he bellowed at them and ran at them. “Pansóna! Pansóna!” they’d yell. “Miss Big Belly! Miss Big Belly!” The nun in charge of the playground would snatch the lunch pail away from the others and send them to the mother superior’s office. But when they knew the old nun had turned back to the rest of the playground, the boys used to take mincing little steps, swivel their hips, or thrust their flat bellies out in front of them, mimicking Ferro.

Jamey has a perfect body. Ferro was not content with taking measurements. He bought the expensive coffee-table book of classical sculpture. Jamey is proportioned like the discus thrower. His belly is slightly concave. His buttocks are like BBs. In Tucson, Jamey stays tan year-round. The downy blond hair on his thighs and belly bleaches platinum. Jamey’s eyes are deep blue, not pale, washed-out like Paulie’s eyes.

In the beginning Ferro had compared the two of them because he could not quite believe he had settled for Paulie when something so much finer had been available. But now he has nearly forgotten that Paulie had been his lover.

Ferro takes another snort and then pretends to toss it over to Jamey. But his throw is purposely wide and the little glass vial sinks in the water. “Ferro!” Jamey can sound almost like a girl. Ferro had never let on where the cocaine comes from. The glass vial is Jamey’s. Jamey claims the money is from his family for college expenses, though Jamey never attends class. Ferro sells him the best because Ferro knows he will be using it too. Occasionally Ferro will bring a gram or two for all-night sex, but generally he likes to see Jamey buy it from him. Jamey is shaking. His pretty face is flushed and Ferro can see tears in his eyes. “It was nearly full! That’s a whole gram. Why did you do that?” Ferro raises up and the water level in the hot tub falls so low he can almost see Jamey’s neat little navel. Jamey trails after him, asking, “Why?” Ferro glances at his wristwatch on the marble shelf by the sink, then gets into the shower. He has two hours to get to the hills for the drop. Before he leaves Jamey’s apartment he reaches into his coat pocket and tosses a full vial of pink flake on the pale blue carpet. Jamey looks at it and then at him. But before Jamey can speak, Ferro is out the door.

MEMORIES

PAULIE IS PARKED by the exit ramp with the hood of the jeep raised. Ferro gets out of the Lincoln and pretends to be untangling battery jumper cables. Paulie lifts the hood of the Lincoln briefly, slams it shut. Ferro slams down the jeep hood and jumps in. Paulie drives. Zeta’s cardinal rule is no radios or electronic linkups of any kind. The back of the jeep is full of camera equipment and a telescope. Under it all in a telescope case there is a.223 with an infrared scope. There are two.357 magnums in the glove compartment. Paulie drives around a foothill subdivisions for a while. Ferro tries to get a good look at his face whenever they pass under a mercury-vapor light at an intersection. Ferro detects a difference in Paulie now that Jamey is his lover. Paulie senses the scrutiny and turns to look Ferro straight in the eyes.

“I was just seeing you in thirty years. How your face will be. A hook — a beak nose,” Ferro says. Paulie guns the jeep and turns onto the pipeline road. Ferro continues to study Paulie’s profile.

The flesh sinks away and the bones rise up. That had been Ferro’s experience. In the old two-story house in Sonora with whitewash smeared over clay plaster that peels away from the adobe bricks. Whitewash everywhere — covering the wood planks and pillars of the long porch. Ferro remembers playing with chunks of white clay. Rubbing it over his hands and arms to make himself lighter. Inside the argument among the women continues for days. He thinks there is a baby in the room next to the kitchen. Cries come from behind the low wooden door, and the women arguing at the kitchen table all jump up together and rush into the room. Ferro knows that the imbecile cousins must have been around then, but does not recall seeing any of them. He had not thought of that trip to Mexico for many years and could not remember much anyway. Except that Zeta had let him order a tuna fish sandwich at the dirty café along the highway. The door of the café had been set inside a giant longhorn steer skull that rose twenty feet above the roof of the little cinder-block building. When Ferro had seen the giant steer skull, he had cried that he was hungry and that he had to go to the bathroom. Zeta had already been full of fury before they left home, and Ferro had pressed himself into the farthest corner of the big backseat of the Hudson. All he could remember about the door in the steer skull was the disappointment as he walked through. It was a dirty-white screen door and nothing of the giant steer skull could be seen. The tuna fish had been bad, and all the way from Tubac to the border he had been carsick. Or maybe it had been too hot. Zeta had not believed in air-conditioning of any kind.

Zeta had seldom taken him on any of her business trips. She had told him that children did not belong on business trips. The nuns at the school did not seem to understand how a woman could have business trips, and for a long time Ferro had not trusted her. He had decided that she simply did not want him along. But when he got older and she began to put him to work, and he started to realize what the business was, he had suddenly felt bad for not trusting her. It was dangerous business. It wasn’t any place for a little child. When she went away on her business trips, the nuns kept him with the other boarding students. He would be one of the youngest, but they gave him a tiny room alone, not in the dorm with the others. The tiny room was between the rooms of the school principal and the old nun who cooked. Zeta had seldom left him with the nuns for more than a week, but it had always been terrifying. The others hated him even more when he slept in the little room. It had belonged to the old sister, the one who had died before Ferro came to school. The others reported that all the nuns were afraid to take that room because old Sister Maria Jose’s ghost had not gone to heaven but was occupying that room while she served out her time in purgatory. The stories had kept him paralyzed with terror all night. He had lain there thinking about his real mother then. He had lain there hating her with all his might. He had hated her more than he had feared dying with a mortal sin on his soul. Zeta had told him she did not know where her sister was. Zeta did not apologize or try to tell him that his mother loved him but was unable to take care of him. And yet Ferro had never known why Lecha had abandoned him. He only knew that his aunt did not raise him out of maternal love but out of duty. Ferro had seen how Zeta had cast off “business associates” after one mistake. So Ferro knew that something about his mother was special and that made him special. But it had never stopped him from hating her, with all his being.

• • •

At the old house in Sonora, Ferro had been obsessed with the stairs to the second floor, and with the second-story porch where he could drop his little metal horses and soldiers to the ground. He loved the stairs and the height because none of the houses he had ever been in had had a second floor. Most of Tucson was flat. He had so many aunts he could not keep them straight. They all looked alike to him. They were arguing over the big house and over who should have what.

Zeta had told him to stay at the house. They had crowded into the big green Hudson. The instant Ferro had seen the car go over the sandy hill he crept inside. He tiptoed to the little wooden door to the room off the kitchen. He listened for a long time. He did not know much about babies, but he also knew that mothers of his schoolmates never left babies without asking someone to look in on them. Finally he had slowly and carefully turned the cutglass knob. He did not breathe as he opened the door just a crack. What he saw were two glittering black eyes watching him from a baby crib. Just as he was trying to figure out why the eyes did not seem like the eyes of other babies he had seen, the strange baby raised up and caused the crib to shake and bump the wall. At that instant the paralysis he suffered sleeping in the ghost nun’s bedroom afflicted his legs and hands. He watched in horror as two long-fingered, bony hands grabbed the top rail of the crib and the big head with the glittering black eyes hung over the top rail. The mouth had four huge, yellow teeth. The big bony head spoke in Spanish first, and when Ferro did not move, it brought out a few English words, but still Ferro did not move. The white hair had been cut short and stuck out around the skeleton face like dry weeds. Then Ferro had heard it call his name, softly at first and then gradually louder until it made his own name into a cry. He had pulled the door shut then and had started running for the beach although Zeta had forbidden him to go to the ocean alone. He ran and ran, imagining that the skeleton man was dragging himself over the edge of the crib and then along the brick floor to the porch.

When Zeta finally came for him, it was late afternoon. She drove the car only as far as the first sand dune and then began honking the horn. Ferro had been sitting with his back to the sea, watching the crest of the dunes for the appearance of the skeleton man. The tide was coming in, and as he moved to avoid getting wet, he had begun to feel a slow panic. Before long, the ocean would push him to the base of the high dune where the skeleton man could suddenly come rolling down to catch Ferro.

Ferro stood in front of the car and stared at Zeta. He was trying to see if she was going to whip him with the hairbrush in her purse. But she was in a hurry and gestured for him to hurry and get in. When he got in the backseat, Zeta put the car in reverse, then stopped and told him to get out and shake the sand from his cuffs and to empty his shoes. Something about having to untie his shoes made him want to cry. But he clapped his jaws together and did as he was told. Zeta told him to hurry, he could always put his shoes back on while they were driving.

Zeta had never talked much. She preferred to be left alone with her scheming and thinking, that was what Ferro had figured out later. As a child he had simply known that unlike his schoolmates and their mothers, he and Zeta did not say much to each other. They spoke only when it was absolutely necessary. Ferro had come to prefer silence just as she did. He had come to believe that talk was cheap. That it was common. That was what was best about Paulie. Nothing needed to be said.

DROP POINTS

THE KEY to this drop point is the Marana Air Park across the mountain from the gas line. The subdivisions inch out from the Santa Cruz River along Ina Road. But the people living in the area are used to the small-aircraft traffic that begin landing approaches here, and they don’t notice takeoff accelerations and airplanes climbing as they cross the foothills. Ferro learned from Zeta, and Zeta would not say, but Ferro thought she had learned from Calabazas and the other old-timers.

At sundown they spotted a small white Cessna that appeared to be gaining altitude slowly. The steel canister had landed at the edge of the gasline road four hundred yards away. The dull gray color of the metal was almost invisible in the twilight. Ferro continued setting up the tripod, and Paulie brought out the telescope. Although they appeared to be concentrating on the telescope, they were straining to pick up sounds that might indicate people in the area — horseback riders, hikers, or kids on dirt bikes. They never repeated the pattern of any drop, although it required much more planning. It was a simple matter to avoid the radar along the border by flying the plane a hundred feet above the mesquite groves. But Ferro had made it his job to continually invent new occasions and new opportunities to move the goods across the border. Lately prices had been down and Zeta had talked about trading arms and explosives instead of cocaine.

As the twilight darkened and Venus flared brighter in the lens of the telescope, Ferro told Paulie to go ahead. Ferro rested the.223 with the infrared scope across the hood of the jeep. He followed Paulie in the scope, occasionally scanning ahead and behind him, and all around the paloverde tree where the canister had bounced and rolled.

The easiest drops were also the most dangerous. Lately there had been a new kind of pressure. Not from the drug agents, but from the new kid in town, as Ferro liked to call him. Sonny Blue wasn’t new, but what he seemed to be trying was new. Content for many years to leave the drug trade with Mexico to the old families such as theirs and Calabazas, suddenly Max Blue and his people had begun to make moves.

The canister rode in the corner of the backseat of the jeep. Paulie had already smeared motor oil on the canister. It could have passed for a five-gallon fuel can. It might have been a waterproof case for telescopic lenses. Paulie dropped Ferro at his car. When Ferro pulled onto Interstate 10, his windbreaker was zipped over his massive belly and hips. The black rubber body belt had uncoiled from the canister like a jungle snake after a heavy meal. Ferro never felt happier than when he wore the black rubber belt concealed under his clothes.

When Ferro got to the apartment, he made sure Jamey was not there. He stood for a long time in front of the mirror in the upstairs bathroom, studying the length of zippered black rubber full of Bolivian cocaine. The over-hang of his belly hid his cock, shriveled from the breeze from the open balcony door. The black rubber belt crisscrossed his chest like Pancho Villa’s bandoliers. He had always wanted thick black hair on his chest. The fat made his breasts hang like a woman’s. With hair the fat would have been less repulsive. Jamey said he loved him more than anyone ever before. I love you as you are, he had told Ferro then scooted across the bed so that he could give Ferro head. The immensity of the belly interfered with the usual positions Jamey tried, but he had always been quick to figure out those things. It was other things Jamey had trouble with.

Ferro coiled the rubber body belt under the guest bed and got into the shower. As he was finishing with the hair drier, he heard Jamey’s Corvette pull into the parking space below the balcony doors. Before Jamey could unlock the downstairs door and reach the bedroom, Ferro was lying naked on his back, his penis swollen into a wide curve away from his belly. Jamey would call it a special treat, although they both knew that rubbing coke on the penis head slowed the ejaculations and kept Ferro going longer. Zeta had accused him once of having only his balls and dick to think with. He knew it was not true, but he also knew that before he had found Jamey, he had made mistakes that had not happened since. He imagined there was gradual buildup — secretions, fluids in his lower abdomen, and finally his crotch. The sensation had not changed since grade school when he was sent to the school chapel alone; perhaps it was to pray for aid in curbing his tongue. He did not remember the reason, only rows and rows of tiny votive candles in red glass. When he had leaned forward as he knelt, he had brushed against the pew ahead of him. He had been looking at the bare legs of the Jesus hanging from the cross. The pleasure he got from leaning closer and rubbing against the pew made him close his eyes. What he saw then was the spear the soldier stabbed into Jesus’ ribs and the gush of blood that had spurted. Ferro always imagined the soldier as large and handsome and reluctant to hurt Jesus, but some mightier force had given him orders. The older boys claimed hanged men died with penises erect or spurting liquid. Ferro realized the loincloth on Jesus had only been for the sake of good taste. When he closed his eyes, he imagined Jesus’ execution conducted in the nude. The last sign of life had left Jesus’ body in the same spasmodic jerks that Ferro saw his own penis make as he pulled it in the warm bathwater.

Ferro left Jamey spread-eagle on the bed, facedown. Orgasm was such a relief he no longer felt the regret he had as a child who then had to kneel and confess a mortal sin. The only regret he felt was that he could not keep away from Jamey, that he had gone from seeing Jamey two nights a week, to seeing Jamey every night, and often in the late afternoon. Zeta was already complaining that the work was suffering. That Sonny Blue and his people were beginning to make inroads around town. They were selling more and they were selling it cheaper. “Mine is better,” Ferro had said sullenly. Zeta laughed. “We are not talking about sex acts,” she said. “We are talking about drugs. Down on the street they don’t know good. They know cheap. That’s all.”

MOTHER

AN HOUR AFTER Lecha had returned with the skinny blond girl, Ferro had cornered Zeta in her office. He had demanded to know why Zeta had not told him. What the fuck reason had that — that—thing for returning after all these years? He was shouting, but Zeta remained calm. She had a pencil and a stack of blank yellow paper on the desk in front of her. She was doodling interlocking squares in a pattern that reminded Ferro of his coffee-table book full of Greek statues.

Ferro had learned when he was still very small never to let Zeta lock eyes with him. Because it was the eyes that gave the real meaning to any words she might have spoken. When Zeta had told Ferro that his mother had left him in Tucson because she could not be bothered with a tiny baby, her eyes had told him that she did not want him feeling sorry for himself. She did not believe anything teachers or psychologists might say about the ill effects of rejection upon the child. Her eyes said that what was good or necessary for white people was quite different for them.

They had had great shouting fights after he was grown. But Ferro had always known that despite what he felt or what he wanted, Zeta knew a great deal more than he did. Ferro had come to understand this gradually. At first, before he understood, Ferro had studied and read his books, waiting for the day when the argument came and it was Ferro and not Zeta who had the definitive facts. When he would be able to tell her that he had tried X or Y or Z and that he knew which was best. But after he had finished college with a business degree and had been working for Zeta, it dawned on him that he was getting no closer to what she knew and how she knew.

“How many times has your mother said she was coming back and then we don’t hear from her again for three years?” Although Ferro had taken a double shot of whiskey and a couple of lines of coke, he felt as if his heart would beat a path straight into his belly, taking both lungs with it. “Your mother,” as if Lecha were his fault or his invention. Ferro had wanted to yell back, “She’s your sister!” but he knew without saying the words that Zeta had him beaten right there. Every word Zeta had spoken was true. She seldom lied or exaggerated, while Lecha had many times announced returns or permanent changes and then had failed to appear or call again for years. Ferro had been furious at something inside himself that had been waiting for Lecha to return.

At that moment, Ferro looked at Zeta and was stunned to see how much she looked like Lecha, although something running in the distance behind the voice inside him kept telling him it was only the whiskey and the drug. But he could see only Lecha, his mother — the one he had hated so fervently all these years. The mouth, the teeth, and the eyes — Ferro could feel the sweat sliding down the crack of his ass — but just when he thought he would not be able to hold off the shivering in his chest, he had seen the wide streaks of white in Zeta’s hair. He could see her big hands, big knuckles, dark brown from working with dusty “antiquities.” No long red nails, no gaudy fake emeralds like Lecha’s. Ferro took a deep breath. “You did it for her. You did it for you! It wasn’t for me!” Sweat had rolled down his forehead into his eyes, stinging and running tears down his cheeks. Zeta had not moved her eyes from his. She did not dispute Ferro. She had done it for herself. In spite of her sister, Ferro had got raised, and that was all that had mattered. Ferro whirled around blindly for the door. “Fuck you! Fuck you!” he screamed, and slammed the wrought-iron gate so hard the glass rattled in the windows.

THE WEIGHT OF GHOSTS

CALABAZAS IS IN THE CORRAL with his little mule and donkeys. He talks to them in a singsong voice. He has a bushel basket of overripe broccoli he picked up at the back door of the produce warehouse down the street. But in his pockets Calabazas has green crab apples he picked in the backyard. The little donkeys pin back their ears at each other and push to get closer to him. The spotted mule stands with its head shoved against Calabazas’s left shoulder. When the donkeys try to bite the spotted mule, Calabazas claps his hands and laughs.

