The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

Blasted porous white bone arcs to join pitted terra cotta against blue, blue ever-changing sky, and the small bones join with the windhoned stones flecking the shifting sand below . . . framed against the distant Pedemal, she has become one with Art . . .

Like Georgia O’Keeffe before me, I too grew disenchanted with my native Wisconsin. Taking a cue from my spiritual mentor, I too professed disdain for the gently rolling, ever-unsure contours of the land, and for the indecisive blur of green and brown below me. Paint such landscapes? Me? One look at O’Keeffe’s “Red Hill and White Shell” or “Pelvis With Pedernal” had this boy hooked; never mind those glossy fliers the New Mexico Tourist Bureau sent to me.

So, I left home, suitcase of art supplies and dufflebag of old clothes in hand, in search of the land which had inspired the most beautiful woman in the world to create the most exquisite artwork Pd ever seen—as she herself once proclaimed, “God told me that if I painted that mountain enough, I could have it.”

O’Keeffe was speaking about her beloved Pedernal, that flat-topped mountain not far off from Ghost Ranch, but in my case, “that mountain” was all of what I’d long dubbed “Georgia’s land.” The sun-whitened cow skulls and striated pale cliffs. The pink hills fuzzed with clumps of pinon trees. The hills, cliffs, and runneled dark mesas Georgia (later, Georgia and her companion Juan) had stared at, in search of what Art lay there. O’Keeffe had found that elusive Muse in this warm, dry place of singing color and clean colorless air, and I was determined to find Art there too.

As things turned out, I not only missed the opportunity to meet my mentor (the grand lady died five months before I arrived in the state), but, as I ruefully had to admit six months into my new New Mexico life, somehow I missed my meeting with Art, too.

For me, burnt umber and ocher only looked like . . . globs of brush-smeared burnt umber and ocher on poorly stretched canvas. What I had envisioned as a fresh view of Georgia’s land was only worth viewing when hung above the grease-dotted surface of a diner range-top. And those paintings were only hung there because I had put them there. My boss, the man who put fresh grease spatters on the chipped white enamel of the range with every flip of a burger, he didn’t mind my efforts to sell my work. As long as the dishes were washed, Duke didn’t care if I hung my paintings in the restrooms next to the machine that sold rubbers.

I came to Duke’s Burgers with a stack of paintings in the trunk of my rust-fringed Volvo (bought in Taos, the rust filagree attested to a previous owner in a more northern clime than barely-humid and certainly road-salt free Taos); aside from the vague hope that the owner would let me hawk my paintings there, I wanted nothing more than a cup of coffee and a place to relieve myself. I was wary of using the wayside between Talpa and Pilar; even the mere possibility of rattlers spooked me.

But after my second cup of watery java, Duke—I never have learned whether that dog-like name was given or adopted—shyly hinted that his top-of-the-building sign needed freshening. For a second I wanted to sputter, “Sir, I am an artist,” but my trunk full of semi-motel art made me reconsider.

Duke’s sign only needed so much touch-up work; after that, he found real work for me. And I never added any more paintings to my series, hell, there isn’t any more room above the range anyway. But I had the whole of the desert outside my above-the-washer window, and nothing—not lack of real talent, not missed opportunities, not even the loss of something so intangible that its loss was more of an inner sigh of relief (rest easy, Georgia-girl, this Wisconsin wanna-be wont steal your desert thunder)—could take the beauty of the desert away from me. True, nothing could make that same desert, that distant Pedernal give up its secrets to my now paint-stiffened brush, or to my now paint-free fingers, but I had resigned myself to what couldn’t be.

Another Wisconsinite had beat me to this place, the most beautiful woman God ever created to puzzle and delight man (if I were to say that back home, people would look at me funny-like; in Wisconsin a woman has to be hung on the back of a door wearing a suede bikini to be considered “beautiful” . . . diner-job or not, I’m glad I left).

Georgia had painted “that mountain” enough times that God gave the whole damned desert to her. But she earned every grain of sand, every sun-glinting chip of bone, seemingly forever.

