When she turned back again to look at the Santa Ritas as they stretched to the south, something caught her eye. The color orange.
Her window framed the expected mountains as backdrop. Close in she saw the expected brick wall, and just on the other side of that, the expected mesquite tree which had been dropping some of its leaves. But now the unexpected: orange globes hung from the branches.
She thought of Magritte. Something was amiss, something afoot, something disorganized. She blinked. She was only beginning to realize that she couldn’t blink away cataracts. In a light breeze the mesquite branches moved; the orange globes moved. Were they a signal? Food for border crossers? Both signal and a promise of nourishment?
Sophie got up and started for the door. She had been oddly hesitant about going outside, though she had come to the Southwest to be outside, to be in the sun. Wouldn’t you know, it still took effort to do what you had been eager to do.
Perhaps it was daunting to go out of doors because the sky here was so immense, the sun brighter than she had imagined. Perhaps she felt unprotected in the open—as if a meteor was more likely to fall here or lightning more likely to strike or a rattlesnake appear out of nowhere. She could at any moment be fried, blasted to bits, or just plain bitten on the ankle.
But now she was pulled up to her feet and out the door before she had time to think about it much more. Maybe that was the key to movement, to lifting a finger and an opposable thumb and following through with the body. Don’t think too much.
She had been somewhat successful in the airplane. She had finally gotten up out of her seat to confront the woman in the jaguar-print scarf who had in fact, she read, been held for psychiatric evaluation. Probably held and treated for three days and then released. That meant she was probably not Anton Chigurh. Where was she now?
In time, Sophie would learn to walk out of doors every blessed day; at the same time, she would scan the near distance for snakes as she had used to scan for potential muggers, years ago, in New York City. There were more muggers around than rattlesnakes. Many more if you thought about all the psychological muggers.
The orange globes before her were actually half-globes, half-orbs, half-navel-oranges stuck on branches of the mesquite. For the undocumented? More likely for the birds—the small undocumented. Someone was feeding them and had aligned the oranges at the perfect height: the birds could stand, if they wished, on her wall and eat the fruit. They could be comfortable.
Wait a minute. Though the mesquite lay just beyond the wall, she was quite sure that this mesquite was her own mesquite, on her property.
Damn. The nerve. Some man must have done that.
Jammed
In order to write a mystery, Sophie decided to read more mysteries. She ordered some and decided to go to the library for others. The desk in her tiny sun-room study had only two concealed drawers. How could she spread out to write? She thought of relocating to the guest bedroom.
No, she thought, I will never leave this glassy room. I will figure it out. She could get a tall, narrow, Mission-style bookcase. And maybe a low file cabinet which would also serve as a footstool. It would be fun, adapting.
Her state reminded her of something. Someone. Someone else of whom she had read, someone who also started anew in badly cramped quarters? Who was it? Someone famous.
Her mind jammed.
A System Evolving With Time
The next morning Sophie’s jaws felt sore. Was she grinding her teeth at night? No one was there to tell her what they had heard or had not heard.
All the roles she had in the east had folded their tents and disappeared. She had written books, but she had also taught. She had hurried to class, hurried to office hours, hurried to committee meetings. She had huddled with individual students and discussed their work; sometimes they brought up their personal worries; sometimes they taught her things.
Now the writing would somehow be unrelieved. Do nothing but write? “On her own” suddenly had a real ring to it. Without her other roles, would writing be to her as it once had been?
Well, she needed to get going. Move it. Try it. And she thought about getting back to cooking, which her mother had taught her to do. “Give your mind a rest, Sophie. Get your hands on leafy greens. Feel the heft of a sharpened chopping knife. Mix minced garlic with parsley and lemon zest. Flatten chicken breasts. Concoct shimmering soups: lentil, avgolemono, tortilla, wild mushroom with herbed matzo balls. Then feel the joy of feeding yourself and others.”
“What are you doing, mother?”
Just as she dropped saffron threads into a complicated Ligurian fish stew, Consuelo would aim a blowgun dart at the fancy food writers by answering, “Slinging hash.” Her mother hated pretension. Well, Sophie just needed to sling hash: write and cook.
First, she would go for a walk. She laced up her sneakers and set off for one of the nature trails. She passed a prickly pear, a creosote bush, a barrel cactus.
Between one plant and another there was space—a foot, two feet, four feet, one foot, ten feet, a few inches. How different from Pennsylvania where the floral undergrowth, the understory, was such a snarl that you could not easily walk. The Northeast and the mid-Atlantic were like Henry James’s stories.
Here in the West, it was Hemingway. Or better, it was itself. Spare. A place for a new style. Here was framing and light and space after space for punctuation. You could move easily, and you could focus on detail.
“The soul selects its own society,” the poet wrote; although often people are doubtful, hesitant about selecting anything, much less the people with whom they will associate. Sophie thought, I selected the desert. I did select Thoreau’s “broken shaft” and “crumbling mound” against a “limitless horizon.” Now, she was eager to see how it would inform her. If she had the mettle for it.