Root smiles when he sees Calabazas in the corral with his animals. Calabazas likes the old ways, the old tricks, best. But he won’t like it if Root doesn’t tell him about the Salvadorians. Root isn’t sure how to bring it up, but Calabazas is in one of his talking moods.

“The story I like best,” Calabazas says as if he and Root have been exchanging stories all morning, “is about the old man riding his mule along the river.” Calabazas gestures in the direction of the Santa Cruz River, but Root thinks “sewage treatment” not “river” when he looks in that direction. Both are true. Tucson built its largest sewage treatment plant on the northwest side of the city, next to the river.

Farther south, near the Mexican border, the Santa Cruz runs as clear as a mountain stream. The Yaqui people know the location of the sewage plant is no accident. Calabazas’s goats and little donkeys and livestock from the Yaqui barrio wander on city property surrounding the sewage plant. The Yaqui livestock fatten on the tall river grass and willows as they always have since the days before there was a city of Tucson to condemn Yaqui land.

Root turns over a tin bucket and sits down to get comfortable. Because Calabazas is in one of his moods. “In those days there were witches up and down the Santa Cruz,” he begins. Root wishes he could talk as fast as he can think because he’d make a wisecrack about there being plenty of witches right now — teasing Calabazas, who has, from time to time, been accused of being a witch himself.

“The sky above the riverbanks used to glow electric blue all night from the burning witches’ pots. Us kids stayed close to the house on those nights. Besides witches, we always had to be careful of Yaqui ghosts. The ghosts are always traveling up and down the riverbanks searching for their loved ones. Because the Mexican soldiers slaughtered all of them. Babies, little children, old women. Yaquis who refused to acknowledge the Mexican government or to pay taxes on their land were rounded up and shot. The soldiers filled the arroyos with their bodies, and families never knew who had been murdered or who had escaped. Those ghosts can’t rest. Not even now.”

Root raises his eyebrows and widens his eyes at Calabazas. Root has come to depend upon facial expressions because they don’t get caught then stuttered out of his mouth. “That’s right,” Calabazas continues, “and that’s what this old man riding his mule along the riverbank found out.” Calabazas stops to light up a cigarette. He always offers the pack to Root, who always shakes his head. “What do these ghosts want? They are still running away, thinking they are escaping the slaughter. They keep traveling, but at a much slower rate of speed than when they were alive. They are just now reaching Tucson as the water and the land are disappearing. Relatives already settled here had pleaded with them to flee Sonora sooner. Now the ghosts have come, and they want to know where the lake they were always hearing about has gone. The lake their brothers and cousins were bragging about. Plentiful fresh water in Tucson. Which is what the word tucson means in Papago.” Root nods, and Calabazas takes a couple of puffs from his cigarette.

“This man had bought a little mule. One like mine. Everyone told him he didn’t want a little mule. His relatives. Relatives always tell you what they want.” Calabazas glances in the direction of the houses owned by his wife’s family as he says this. “All of them tried to talk him out of the little mule. They wanted him to buy something bigger. Maybe even a horse. Because it would be his money that was getting spent. Not theirs. But the man liked something about this little mule. He bought it from someone up at the village in Marana. They invited him to spend the night. But he was living alone, and he had a garden that needed care. He didn’t want to ask his relatives because the melons were getting ripe, and who could resist taking a few? So early in the afternoon the man got on the little mule he’d bought. This mule was the color of red dust. It had the sign of the cross down its spine, which was good luck too. So they went along, and the little red mule did very well. The old man was pleased because now the little mule would show all those relatives of his who didn’t approve of small mules. But right around sundown, the little mule started slowing down. They were near the Seven Mile crossing on the riverbank. Seven Mile crossing got its name because at the time it was seven miles from town. Not anymore. The interstate runs right by there. And there’s that striptease bar there.”

Root nods. He wonders about Calabazas sometimes. All the different moods. Today he wants to talk about the old times. But tomorrow Calabazas might not say anything. For days at a time he might not speak to anyone — just point or gesture. If a deal had been made and a drop had been scheduled, then nothing happened. Customers got used to peculiarities dealing with Calabazas. Root and Mosca would have to carry on until Calabazas got a change in mood. As long as supplies hold out Root just keeps working the university neighborhood and Pima College, where it’s mostly college kids who want to score.

“Well, this man began to think maybe what people had been saying against the small mule might be true after all. Maybe he had been cheated. It took the man all night just to get seven miles. The red mule went slower and slower. The mule started sweating. It lay down in the sand three times. The man was ready to turn around and go right back the next morning, to return the mule and get his money back. Of course he told everyone the next day. But the old-timers just laughed at him. ‘Don’t blame the mule. Why do you think they invited you to spend the night in Marana?’ The old-timers were really getting a kick out of the whole thing because this man had not believed in spirits and ghosts and things like that. So they said to him, ‘Why do you think they asked you to spend the night? Because ghosts can make a wagon heavier for the horses to pull. The ghosts pile into the wagon. They weigh twice or three times what they weighed in life. The body carries the weight of the soul all the life, but with the body gone, there’s nothing to hold the weight anymore.’ ”

FALLING FOREVER

ROOT KNOWS HOW heavy the body is. Never mind spirits or ghosts. He knows how heavy the body is as it falls — falls so slowly the mass and weight of it pulls everything down in slow motion. He has dreams of the heaviness, of falling forever and ever. His arms slam against the mattress. He wakes in a sweat. He knows what they told him. How much of his brain came away with the crushed skull. How doctors fucked up with the steel plate. “One in ten” had been the odds they quoted his mother during the fever.

The world had pulled away and left him lying in white, puffy clouds. He could look down and look through the clouds. He might have been in a jet airliner except for the silence. He could look down through layers of clouds and see himself lying in the hospital bed connected to the machines. He lies in the bed with his eyes closed. It is difficult to recognize the visitors who come and stand at the foot of the hospital bed since he can see only the tops of heads. He can always tell which one his mother is. But he does not remember seeing the top of her head more than a few times. The therapist asks if they are cumulus clouds. Root hates the sounds he makes. He can hear the correct sound of the words inside his head, but his mouth doesn’t make the sounds clearly anymore. Words are groans or choking sounds. Does the tongue actually move or is it like the feet and toes, which feel as if they are moving, but when he watches in the mirror above the bed, they are motionless, white as candle wax. Even before the accident, Root had never trusted mirrors on ceilings. The first time he saw mirrors on the ceiling had been with Lecha in the deluxe suite at the Marilyn Motel. When he saw Lecha’s back, the cheeks of her wide brown ass spreading over his skinny white legs, Root had realized that mirrors do not show what really is. So he had bellowed at the physical therapist, young, blond, and enthusiastic, when she told him he could see for himself in the mirror his toes were not moving. He could not tell her mirrors on ceilings do not show the truth because he could not even say yes or no. In the ceiling mirror of the Marilyn Motel, Lecha appeared to sit on someone he had not recognized, a teenage boy much whiter and shorter than himself, flexing his feet in rhythm with Lecha’s slow, smooth rocking on top. The face Root had seen over Lecha’s left shoulder should have been his, but was not. Just as now the bellows and grunts should have been words, but were not.

He had awakened after five months. He had no memory of what had happened. He thought he might have some idea of a past life with a family, but he did not feel sure. The nurse who came into the room said that she had just been transferred to that ward, but she would see that someone came who could tell him what had happened. A car had turned in front of his motorcycle. Later his mother had filled in all the details. They were fresh in her mind, she said, because she had just been talking to their lawyer. The company insuring the car and driver had made a generous offer. The car had turned in front of him where Miracle Mile intersected Ft. Lowell Road. Root thought it was funny it had happened next to the graveyard. As kids they had joked about riding their bikes past the cemetery after basketball practice in late November when it was nearly dark. They had joked about what might happen to you passing a graveyard after dark, or even in broad daylight — three-thirty in the afternoon — the time his accident had occurred. Ghosts might hop into a wagon or onto a motorcycle.

Root stands up. Calabazas has been pulling thistle burrs from the burro’s fetlocks. He knows Root has something to tell him, but it takes Root time to get it out. Root stares at the tall hollyhocks blooming near the sagging clothesline. He finds something to focus on so he doesn’t have to watch the face of the person listening; so he doesn’t have to watch their difficulty understanding his words. Root concentrates on the intensity of the colors of the blossoms — the reds that are dark as wine, garnets, even blood. Root feels sweat break out across his shoulders. It soaks his T-shirt. It runs like ants from his armpits down his ribs. He tells Calabazas about the men who’ve come. Not Mexicans, but foreigners who are very short and very dark and speak strange Spanish. They say they’ve come from El Salvador.

Calabazas is staring at the little donkeys bunched in the shady corner of the corral. He is still calculating the weight of one ghost. Somewhere near five hundred pounds. “How did they find you?”

Root shakes his head. “They say they were told to find me to reach you.” Elaborate precautions had to be taken against narcs and others. Calabazas takes a last, hard suck from the cigarette and throws the butt hard against the ground. He doesn’t like strangers looking for him. “Tell me more.” Root shrugs his shoulders. “Brand-new leisure suits — sort of tan colored. All identical. Everything — white plastic belts, white loafers. Blue shirts. Bad haircuts.” Calabazas chews the end of his thumb but says nothing. Root decides Calabazas is ready for the best part. “They pulled up to my place in an old Volkswagen with Sonora plates. They each carried a blue suitcase. Brand-new powder-blue Samsonite.” Calabazas draws himself up straight, and looks Root in the eyes. “What?” “Samsonite.” Usually Calabazas understands his speech much better than anyone except maybe Lecha. Root frowns and tries to repeat the word very slowly, straining to control every single sound. “Samson-ite — it’s the brand-name luggage.” Calabazas doesn’t always understand English. It wasn’t just Root’s slurring of the words. There seemed to be days when Calabazas didn’t understand English at all. There was no explanation.

Root sees Calabazas still doesn’t understand him. Root used to cry in the hospital from the frustration of all that he wanted to say and all the sounds he could not form. The light-blue Samsonite suitcase each man carried is important. It reveals something, although Root is not sure exactly what. He knows that if Calabazas can only understand what he is saying, he will be able to interpret the meaning of the identical blue suitcases. “What do they want?” “To talk to you.” Calabazas remembers what Samsonite is. “What do they carry in these suitcases?” Root shrugs his shoulders, and Calabazas grunts. The men aren’t showing anything unless it’s to Calabazas. “How many?” Calabazas acts as if he can’t remember if Root has already told him or not. Root holds up four fingers. The sun is high enough to make the mule corral hot. Root feels the sweat sticking his T-shirt to his belly and his back. This talk about ghosts in wagons and strangers with blue suitcases looking for Calabazas has left Root tired and hungry. He follows Calabazas out of the corral. Calabazas walks away from him without saying any more and crosses the bare, smooth-packed adobe of the yard to the back door of the old house. Calabazas is lost in calculating all the angles, as he himself might put it, all the ways to figure these Salvadorians with new Samsonite luggage.

Root is ready for a cold beer. Maybe Carlos wants to drive out to the Stage Coach. Calabazas calls Carlos “Mosca.” Carlos claims he has no idea why the boss calls him that. Root calls him Fly. Carlos says that doesn’t bother him because in English fly can also mean the zipper, the opening, the crotch, and this suits him perfectly, Carlos likes to say. Carlos is related to Calabazas’s wife. Mosca mostly does what Root does, except Mosca’s customers live on the South Side. They don’t talk much. Root has no curiosity about the Fly’s life. Root figures Mosca’s life is a lot like his own. Mosca talks a lot sometimes, depending on what drugs he’s on. Other times he doesn’t say anything. Root tries sometimes to figure out why he and Fly get along, but it is no use. Root knows a question like that has never crossed Fly’s mind. When they go out together, it is usually to places where there is little need to talk, only to watch and to listen. They like the Stage Coach because there is always a stripper on stage and they can watch the bikers play pool.

Mosca comes out the back door of the old house blinking rapidly until he can get his dark glasses on. The deep, dark blue of the lenses is one of his trademarks. Maybe that’s where Calabazas got the nickname. Mosca is short and wiry. His head and the blue lenses of the sunglasses are a little too large for his body. Root can feel the cocaine ten feet away. The cocaine acts like a fuel for a system of electric turbines located deep inside the human body. Electricity from chemical reactions crackles and sizzles through the bloodstream. Root can look over the top of his head. “The horse races,” Mosca announces, patting his pockets to indicate he had some deliveries to make there. Root nods his head and realizes he is grinning. Because Mosca is so damn happy and even the buzzing of the cocaine in him is strangly in tune with the sound of the cicadas in the giant tamarisk trees in Calabazas’s yard. They will buy two six-packs on the way. Mosca estimates the distance from where they stand to the big four-wheel-drive truck Mosca is so proud of. “I’ll race you,” Mosca says. He is the only person who acknowledges Root’s disabilities. Mosca finds Root’s brain damage fascinating.

Mosca challenges Root to physical contests he figures Root can’t win. “Because I like to win. I like to win against you. It feels just as good. Don’t ask me why.” Mosca likes to say that he doesn’t believe cripples should be given special favors. Mosca parks his big, black, four-wheel-drive Chevy in spaces painted with wheelchair symbols and marked with handicapped signs. Mosca laughs. “You are not handicapped if it is easy for you to get around. Special parking places make it too easy,” Mosca said.

Mosca knows horses. He sneers at what he sees in the paddock where the trainers saddle for the next race. You are betting on whether the trainer has shot the horse too full of crank and it keels over dead on the backstretch. You are betting on which runt jockey fucks up the deal and bumps his nag into the number everyone is betting. “Mosca.” “The Fly.” At the track Root sees another way the nickname might have come. Mosca is getting the numbers. He never bothers to look at the horses. He flits through the crowd. Root waits, leaning against the fence by the finish-line rail. The horses seem to float when they run. Hooves barely touch the surface of the track. Their eyes shine hot. They are lighter than their bodies. Root had stopped growing after the accident. The part of the brain sending those chemical messages was gone. It was better that way. Less hulk to drag around. Root had learned how to walk again after three months. He might have blamed the accident for the size of his cock if he had not seen the size of his father’s and his brothers’. None of them would have won any prizes.

HORSE RACES

ENTRY NUMBERS and the odds flash across the tote board in the center of the racetrack. Root is fascinated with the foam between the horses’ hind legs. The lather on their necks. Mosca is beside him now, watching the board. “Look out for the ones that sweat too much…. No, no, that one isn’t sweating at all. That’s an OD…. No, man; these are horses, remember?” He shows Root a number so that no one standing close can see. “It’s this one. You want me to put fifty dollars on it for you?” Before Root can say anything, Mosca is gone, headed for the WIN window. A man in a white linen suit steps in line behind Mosca. All he needs is the panama hat. Root sees he’s carrying something in his left hand, hidden inside a Racing Form. He says something to Mosca as he turns away from the window with the yellow tickets. Root imagines something familiar about the face. Italian or maybe Jewish. Root asks, but Mosca keeps his eyes on the horses loading into the starting gates on the far side of the track. “He’s got a couple of horses, that’s all. Personal pleasure. Strictly amateur,” Mosca says. Root wants to see the face again, the face of a man who has nothing better to do than watch his horses run and snort what he buys from Mosca. But the man in the white linen suit is gone. Root tries to imagine the car he drives and the women he fucks. All “white linen” quality throughout his life, Root figures, then turns in time to get hit with dirt flying off the hooves as their horse finishes first.

Mosca reappears long enough to count out the money. Odds were only five to one, but a couple of hundred is okay for standing around drinking cold beer and watching the people. Root drifts away from the fence. He likes to watch the trainers and jockeys saddle the big horses. A few of the owners are there. Root likes to try to figure out why they own racehorses. He understands how people spend money on sex, cars, and clothes; and of course, drugs. But Root wonders what it is about the horses. The owners don’t ride them. Most of the owners don’t even watch the horses run except for the big races at the big tracks. But what were these horses, and what was this track doing in Tucson? Then there was the man in the white linen suit with the two gorgeous fillies, horses with class. Those horses were only pasing through, to be graded for better tracks. The fillies were led from the paddock to join the other entries parading in front of the grandstand. Root looked for the owner’s name on the racing program, but saw the fillies were listed as the property of a private investment group. Half of the horses on the program were listed that way. Tax shelters: strings of nags running on two-bit tracks. The more horses that got hurt or just lay down and died, the more money people made.

In the truck Mosca pulled a pint bottle of whiskey from under the seat. He handed it to Root and then began pouring neat piles of cocaine on the dashboard. Root took big swallows and passed the bottle back to Mosca, but he shook his head and nodded at the pint. Root finished the bottle, and when he had opened his eyes and wiped the sweat off his face, Mosca was offering him a segment of a red and white plastic straw. “McDonald’s,” Mosca said, showing big white teeth when he grinned. “Man, you sure surprised me! I heard all those stories they tell about you, you know, things like that, but—” The cocaine was already plumping up his brain cells. Root imagined a feather pillow being fluffed and smoothed into a soft, round belly of comfort and ease. He did not care what Mosca was saying.

Mosca snorted his two piles and pointed the straw at the last two piles while holding both nostrils shut with his other hand. Root glanced around the parking lot and then took the other two. As he raised up from snorting the last pile, he saw a white Mercedes pulling out from long rows of stalls. He caught only a glimpse of the driver, but Root knew it had to be the man in the white linen suit. Root glanced over to see if Mosca had any reaction to the white car, but Mosca was fumbling with a plastic bag full of marijuana and rolling papers in his lap.