Until her rival, her only real competition, arrived at Duke’s.

Indentations, the dark places in the skull catch the darkness and hold onto it, greedily, and the places where the moonlight caresses gleam all the brighter against the contrasted darkness, in a moment of purest, most unconscious Beauty . . .

Duke waved the newspaper in front of my nose, asking, “West Salem, in Wisconsin—you come from ’round there, no?”

I dried my hands before taking the paper from him. The article under the header “Hands Down Victory” was from the AP; I frowned slightly as I read it, while Duke watched me read with dancing, moist eyes.

When Duke’s eyes were all shiny and jiggling, I knew it was time to get nervous. That old “this-promotion-will-nab-the-tourists” look. Lately of the “Free Friers for Flyers” give away (kids from neighboring towns took to fishing airline tickets out of dumpers to cash in on the offer) and the Mother’s Day corsage debacle. Not that I blamed him for wanting to make it big. Tucked slightly out of the way as his diner was, just out of reach of the tourists heading to or from Taos Ski Valley, Kit Carson Memorial State Park and other draws, Duke missed the really big crowds. And as I read the article, I sensed another promotion in the works.

A Chevrolet dealer and a radio station gave away a car to a man who had stood—not counting short breaks every few hours—with both hands touching a Sprint for more hours than any other contestant. Oh, true, the contestants started out only attached to the car with a rope that got shorter as the contest progressed, but the ending of it all was pure 1930’s “they shoot horses, don’t they?” marathon stuff. No sitting, no leaning on the car, just stand upright next to that car, with both hands laid on it, evangelist-healing-the-dying style. With only five minutes of rest every three hours.

I folded the paper into thirds before tossing it on the faintly damp counter, and snorted dryly through my nose.

“Forget it, Duke. AP’s spread that story all over the country. Old hat. Polesitting’s passe. Even that girl in the midwest gave up after she broke the record her mom set. It won’t draw anyone—”

“A camper. Big one. Lots of people could lean against it, no? Lots of room out back, you could paint the sign. Put it up against the front, next to the door. Real bright, you can paint it. Red, lots of red. And yellow, customers, they like yellow—”

I turned my back to Duke, tried to lose myself in the subtle shift of the top layer of sand in the wind (it reminded me of the way powdery snow would snake across the highways when the Wisconsin winter winds blew, and I silently cussed those people in West Salem), but minutes later something round bumped up against my back.

A paint can. Duke had found a big can of red in the back shed. Plus a huge brush.

Two weeks in the sun and occasionally blowing sand had scoured my freshly painted sign to a deep fuchsia by the day the contest was to begin rolled around. Duke had all but left the running of the diner to me; he scooted around Taos, Talpa, Pilar and Dixon, not to mention La Medera and Santa Fe, with photocopied and hand-colored (thanks to me) fliers advertising the “Put Up Yer Dukes Camper Give-Away.” I had to hand it to Duke; he shook butt and got the word out. Newspaper ads, fliers stapled to telephone poles and thumbtacked to bulletin boards in supermarkets, even a radio spot. And, God help the man, he bought a camper.

Huge thing. White as a cow skull, all banded in gleaming chrome, and the windows sparkled, like old bottles thrown to shatter in a ditch. A massive, insane, beautiful, impossible hulk of a camper. Once, I tried to tell Duke that the Chevy dealer in West Salem only gave away an auto worth less than $7,000 dollars— and the guy went in with a radio station. Duke only gave me a sad, blissful smile, and I said no more.

The camper was a wonderous thing; Duke parked it out back, where there would be plenty of room for the would-be winners of it, and come sunset, the camper was a thing of shell-like purity against the raw intense colors of the hills beyond. It was almost enough to make me want to dig out my box of scrunched and flattened oils and try once more to ... to be what only a sunburned and slat Thin woman already was, for now and forever. No matter how much I painted the mountain, the desert, the stones—even the damned camper—they would never be mine. The box of paint tubes stayed under my cot in the back room.