As she started down the trail, Sophie saw a man coming towards her at a fast pace. He wore a baseball cap, a T-shirt, shorts, and low-cut hiking boots His legs were long. She hoped he would not talk to her and ruin her contemplation of what space between plants might do for the eye and the spirit in her new home.
Then she felt a very specific and sharp pain in her ankle. A rattlesnake? She was afraid to look.
She looked. Cactus. Here there were jumping chollas whose spiny branches seemed to detach themselves and stick to sneakers or clothing if you so much as looked at them. At the moment she had one sticking out of her sock. She bent down to remove it.
“I wouldn’t. Wait.” The man had reached her.
He picked up two small rocks. “You might want to use these,” he said. “Or a comb if you have one.”
“For—”
“Pulling out the cholla. Don’t use your fingers. Put one rock on each side and pull straight out. Pull quickly.” He did not offer to do it for her.
She felt like a klutz, but she did as he had suggested. Finally—with one quick stinging—it was out. She said, “Thank you.”
“You are welcome.”
His faded blue T-shirt bore a complicated equation in white print that was cracking or peeling with age. Later she would come to know it as
or—a description of a quantum system evolving with time.
He was much taller than Sophie, but he did not bend to look at her face under the broad brim of her new rancher’s hat. “I have seen you before,” he said as if talking over her head to the mountains.
“Oh,” she said. She didn’t want to talk to him.
“I’m your neighbor—to the south of your house. My name is Jack.” To her relief, he did not extend his hand.
“I’m Sophie. And I hope you are enjoying your walk.”
So this was the one. The Impaler, the impaler of orbs had a name. The oranges in her mesquite were in all likelihood his work.
He said only, “I am,” and then he walked right away.
My father use
d to say that it was the absolute necessity of tidiness in the cramped space on the Beagle that helped “to give him his methodical habits of working.” On the Beagle, too, he would say, that he learned what he considered the golden rule for saving time; i.e., taking care of the minutes. 1
– Francis Darwin
Charles Darwin
Why would a name come to her when she was at her desk staring eastward at Mt. Hopkins and its tiny white crown, the structure that was Whipple Observatory? It looked like a humpback whale—Charles Darwin.
That was it. She had read that Charles Darwin was that cramped person or, rather, was the one who had those impossibly cramped quarters on the Beagle. His shipboard cabin, the space allotted to him, had been dismayingly small. He had to keep himself and his collections perfectly organized. Everything was labeled, shelved, cosseted. The young man who was used to a sprawling British country home had to adapt. And this he did despite, as the ship lurched beneath him, days and days of desperate vomiting. Sophie was beginning to warm to him.
Sometimes, in these new days and perfectly alone—with the desert lurching beneath her—she too felt like vomiting. She turned her desk chair to gaze out to the northeast, through the sliding glass doors of her study: here was the best view of the desert as a sea; here, looking out toward the Santa Rita Experimental Range. In the distance and with Sophie’s early cataracts, the scrubby shapes—creosote bushes, cholla—with spaces between them could be pods of whales.
Because of the sparseness, those spaces between growing things, there was too little cover for undocumented persons on the move. The border patrol helicopters would easily spot border-crossers and send land vehicles lumbering across the terrain. The routine would be: pick them up, give them water to drink, handcuff them, drive them back to Nogales. So Sophie imagined. So far, she had not once seen this happen.
The Range also held rattlesnakes and bark scorpions. The Range was wildly beautiful and wildly dangerous, brutal.
Something about the Santa Ritas above the alluvial fans and stretches of desert was beginning to amount to a subtle shift. She had been widowed years ago, but she still carried the loss of Richard—his wit, those hands with their fine motor skills, his expressive eyebrows—with her; she would never get over it. Still, from the first her sense had been that she might feel comforted here. The mountains’ changing folds, their lights and shadows reminded her of her husband and brought his presence closer. Richard had been entranced by young, rugged mountains and by their origins. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “azurous hung hills” were indeed a “world-wielding shoulder.”
“Born of the molten, Soph,” he would say. “Sometimes I look at them and imagine them still smoking. Right there, right in front of us, are the real smoking guns. Everyone should move west.”
Her husband had died at the hands of a drunken driver at the intersection of Palm Drive and Camino Real when Sophie was a Fellow at Stanford and pregnant with Isabelle. Richard had simply gone out to buy fish and bread.
“Okay,” he had said before he went out the door. “The fish. Bread. Is that it?”
“A bottle of wine for you.”
“O.K. Is that it?”
That was it.
“Are you sure?”
Sophie was sure.
How could he have died on Palm Drive, that heart-stopping avenue that swept into the Stanford campus? How could anyone possibly have been instantly killed at the foot—or at the head—of Palm Drive?
Perhaps only now would she dwell with Richard again. Perhaps here she would have less need of other living humans—the clerk, her old colleagues. Would she even need neighbors? Who could ask—if she had to do without Richard’s shoulders—for shoulders better than these mountains.”
Right.
Five minutes later, she yearned to have her husband’s actual shoulders back. She dismissed the thought and went to chop onions. For whom? Guess who’s coming to dinner? No one. No one is coming to dinner.