“You shouldn’t take those things so seriously,” Mosca was saying as he roared down First Avenue doing sixty. Root didn’t mind the speed, but he was thinking about Tucson cops who instantly turned speeding tickets into illegal searches. But Root was clean. Only Mosca had been “transacting.” The sensation of the engine and the motion, tires whining and the exhilaration of the cocaine, settled Root back in the seat where he watched as the world was left behind.

“Eat my dust,” Mosca says then, and the big Chevy veers suddenly into a convenience store lot. He leaps down from the high cab, makes two calls at the pay phone, dashes in the store for two cold six-packs, and screeches the truck into reverse. From where Root sits it is abundantly clear where Calabazas got the name Mosca; quick and busy; all over everything at once. The Fly. Mosca shoves a cold beer in Root’s hand, then lights up another joint. The dingy upholstery shops, wrecking yards, and one-stall repair shops on First Avenue fall away from them faster and faster. Root has a sensation of well-being he has not felt in years as the big four-wheel-drive truck blasts ahead.

The last time Root had felt so good he had been a kid. Eighteen or nineteen. Right after he first met Lecha. They all took acid and went riding. He had just bought a beat-up Harley. He thought he had everything he wanted. The chopper, a woman. A real woman. The acid let him feel just how good it all really was. Later Root was uncertain he could trust his feelings then because he had been high. But the acid had not lied, not that time. When it was all over, after his accident, the first time Root smoked dope, that afternoon of riding motorcycles with his friends had flashed back to him. Vividly. The fresh smell of the desert, creosote, sage, and sand. The temperature of the air and the temperature of his own body so perfectly aligned that he was no longer sure where his body ended and the rest of the world began. They had turned down Silverbell Road to get away from the city traffic, and Root remembered the instant he saw the trees on both sides of the road. Masses of brilliant-yellow blossoms seemed to cascade off the paloverdes and lie in deep yellow pools beneath them. He had just been to see Lecha a few hours before, and it was as if for a brief instant he had poured out of himself into something larger, and the motorcycle was carrying him deep into it, and clouds of yellow flowers were billowing around him endlessly until he no longer knew how he was keeping the bike balanced upright, but he was, and he believed that he always could, and that he would always be in a world as infinite as this one. The beauty and joy of that afternoon had been a premonition, Root thought later. A last taste. Because the world was never the same after the accident. Vertical became horizontal.

Mosca, all the cousins, looked at the accident differently from white people. Calabazas and Mosca did not think it was strange that Root kept the twisted, broken Harley frame. Root’s mother had actually called the shrink when Root refused to sell the wreckage to a junkyard. Indians and Mexicans understood, or at least the ones Root liked understood. Root had moved out to his own place after that. He did not belong; his mother and brothers were strangers.

Root looks over at Mosca, who has broken free even from the laws of gravity; Mosca’s flying high with beer foam at both corners of his mouth, nose hairs caked white, and now one of the Fly’s famous cocaine monologues. It is as if they have been working on the same puzzle. Root’s accident. Root knows they feel the accident has significance, that it was a journey to the boundaries of the land of the dead.

FAMILY

MOSCA KEPT TRYING to make Root remember the accident. Root did not feel the same anger when Mosca asked. But the therapist had enraged him with her constant whining “Oh, come on now, try. Try to remember!” She had been trying to get him to remember his life before the accident. Remember. Remember your sisters and your brothers? Once he did start remembering, Root had screamed at the therapist that he wanted to forget again. His family were strangers; they were repelled by his condition, by the shaved head and the scars on his skull. Big zippers. Frankenstein zippers. “See, I can unzip it,” Root had said to his youngest sister, meaning to tease her and play as they once had. But she had shrunk away, almost knocking their mother into the IV bottle.

Mosca wanted Root to remember, but Mosca was not interested in the past, or memories before the accident. Root had teased Mosca about acting like a shrink, always trying to get him to remember “Christmas with the family,” and Mosca had suddenly turned serious. “Man, don’t take this personal. I have no room to talk. But man, your family! If I were you — yeah! I’d forget all of them, man.” Mosca could say that because he had driven Root to his mother’s place a few times on holidays. Mosca said there was nothing worse than half-Mexicans or quarter-Mexicans who were so stunned by having light skin they never noticed the odor of their own shit again. Root agreed with Mosca. The way he had it figured, his mother and grandmother had spent their time praying he would die in the coma.

For years, for as far back as Root could remember, Mosca had wanted Root to remember what the accident had been like. “What do you mean, what it was like?” Root would say.

“Well, you know, old Calabazas, he said one time people who get wiped out like that — you know, almost killed — well, they get visions or they take a long journey.” Mosca would pause and wait for Root to take up where Mosca had left off; he wanted Root to talk about the soul journey and about visions. Root always got exasperated and said he remembered nothing. That as far as he knew, he had not even dreamed while he was in the coma. Mosca would look disappointed, and then hurt. “I thought we were friends,” he would say. But Mosca is a patient man, and Root can’t think of a month gone by without Mosca’s mentioning Root’s accident.

Mosca wheels the truck down Ft. Lowell to Oracle. Mosca has done this with Root so many times, Root thinks he may not even realize he is doing it. Mosca drives Root through the intersection where the woman in the real estate company car made the illegal left turn that had sent Root on his way; flying on his motocycle to nowhere. But after a while, Root got used to Mosca’s notion the collision with the ’60 Plymouth had sent him somewhere. Try to think and remember, cast yourself back into months of coma.

It had taken Root a few years to decide which people were worse: the ones who gawked, mouths opened so wide they slobbered on their shoes, or the ones who pretended they had seen nothing out of the ordinary when they passed him in the shopping mall, but if Root glanced back over his shoulder, he would catch them staring at him. Root soon learned the worst were those who thought his limp and dragging foot somehow gave them the right to walk up and start telling him about their daughter or son-in-law and the fall in the bathroom or the can of poison green beans that caused the paralysis.

It had not taken Root very long to figure out that the gawkers and the queasy stomachs were invariably in the shopping malls and department stores, or were well-dressed white women passing the physical-therapy wing during hospital visiting hours. Downtown, Root had instinctively felt more comfortable. Gray-haired women loaded with shopping bags waiting for buses might look, but Root watched to see how they looked at people walking ahead or behind him. It had been a great relief to see that these old Mexican women saw nothing any more remarkable about him than the others passing by: two dark, fat Papago teenagers carrying a boxy, silver tape player shoulder-high, between them, heads cocked to the speakers; the tall, balding lawyer perspiring in his dark brown suit and vest, briefcase in hand; or the leftover rich hippie in black leather jeans, his long blond hair spreading down the back of a red silk tunic. Root felt he belonged there.

Mosca had taught Root a lot, but so had Calabazas. Not intentionally, but the longer Root worked with both of them and saw the Yaqui cousins who worked on the other end, the more Root realized they did not expect what white people might call “normal” or “standard.” There had never been any such thing as “normal” for them. When Root had first begun working with them, the delivery routes had been far more difficult and remote. Hours and hours of night driving off the crude roads, careening down sandy washes for miles into the heart of the Tohano O’Dom Reservation, had taught Root not to see things as “normal.” Calabazas always did the driving, and the wonder was that all three of them had not been killed as Calabazas leaped the battered ’54 Dodge pickup over arroyos four feet wide. If Calabazas thought Mosca and Root were trying to catch some sleep, he would light up a Kool and begin a lecture on desert trails and secret border-crossing routes. Once Root had remarked that he thought one dull gray boulder looked identical to another dull gray boulder a few hundred yards back. Calabazas took his foot off the accelerator, and Mosca had tried to save Root by adding quickly, “Maybe in the dark they look alike.” But that had not prevented Calabazas from giving them one of his sarcastic lectures on blindness. Blindness caused solely by stupidity, a blindness that Root and Mosca would probably always suffer from, just as they would always suffer from the location of their brains below their belts. “I get mad when I hear the word identical,” Calabazas had continued. “There is no such thing. Nowhere. At no time. All you have to do is stop and think. Stop and take a look.” The old Dodge truck had slowed to a crawl; the engine idle sounded wheezy. They had left in plenty of time for the rendezvous with the couriers. Calabazas stopped the truck and turned off the headlights. He made them both get out. Mosca was yawning and pretended to moan and whine “uncle” at Calabazas, but it was no use. He made Root and Mosca walk ahead of him in the sandy wash. The deep, white arroyos reflected a strange luminous-silver light from the stars even without a moon. Calabazas was only worried about his merchandise, he said. Because fuckers like them were a dime a dozen, and he couldn’t care less if they got themselves lost, or ran themselves out of gas or got stuck, and then died after they’d finished the five-gallon water can.

Root suspected it might have been fatigue and the fat green joints he and Mosca had smoked hours earlier. Root’s ass had been dragging he was so tired; but that night Calabazas marched them up and down, up and down the same stretch of the arroyo, until Root suddenly realized what the old bastard was saying. “Look at it for what it is. That’s all. This big rock is like it is. Look. Now, come on. Over here. This one is about as big, but not quite. And the rock broke out a chunk like a horse head, but see, this one over here broke out a piece that’s more like a washtub.” Root had rubbed his hand over the edges of the fracture lines, and although both rocks were the same dull gray basalt, he had been able to feel differences along the fractures. One had been weathered smooth on the edges. One sat slightly higher on a gravel bench shaped by the confluences of the wash. The other rock had rested at its location long enough to collect a snarl of tall rice grass and broken twigs and tumbleweeds at its base.

Survival had depended on differences. Not just the differences in the terrain that gave the desert traveler critical information about traces of water or grass for his animals, but the sheer varieties of plants and bugs and animals. Calabazas liked to talk about the years of drought, when so many rodents and small animals died, and the deer and larger game migrated north. “Buzzard was the king those years. You should have seen. They don’t have to drink much water. They get it from the rotting meat they eat. It swells up with gas and then it makes greenish water. Buzzards gather around and feast. It is like their beer. They drink and drink.” The old Dodge pickup was spinning and sliding around corners sometimes in the dry wash, sometimes on a faint wagon road parallel with the wash. He parked the pickup by a big mesquite tree, but Calabazas kept lecturing even after the engine stopped.

Mosca pretended to gag on Calabazas’s lecture, then he laid his head on the dashboard and went to sleep. But Root sat leaning out the truck window, catching the cool, damp smell of the summer desert night. Being around Mexicans and Indians or black people, had not made him feel uncomfortable. Not as his own family had. Because if you weren’t born white, you were forced to see differences; or if you weren’t born what they called normal, or if you got injured, then you were left to explore the world of the different.

Root always remembered the last remark Calabazas had made that night, just as they were drawing near the basalt knob where the drop was to be made. Calabazas said, “Those who can’t learn to appreciate the world’s differences won’t make it. They’ll die.”

Mosca skids to a stop for the red light. Root knows Mosca could clear the intersection while the light was still yellow, but it has been Mosca’s custom to hit the red light at Oracle and Ft. Lowell so they can pause a minute or two at the site where Root’s journey to the world of differences had commenced. Root tolerates Mosca’s obsession because Mosca sees the accident as supernatural intrigue and the brain damage as strange power. Mosca strides into a crowded bar on a Friday night with Root, weighing 260, dragging a foot and slurring words, and Mosca is oblivious of the stares and remarks. Root is fairly certain Mosca doesn’t know any better. Mosca doesn’t understand why white people become uneasy when they see cripples or brain damage; their fear is irrational. They believe another person’s bad luck is contagious no matter how many times they are given scientific facts.

THE HAPPY ONES

MOSCA IS OBLIVIOUS of the bars all over Tucson where blacks, Mexicans, and Indians aren’t welcome. Mosca moves in so fast and gets so caught up in the sounds and faces that he never registers the hostile eyes. Quick, quick he is around the entire room, in and out of the men’s room, scanning the pool tables, poking quarters into the jukebox, and counting the whores and single women. Mosca could spend the night sipping at his beer and watching a man across the room, whispering to Root from time to time, as he tried to figure out whether the guy he was watching had gotten his face fixed by the feds for testifying in the federal witness protection program. Mosca knew all about cheap face-lifts and the “new” identities. Mosca knew a bookie in Phoenix who took bets on how long the protection of a federal witness would last once the feds had finished with the witness.

At the intersection light, Mosca smiles broadly at Root and nods his head. His nose runs a little and Mosca wipes it on the back of his hand, takes a swallow of beer, and says, “I been shot twice. Once in the shoulder with a.38 and the other time a.22 in the stomach. But you know, I never passed out or anything like that. Because right away it doesn’t hurt. Later it hurts. But for me, I don’t know — it was like good dope right in the vein. I sort of could see myself, you know? Everything going on around me. I just lie back and watch. I saw everything even though both times the guys who were there said my eyes were closed and I looked like I was out. But I could tell them everything. That my aunt and her boyfriend came while the medics were working over me and they left to get my father. I could even tell them that one of the pigs that came right after it happened was a woman cop.

“But you don’t remember anything about your accident.”

“No,” Root says, and then Mosca starts repeating what Root has told him, which is the little that Root’s mother and the police report revealed. Mosca doesn’t care if they are zooming down Oracle Road with the graveyard and intersection far behind. He repeats Root’s story lovingly. Green Plymouth station wagon, a white woman driving, works for a real estate agency. This makes Root want to laugh, but the beer and the drugs make Mosca seem as distant as a face on a television screen. But Root likes to hear Mosca’s different versions of his accident. Somehow it feels less personal for Root then, and more like one of the old stories Calabazas is always telling about ghosts jumping into the back of a wagon.

“Three-thirty P.M. A Thursday.”

“Wednesday,” Root corrects him, although the day of the week hardly matters at all, but then it will seem more like conversation than Mosca and one of his litanies of disaster.

“Oh, yeah, man, I always get it confused—”

“With the time they shot you on Thursday.”

“Yeah, right: got me on a Thursday afternoon. Cinco de Mayo party along the riverbank.”

“That was the.38 in the shoulder—”

“No, man — the fucking.22 in the gut. And I tell you something, that.22 was plenty bad. These guys all want to be carrying a bigger piece.” Mosca pats the front pocket of his white jeans. “Twenty-two magnums will kill you just as dead as.38 specials. Aim for the head.”

Root nodded. It was the speed, the muzzle velocity, and the shock. “Yeah, like the speed of this pickup.” Root nods at the speedometer. Mosca glances down, then mugs a face full of mock surprise. The truck tires squeal around the corner of a side street. Mosca likes to use side streets to ditch the heat. Mosca likes to be able to pull over to the curb in the neighborhood and pour those toots of cocaine on the dashboard. Mosca is laughing now, and Root sees just how crazy this bastard is. But so happy. One of the happy ones, as Root’s own mother used to say, her eyes roaming the hospital halls, or the wards where microcephalic children rocked back and forth strapped in high chairs. Root’s mother thought their moans and grimaces were laughter and smiles. “Poor little things,” she’d say as she pushed Root in the wheelchair, “they are the happiest ones because they don’t know any better. They are happy like they are.” Root had not associated the retarded children with himself. There was no comparison. Then suddenly he realized his mother believed he was retarded by the brain damage. She had screamed at him before the accident; she didn’t want him with “that element.” She wanted to wash her hands of him when she saw the motorcycle. To her a motorcycle and friends with motorcycles meant Hell’s Angels.

Root had sat up as straight as he could in the wheelchair. He had not made any sound, but his cheeks and the front of the hospital gown had been soaked by the time she had pushed him back to his room. She had made little clucking noises when she saw the tears, and Root had hated her so much at that instant it had been all he could do to keep from trying to smash her, smash her face with anything he could get his hands on — the bedpan, the dirty breakfast dishes and tray still lying on the table. Root identified the clucking noises with the sound he knew she would be making for her grandchildren, any day now, when his sister hatched the first grandkid. Root wanted to bash in her head because she had abandoned him, left him with the other “poor things.” She would always see him as one of them. She would always reassure herself that he was happy no matter how many times the doctors and therapists had assured her Root had not lost intelligence or cognitive power; what was gone was partial motor control affecting his balance and speech. The insurance company had paid. But the money had not gone to Root. His mother had arranged the trust while he was still in the coma. Eighteen or not, a man in a coma wasn’t a man. Fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money. When he could finally ask her, she had brushed him off. It was all invested in real estate, she said, and he was never going to have to worry about a thing. He’d be taken care of. Root had seen how her eyes and attention drifted away from the covey of earnest young neurologists standing in front of her, out the hospital window to the roof of the other hospital wing where pigeons were quarreling in spiral swirls over the huge air-conditioning unit. Root’s mother did not seem to hear them when they told her the results of the latest testing they’d done. Her son might be missing a good portion of his brain, but that he still had an IQ only a few points below the genius level.

“No, Mom, I’m not one of the happy ones. But Mosca is.” Root carries on imaginary conversations, inside his head. Mosca almost glows with excitement. He is pointing to a bus stop just beyond the dry-cleaning plant and a little way from a scrap-metal yard. Mosca turns to Root and only his hands have anything at all to do with driving, and even then, they flap on and fly off the wheel while Mosca babbles about witches. Mosca says he has just figured it all out. “What?” “How the accident happened.” Mosca knows how Root’s head got dented by that Plymouth fender. They are only ten or twelve blocks from Calabazas’s place, and Root is thinking this high-wheeled truck could literally run over the top of a sports car. How about a sports car full of secretaries? With Mosca’s luck they’d all be secretaries in downtown law firms specializing in accidents. And Mosca added there’d be no way to tell if any of them had got brain damage in the wreck. “You don’t damage what you don’t got in the first place!”