But nothing could keep me from looking at it, parked under a cloudless and swelling blue sky, like a pebble of white near a still ocean. Others looked at the camper, too, but I don’t think they saw it in the same way I did. O’Keeffe, she might have understood it, but the other people who came to gawk at it, they saw only gas mileage, something to win and then sell, or a thing to impress their friends with the winning of it.

Except for the woman in the faded denim, the one who . . . who claimed it.

Spaces between the bone say the most about the bone, the spaces define what is all around them, accentuate the white purity of line, of sweeping form, and when sunlight or moonlight hit the bone, the spots free of bone complement the clean bareness, in perfect Symmetry . . .

Duke wasn’t quite as crazy as I had thought him. He pulled me aside minutes before we opened the doors of the diner to admit the fifty or so people waiting outside, and whispered, “See the big guy, bandana on his head, mustache?”

“You gonna tell me something I really don’t want to hear?”

“That guy, he’s the winner. From Santa Fe. Trucker. Used to holding it, y’know? Used to going thirsty. Riding in that rig, they get used to things like that. Found him last week. He wins, I get the camper, and it goes back to the dealer. ”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“He'll win. He's a good boy. He don’t want to see Duke lose the diner, no?” Duke’s eyes were doing their soggy jig, and I just shrugged. I still had the Volvo; no rope was tying me to the diner.

Duke was playing Mr. Bountiful before the contest was to begin; every contestant was treated to a free meal. From the way Duke laid on the salt earlier that morning, I knew that more than one entrant would spend more than the limit of two minutes in the porta-potty come the first three-hour break. And naturally, the water jugs were free, and plentiful. And the menu that morning was loaded with fish, salty scrambled eggs and hash browns.

There wasn’t enough room for every contestant to sit and eat, so plates were passed amid the nervous laughter, and most people had to lean against walls or put their plates on the narrow windowsills. As I circulated with a carafe of coffee, I noticed that some folks were wise to Duke; they avoided the sodium rich stuff and stuck to sips of water and nibbles of dry toast.

The woman in the distressed denim (as in bleached naturally by the sun, her shoulders were almost white) forked her fish filet into delicate chevrons of cooked flesh; when I offered her some coffee she slowly shook her head. She was so sun-browned and leathery it was hard to tell if she came by her dark complexion naturally or had worked at it; her cheeks were worthy of O’Keeffe, though. High flaring wings of bone under spare taut skin. Her eyes were dark, almost dry stones set in sullen clouds. Thin, cracked lips (striated, with moist valleys of pink between) moved into a rictus of a smile before I left her for the next entrant.

I hadn’t seen the woman among the crowds who had come in the days before the contest. Her, I would have remembered. She was easily the second most beautiful woman I’d ever seen; Art embodied in worn denim and a work shirt with frayed cuffs. Whether she was twenty or fifty was impossible to tell, her black hair signified nothing. Some reservation women kept black hair, or near enough, into their dotage. But no jewelry, turquoise or otherwise, adorned her neck, wrists, or fingers, and I’m of the opinion that most Indian women are born with silver and blue jewelry on their bodies.

She had stationed herself near the back of the diner, close by “my” above-the-dishwasher window. Every few seconds, when she wasn’t toying with her uneaten breakfast, she’d look at the camper. Not in a greedy way. Appreciative, the way you or I would look at a piece of art in a museum. Yet, there was this aching-to-buy pull to her mouth, and furrowing of her brow . . .

“Good crowd, no?”

Reluctantly, I turned to Duke. He shook the cash box full of entrant’s money, two bucks per person, all for a “free” breakfast and the privilege of standing out in the hot desert sun with an umbilical cord of rope between the entrant and the camper. Judging from the way the box rattled, a lot of people had paid in change. I swallowed so hard I felt my adam’s apple rub against my buttoned collar.

Behind me, I could all but feel the dark woman stare at that camper, the waves of longing wavering hot and invisible, like heat devils on a highway at noon.