Despite the Santa Ritas, she would still have her moments. Missing Richard. It was like having had a bad case of shingles. Some people, it was said, flinched from a sudden pain—postherpetic neuralgia, say—forty years after they had contracted it.
She was also missing Isabelle. Why had she not moved to the East Bay? She knew why. Isabelle was so busy wrangling faculty at Berkeley that she barely had time for anything else. She knew her daughter was still alive from her Facebook posts. And more alive than most people.
She picked up her knife. Why are you here, Sophie, she thought. What in God’s name have you done with what little life you may have left.
She sliced the white onion and then began to dice it. She picked up the pace. She had forgotten how therapeutic chopping was. Moisture appeared on the knife.
She was smarting; her eyes began smarting. She was not afraid of shedding stinging tears over the onion. Let it sting, the solid onion out of solid earth. It stung, but in the end it could be put to uses both sweet and savory—like that earth from which it had been pulled.
Death
Sophie could not stop thinking of Charles Darwin or, rather, of his cabin. She watered the plants, she watched the cactus wrens and the round-tailed ground squirrels stand on the brick wall and pluck out the pulp of the half-oranges. But at the edge of her consciousness was a small, perfectly neat cabin. Empty.
Where was Charles? Long dead, of course. But how had he died? She had not gotten very far in the Darwin Volume I biography.
Stop it, she said to herself, for crying out loud. Get down to work. But the thought of conventional mystery writing depressed her. Maybe she should go back and read, in order, the books that had earlier rattled her with their mysteries: Jane Eyre, for example, and Rebecca; later in her life, Arthur and George. And Bel Canto where she had been so eager to find out the fates of Mr. Hosokawa and Gen, held as they were by those terrorists—La Dirección Auténtica.
But how had Darwin died? She was curious. She loved knowing how people died. William Blake, for instance, sang. George Richmond wrote that Blake “…died … in a most glorious manner. He said He was going to that Country he had all His life wished to see & expressed Himself Happy, hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ — Just before he died His Countenance became fair. His eyes Brighten’d and he burst out Singing of the things he saw in Heaven.” This sort of death for Mr. Blake: a ferocious poet, a ferocious artist, a ferocious critic of the distortions of conventional religion.
How had Darwin died? She took up her Darwin reading again. She had ordered another biography, this time in paperback. She took the book from her shelf and found death in the Index.
Charles had died at home, at Down House, in 1882. The death certificate read, “Angina Pectoris Syncope.”
He had apparently said to his wife, Emma, “I am not the least afraid to die.” Though this utterance was not exactly a Blakean-bursting-out-singing, Sophie was struck by it. He had also said, “Remember what a good wife you have been.”
There was something else. A few days after Charles’s death, his dog Polly had to be put down. Sophie loved dogs.
So now she knew a very few more things about Charles besides the fact that he had adapted splendidly to his tiny shipboard cabin. He had said he was not afraid to die. He had probably known that in later days, his wife would cherish his reminder about her goodness to him. And he had had an actual dog. She warmed to the man. Could he really have been, as some called him, an “evil genius”?
Sophie had wanted for a long time to create an evil-genius antagonist for the mystery book she would write. She felt a queasiness rising: she had lost interest in writing riffs in a stilted style about herself as a kind of Ishmael; now she was losing interest in writing the mystery she had thought would fill her days in the desert. Losing interest, losing interest.
Was she depressed? What was all this interest in the death question? Maybe getting outsi
de would help.
Right.
Jesus with Hat in Hand
After she opened her front door, she jumped. A man was standing there. His face was grave. He said, “Excuse me,” He said, “I am Jesus.”
He studied Sophie’s face. Then he smiled. “Or, if you will, ‘Jesús.’”
In one hand he held a glass jar, with something red in it. In the other hand, he held a classic gaucho hat, a Zorro, by its brim.
“I live across the street and around the corner. You are new in our neighborhood. I have here some prickly-pear jelly. I gather the cacti fruits. Some people here call these fruits the tunas. I pluck them from the cacti with tongs. In the early mornings, I make the jelly. And so—welcome. This jar of jelly is for you.”
“Thank you. I am Sophie. You are so kind.”
“It is nothing. But I warn you. My daughter, once she ate this, would eat no other kind of jelly.” He pulled out a large vermillion-bordered handkerchief and wiped his flushed face. He looked as if he were going to make a speech or ask her questions.
She was afraid he was going to ask her what she had done in her life and what she was doing now. If she told him that she was sitting there contemplating Charles Darwin, he might take a step backwards. This news might be like confessing a murder to him.
But he merely nodded. “And so—welcome.”
After spreading the jelly on her toast the next morning, Sophie could see why his daughter would eat no other jelly save his. It was neon-magenta or fuchsia in color and tasted like pear and apple and watermelon combined.
When she next saw Jesús in his yard, he was staring at a small prickly pear and shaking his head. Half-moon disks of space, perfect bites, showed on the lower pads.
He said, “Javelinas. They come like ghouls for a midnight meal.”
She had not as yet seen a javelina, but she knew they were wild, pig-like, but not pigs; they were collared peccaries. If cornered, they could be dangerous. “They eat cactus?”
The Crossings Page 3