Mosca sees that Root is with him, listening, so he turns his attention back to driving in time to whip the truck around a city bus stopped in the curb lane. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before,” Mosca says. “You see, it all adds up. Someone in your family could have arranged it. Or it might have to do with women or the bad things your great-grandfather did around here. You know, in the old days. You can never tell. Myself, I’d bet on someone in the family.” Mosca pauses. “I don’t know. I hate to say this, but from what I’ve seen”—Mosca looks over at Root to gauge his reaction so far—“I hate to say this but — your mother.”

“My mother.” Root repeats the statement. No question mark. Not “My mother?” but “My mother.” Yeah. Root knows Mosca is right about his mother.

Mosca finishes the beer and flings the can to the floor by Root’s feet. Mosca’s brain doesn’t need the extra spin that cocaine gives it; now the brain whirs faster than the poor asshole knows how to talk. “She was always pissed off at you, right? After your dad died. She was always on your back about your scooter, right? She always thought you were supposed to help out more.” Root nods; he knows beter than to argue with a drunk crazy man.

Root can see the tops of the tall tamarisks in Calabazas’s yard looming down the block, and he wants to say, “Okay, okay, go on, go on,” but Root’s high is too serene and too comfortable for words. Root can only nod at Mosca, who is back on the sins of Root’s great-grandfather. Mosca was born and will die a Catholic, but he quotes the Bible like a fundamentalist. Mosca goes to the tent meetings on South Fourth Avenue. Mosca claims it can’t hurt to know what those cracker Baptist assholes are thinking.

TUCSON WITCHES

ROOT LETS HIMSELF slide farther down into the deep bucket seat of the big Chevy four-wheel-drive truck. All the border smugglers drive them. They are the equivalent of Lincolns or Cadillacs for pimps. Root prefers taxis. He likes Mosca’s theory of witchcraft as well as any he has heard for the accident. Middle afternoon, dry and clear, on a straight stretch of Oracle Road. The woman who hit him testifies she saw nothing. Suddenly his body was just there on the hood of her station wagon. Mosca claims witches have methods of making their victims invisible momentarily so that just this sort of accident takes place. Witches can make a two-hundred-pound man dressed in a bright yellow-and-red hunting vest appear to be a turkey gobbler with a powder-blue throat under a pine tree. An instant after a hunter pulls the trigger the body of his hunting companion falls where the turkey had been. Mosca is really hot now. He is interpreting the meaning of the spell of invisibility. Root knows he is right. That one meeting between Mosca and Root’s mother had been enough. She had not wanted Mosca to sit on the living room sofa or chairs. She was certain they both had motor oil on their clothes from riding motorcycles. But when Root carefully showed her both of them were wearing clean shirts and jeans, Root’s mother ignored him. She had been ahead of them already, telling them she had cookies and coffee in the kitchen and that they’d all be more comfortable in there. Mosca knew immediately it was his dark skin that had set off Root’s mother. He had heard all about this woman’s grandparents and the early days of Tucson. How many Indian slaves they had owned? Why they had refused to sell a young Yaqui girl to her own family after her father and the brothers had walked three hundred miles to bring her home!

Mosca kept talking. “Yeah, your mother probably told the witch. She probably said something like, ‘I wish he would just disappear,’ or something like that, you know?” They had crossed the river and were driving down Silverbell Road; Root could feel his high level off. In a minute or two, the sensation of the ground crumbling under his feet would surge through his body, and Root would need more cocaine and more whiskey. “The witch made you disappear for a second or two, just long enough for blubber ass to turn in front of you. The witch could have been right there that day. Walking on the sidewalk by the cemetery, waiting for you to come riding along. That’s how they work. That’s how it happens.”

Mosca has pulled the truck off the road under the tall tamarisk tree in the deep shade. He is talking while he is spooning out more cocaine. “It might look like just another old potbelly man walking his scabby dog. Or just another wino hobbling along on crutches. All it takes is a split second.” Root can’t dispute Mosca because he doesn’t remember. He can’t even remember the week before the accident. If he could only remember. Memory returns but in slow motion; the accident must have happened in slow motion, the way all his falls were in slow motion as he learned to walk again.

Mosca is still rambling on about witches as he skids back on the road. Mosca pinches both nostrils and throws his head back violently. Root is riding his high the way he imagines desert hawks ride the updrafts over the arroyos and ravines. Root doesn’t want to spoil the feeling right now. He imagines the moment as an edge polished with fine emery cloth. In the truck, Root leans out the window and opens his mouth. He remembers as a kid he tried to drink the evening air because it smelled so good.

“When was the first time you ever really saw a witch?” Root says as clearly as he can, but Mosca is lost in blasting the big pickup down the road, swerving around slower traffic, and Root has to repeat the question patiently, two more times. Mosca shoots a curious look at Root because it is the first time Root has brought up witches. Mosca smiles, shakes his head, relaxes the foot on the accelerator, and hands Root the sack with the peanut butter jar. Root rolls up his window and reaches for the tiny silver spoon.

Mosca settles back in the seat, steering now with one hand. “I ended up in jail on account of a witch.”

“What witch?”

“The first witch I ever saw,” Mosca says. “You know I can see them. I can just take one look and I know.”

“How?”

Mosca shakes his head. His expression is serious. “I was driving down Miracle Mile. I was on my way to sentencing. My first time. I mean ‘first time’ as an adult. Anyway, I was driving and I was real nervous. I was going before the worst judge — Arne.”

“Arne’s the federal judge,” Root interrupts, but Mosca only nods.

“Now he is, but before that, he was a state judge…. I was driving down Miracle Mile and I had just made that big turn by that used-car lot across from the Motor Inn where all the whores like to stand, and I looked over at the bus stop and I saw him.”

“A witch?”

“Yeah, I saw this guy, and the instant I glanced at him, he looked right at me, right into my eyes. That’s how I knew. It’s all in the eyes. The lawyer had said whatever happens, don’t be late. But I couldn’t get over it, you know? I figure the witch probably sensed I have the ability to see things like him. Anyway, all the hair on my neck was chilled stiff, you know, and I could feel sweat just pouring off me. I had plenty of time. It was just twenty to ten by the bank clock, so I thought I would go around and take another pass by the bus stop. I was sort of scared but curious too. It was July and hot, but I could see this old man wore something black and long — I thought it was a long overcoat or raincoat. Then I realized he was wearing a long black skirt. The witch pointed at me and laughed.”

“A long black skirt? Did you ever do acid, Mosca?”

Mosca slows the truck dramatically so he can give Root the most intense gaze possible. “I was going before Arne to be sentenced! You think I’m crazy?”

HOMELESS

MOSCA VEERED SUDDENLY off Silverbell Road and turned onto a narrow tire track that snaked through the mesquite forest on the vacant lot behind the Safeway store. Beyond the forest was the big arroyo. The hobos and tramps rolled off Southern Pacific freight trains night and day during the cold months. Mosca was taking the sandy road so fast that mesquite branches had nearly torn off the big side-view mirrors of the truck. Mosca was high and talking a mile a minute and pointing out campsites and trees where he’d slept. He had been annoyed when Root made a joke about Mosca’s sleeping in a tree like a monkey and not under a tree. Mosca said all Root had to do was take a good look at the campsite under the big mesquite trees set back from Interstate 10. “Go ahead! Go ahead! Take a look!” Root couldn’t see what Mosca was pointing at. The cocaine had made Mosca impatient. “See the way they made a fort out of piled-up branches they tore off trees?” Root nodded. He could see what Mosca was talking about. It was the kind of fort he had built with the other kids in the summer down along the riverbanks. Make-believe forts where they pretended to live because they knew they could walk away anytime.

The campsite Mosca had pointed out stood apart from the other lean-tos because of the similarity and orderliness of the tents and lean-tos. Root noticed a number of the tents displayed U.S. flags.

“You want to talk about crazy,” Mosca began dramatically, “those war vets, those guys are really something! They call this their ‘firebase camp.’ ” Mosca was leaning against the hood of his truck fumbling to light up a joint. Root could only see a few men outside the shelters; one wore a green beret. Another wore a camouflage T-shirt and combat boots; otherwise to Root they looked like any other homeless men camped along the Santa Cruz River.

“I been inside their firebase,” Mosca said, exhaling the marijuana smoke as he spoke. “They have bunkers, sandbags, everything just like the movies. One of them even calls himself Rambo.” Mosca kicked at empty plastic milk and bleach bottles scattered around an old campsite circle of soot-blackened river stones.

Root had listened to Mosca before on the subject of homeless white men. Women and children were different, Mosca maintained, and the war veterans were different too. But the rest of the grimy white men who lived on the streets Mosca called “hobos” and “tramps”; they had no excuses except laziness and they liked to sleep under cardboard in a city park. Mosca knew they liked to sleep in the street because he himself had lived on the streets for a couple of years even when he could have gone to cousins or to other relatives anytime he wanted.

Mosca said he used to get an incredible high off transient living. He claimed it was really a great high — street survival. “Almost as good as coke!” Root laughed out loud. He didn’t care if Mosca got upset. Mosca was crazy. Mosca was leaning against the hood of the truck, fumbling to light up a joint. He was still talking about living on the street. It was the “accomplishment,” Mosca said, the accomplishment of survival all on your own, without any help, that’s what made Mosca high.

“Well, you don’t feel it right away,” Mosca says in response to Root’s laughter.

Mosca stopped to spoon coke up both nostrils, then passed Root the vial. Mosca squatted by the truck, then rocked back on the heels of his cowboy boots, both eyes closed. The rush made Mosca smile. “Okay,” Mosca says dreamily. “What I mean is — you learn it’s not so bad. It’s not the end. You learn you can do it.”

When they got back into the truck, Mosca purposely made a wide turn so they could pass close to the war veterans’ camp. Mosca was talking a mile a minute about the nut who called himself Rambo and the big black man who was his lieutenant. “You ever talk to any of those guys?” Mosca went on before Root could answer. “Those guys are scary. War taught those dudes all kinds of bad shit! I like to hear them talk. Demolitions, night attack—” They were speeding down Silverbell Road and Mosca was laughing. Mosca thought it would be really funny if they ever got hold of a little dynamite and a few rifles. Homeless war veterans attacking the country they had defended so many years before. Mosca thought it would be the funniest thing in the world.

Mosca shook his head violently and waved both hands in front of him. Root was amazed the truck did not veer off the road. The white men on the street were genetically defective. Mosca was certain of it. Take mass murderers for example. They were always white men with educations and good jobs, even families. Symptoms of trouble never came in time to stop the slaughter. There was a lot of evidence these days, Mosca said, that the mass murder of family members might be a scientifically desirable outcome in the certain cases where the entire family was hopelessly defective. The healthiest family member killed all the others. Look at the survivors of the death camps in Germany. They had carried death with them like an incurable fever. All Germans had been infected by the Nazis — even the poor Jews. Mosca blamed all the violence in the Middle East on Israel. Each time a Palestinian child was shot by Israeli soldiers, Hitler smiled.

Root shook his head. “I never get over what a fucking racist you are, Mosca.” Mosca does a “Who me?” routine, but goes right back to his theory. According to Mosca’s theory, the battered and murdered children are the offspring of defective parents who instinctively kill their own offspring because none in their line is genetically fit to continue.

Root had watched Mosca a thousand times: Root watched as the rage gathered, and then Mosca erupted in a fury of words — his rage and indignation blazing like automatic rifle fire. Mosca’s foot would crunch the accelerator and his hands would twist the steering wheel savagely, and the big Chevy Blazer would go skidding around corners, fishtailing into the straightaways. It had been during these berserk rages that Root had seen how he and Mosca the Fly would die. Not in a rain of bullets from the DEA or local narcs; not even shot in the back by one of Calabazas’s nephews. They would die maybe even this next minute because Mosca had noticed cars and pickups carrying the middle-aged couples, mostly white people but with a scattering of Hispanics and blacks. They were the low-level civil servants and clerks: the meter readers and delivery-truck drivers who had risen to managerial level by obeying the rules, written and unwritten. Mosca became outraged by the suck-ass expressions on their faces. They were the puritans who believed they were the chosen, the saved, because they were so clean, because they were always so careful to obey every rule and every law. Every yellow and red light was one of their lights, and Mosca plowed through full speed, scattering vehicles at intersections, while he raved and ranted about the churches, rotted with hypocrisy.

Root had learned the only way to stop Mosca’s outrage over the faces in the cars on the street was to get Mosca’s attention on something that delighted or amused him. Root pretended to be indifferent to the screeching of brakes. Root knew Mosca did not want any response from him. All that mattered to Mosca was getting it off his chest. A reply from Root or anyone might interrupt the flow of outrage. Mosca used to laugh and agree with Root that he did have enough hate and homicide in his heart to last all of them a long long time.

The dumb faces were so full of self-righteousness after church that Mosca wanted to slit their throats. What good would that do? If they had been to Holy Communion, Mosca would be sending them straight to heaven, Root pointed out. But Mosca was pounding his fists on the steering wheel and shaking his head violently from side to side. “Look at their faces!” Mosca had shouted as the big Blazer veered head-on at the car Mosca was pointing at. Root had looked and seen puffy white faces, middle-aged female and male, frozen in stupefied horror. Mosca had whipped the truck back across the center line at the last possible moment.

After Mosca left, Root opened a beer and sat for a long time in the dark thinking about the system and how it worked. Calabazas liked to talk about Root’s great-grandfather and the other white men in Tucson. “You can read about it if you don’t believe me. What they did. The whites came into these territories. Arizona. New Mexico. They came in, and where the Spanish-speaking people had courts and elected officials, the americanos came in and set up their own courts — all in English. They went around looking at all the best land and where the good water was. Then they filed quiet title suits. Only a few people bothered to find out what the papers in English were talking about. After all, the people had land grants and deeds from the king of Spain. The people believed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo protected their rights. They couldn’t conceive of any way they could lose land their people had always held. They couldn’t believe it. Some of them never did. Even after it was all over, and all the land and water were lost.”

Root was still sitting in the dark when Lecha came in. “I hired a nurse,” Lecha said. The taxi was waiting in the driveway.

Root reached over the grimy sofa arm and switched on the lamp. “Who?”

“That blonde. The one that lost her kid. I hired her. Secretary. Nurse.” Lecha sat down on the sofa close to him and started rubbing up against him like a cat. Her eyes were glittering as if she was high on something. Whatever it was, it had aroused her. Still, she was quick to sense his mood. Lecha had not forgotten the months after the accident, and even after Root could again talk and walk. She had come into town and found him sitting in the same ratty armchair or lying on the same sofa where she had last seen him two weeks before.

“So what’s this about? Business?” Lecha wasn’t going to let him forget that he’d told her she couldn’t stay there because of “business.”

“I was just thinking,” Root said.

Lecha raised her eyebrows the way Root often did, when he asked a question. “About how old you are getting. And how fat I’m getting,” Root joked.

“Wrong,” Lecha said. “You were thinking about your great-grandfather and all the money he made off the Apache Wars. You were wondering if the sins of the great-grandfather bash in the head of the great-grandson.”

Root looked closely at Lecha. “What are you on? I could use some.”

Lecha laughed and laughed. “Nothing!” she said in a light, young-girl’s tone, lying and hoping he’d let her get away with it. Lecha gave him a big kiss and then threw open the door of the trailer. She called out to the taxi driver that she’d be right there.

Root helped her wrestle the folded-up wheelchair down the trailer steps. The taxi driver couldn’t fit it in the trunk, which was already jammed full with Lecha’s suitcases and other luggage. Root knew Lecha was nervous about seeing Zeta, or maybe it was seeing her son, Ferro. Lecha had waited until she was high enough and had someone to go with her before she’d return to the ranch in the mountains. Lecha leaned out the window of the taxi. “Thanks, sweetie! Take care of that business now!” Root stood in the doorway of the trailer looking down at her. He nodded his head slowly.

IMAGINARY LINES

AS THE TAXI LEFT HIM at the end of the driveway, Root thought he could see a darker form against the black silhouette of the big tamarisk tree in Calabazas’s yard. Root could hear kitchen sounds and a radio playing rock and roll from the front of the L-shaped adobe, and more distantly another radio playing norteño—accordions, trumpets, and guitars that made a peculiar combination of Mexican Indian music and German polka. Root had never paid much attention to classes or teachers when he was in school, but he had never forgotten the color plate of Maximilian and Charlotte in their gold and jewel-crusted regalia as emperor and empress of Mexico. Blond and blue-eyed, they had been surrounded by legions of short, dark soldiers and honor guards. Maximilian collects insects. He has more and more sexual liaisons with servant girls; Charlotte becomes obsessed with ridding the castle of spiders and vermin. Maximilian sleeps on a billiard table.

Root could see the red ash on Calabazas’s cigarette. Calabazas had dragged two five-gallon buckets under the tree for them to sit on. When Root got close, Calabazas had shoved a bucket to him. Maximilian and Charlotte had got as far as any Germans were going to get with Mexican Indians. Charlotte went crazy; she kept trying to get maids and servants to kill the flies and spiders crawling and flying through the royal apartments. The chastised German ladies-in-waiting had complained to Maximilian. The Indians and mestizos refused to kill insects in the palace or the garden because spirits would be offended. When Maximilian began to execute palace chambermaids for spiders and flies found in the royal bedchamber, the days of their reign had been numbered.

Calabazas gazed toward the northwest at the quarter moon descending. They sat and smoked in silence. Finally Calabazas cleared his throat, then spit between his boots. “You two, where were you?”

“Racetrack. Getting high.”