“Hundred bucks ain’t much, Duke.”

“That’s jus’ the start,” he bubbled, rattling the box in time with his words. “People, they’ll come to watch, and they gotta eat, no? Be like a circus, you see.

Radio station, papers, they’ll come. They got to eat, no? AP, they come. Free advertising—”

Duke didn't notice when I turned away to watch the woman. Her flayed breakfast rested on the plate balanced on her extended arm, as if she had already endured the initial rounds of the contest and was in the home stretch. Her palm was held sideways, outspread, and by moving my head, I could see that her hand was in perfect alignment with the camper beyond the window. Those pebble eyes were closed, and those parched lips formed a word I couldn’t make out.

“—then, after the others drop out, when it’s down to one, two ’sides—” Duke's voice dropped here “—my pal, maybe TV stations come, and they gotta eat, no?”

“Yeah, Duke, yeah,” I mumbled, as I watched the woman in denim devour the camper with her fixed, staring eyes.

Dry winds play soft tunes through the bone, a muted whistle, and the gentle sussuration of shifting sand provides the gentle harmony, and far, far off, the piñon trees move slowly in time to the eternal music of Time . . .

As I expected, few people made it past the first bathroom break. Some of the men didn’t make it to the porta-potties at all, just dashed around the back of the shed, but all that running there and back ate up their two minutes of freedom from the long ropes. Soon there were only thirty, thirty-five people standing six feet away from the camper. As the day progressed, Duke’s expected crowd of on-lookers did arrive . . . and by the next biffy-break, the crowd was augmented by former entrants.

After the second break, the ropes were shortened to five feet. With fewer people attached to the camper, I was able to pick out the dark woman. She hadn’t used either opportunity to relieve herself, which was as I’d expected. Her breakfast of fish didn’t need any water to swim in, and I saw that she hadn’t touched her jug of water.

The third break freed a handful of entrants, but the woman stood her ground, only moving when Duke shortened her tether to the camper.

I couldn’t believe the woman’s perseverance. Nine hours without a break; hell, she didn’t even sit on the ground. No water, no food come evening (Duke offered cold-cut sandwiches, or fried chicken wings), and once it got cold, she didn’t so much as draw her worn jacket tighter across her shoulders.

When the moon came up, shone down cold on the camper and the ring of people around it, Duke whispered, “I thought they’d give up come night, no?”

It had finally dawned on Duke that he had made no provisions for watching his entrants come night time; he had no one to spell him in the diner come morning after a sleepless night. The hordes of radio, newspaper and television reporters hadn’t shown, yet he was honorbound to at least make a show of fair play . . . until his buddy the trucker was the only person standing by the camper.

“That article, how many days it say the contest was running?” Moonlight turned the deep furrow between his eyes into a mooncrater, all high pale ridges and black shadow.

“Five and a half days,” I said as evenly as I could. It was hard not to smile.

"Five and a . . . sheesh. I thought the sun ... or the cold—”

Before me, the woman in denim was a piece of umber sculpture, softened only by the dark fall of her hair and the white-worn clothes she wore. I thought again of O’Keeffe, the earth-nun in black and white, posed before a bare wall and a hanging cow skull. Spare, but lush at once. Shadows pooled in her eye sockets as the woman stood there, bound to the camper with faintly luminous rope, and all the scene needed was a white rose, suspended in space.

Around her, the other entrants settled down for the easy part. Many, including the trucker from Santa Fe, slept, curled like dark shells on the sand. Duke offered me a ten spot if I sat out there and stayed awake while the entrants slept. I took it, not telling him I would have watched the woman for free.

I swear that I didn’t sleep at all that night; I had to have been awake to call out the break times twice that night. I know that I was awake; I docked the stragglers and untied their ropes. I had to be alert, awake; I told the people that once the ropes were a foot away (come morning) Duke would take them off and everyone would have to keep at least one hand on the camper, for starters.

I did, I did stay awake through it all, but yet. . . the woman didn’t move, save for a sideways shuffle of her worn cowboy boots when I drew her rope in. Oh, yeah, she blinked, and she breathed, she wasn’t dead, but. . . God, she was still. And she hadn’t peed, I mean nobody can hold it like that. Can they?

She didn’t eat, she didn’t drink. Her water jug rested obscenely full, sloshing when Duke or I kicked it along after her with each foot-long pulling-in of the rope. I’ve heard about how starving people get to a point where they can’t eat; the body forgets or something. But not to take water? Lizards, some desert mice pull that shtick, not people.

Come sun-up, she was still standing there, conserving strength, I supposed. Her camper-mates numbered around twenty or so. I was too rattled to count.

Duke spelled me, watching through the back window he kept track of his people while fixing food, while I napped. But my dreams were full of stark white and oily black hair above denim, and I went back out come ten, ten-thirty. Before I stepped outside, Duke said, "That woman, she don’t take breaks, no?”

"No.”

The reporters were there, and so were the crowds. And the woman was still standing, one hand pressed against the hot skin of the camper. Yes, she stood on the hot side, even though she was now free to move to the cooler side of the camper.

“Hey, you work here?” The moist-faced man in the madras plaid shirt held a notebook and pen in his hand. Second-string flunky from the local news, I supposed.

"No, I wash the dishes for my health—sorry, didn’t sleep—”

"That’s okay. You been here from the start, right? See that woman, in the jeans jacket? She some kind of nutcase?”

I marveled at the fellow’s lack of verbal skills. I scraped my hand against my cheek; the beard stubble was faintly audible as I replied, "Just determined, I guess. Maybe she likes the heat,” I added defensively. The reporter probably wouldn’t think she was beautiful, either.

“I tried to talk to her, but no go. Can she talk?”

“Beats me.” I wished the man would leave; his cologne was offensive, all fussy woody notes and overlaid thickly with musk. He shaded his eyes, and blathered on, “I been asking around, and nobody knows who she is, where she comes from, nothing. Think she’s from the reservation?”

I repeated my theory about Indians being born wearing jewelry; when he asked if he could use it in his story, I told him to blow. The gods were smiling down on me; the guy actually left to go bother people in the crowd.

If the woman noticed the man pointing at her before, she either didn’t care or cared too much to let it show. Her plastic water jug was sweating, a dark ring circled it on the sand. She didn’t so much as swallow down spit.

I was swallowing for her as Duke called out the next break. She stayed in place, and when the break was over, she calmly put both hands on the white skin of the camper. The sun was shining full on the metal; against it, her hands looked brittle black.

I caught myself looking at her, even as I helped the waitresses who came in at midday to dish up the food. Duke’s till swelled. Duke bit his lips until blood came and dried red-black—the woman still hadn’t had a bite to eat, let alone a sip of water, or so he told me in a bile-scented whisper.

“Not that I got to worry, my boy, he’s doin’ fine. Pisses in a bucket so he don’t go over the breaks. Sunburned, but that’s not much, no?”

The woman didn’t sweat, that was the hard part for me. No water goes in, none can come out. I told myself that she’d have to keel over sometime, no body can live like that.

When the film crew approached her, tried to distract her, I bolted from the diner and told them to fuck off, knowing full well that they’d have to scrape their tape or erase the sound.

That was around four o’clock; there were only nine people left, including the woman. And one guy was swaying in place, his face cheesy pale under a dotting of black dead pores. Thinking, Let him fall, I looked away from the guy and took a good, close look at the woman. With a stillness which reminded me of a jackrabbit before it leaps away from a sudden intruder, she focused on the glaring surface of the camper, ignoring me.

She was so beautiful. Up close, under the harsh sun, I saw that she was past middle age. Thin lines creased her skm, dozens of them. Her nose was big at the tip, and her ears were just beginning to get that “big” look associated with old age. But she was so pure, so utterly, simply perfect. Her colors were so true, against the brightness of the land and sky around her. I could draw her face, describe her veined hands with their chipped, striated nails in detail, but O’Keeffe had painted her. Oh, not a portrait, Georgia didn’t stoop to such foolishness, bless her artist’s soul.