“You saw—”

“Horses.”

“And Mosca?”

“He moves pretty fast.”

Calabazas nods and drops the burning butt between his legs, then grinds it flat with a bootheel. Root sees that Calabazas is drawing himself into his oratory posture. Calabazas calls it “Indian style” when he talks and talks before he turns at the last moment, to the point he wants Root to get. For a long time it drove Root crazy, and he wanted to yell at the old man to just tell him what it was, what was bothering him or what had gone wrong. But over the years Root had learned that there were certain messages in the route Calabazas took when he talked.

Calabazas lit up another cigarette and took a long drag before he started. He blew big smoke rings that tumbled toward Root’s face before they broke. “I was born here. My great-grandmother was born here. Her grandmother was from the mountains in Sonora. Later the other Yaquis used to hide up there from the soldiers. I have to laugh at all the talk about Hitler. Hitler got all he knew from the Spanish and Portuguese invaders. De Guzman was the first to make lamp shades out of human skin. They just weren’t electric lamps, that’s all. De Guzman enjoyed sitting Indian women down on sharp-pointed sticks, then piling leather sacks of silver on their laps until the sticks poked right up their guts. In no time the Europeans wiped out millions of Indians. In 1902, the federals are lining Yaqui women, their little children, on the edge of an arroyo. The soldiers fire randomly. Laugh when a child topples backwards. Shooting for laughs until they are all dead. Walk through those dry mountains. Right now. Today. I have seen it. Where the arroyo curves sharp. Caught, washed up against big boulders with broken branches and weeds. Human bones piled high. Skulls piled and stacked like melons.

“Did the Jews know? Did the Americans know? So many Yaquis had fled north to settle here in Tuscon. But did anyone care when these reports were told?” Calabazas stands up, takes a last drag on the cigarette, then tosses the butt, ash glowing, into the center of the yard. He leaves Root sitting then returns carrying a small red ice chest. He offers Root a beer and opens one for himself. When Calabazas gets like this, he will talk all night. Root wonders if he can last. Somehow this day has wrapped up about five days in itself.

Root decides he will watch the tail of Scorpio. When the fourth star of the stinger drops below the horizon, he will tell Calabazas he needs to sleep. Calabazas doesn’t start talking again until he’s downed half of the first can.

“We don’t believe in boundaries. Borders. Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the first whites. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong on this earth. We have always moved freely. North-south. East-west. We pay no attention to what isn’t real. Imaginary lines. Imaginary minutes and hours. Written law. We recognize none of that. And we carry a great many things back and forth. We don’t see any border. We have been here and this has continued thousands of years. We don’t stop. No one stops us. You have a working name. That’s nothing new. I made up my name. Calabazas, ‘Pumpkins.’ That’s what you did. Invent yourself a name. See, my brothers and cousins at San Rafael grew them. Big beauties. A big river down there. Plenty of water for the pumpkins. I’d load up with altar candles in little red glasses. My wife and my sisters-in-law would spend a week making big wreaths of paper flowers. Liria, my wife’s youngest sister, could make colored paper talk. Could make it sing. She had a crush on me. She made big orange squash and pumpkin blossoms — they looked so real that other people stared at me and my brothers when we spread them over our parents’ graves — how they admired the flowers Liria made!

“So there I’d be at the border crossing, the back of my old green Ford pickup loaded with candles and flowers and usually a goat or fat sheep for the feast. The guards on the Mexican side don’t care, hundreds of Yaquis crossed for the feast of All Souls. I never had any trouble. One time a goat tied in back got loose and ate all the paper-flower wreaths, but I’ve always had good luck. Right at sundown we’d cover the graves with flower wreaths and candles in the red glasses blinking. My sister-in-law and nieces would set out a bowl of goat stew at the head of each grave. We’d sit up at the graveyard drinking all night, listening to Uncle Casimiro’s claims that he’d talked to the souls, and they say they don’t know any more now than they did when they were alive.

“I don’t know. We live in a different world now. Liars and feebleminded are everywhere, getting elected to public office or appointed federal judge. Spoken words can no longer be trusted. Put everything in writing.

“I’m not saying where or how the marijuana was grown because it grows wild and always has. My brothers kept the pumpkin harvest in an adobe shed behind the house. I’m not saying where the mota was. I’m not even going to say which way we cut those calabazas, but while we worked in the shed, my sister-in-law and little nieces were cooking pumpkin soups and puddings. Roasting all those fat, yellow seeds.

“At the border I’d wait and cross with all the other Yaquis returning from All Souls’ Day. The U.S. only has a two-man station at Sasabe. They hated to see the Indians coming because they knew that meant rat-trap cars, pickups loaded down with pigs and firewood, corn and melons. The U.S. guards were on the alert for brothers and uncles hiding under firewood. They didn’t think we were smart enough to bring across anything else.

“So the first time I tried it everyone was skeptical. Except my family in San Rafael. Because they knew me. But my wife and her family — well, I had to prove myself. So the first time when I drove into the yard back in Tucson, the back of my old truck was piled high with pumpkins, big and orange-red like full moons. Liria was watering the chrysanthemums and Liria yelled, “Calabazas! Calabazas!” when she saw my load. And from that time on, that’s what they call me. Younger generations don’t even know I have another name. The pumpkins — well, they were something special. Even in those days, what I sold that load for was a great deal of money. My wife’s family had to take notice.

“I married the wrong sister, but at least I married the right family. At one time they owned fields up and down the Santa Cruz River valley. They only saved a few fields after the outsiders came. That’s when our families were forced to find other ways to make a living. We have always had the advantage because this country is ours — it’s our backyard. We know it in the black of night. We know it in the July heat of hell. The gringos come in and the going for us gets rough. But we just get tougher. That’s how it’s always been.

“So now I get the drift of certain rumors,” Calabazas said, finishing a third beer. The moon was gone but the glow off the city lights and the mercury-vapor light down the driveway illuminated their faces. Root could see that Calabazas was trying to gauge how much he knew. Root wasn’t family. Wasn’t one of the nephews or a husband of a niece. Calabazas had hired Root because Root’s great-grandfather had hired him once. Calabazas used to laugh about the turnabout. It gave Calabazas great pleasure, and now it was causing him some doubt. Root looked right back at Calabazas. Calabazas could trust him or not.

Finally Calabazas said, “I don’t know what will become of an old man like me.” Calabazas had settled back with his head against the tree trunk, his eyes closed. “You — the only one that’s never wanted to be boss. All the rest, Mosca included, they have a dozen deals on the side so they can be making their own profits while I ride the risks.” Root nodded. The tail of the scorpion was the only star remaining above the horizon. Root felt sorry for Calabazas. Forty or fifty in-laws, cousins, and nephews had depended on Calabazas for as long as Root had known him.

“It’s Max Blue — with friends in high places.” Calabazas was referring to a specific cocaine route, the one used by the CIA.

That was the old story. But the new story traveled inside the bright blue Samsonite suitcases.

Calabazas wanted to keep what was his — all the years he’d worked with the Guatemalan and Salvadorian connections. Except now the pressure was on. “Your country boys with their brand-new suitcases, know where they’re from? Did you see what they were carrying in the suitcases?”

Root shook his head. Root had pretended he did not understand whom they were looking for or what the transaction might be.

“I told them I have to think. I have to think about it.”

Root nods.

“Politics. It’s never helped any of us. But then here it is.”

BOOK EIGHT. INDIAN COUNTRY

RESISTANCE

CALABAZAS WATCHES ROOT disappear into the shadows of the tall trees. He gets a last glimpse when Root steps through the silver disk the streetlight spreads at the curb. Each year one was alive, things got more complicated. In the beginning it had only been the border crossings and occasionally payments to a few border officials, and they had been cousins or kin. But more and more people came. More and more outsiders. They had only been slight obstacles, nothing more to Calabazas and his enterprises than a washout on a back road or a boulder slide in the center of an arroyo. There had always been alternative trails, or other maneuvers. Calabazas had always known they would never touch him unless they got inside. From the first moment Spanish ships scraped against the shore, they had depended on the native Americans. The so-called explorers and “conquistadors” had explored and conquered nothing. The “explorers” had followed Indian guides kidnapped from coastal villages to lead them as far as they knew, and then the explorers kidnapped more guides. The so-called conquerors merely aligned themselves with forces already in power or forces already gathered to strip power from rivals. The tribes in Mexico had been drifting toward political disaster for hundreds of years before the Europeans had ever appeared.

How many years had the U.S. army garrisoned five thousand troops in Tuscon to chase one old Apache man, twenty-five or thirty teenagers, and fifty women and small children? When Geronimo had gone to Skeleton Canyon, he had gone under a white flag of truce, lured there by one of his most trusted lieutenants. Only by betrayal of the truce flag did the white men take him. Geronimo would never have been taken except with treachery.

It had taken Calabazas years to realize what the old scouts had seen fifty years before: the motives of outsiders and others were far more clear than the motives of friends and kin. They had lasted a long time together, Calabazas and Root. Sometimes Calabazas thought Root might have known more than he let on.

Calabazas had studied Root even before the accident, when Root had been smoking dope and riding motorcycles instead of going to school. White kid with Mexican and Indian second and third cousins. Root was tolerated because he had some of their blood. He was a second or third cousin but still a white boy. They never let him forget, but Root remained calm, as if those remarks only proved they had accepted him. Root liked to be the only gringo running with them. Root liked to be the only one people stared at or remembered.

Calabazas knew about Root’s mother and her mother too. The daughter of old Gorgon. How white their skin was! Nursemaids and servants had kept them all wrapped and veiled. They were not allowed to play with other children. Teachers were hired for the big house on Main Street. Root’s mother had rebelled when she was seventeen. The air force enlisted man she married had been the first man she dated. Calabazas had seen it happen many times. In time Root’s mother had come back around with the husband her mother called “trash,” much in the same way old man Gorgon had called all his daughters’ husbands “trash.”

The truth was that one could not trust a son or daughter. One could not trust a wife. Calabazas had decided to trust Root because he had a theory about this great-grandson of old Gorgon. Despite his blue eyes and light hair, Root was a throwback. Mosca was a different case. Calabazas had a good idea why Mosca had taken Root to the racetrack. Mosca was doing a little business of his own on the side. It might be nothing, but the racetrack was not a good sign.

The Italian families had been content to hide out, to “retire” to Tucson. Then the nephews and cousins had come West, and the racetracks and betting had come in. At first Calabazas and the old families didn’t mind. They’d let the wops have the Thoroughbreds, greyhounds, and whores. Because Calabazas’s people did their best work in the desert mountains, and on the vast burning miles between Tucson and Sonora. Because it was the land itself, that protected native people. White men were terrified of the desert’s stark, chalk plains that seem to glitter with the ashes of planets and worlds yet to come. So these mafioso-pimp syndicates did not move beyond the city limits. The old people did not call the desert Mother for nothing; they did not cry in vain.

Once Liria had asked Calabazas what their protection was from outsiders, and he had pointed at the sun and then out at the creosote flats and rocky foothills of cactus and brush.

“We are safe for as long as we have all this,” Calabazas had told her, and at the time he said it, he had believed there could never be any end to it.

Now Calabazas realized he had finally lived so long that from then on, he would be seeing more endings than beginnings. He had heard the old men and old women in the village when he was a child. In the darkness after the sun had been down an hour or so, they’d begin talking about how things had once been. They’d say “before” the whites came we remember the deer were as thick as jackrabbits and the grass in the canyon bottoms was as high as their bellies, and the people had always had plenty to eat. The streams and rivers had run deep with clean, cold water. But all of that had been “before,” and Calabazas had, even as a child, grown to hate the word, the sound of that word in the mouths of the old ones, and he hated its sound in Spanish and finally in English too.

Calabazas had resented what sounded to him like whining and crying of the old folks during the long summer evenings. He did not want to know what had happened “before.” Young as he was and with as little as he knew about the killing of his people, Calabazas was part of the new generation that the old-time people had scolded for its peculiar interest in “now” and tomorrow.

Now that it was safe, Yaquis were returning for visits in the twilight of their days. They brought with them these stories of what was possible in the North, in Tucson.

Calabazas had leapt at the chance to go North. He had been fourteen or fifteen. He had been restless. The old uncle and aunt he lived with kept saying a wife would be the solution. But Calabazas had thought the solution lay in getting out of the village. The mountain village had served as a sanctuary for a hundred years or so, but finally it was just a temporary refuge, and the people were anxious to get back to shallow, narrow rivers with the tall cottonwoods. The mountain village really mattered to only a generation or two who felt a great attachment and tenderness for sheer basalt ridges and thorny brush guarding the narrow trails to precipitous peaks. The contours and textures of the mountain had encircled the Yaquis in massive stone barricades that no white man’s army could penetrate. Calabazas knew his old uncle and aunt did not plan to leave because they felt loyalty for the ugly, barren mountain plateau. They wanted to be buried with their loved ones — beloved sisters and grandparents who had escaped the blood-drinking Beast to live out their last days in the high, rugged peaks.

Geronimo had spent the last half of his free life hiding in the high, rugged peaks of Sonora. He had made hits against the Mexican army on his way across the border to recruit unhappy kinsmen from the new reservations at San Carlos and the White Mountains. The Yaquis had been generous with their mountain sanctuaries and strongholds. Calabazas could remember himself the strange arrivals in the middle of the night, when he had been too young not to trust all that he had seen or heard. Nights when the village dogs gave only the low growls and whispering necessary to alert, and then had come low whispering, and from his bedroll in the corner he could press an eye to the little gap in the woven wall and see silhouettes of refugees from villages far away — loaded with bundles, the women weeping silently, dabbing at the corners of their eyes with the ragged edges of their shawls.

Years later after Calabazas had heard stories about the Apaches in Arizona at the same time the Yaquis were hiding in the high mountains. Yaquis liked to argue which groups had “it” the worst — the ones who stayed down with the land in the valleys or those who had gone to the mountain strongholds to fight. “We all fought,” old Mahawala liked to say after her first glass of beer. Calabazas always bought his aunt and uncle beer when he came home. And flashlight batteries.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY

“OF COURSE THE REAL MAN they called Geronimo, they never did catch. The real Geronimo got away,” old Mahawala said late one night when Calabazas was half-asleep. Although the small cook fire at their feet had died down to a few coals and there was no moon, he could still see the faces of these old-timers well enough in the light of the stars and the wide luminous belt of the Milky Way. High in the mountains, the old ones claimed they were that much closer to the clouds and the winds. They claimed people of the mountain peaks got special attention from the planets and moon. Calabazas had looked at each face trying to determine in an instant if this was a joke or not. Because if it was a joke and he appeared to take it seriously, they would have him. And if it wasn’t a joke, and he laughed, they would have him too. But when Calabazas realized the old ones were serious about this Geronimo story, he had given in.

Old Mahawala started out, and then the others, one by one, had contributed some detail or opinion or alternative version. The story they told did not run in a line for the horizon but circled and spiraled instead like the red-tailed hawk. “Geronimo” of course was the war cry Mexican soldiers made as they rode into battle, counting on help from St. Jerome. The U.S. soldiers had misunderstood just as they had misunderstood just about everything else they had found in this land. In time there came to be at least four Apache raiders who were called by the name Geronimo, either by the Mexican soldiers or the gringos. The tribal people here were all very aware that the whites put great store in names. But once the whites had a name for a thing, they seemed unable ever again to recognize the thing itself.

The elders used to argue that this was one of the most dangerous qualities of the Europeans: Europeans suffered a sort of blindness to the world. To them, a “rock” was just a “rock” wherever they found it, despite obvious differences in shape, density, color, or the position of the rock relative to all things around it. The Europeans, whether they spoke Spanish or English, could often be heard complaining in frightened tones that the hills and canyons looked the same to them, and they could not remember if the dark volcanic hills in the distance were the same dark hills they’d marched past hours earlier. To whites all Apache warriors looked alike, and no one realized that for a while, there had been three different Apache warriors called Geronimo who ranged across the Sonoran desert south of Tuscon.

Strategists for both the Yaquis and the Apaches quickly learned to make use of the Europeans’ inability to perceive unique details in the landscape. Although the Indians hired as scouts by the white armies were not so easily fooled, still the confusion of the white officers and their arguments with the scouts time and again gave the Apache and Yaqui women and children opportunities to escape their pursuers. The trick was to lead the chase to rocky terrain cut by narrow, deep arroyos. The longer the soldiers rode up and down the steep terrain, the more exhausted and afraid they became.

So the Apache warrior called Geronimo had been three, even four different men. The warrior of prominence and also of controversy among other Apaches had been born in the high mountains above the river now called Gila. This man had not been a warrior but had been trained as a medicine man. As the wars with the americanos and Mexicans had intensified, and the ranks of the warriors wanted men, the medicine man had begun riding with them on the raids. His specialty had been silence and occasionally, invisibility. With his special skills, the raiders had been able to move so silently not even the Apache scouts who worked for the U.S. cavalry had been able to hear the raiders walk past their bedrolls.

The old Yaquis liked to tell stories about the days when their beloved mountain canyons used to shelter the four Geronimos. They discussed the strange phenomenon of the Geronimo photographs and of course other matters, such as how best to exploit the weakness of the whites.

First they had settled back over mutton ribs supplied by the youngest of the three “Geronimos.” They each told their most strange or amusing experience with American colonels or Mexican captains who believed they had captured the notorious “Geronimo.” Denials or attempts to explain the mistaken identity were always rejected angrily by the white men. “You are that murderer! The savage beast Geronimo!” the white men would bellow. Explanations or denials had only been further proof of guilt for the soldiers.

General Crook had been careful to engage the services of the traveling photographer stationed in Tombstone. The photographs had been for national publicity to maintain Crook’s support among the territorial congressional delegations in Washington. The old people, who generally could not agree on the details of anything that had happened more than a minute or two before, had been unanimous about the photograph. Calabazas remembered he had repeated the word photograph to Mahawala, and one of the other old people mimicked his tone of dumb surprise. At the meeting of the three Geronimos, naturally there had been discussion of photographic images. All of them, even Red Clay, the final Geronimo who died in Oklahoma, had been photographed at one time or another. Sleet, the youngest of the Geronimos, had been photographed during a stay at Fort Apache when General Crook and the Indian agents had attempted to get the War Department to order the forcible removal of white squatters from mountain land that had already been promised to Sleet and his people.

The photographer who made the photograph had been at Fort Apache for a number of weeks by the time he learned from the camp mulemaster which of the Apaches was “Geronimo.” The photographer had perfected his Arizona-desert backdrop and had time enough to commission Apache women to create a huge feathery warbonnet unlike any headpiece the Apaches had ever seen, let alone worn. Sleet had dressed exactly as the photographer directed, then stood slightly to one side so that the long, trailing cascade of chicken and turkey feathers could be fully appreciated in the profile view.

Big Pine had been photographed around the same time. By then the photographer’s warbonnet had disappeared, and Big Pine had posed instead with a.45–70 across his lap. The rifle had no firing pin and the barrel had been jammed with an iron rod because Big Pine and his band had been arrested at their camp west of Tucson and even the small children had been locked in manacles and shackles. The locks and chains were “punishment” for “breaking away” from the Fort while Washington made a final determination of their ancestral homelands. Big Pine had tried to explain to the Indian scouts and interpreters that he was not “Geronimo,” that the one they were looking for was probably Sleet, and his band of warriors, who were headed for the border. Big Pine offered as proof their tidy little camp. Anyone could see, Big Pine said patiently, this camp had taken months to build, and that the venison drying in the sun had taken weeks of patient hunting. All this proved he and his band of women and children could not have just escaped from Fort Apache and gone there. The half-breed Apache scout knew Big Pine was truthful, and Sleet’s band had headed for Mexico. But the Indian scouts had discovered that American army officers did not like complications. The Indian scouts had already determined that if they ever revealed that mistakes had been made, and that there were probably three or maybe even four Apache warriors called Geronimo, all of the Apache scouts might be court-martialed and hanged. Every hotshot young captain had come to the Arizona and New Mexico territories eager to be the man who captured and brought in Geronimo. Cash bonuses were constantly offered to the army scout or enlisted man whose efforts led to the taking of Geronimo dead or alive.

The man who had been born at the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico and who had spent years as a medicine man before assuming certain duties on raids had gone by different names. He had been photographed in a group picture some years before with Nana, Mangaas Coloradas, and Jute. He was known to the Yaquis in the mountains of Sonora as Wide Ledge, which the Yaquis understood to be the meaning of his Apache name. But Yaquis also understood that a person might need a number of names in order to conduct all of his or her earthly business.

The discussion of the photographic image centered upon the group photograph, which Wide Ledge had been shown by a young U.S. cavalry officer. Wide Ledge recalled that the young white man had pointed to the flat paper. Here the chorus of voices in the darkness had quickened, and Calabazas knew they were nearing what they considered to be the heart of the story of the four Geronimos. Wide Ledge, old Mahawala told Calabazas emphatically, had done a lot of thinking and looking at these flat pieces of paper called photographs. From what he had seen, Wide Ledge said, the white people had little smudges and marks like animal tracks across snow or light brown dust; these “tracks” were supposed to “represent” certain persons, places, or things. Wide Ledge explained how with a certain amount of training and time, he had been able to see the “tracks” representing a horse, a canyon, and white man. But invariably, Wide Ledge said, these traces of other beings and other places preserved on paper became confused even for the white people, who believed they understood these tracks so well. Wide Ledge had actually observed a young soldier fly into a rage at the photographer because the soldier said the image on the paper did not truly represent him. The soldier’s friends had examined the photograph, but among themselves they could not agree. The photographer only wanted to be paid.

The secret, as a Yaqui or Apache might already have guessed, was that the black box contained a huge quartz crystal that had been carefully cut, polished, and mounted inside the black wooden box. Wide Ledge had had a chance to look through the flat, polished crystal; a boulder nearby had taken on a great many different forms while Wide Ledge looked through the lens. Wide Ledge said he was just beginning to have an understanding of the big polished crystal when the photographer saw him under the black cloth and began shouting at him.

Each of the so-called Geronimos had learned to demand prints of themselves as payment for posing. At meetings in the mountains they had compared photographs. The puzzle had been to account for the Apache warrior whose broad, dark face, penetrating eyes, and powerful barrel-chested body had appeared in every photograph taken of the other Geronimos. The image of this man appeared where the faces of the other Geronimos should have been. The old man called Nana by the whites studied the photographs and conferred with his acquaintances, elderly people who had ranged in the mountains even before the Apache Wars. The identity of the Apache in the photograph could not be determined, but a number of theories were advanced by both Apaches and Yaquis concerning the phenomenon; the light of the polished crystal, the light of the sun, and the light of the warrior’s soul had left their distinctive mark with the Apache face white people identified as Geronimo.

Opinion had been divided over the dangers of allowing a photographic image to be made. Could the face and body that kept appearing in place of the three Geronimos be evidence that at some earlier photographic session, the soul of an unidentified Apache warrior had been captured by the white man’s polished crystal in the black box and was now attempting to somehow come back? If so, why did this warrior’s soul appear only in connection with the three Apaches white people called Geronimo?

Well, there were many interesting questions surrounding the strange polished crystals in the white men’s black boxes, Sleet said. Why bother with speculations and arguments over whether the crystal always stole the soul or only did so when white men harbored certain intentions toward the person in front of the camera. The point was, Sleet reminded Wide Ledge and Big Pine, whites on both sides of the border were hunting the Apache called Geronimo. U.S. newspapers from Tucson to Washington, D.C., had the biggest headlines in the blackest ink Sleet had ever seen, demanding death for Geronimo. Wide Ledge was the oldest and most tired of the three Geronimos. Constant movement through rough desert country and the endless scattering of the women and children had exhausted this “Geronimo.” He had been ready to “go in” until the bootlegger in the whiskey wagon from Tucson had shown him that same newspaper. The bootlegger had read the big words to him, Wide Ledge said, and that had scared all of them. If they were going to die, to have their heads chopped off and their skins tanned for chair cushions, Wide Ledge and all his people had agreed, they would not make it easy for the whites. The people would crawl back into the stony crevices and cling fiercely like scorpions.

OLD PANCAKES

BUT WHILE THE THREE Apaches had been meeting to discuss the confusion of the whites over “Geronimo,” news came that Old Pancakes had surrendered to U.S. troops in Skeleton Canyon. Old Pancakes had been the best customer the Tucson bootleggers had ever had. Old Pancakes bragged that the bootleggers in Tucson protected him from the army; Old Pancakes would only “surrender” his tiny band long enough to rest, fatten up, then they would escape again. Old Pancakes bragged he was fighting his own personal war, for his right to drink when and what he wanted to drink, and as much as he wanted to.

Wide Ledge and Big Pine did not see why this news should concern them. But the young boy who had brought the news of Pancakes’ surrender stood before the three Geronimos seemed to have something more to tell them. Sleet told the boy not to be afraid to tell them whatever it was. Well, Old Pancakes had really done it. Old Pancakes had claimed he was the warrior called Geronimo. The Indian scouts doubted the story, but the attaché to General Miles had heard the name Geronimo. The attaché accused the scouts of withholding critical intelligence information. It was no secret General Miles wanted to do what his rival Crook had failed to do, namely, bring in the ferocious criminal Geronimo and make the territories safe for white settlement.

Thus Old Pancakes had finally been able to use his skills as a liar and joker to seize the opportunity to save the others. Old Pancakes had released all his men and women of fighting age early in the campaigns. For years Pancakes managed somehow to guide his small band of old women and small children left in their care, to one or two campsites in the Santa Rita mountains south of Tucson.

The boy reported that Old Pancakes had not expected the Geronimo trick to work because he was such an old man and he had no warriors with him anymore, and he spent most of his time dozing under shady trees in Skeleton Canyon or one of the other canyons in the Santa Ritas. But Pancakes had not counted on army politics. Even when the scouts failed to convince the attaché and the general that Pancakes was an impostor, Pancakes had been certain once the wagon carrying him in shackles and chains reached Tucson, General Miles and his aide would be set straight by other seasoned army personnel.

But as the troops with their captive arrived in Tucson, a strange thing occurred. A stagecoach load of East Coast journalists who had arrived a few days before came running out of bars and whorehouses. The only word Old Pancakes heard was “Geronimo!” Pancakes watched the bootlegger come out of his yard where the wooden vats of fermenting liquor were poured into oak barrels. Pancakes watched the face of his old friend who had made vast fortunes off the Apache Wars. Out came the townspeople who held contracts to supply the U.S. cavalry troops with hardtack, beans, and meat. Pancakes watched the faces of the Tucson city fathers.

Pancakes’ good friends, the white fathers of Tucson, realized the Army’s mistake but the swarms of journalists at the telegraph station and the army greatly outnumbered them. The news of Geronimo’s capture had been telegraphed to the entire U.S. By then, Pancakes had begun to be frightened by his joke. He could see he was not going to be turned loose, with all forgiven as a big misunderstanding. When the bootlegger and other Tucson dignitaries told the army they had the wrong Apache, General Miles revealed to the press there had been cooperation between some white men and the marauding Apaches. Although Miles did not say so, the implication had been the white businessmen in Tucson might have reasons for alleging Miles had captured the wrong Apache.

Within three days the president of the United States had sent a telegram to General Miles, rewarding him with another star. By then Old Pancakes had been locked up in Fort Lowell, and he realized the bootlegger and all the others could not stop what was happening. Pancakes’ last hope had been the skepticism of two reporters — one from the New York Times, and the other from the Washington Post. They had studied photographs in the general’s dossier on Geronimo. The general reminded them the photographs were from years before. As they could see from Pancakes’ appearance, the years of relentless pursuit had taken their toll. The reporter from the Times had a proposal. Would the general allow the captive Geronimo to be taken out the back door of the brig to be photographed? The man from the Times had already engaged the photographer. Miles, who was concerned that reporters might in some way tarnish his moment in history, reluctantly agreed. Miles remarked that he’d had nightmares since they had brought Geronimo from Skeleton Canyon. In the general’s dreams, Geronimo had brushed away shackles and leg irons as if they were cobwebs, and walked away, disappearing as the troops looked on, paralyzed by an invisible force. For more than fifteen years, five thousand U.S. troops, costing $20 million, had stomped through cactus and rock to capture one old Apache man more sorrowful than fierce.

“And what do you think?” old Mahawala had said, pointing her arthritic finger so it nearly touched Calabazas’s forehead. “What do you think? What did Old Pancakes see when they showed him the picture of ‘Geronimo’s’ surrender?” They had all been grinning at Calabazas, waiting for him to pick up where old Mahawala left off. Calabazas opened the last beer and began:

Old Pancakes did not go in much for photographs anyway. He held the photograph in his hands and turned it slowly around and over, sniffing it and sneezing from the strong smell of the chemicals. All the white men watching Pancakes would have laughed; the East Coast journalists would have laughed harder than the americano soldiers or the general, who was probably glancing nervously at the brushy slopes of the rocky foothills above the fort, watching nervously for the legions of war-painted Apaches he’d dreamed of the night before. The journalists loved the ease with which this savage desert and its savage creatures so effortlessly yielded front-page copy.

Hours later, after the plate was developed, they compared it to the wiry old man standing in front of them. Old Pancakes had never been defiant, but he had never given up anything he cared about either. He stood before them refusing to admire the piece of paper covered with brownish spots and smudges. The lieutenant and the major thought it was not a good likeness and turned to the photographer to ask for another shot. But the photographer said he wasn’t being paid by them, he was being paid by the gentleman from the New York Times. If the gentleman from the Times was satisfied, that was that. Of course there was little resemblance between Old Pancakes and the image of the Apache that appeared in the photograph.

“And so the three Geronimos suddenly were safe again.” Old Mahawala gave a grin as wide as a full moon.

“There,” she said to Calabazas, “you have heard that one again.” Calabazas had nodded. A lot of Yaqui stories about Apaches were not so good or amusing. Until the white men came, they had been enemies; sometimes they had raided one another. Of course, as they later reminded one another, the raids and the scattered deaths were not at all the same as the slaughters by U.S. or Mexican soldiers.

Calabazas had asked if any Yaqui ever claimed to know the identity of the Apache whose face kept appearing in the photographs. But old Mahawala and the others had only shaken their heads and begun to gather up the empty beer bottles to wash and reuse for home remedies. Then an old uncle had hobbled over to Calabazas. The face in all the photographs had belonged to an ancestor, the soul of one long dead who knew the plight of the “Geronimos.” The Apaches were nervous about the dead and the activities of their souls, but the Yaquis were not. The Yaquis had extensive experiences with just such occurrences. The spirit of the ancestor had cast its light, its power, in front of the faces of the three “Geronimos.” Calabazas had been fascinated, and he asked the old man if the spirit had entered those warriors. “Oh, no!” the old uncle had said, waving his arms and shaking his head. “That is something else again! Very different! Not so good!” The spirit could move in and out easily through a crystal rock, that was all, the old man assured Calabazas. So a camera could not steal the soul as some people fear. A camera could not steal your soul unless you were already letting it go in the first place. But Calabazas had never forgotten the last thing his old uncle had said that night: “Of course in the hands of a sorcerer, who can say what might happen. Don’t take any chances. Look where poor Old Pancakes ended up.”

WILD ONES

CALABAZAS SAT ON HIS narrow bed with his back against the wall and smoked one of the “special blends” he preferred at bedtime: fifty-fifty Prince Albert and marijuana. Calabazas laughed at the young guys who wanted the sin semilla, something that might have had more kick, but that had none of the sweet calm of a female plant that had completed her full cycle. He must be getting old himself if he was thinking about a night almost forty years ago when he had made one of the last journeys back to the Chalky Place camp where the last of the wild ones stubbornly lived out their last days, refusing to come down to the villages along the riverbank where the melons and pumpkins grew juicy and big, where their grandchildren now had toddlers playing in the white river sand.

The old wild ones would not leave the mountain camp until the claws of the winter winds raked their necks and legs with icy chills. But gradually, fewer and fewer of the wild ones reassembled each February for the return trip to the mountain stronghold. Calabazas had heard time and again that these last wild people at their moment of death always spoke of the mountains. Some spoke as if they were talking to the others, sometimes in a time of siege and grave danger, but more often, they were welcoming visitors or they themselves were returning to the strong hold. The last thing old Mahawala had told everyone was that human life spans weren’t much, and they should all remember that the soldiers had come once, and they would come again. The day would come when once more the people would have to flee to the mountains. Old Mahawala had even warned them they were becoming forgetful and arrogant because of all the white man’s toys, radios and televisions and automobiles, which were causing them to forget a great many important things. “You think it won’t happen again, that the time won’t come around again. Well, you just go ahead and think that way. I will be the sudden gust of wind that overturns your lantern.”

None of those old ones had ever forgotten the final year of the Yaqui struggle when Mexican federal troops slaughtered four hundred unarmed men and women at Rooster Hill. Even then, when the heart of every Yaqui was crying out, no Yaqui ever said “surrender.” It was the same war they had been fighting for more than four hundred years, ever since pig-anus De Guzman had come hunting for Yaquis to enslave for his silver mines. Thinking about De Guzman reminded Calabazas about Max Blue. The newspapers had said he had been an important man in the Mafia, but he had had serious injuries that forced retirement in Tucson. Calabazas and the others kept watch, and for a long time Max Blue had performed only out-of-town work — nothing south of Salt Lake City or Denver. But Calabazas and the others had watched the two sons grow up, while the mother bought real estate. Max Blue always had the perfect alibi when a gangland execution took place in Atlantic City or Trenton or in a garden restaurant in Manhattan’s Little Italy. Maybe because Max wasn’t getting any younger himself, but all along Calabazas had been worried about the two sons. Not because the sons themselves were anything special, but because of the mother. The woman. The wife of Max Blue. Calabazas had never felt easy about her. Because she was doing something all the time with land and with money. And while her husband was reputed to spend all his days on the golf course north of the city, Leah was seen all over, everywhere, and she flew to Los Angeles twice a month sometimes.

Calabazas took a last hit off the cigarette and headed outside for a last look at the night. More and more he was thinking about “retirement” too, except he meant real retirement, not like Max Blue, who arranged executions from the golf course. Calabazas was thinking maybe of Sonora, of getting closer to where he wanted to rest at last. Whatever retirement was, it couldn’t be any worse than the years Old Pancakes spent as “Geronimo.”

The women and children with Old Pancakes had been loaded on the train in Tucson. Sometime after the Apaches arrived at the island fortress off the Florida coast, white men from a school for Indians in Pennsylvania had come to take away their children. The Indian school in Pennsylvania was in damp country, and many of the Apache children fell ill and died. The Apache scouts, those betrayers of their people, got loaded on that train too. Those scouts who had enabled the U.S. soldiers to evade ambushes and traps, those scouts willing to sell the locations of the Apache camps, those scouts had gone to prison with the Apaches they had once pursued.