“Cow’s Skull: Red, White and Blue.” From 1931, when O’Keeffe was still earning her flat-topped mountain with her brush. Simple cow’s skull, and bands of color behind. I can’t describe the denim woman any better. No human can.

A faint breeze ruffled her dark hair, and I wanted to cry. Her eyes were dry. The cracks in her lips were furrows. She was past sweating, past ever drinking ioo A. R. Morlan again. I knew it. She was old jerky on million year old bones, and she had both hands pressed on that great stupid beast of a camper so flat even the wind couldn’t squeeze itself in there, between her dry palms and the blistering hot paint.

I kicked the water jug, made it slosh. Clearing my throat, I asked, “Ma’am, you sure you don’t want any water? It’s allowed,” I added, thinking that perhaps there had been a ghastly misunderstanding and the woman thought she couldn’t drink.

She shook her head no and the earth moved under me. She was aware, of everything. Beyond us, people were laughing, eating, slurping down cold pop. Obscene.

I hunkered down near her, stared at her dusty worn boots with the frayed stitching. Those boots had walked many a mile of Georgia’s land, and beyond. Her legs weren’t even shaking, nor had she taken a secret pee while standing out there for over a day. Her jeans were worn, but clean. I smelled no sweat.

Sick at heart, I asked, “Lady, it isn’t any of my business, but why are you doing this? Shit, you have no chance.” I cupped a hand around my mouth, to shield it from Duke, and whispered, “It’s fixed, lady. Fixed. That slob in the bandana is the winner. It’s his camper, until he gives it to Duke. And Duke’s giving it to the dealer. You’ve proved your point . . . hell, lady, if it were my camper I’d give it to you.”

I noticed that she didn’t have a purse. Probably didn’t have a driver’s license, either. Not the way those boots were scuffed.

It was hard for her to blink. Not much fluid to ease the eyelids. So ... I blinked for her. I swallowed, and spit, and cried. I had to. She was past doing it for herself.

Duke yelled, “Hey, lover-boy, we got customers.” The crowd loved that, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. Dusting off my pants, I got up and said, “It’s true. You’ve got no chance. Don’t let the whole thing turn into a freak show, ’kay? They don’t deserve your dignity.” I started to walk away, but after only three feet I couldn’t resist a look back. I almost jumped when I saw that she’d turned her head my way.

The denim woman said but one word, and God bless her she said it to me. Spreading her fingers against the flesh of that metal beast, she said in a quiet, even voice, “Mine.”

Sunrise brings out the last metallic gleam of what had once been the bumpers, against the rusted terra cotta of the once-white sides the silvery gleam is all the brighter, all the more shiny, a compliment to the statue of white beside it, together they form Art . . .

Another night came and went, and still the woman did not move, did not eat, did not drink, did not eliminate. Only two men remained to stand alongside her camper, and Duke’s trucker’s knees shook under soggy denim. As if sensing that what was happening was no longer the stuff of pleasant news, the reporters crept away. By the third dawn, the crowd had thinned.

Duke didn’t shave, didn’t bathe. His eyes were dead marbles. He couldn’t watch the woman, not after his trucker flopped over as the first rays of the sun hit him that last morning. The other man standing, a wiry Indian from the Taos reservation, was wild-eyed and sweating even before the sun grew hot.

The woman . . . What can I say? That someone should have pulled her away? That the reporters should have called the authorities, pulled the plug on the first and last “Stick Up Yer Dukes” contest? It was just too late for that, or for anything.

Her head was tilted forward, crown touching the camper. Her hair hid her face, and her already oversized jacket hid any motion her body may have been making under it. But she stood, God bless her, she stood straight and proud, hands pressed firmly on that damned, gorgeous, asinine camper. Cool night dew had washed the camper each evening, and the sides were pristine, spotless. And she stood on and on, with no break for three days and then some; nothing had detracted her from her goal. It was hers, all hers.