Calabazas had begun to notice that he did not sleep as much as he once had, and he identified that characteristic with old age. As the human soul approached death, it got more and more restless and more and more energy for wandering, a preparation for all eternity where the old people believed no one would rest or sleep but would range over the earth and between the moon and stars, traveling on winds and clouds, in constant motion with ocean tides, migrations of birds and animals, pulsing within all life and all beings ever created. Calabazas had not thought very often about warriors because they had died out when he was still a small boy. But he could not forget Old Pancakes. The last years Old Pancakes had been proof of the surprises and the sheer wonder still left in this world. Shrewd Pancakes had made the best of the situation. And if the whites wanted to pay him to ride spotted ponies in Wild West shows and wave an unloaded rifle over his head as the character the white journalists called Geronimo, then that was okay with the old man. Because he had seen a lot of changes throughout those years of struggle. As a boy he had ridden with the great man the whites called Cochise. But he had also heard what the great man had said before his death. Guns and knives would not resolve the struggle. He had reminded the people of the prophecies different tribes had. In each version one fact was clear: the world that the whites brought with them would not last. It would be swept away in a giant gust of wind. All they had to do was to wait. It would be only a matter of time.

Calabazas woke in the middle of the night from a dream in which the old ones long dead had gathered for a celebration.

“Drink up!” they all told Calabazas. “We are drinking to celebrate your wedding! Congratulations! What a lovely bride!” But in the dream Calabazas tried to tell them he was already married. He tried to find Sarita, but she was not in the room. Then through a half-open door, Calabazas saw the bride in her dress; the bride turned, but she was not Sarita, the woman he had married. She had Sarita’s body, with the big ass and small breasts, and the small, lovely hands. But the face was Liria’s, her sister’s.

TWO SISTERS

CALABAZAS GOT UP and made coffee. Another sign of old age. Brewing coffee long before sunrise. The dream that he was married to Liria and not her sister, his wife, Sarita, was the longest-running dream Calabazas had. Calabazas shaved while the coffee boiled. He had never dreamed the actual wedding before, probably because that had been the decisive moment, when both he and Liria should have spoken up. Because long before the wedding Calabazas had been in love with Liria. Liria had loved him too, but she had also been confused and frightened by her betrayal of her sister. Sarita was the eldest, the one the other children looked up to and had to obey. Liria had been just a girl, and falling in love with her brother-in-law-to-be had terrified her.

Calabazas folded the chrome legs of the shaving mirror and cleaned up the razor before he poured himself some coffee. It had been going on so long between Liria and him that even if he called Sarita by Liria’s name, Sarita answered and no longer even bothered to get angry or hurt. Because Calabazas had lived up to his side of the bargain; he had accepted responsibility for Sarita, as his wife, but also for the others, Liria included. The bargain had been made by representatives of both family groups, representatives who sometimes traveled to Sonora to be certain that Calabazas’s elder brothers and sisters were satisfied with the terms. There had initially been friction because the Sonora Yaquis felt the Tucson clan had adopted a somewhat haughty attitude. But already Calabazas had proven himself to be a brilliant businessman, expanding his import-export business year after year. He had taken the whole family, cousins and stray in-laws, and looked after them. Despite the thefts from both private citizens and the city of Tucson, the Brito family had managed to keep a sizable parcel of land along the Santa Cruz River.

Old man Brito, as he got older and his mind became less clear, imagined thieves were stealing his property. But when Calabazas or one of the others questioned the old man, he could not tell them what items were missing or stolen. Sarita’s theory was simple. Her father’s family had lost a great deal to the first whites who had settled in Tucson. The terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had guaranteed protection for all land titles granted prior to the arrival of the U.S., but the treaty had been violated again and again by whites greedy for the best land. Sarita and Liria never spoke of what the family had lost without great bitterness. Any talk about the lost land caused Sarita to become furious with him, Calabazas. At first Calabazas had tried to reason with Sarita, gently reminding her the anger she was feeling was for criminal acts committed years and years before. How could Sarita be angry at him?

At first Liria had refused to discuss her sister at all with Calabazas. Liria had been so upset about committing adultery with her brother-in-law that she would hardly speak to him at all even when they made love. It had taken almost a year before Calabazas had managed to get Liria to succumb. From the beginning something powerful had pulsed between them whenever they had looked at one another or whenever one spoke to the other. The strength of this feeling had caused them both embarrassment and apprehension. Liria used to glance nervously over her shoulder. Calabazas thought Liria had acted foolishly. Years later he realized her instincts had been correct, and they should have let the truth be seen. Sarita would have recovered and would have married again. Toward the end, old Brito had confused Liria with Sarita anyway, and for weeks at a time, old man Brito had embarrassed them because he thought Calabazas and Liria were husband and wife, and Sarita was still engaged to the neighbor boy who had died.

Day and night Calabazas had schemed, locating faint trails through dark volcanic rock and thick spiny bushes and cactus that figured in all his dreams. He preferred to do all the border crossing himself, but in time, as his clanspeople in San Rafael grew larger crops, it became clear Calabazas would have to hire help. The family and clan in San Rafael were getting ambitious too. They wanted to guide “travelers” north across the border for a small fee. The business of guiding strangers through the deserts of the south had been going on for longer than anyone could remember. The so-called “explorers” Cabeza de Vaca, Estevan, and Coronado could not have lasted more than a few days without the assistance of Indian guides. Without a guide, the traveler might die of heat and dehydration within sight of a cluster of rocks and mesquite where wild desert pigs and coyotes had managed to scratch water holes.

Calabazas told his relatives to do whatever they wished. Himself — he avoided human cargoes. Too many things could go wrong during a crossing. Ten or twelve gunnysacks full of marijuana could be hidden in the limbs of mesquites or behind big boulders. Gunnysacks or boxes could be abandoned, left for weeks. But human beings — there they were. What did you do with them? Calabazas had always had the philosophy it was better to put in-laws to work for you, even if they were always borrowing against their wages. Working for you, they were automatically tied up with what happened to you. It made the prospect of betrayal less likely. They might not like Calabazas. They might say behind his back that he was nothing but a parasite, and an opportunist, taking advantage of all the land the Brito family had along the river. They might complain that Calabazas thought he was better than they were, when here he was the one born in Mexico and not a legal citizen. They might have any number of slights, injuries to pride or reputation, blamed on Calabazas. But unless one wanted to betray and destroy the entire clan, nobody was going to sell information. No one was going to talk.

Calabazas realized they could stay with the marijuana and do reasonably well. In the beginning marijuana had been all they could afford because smuggling goods demanded up-front money. During the Second World War, Calabazas had concentrated on truck tires, and spools of copper wire, he brought across the border. The truck tires were worth many times the amount Calabazas had paid in Mexico.

Calabazas had always seen his marriage to Sarita as an arrangement with the family, as well as an arrangement with Sarita. Calabazas had exceeded all the wildest dreams of Sarita’s clanspeople. Husbands, brothers, cousins, and their in-laws only needed to ask and somehow Calabazas found them jobs.

Years later Calabazas could look back on that day with Sarita and laugh at himself. Because in those days he had been such a cocky bastard. He had thought back then he could “read” what was going on inside a person. How wrong he had been about Sarita!

Calabazas refilled his cup and stepped outside to watch the sun come up. Around at the front gate he thought he could hear the car doors opening. Liria had started going to six-o’clock Mass with Sarita. Did they pray for him? Did they pray for continued success for the family business? Very likely they prayed for that. But sometimes Calabazas wondered what they said to one another, now that they were getting older. Did they ever talk about what went on years before?

Calabazas had been so cocksure of himself he had never suspected Sarita. Out of the blue sky the bolt struck him. Sarita went to Mass every day at the downtown cathedral. Sarita had spent Saturday afternoons helping the women of the altar society wash the altar cloths and priests’ vestments. Calabazas suddenly remembered that as Liria was telling him about Sarita’s unusual devotion to the Church and to the altar society, he had sensed something strange. According to Liria, Sarita had been a goody-goody who had no time for high school dances. After school Sarita had walked downtown to assist the priests’ housekeeper with the evening meal or to finish washing up noon dishes. There had been six priests as well as the monsignor.

How stupid! How blind! How arrogant! A more humble man would have seen it. Sarita had been in love with the monsignor when she had married Calabazas in the cathedral. Her lover had given the Mass and his blessing to their marriage. All of this Calabazas had not seen because he had been in love with Liria.

Calabazas had started laughing then. He could remember the strange reaction of his beloved uncle and aunt to the wedding.

GAMBLING DEBT

THE BRITOS HAD SENT an invitation to Calabazas the day after he had arrived at his granduncle’s house in Tucson. Old Brito was notorious for his gambling debts. In fact, Calabazas seemed to remember that at Chalky Place camp they had laughed over Brito stories that had come filtering back from Tucson. Of course when Calabazas had arrived, he had found his poor granduncle needing someone to chop wood for him and someone to fill and carry the big milk cans of drinking water.

Old Mahawala had warned him to “watch out for Brito,” but at the time, Calabazas had not been able to imagine what she meant. “Cards and dice, cockfights, dogfights, that old Brito was always there, taking on everyone. Making wild claims.” Old Brito had been dark, wiry, with his top front teeth missing, and he kept an ancient revolver, almost as tall as he was, shoved down the front of his baggy trousers. That old Brito! What a troublemaker he got to be! No wonder they ran him out of San Rafael. But old Brito had saved his best trick — the big horse race — for last. Everyone was there. People had come up from Sonora because two of the horses running were from Mexico. Hands were full of fifties. They all made bets. The women sat on lawn chairs under bright-colored umbrellas although the sun was beginning to get low in the west. Old Brito was everywhere making bets. His sore hip never seemed to bother him when he was gambling. There had been four horses. The horse from Hermosillo was a big black one, and outclassed the others. But old man Brito had been taking bets all afternoon on a shaggy-looking gray horse owned by four Tucson men. The gray horse won the first race by a head, and old Brito had jumped up and down until the gun in his pants almost dropped on the ground. But for the second race, Brito bet on the black horse. Brito got a lot of money that way, betting on the black horse when everyone thought the gray would win again. By this time, the sun had just about disappeared, and a breeze was coming up from the river. The racetrack was near the riverbank, where the sandy soil was raked and packed just right.

The men at the starting line dropped their arms and the horses leaped down the straightaway. Oh, how the women in those days loved to shop for the paraguas, the parasols. Umbrella crazy they all were. The women went to the races to show off their umbrellas and to keep an ear cocked in the direction of the clusters of husbands and sons laying down their money. Calabazas had never forgot the festive scene at the races. The women and their gorgeous parasols might have been a dream garden of giant flowers, blossoming with turquoise roses and pink paisleys and parrot-green vines of leaves and buds covered with brilliant reds, yellows, and lavenders.

It had been a good start, but then a gust of wind off the river caught a bright-orange umbrella and tore it from the hands of a horrified woman. It had been as if all time had slowed down so that one could look at the racehorses exploding down the straightaway, head to head, and at the same time one could see the glorious orange umbrella above the heads of spectators. The umbrella paused, as if waiting for the racehorses to catch up with it before it began its descent. The orange umbrella floated down onto the center of the racetrack just in front of the finish line, where it caused a terrible pileup. Although three of the jockeys were thrown, none of the riders or horses were injured.

Brito had leaped onto the track an instant after the horses had collided at the finish line. He had whipped out the huge old revolver, which was so heavy he had to hold it in both hands. It had been one of his blind furies, which he claimed later he did not remember. As the riders brought the panting, foaming racehorses back down the track, Brito took aim and fired. He hit the jockey on the black horse in the thigh. The black horse half-reared, and the wounded rider slid off into the arms of the horse’s owner. Brito fired at the jockey again but managed to hit the owner in the arm. By then everyone had scattered, running hunched close to the ground, heads down. The sun had set and the night coolness with the damp smell of the river began to settle over them. All the umbrellas had disappeared from the spectators area, and the woman who had lost the orange umbrella had fled by way of the old riverbank path.

Brito had got himself deep in trouble because the owner of the black horse from Hermosillo had not come up to Tucson alone and had many relatives in Tucson. Before it got dark that day, word had gone out that friends of the wounded were in the mood to squash the little worm Brito. So Calabazas had paid off the irate Sonorans. Old Brito had worked a deal: Calabazas would marry Brito’s eldest daughter, Sarita.

Had old Brito and his wife already suspected Sarita and the monsignor?

MARRIAGE

SARITA WAS ALWAYS SERIOUS and quiet, as if her attention were focused far away. Later of course, Calabazas realized that had been precisely the case. Sarita had fallen in love with the monsignor, who must have begun fondling and petting her the first time she had volunteered to help the women of the altar society clean the cathedral.

Now Calabazas could look back and laugh. But at the time, the discovery of Sarita and the monsignor had been a terrible shock. It had been on the afternoon old man Brito died. Calabazas had returned early from one of his “business” trips. It had been a Wednesday afternoon. Sarita would be at altar society until six. Liria and Calabazas had time to go off to the back wing of the house if they wanted. Calabazas had been relieved to see that Sarita had gone to wash the priests’ dishes. He had had a lingering urge all morning to take Liria to the back room and push up her skirts.

The advantage of the massive L-shaped adobe house was that the back wing was separated by three-foot adobe walls from the front of the house. The back wing had two entrances, and if someone knocked at one of the doors, anyone inside the back wing could leave by the door on the other side of the building unseen by the person knocking. Liria kept a jungle of hollyhocks around the brick terrace of the back wing. A number of times Liria had had to hurry out one door and into the tall stands of hollyhocks and cosmos while Calabazas calmly pulled on his pants and picked up his woodworking tools to open the door to Sarita or Old Brito’s nurse. It was understood that Calabazas had possession of the back wing to prepare wooden crates with false bottoms or to clean the rifles and pistols.

But on this afternoon Calabazas had only just pushed himself into Liria, between her thick, smooth thighs, when there was a frantic pounding on the door to the terrace. Calabazas could tell by the light pounding it was the day nurse. He gave Liria two quick parting thrusts before he slid off her and picked up his pants. But Liria leaped up too because the nurse said the old man had fallen. Calabazas followed the nurse to the sitting room where old Brito lay gasping in the middle of the floor. The old man’s eyes were closed, but his mouth was open and his lips were making sucking, smacking sounds as if the old man were no longer a creature of air but a strange fish pulled up from the depths. Liria knelt over old Brito.

Her eyes were full of tears, but she was calm when she asked Calabazas to go after Sarita. Liria held her father’s hand and watched his mouth, which frantically sucked at the air while his lungs wheezed and rattled in the bony, heavy chest. The skin on the hand was as soft and smooth as a newborn baby’s, although the dark-brown pigment of the skin had faded in freckles and splotches. The day they had stood at each elbow with the old man at the grave for their mother, Liria and Sarita had known that it would not be long before they lowered their father’s coffin into the ground.

Liria had cried not because the rattles and gasps from the old man’s mouth were becoming less frequent, but because the old man had dictated that Sarita, as the elder, must marry first, and must marry Calabazas. Sarita had not wanted to marry Calabazas. She had not wanted to marry anyone, she told Liria. Liria cried because now the old man was leaving them, but their lives would never be their own. Calabazas had been the old man’s tool, someone to carry out his orders, to guard the land holdings, to keep the keys to the locks. The old man had had that kind of power over the lives of all of them. Something was ruined now the old man was gone. Liria could feel it. The old man had been the only reason Sarita, and not Liria, had Calabazas for her husband.

Old Brito’s entire body jerked once, then went rigid for a moment, then lay still. Liria lay his hand on his chest. A circle of dampness darkened the front of his trousers and spread wider between his legs.

THE MONSIGNOR

CALABAZAS WAS OUT OF BREATH and his voice sounded too fast and too loud. The women had been working in the pantry off the kitchen area of the priests’ quarters when he had pushed open the door. They were starching and ironing white cassocks and white linen altar cloths. Calabazas recognized them only as the older women, most of them widows, who knelt at the front of the cathedral and took Communion at every Mass. They looked startled, as if caught in an illicit act. Calabazas had to ask twice where Sarita was. The women had looked at each other, and by the expressions on their faces Calabazas felt they required some explanation. He told them that old Brito was dying. One of the women pointed in the direction of the monsignor’s apartment across the big courtyard, hidden behind a row of oleanders thick with white and pink blossoms. Later Calabazas would recall that the ladies of the altar society seemed to turn and hurry away abruptly, but at the time Calabazas had thought it was because they did not want to miss the drama of old Brito’s death.

Calabazas strode across the bricked patio and past the small fountain with white water lilies half closed and clusters of tiny golden carp. Calabazas did not think the monsignor would remain in his apartment during cleaning and dusting. The massive oak carved door was not locked, and Calabazas did not knock or wait, but called out once for Sarita as he pushed open the door. Sarita’s purse and shoes were on the floor next to a long wine leather couch in the room that served as the monsignor’s library and parlor. Bookshelves from the floor to the high, whitewashed ceiling were lined with black-leather-bound volumes. The monsignor’s desk was cluttered with envelopes and letters, and a gold-trimmed, black fountain pen with the cap carelessly left off. The polished wood floors were covered with Persian rugs in deep blues and dark reds, and the luxury of the room reminded Calabazas that parishioners and priests in the diocese had complained about the monsignor, who was, after all, a Jesuit.

The monsignor stepped out of the bedroom while Calabazas was facing the writing desk, and when Calabazas turned, he had expected Sarita, not the monsignor. The surprise left Calabazas speechless. The monsignor had closed the bedroom door behind him. Calabazas realized the long, dark-red robe the monsignor was wearing was not a cleric’s robe but a bathrobe, and the monsignor’s hair needed combing. Calabazas apologized for entering without knocking and explained there was an emergency at home and Sarita was needed at once. But the monsignor seemed preoccupied with something other than Calabazas’s words. The monsignor watched intently as if he were examining each word as it came out of Calabazas’s mouth. Calabazas could see the small kitchen through the doorway behind the monsignor. The sink and round glass-top table were spotless. The monsignor had still not spoken. Calabazas did not think he looked angry for the intrusion, but Calabazas mumbled an apology and turned to leave because he was not familiar with the ways of priests. But before Calabazas reached the door, he heard the bedroom door behind him open. Even after he saw the expression on Sarita’s face, Calabazas still had difficulty understanding what had happened. It was as if a part of his brain was tossing bits and pieces of information at him but he could not hold them together. They kept scattering — skittering away before Calabazas could form any coherent idea. The monsignor’s messed hair. The monsignor’s bathrobe. The monsignor’s silence. Sarita’s stricken expression. Sarita’s emerging from the bedroom. Then suddenly it was all there. At that moment Calabazas had not laughed. He had barely been able to swallow. But years later, when he thought of himself as the cocky young stud, so certain he knew the score on everything and on everyone, Calabazas had to laugh. He could imagine himself standing in the monsignor’s study, Persian rugs on the polished wood floor, the white-headed monsignor in his bathrobe with Sarita at his side. Calabazas liked to laugh now when he remembered his absurd pride, his absolute belief in himself and in his little world. Later Calabazas thought he and the monsignor might have stood paralyzed, staring at each other indefinitely, if Sarita had not pushed past both of them and run out the door. Calabazas followed her. The monsignor did not move.

The monsignor sang a High Requiem Mass for old man Brito. The vaulted ceiling high above the altar enveloped all of them in the monsignor’s baritone, and Calabazas realized how Sarita as a Catholic schoolgirl had been attracted to him. They had never talked about that day. Sarita continued with all her ladies’ altar society activities. Calabazas had never gone to Mass or confession anyway. Calabazas would get occasional glimpses of the monsignor driving one of the new Cadillacs donated each year to the diocese by wealthy car dealers. The last time Calabazas had seen the monsignor, walking near the cathedral, the purple-edged cassock had been hanging loosely and Calabazas realized Sarita’s old lover was sick. When the monsignor died, the newspaper gave his age as sixty-four. Sarita had moved on to radical young priests smuggling political refugees across the border, so the death of the monsignor did not sadden her.

JOURNEY OF THE ANCIENT ALMANAC

LECHA REACHED UNDER the pile of pillows beside her and found the wooden ammunition box with the notebooks and fragments of the old manuscript. Her medication left her feeling as thin as an air current a hawk might ride. She sank back on her pillows with her eyes closed and thought how easily she could imagine the gliding and soaring of the red-tailed hawks that often flew near the ranch house. What she needed was her late-afternoon injection so she could be up and around and doing something. She called for Seese although she was perfectly able to get herself moving. It felt nicer when someone else did it. Seese had made friends with the New Mexico Indian Ferro had hired. The gardener. The handyman. The hired man. She called for Seese again and tried to see the face of the little travel clock on the bureau, but its face was turned away from her. No matter.

The injection got everything under way. She was up and out of the pale blue satin nightgown and into her white garden caftan. Shoes were not important. She seized the wooden ammunition box full of notebooks and the loose squares of the old manuscript; the strange parchment got drier and more curled each season until someday the old almanac would reveal nothing more to an interpreter. She headed for the chaise lounge on the patio. Lecha had never been able to get old Yoeme to say much about the old notebooks, except all of the material transcribed into the notebooks had been on thin sheets of membrane, perhaps primitive parchment the Europeans taught the native Americans to make. Yoeme had told them the skins had been stretched and pressed out of horse stomachs, and the little half-moon marks were places the stomach worms had chewed.

• • •

“A number of the pages were lost, you know,” Yoeme had intoned, with her eyes half-closed so she could recall the details clearly. “On the long journey from the South. The fugitives who carried the manuscript suffered great hardships. They were the last of their kind. They knew that after them there would no longer be human beings who had seen what they saw. A dispute erupted among those few survivors of the Butcher.”

They argued whether they should send the strongest to make a run for it, or whether they should give up and all simply die together. Because they were the very last of their tribe, strong cases were made for their dying together and allowing the almanac to die with them. After all, the almanac was what told them who they were and where they had come from in the stories. Since their kind would no longer be, they argued the manuscript should rightly die with them. Finally, the stubborn voices prevailed, and three young girls and a small boy were chosen to carry the almanac North. The pages were divided four ways. This way, if only one of the children reached safety far in the North, at least one part of the book would be safe. The people knew if even part of their almanac survived, they as a people would return someday.

Flight to the North had begun after the occupation by the invaders. The people in the South had heard about the tribes far, far to the North from the traders who spent their lives walking north and south along trade routes. Traders carried parrots and orchids north and returned with turquoise and white buckskins. That had been the final argument: somewhere in the North there might be a few survivors of their tribe who had been given refuge by the strange people of the high, arid mountains.

According to the story, the four children left at night with pages of the almanac sewn into their ragged garments. The eldest girl carried a flint knife. The young boy was given a torn blanket. They were told their only hope was to avoid the slave catchers on horseback with dogs. They must find people in the villages who were not afraid to associate with fugitives. They were carefully instructed before they set out. They were told the “book” they carried was the “book” of all the days of their people. These days and years were all alive, and all these days would return again. The “book” had to be preserved at all costs.

“The story of their journey had somehow been included in these notebooks,” Yoeme said, thumping the notebooks with her bony forefinger. “They set out at night and traveled a great distance before day-break. They slept until sundown and set out once more. They were only young children. The eldest girl was twelve. Perhaps that is why the people in the places they passed were merciful and did not alert the local authorities. The story is all here in the notebooks.”

Many weeks into their journey, as they began to enter the edge of this stern motherland, they were weak with hunger. All along they had managed to find water and to ration what they each carried in the canteen gourds. Finally, early one morning as they prepared to sleep until dark, one of the younger girls burst into tears. She was so hungry, her stomach hurting and hurting worse than the “spike.” But the eldest girl was suspicious of these tears because only the day before they had each got a handful of gourd seeds from a man tending his garden.

They had entered a dry, barren terrain of sharp stones and steep hills cut by gullies. Few people were to be found anywhere along the trail they followed now. When they had met people, they saw there was little food to be had. They were told the aliens had stolen their modest harvests year after year until the people could hardly keep enough to seed the gardens the following season. The children saw few birds or rodents and no large animals because the aliens had slaughtered all these creatures to feed themselves and their soldiers and their slaves. It had been many weeks since the four children had seen meat of any sort. So the eldest girl became suspicious and asked the younger girl to lift the sacklike cotton garment she wore. But the younger girl refused. The eldest knew then what had happened, and she jerked up the ragged dress. The other children were horrified to see the younger girl had torn an opening in the hidden pocket, exposing the edges of the almanac pages.

While the other three had slept, the younger girl had lain next to the others secretly chewing and sucking the edges of the brittle horse-gut pages. The eldest led the others, and they began slapping and kicking the younger girl until she collapsed on the ground in tears. But they were weak from hunger, and soon they stopped and sat on the ground beside her and cried too.

Of course nothing had been lost because the little girl had eaten only the edges of the pages. But as the children continued on, they began to find entire villages that had been abandoned, where the people had not even bothered to carry grinding stones or cooking pots with them. Finally they reached the point on the river where the village known as “the Mouth” is now located, but at that time, all that marked the place was the big grove of cottonwood trees there. The children found the houses empty, but fortunately they found water in a seep dug by coyotes under the cottonwood trees. The children thought they were alone in the village and had just settled themselves in a huddle to sleep when they heard the sound of a woman singing. The voice sounded happy and the children hardly knew what to make of it. She was a hunchbacked woman left behind by the others when they fled the invaders and their soldiers. The woman moved along the ground like a spider to get around in the village and could even reach the water. But of course she could not have fled to the mountains with the others.

The woman began to smile and talk rapidly to them in a language they had never heard. When they did not respond, she smiled again and gestured for them to come closer to her, and to the cook fire she had kindled in front of her house. She pointed into the big soot-layered cooking pot that was beginning to simmer. Bulbs and roots the woman had dug along the dry riverbed floated in the water like the severed arms and heads the children had seen in a lake near their home in the South. Ferny green leaves floated among the bulbs and roots, and the woman brought out a flat, small basket with crystals of rock salt.

The little boy fell asleep in the shady doorway while the girls sat staring at the hunchbacked woman whose face seemed as big as her body. They had been traveling for months and they had met people who were afraid of them — afraid of who might be tracking the children and of the disaster that contact with fugitives might bring. The girls studied the crippled woman for a while and whispered to themselves. They concluded the woman had been abandoned, left for dead. She seemed so happy to have them. She must have been alone a long time. Here was a place they might stay awhile. To rest up and prepare for the mountains. The children had concluded the bright blue mountain range below the higher and bluer ranges were the mountains they had been instructed to find. They discussed it and decided that since they were almost to their destination, they could afford to rest awhile with the crippled woman.

The woman dropped tiny pinches of the rock salt into the stew and adjusted the level of the fire carefully. She was listening to the girls whisper, but did not speak until they had scooted themselves into the shade with their backs against woven-river-reed wall. The eldest girl could understand nothing the woman was saying, but decided the woman had asked about their destination. So the eldest girl stood up and stepped into the sun, shading her eyes with one hand and pointing with the other. The woman dragged herself past the little boy without waking him and moved around the fire until she could see exactly where the girl was pointing. The woman had then pointed at all the empty houses and had nodded her head, then had pointed back at the blue mountains that filled the entire horizon from the west to the east and as far north as it was possible to see. As the sun went higher and the heat of day descended, the mountains became less distinct and their color a hazy blue.

While the others slept and the woman watched the stew, the eldest girl had slipped away as if she were going to the bushes to urinate. But once hidden, she had carefully unknotted the threads closing the hidden pocket. Although she could no more read the writing than she could understand the language of the hunchbacked woman, she looked carefully at each stiff, curled page. When she returned to the little cook fire, she glanced over in the shade to be sure the other three were sleeping, and then she dropped a page of the manuscript into the simmering vegetable stew. The girl had done it so quickly the hunchbacked woman had no chance to protest. The woman watched the stew for a long time. The girl watched beside her. The thin, brittle page gradually began to change. Brownish ink rose in clouds. Outlines of the letters smeared and then they floated up and away like flocks of small birds. The surface of the page began to glisten, and brittle, curled edges swelled flat and spread until the top of the stew pot was nearly covered with a section of horse stomach. Well, it was a wonderful stew. They lived on it for days and days, digging up little round bulbs in the soft, white river sand, and gathering ant eggs and other things the crippled woman directed them to get. Food was difficult to find, but with the four of them they managed very well, and gradually they realized if they had not come along, the crippled woman would have starved as soon as she had gathered all the roots and bulbs she could reach.

They all began to gain strength from just one potful of stew. Only the younger girl who had chewed and sucked the edges of the pages she carried knew the source of the wonderful flavor in the stew. Then, in a quarrel, the little girl who knew the secret of the stew had told the others. The little boy began to cry. He said he would not eat another mouthful because he might be eating the part of the book in which the alien invaders are wiped out forever. He might be eating the passage of the story that describes the return of the spirits of the days who love the people. The eldest girl had shared the shock of her companions at her thoughtlessness. It must have been the hunger — hunger affected the brain. They had all seen what hunger did during the last months the Butcher had starved and slaughtered their people. But then the eldest stopped crying and said, “I remember what was on the page we ate. I know that part of the almanac — I have heard the stories of those days told many times. Now I am going to tell you three. So if something happens to me, the three of you will know how that part of the story goes.”

The little boy did not agree. He did not think tampering with the pages of the almanac was allowed. But the girls were brutal. They told him they didn’t care if he ate or not. Every time a page had been memorized, they could eat it. Of course they hoped to reach some of their own people in the mountains of the North. They agreed they should try not to eat any more pages. They would have to be cautious. The crippled woman only watched. The children noticed she was less cheerful, and they did not hear her singing as they had when they’d first come. The eldest said it was because the woman was afraid soon they would leave her, and then she might die. The youngest girl thought the woman was sad because the others in her village had left her behind. The little boy feared the woman had already suffered the effect of having eaten a page from the almanac.

Sometime in the late afternoon, the eldest girl studied the northern horizon, calculating the last leg of the journey. She had learned the paler the blue of the mountains, the drier and more barren the land where they lay. She must not have her willpower fade at the thought of leaving the comfort of the shady cottonwood trees and the water at the little house of river reeds.

The hunchbacked woman was again boiling a potful of roots and bulbs. The woman gestured at the pot, and the eldest girl knew the woman wanted another page from the almanac. But this time the girl was well rested and not starving. She knew what must be done with these pages. They had not yet reached the mountains the color of the sky. Her instructions had been very clear. The girl pretended not to understand what the crippled woman was asking, but the girl also realized by the expression in the woman’s eyes, the woman was not fooled. The children had not traveled all that distance without encountering “hosts” who had wanted favors in return. Even the little boy was not safe from such propositions. But their elders had warned them they must be prepared for “such hosts” because the epoch that was dawning was known by different names from tribe to tribe, but their people called the epoch Death-Eye Dog. During the epoch of Death-Eye Dog human beings, especially the alien invaders, would become obsessed with hungers and impulses commonly seen in wild dogs. The children had been warned. The children had been reminded. A human being was born into the days she or he must live with until eventually the days themselves would travel on. All anyone could do was recognize the traits, the spirits of the days, and take precautions. The epoch of Death-Eye Dog was male and therefore tended to be somewhat weak and very cruel.

The girl was careful to take each of the children aside one by one. She told them they must travel on and that she felt the crippled woman might try to stop them. So when they went to dig roots and gather larvae in the coolness after sundown, they were careful to fill all of their gourd canteens. The little boy carried the torn blanket. The hunchbacked woman watched helplessly and kept gesturing at the pot full of roots stewing over the coals. The girl who had first chewed the edges of pages she carried hesitated. She had also had her first menstruation because of the food and the rest, and she wanted to show the others, especially the eldest, she was not a child.

“Go on,” she told the others, “I will be following right behind.”

The eldest girl tried to warn her. “Don’t do this! We must stay together.” But the girl would not listen. “At least take off your dress so the pages will be safe.” But the girl refused that too because she was confident of herself. The last they ever saw of her was in front of the house of woven river reeds, accepting a bowl of stew from the crippled woman, who was smiling broadly and nodding her head enthusiastically.

The eldest girl went sneaking back the next day while the others slept. She had gone back for the pages, not for their companion. The crippled woman was asleep in the shade of the cottonwoods. The eldest could find no trace of the other girl. For a while she thought perhaps the girl had somehow been lost attempting to catch up with them, although they had been walking in the river sand, following the dry riverbed. But as the girl quietly checked inside each of the abandoned houses, she finally came to a structure that had been used by the men for ceremonial purposes. Part of the structure was set below the ground’s surface; even as she stood at the entrance she could feel cool air currents pouring out. The girl had stopped at the entrance although she knew she must hurry. She had not hesitated at any of the other houses, but the air currents she felt caused the sweat to chill on her skin; a shudder swept over her. She did not want to go inside. She did not even want to stand in the threshold and look in.

So there, in the hottest part of the day, after the sun had centered in the sky, a restless breeze kicked up the dust and rustled the cottonwood leaves. The girl was standing in front of the ceremonial house; she did not want to look inside, and yet she was certain she must. The clatter of the cottonwood leaves in the wind, and the waves of heat swelling off the packed earth of the abandoned village plaza, seemed to lull her into drowsiness and sleep. The girl realized if she did not move that instant, she would become paralyzed, and her fear startled her and caused her to lunge forward into the coolness of the dim ceremonial chamber. The heat swelling out of the parched earth had been the woman’s ally; while the woman was sleeping, her ally had been instructed to guard the abandoned village.

People did not return to the abandoned village for a long time, and even now, people from the village called the Mouth suffer for reasons that can only be traced to what the eldest girl saw inside the ceremonial house. The epoch of Death-Eye Dog is, of course, notorious for just this sort of thing. Death-Eye Dog has been seated on the throne for five hundred years. His influence has been established across this entire world.

So the girl did not hesitate at what she saw hanging from the cross-beams of the roof. What she had returned for was the ragged garment the younger girl had worn. The eldest girl could only hope the crippled woman had not begun cooking the pages, but had instead feasted upon the liver or heart, known to be the preferred delicacies. The hunchbacked woman had not yet removed the pages from the dress, so the eldest slipped the garment over her head and wore it over her own dress. The children had been told the pages held many forces within them, countless physical and spiritual properties to guide the people and make them strong.

Old Yoeme had paused and looked them both in the eye before she had continued. “You see, it had been the almanac that had saved them. The first night, if the eldest had not sacrificed a page from the book, that crippled woman would have murdered them all right then, while the children were weak from hunger and the longer journey.

“As long as all our days belong to Death-Eye Dog, we will continue to see such things. That woman had been left behind by the others. The reign of Death-Eye Dog is marked by people like her. She did not start out that way. In the days that belong to Death-Eye Dog, the possibility of becoming like her trails each one of us.”