Maybe she scared the people. I know she spooked me. By the evening of the third day, the third day of hot July sun and cold desert night, she still stood, straight except for her bent head. And, looking back on it, maybe that alone should have told us, should have warned us.

But the Indian was so tough, he ran on cramping legs to make his pit stops, and ran back as if his life depended on it when his two minutes were almost up. And his partner in stubbornness was silent and still.

Oh Jesus we should have known . . . but Duke and I kept up the pretense, even though we only had a spare handful of onlookers who were perhaps too scared and awed to leave after witnessing what had to be a miracle.

On the fourth day, the Indian began to sway in place, a stalk straining against a killing wind. Duke was already ruined; the dealer had agreed to hold back payment until after the contest or three days, whichever came first. Duke admitted that to me on the fourth day, the day when he actually cried.

I mumbled something assuring, I can’t remember what.

The Indian fell at six-thirty; I have to hand it to him, he kept both palms against the camper as he slid down. The virgin white paint bore two streaks of pus and blood.

The crowd—all five of them—made no sound, save for a simultaneous taking-in and letting-out of breath that blended in with the fitful wind, and the sounds of morning birdcalls.

And still the woman stood.

Duke, ever the after-the-fact gentleman, walked up to her and began to say, “Congratulations—” when he stopped, bent down low enough to see under her waving hair . . . and dropped in a faint on the sand. I ran over to him, checked to make sure he was still alive, then approached the woman.

Under that gently shifting curtain of hair, she wore a smile on her face—and then I noticed that her eyes were all white, whiter than bone, but just as dead . . .

I made a tiny, strained noise in the back of my throat when I saw that silent, eternal smile, and as I tried to get to my feet I knocked into her—but she didn’t fall over.

She was cold and she was warm where the sun hit her, but she didn’t move, not at all. She defied gravity, she defied a rigged contest, and she defied death . . . after a fashion. But her prize, that camper she had died for, it was hers. And as the people standing near the diner figured out what had happened, and some woman screamed, I heard over and over in my head the woman's lone word:

“Mine.”

Duke was right; he was ruined. He lost the diner, because no one wanted the camper. Not because there was anything wrong with it. There wasn't. Still, it just wasn’t right, taking away a person’s hard-won property.

And, besides, the denim woman wouldn’t let anyone take it away. She never fell down. People were afraid to move her; after Duke lost the diner a couple of weeks later (our previously meager share of customers quit coming in), people chose to ignore the denim woman. People didn’t even care when I moved back into the diner after it had been closed three months; if anyone owned the building, or if any bank had repossessed it, no one came to check.

And she was still standing there. Her denim was tattered, and her skin leather hard. The paint was starting to blister on the sides of the camper, but it was all right by me. By her too, for all I knew. The wind still blew her hair, and the sun shone down on it each morning, just as it had.

With the passing of the days, the weeks, the months and years, she and her camper have changed. The denim, the flesh, the hair are gone, and the sides of her camper no longer gleam in the sun. Yet, the changes are good, and they are beautiful, as beautiful as she and it were in life.

They change, and I watch, and I have never demeaned her with name, or a fabricated history. Enough that there was a mountain that work of art called woman wanted, and enough that she used the only medium available to her to earn that mountain.

A good many years ago another woman who earned a mountain drove through and walked these deserts, and when she died her ashes were scattered in the dust of a place called Ghost Ranch. The beauty that she once was has become part of a beauty that endures. Dust unto dust beauty unto beauty . . . but oh, Georgia girl, you have company now . . .

Originless, like the sun, the sand, the scattered stones, the shifting wind the two skeletal shapes are joined on the desert; one metal, one a small frame of bone, and the winds which blow through the joined ribs of steel and chalky bone whisper something, a word of earning, a word of eternal possession—a word for the few times when God grants mortals their mountain.