The Tropic of Cancer began at 23.5 north; if she traced, and then followed her own longitude down through that Tropic, she would eventually run into nothing but ocean. But on the way to the water, she could stop for a bite to eat near, say, Hermosillo. Afterwards, just south of The Baja—she would be at sea. The yonder blue.
The desert: dark now. Sophie put on the nightgown with the dolman sleeves and thought of Ishmael and found a passage she had long ago marked in her own copy of Moby Dick:
With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him down to rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.
Landlocked and out of sight of water, far away from the mid-Atlantic, she slipped under the comforter, spurned the pile of books on her bedside table, clicked off the light, and closed her eyes. Her outsize bedroom window was open.
Even here, in an interior, the smell was earthy. Unearthly. How could anyone live anywhere but here? If only they knew. All the houses on the market within a hundred miles of Tucson would be snapped up in a day. The GPS would show anchorites’ huts flung up along the sides of the Santa Ritas.
The desert is becoming hers as she slips into sleep and she is becoming the desert’s. She has mysterious access to the desert floor, scrubby alluvial fans; the creosote-bush, cholla, ocotillo, desert marigolds, the rare pineapple-cacti trembling with small exhalings. The dangles, the bean-pods of the mesquite trees release their spice to the desert breathings which become as one breath and move through open windows.
A roiling and rolling back. Rushings. Bands of antique hunters dash ahead of the melting ice, finding themselves—stunned—in desert grasslands in an area which will become Arizona. The frost is melting from their hearts. Who would have known that such a place existed?
And just ahead of them, at least twelve thousand years ago, a mammoth is also rushing. Soon the she-mammoth lies in a streambed, like the one near Naco, with fluted spear points like tiny harpoons in her flesh. The Paleo-Indian people stand for a few moments and twist their torsos in a dance of joy at the mammoth’s death before they give in to their hunger and rush to hack her to pieces.
These Paleolithics, humans and mammoths, as the climate grows hotter and drier give way to the Archaic peoples who are also rushing from place to place, outwitting the seasons, hunting and gathering. One strain of the Archaics, the Hohokam, start running through the very land where Sophie lives.
Under her pillow, the earth is breaking up in minute cracks, giving way to the first corn; then there would be cotton seeds. And cattle. Even deeper in the earth under the pillow, lies copper.
Polly Appears
Sophie found that she could not stop thinking about Polly, the terrier. She wondered if the tree was still there, on the grounds at Down House, with its roots curling around the little dog’s rib cage.
Terrier. Wasn’t Tintin’s Snowy a terrier?
The mutual attachment between dog and man had been Sophie’s first clue that Charles was not an “evil genius.” She supposed that dogs did not attach themselves to bona fide evil geniuses.
What if she associated herself with Polly’s point of view? She might feel less anxious about following Darwin’s thinking to its conclusion.
Dogs didn’t have super-egos floating in their dog-houses, crowding them like ghosts. They might feel guilty once in a while but they didn’t have helium balloons full of shame attached to their paws. When they looked up from a beach they weren’t beguiled by streamers behind a shaky prop plane: THE END IS NEAR or HELL IS REAL.
Dogs could loaf on the job, could dog it, flee, point, retreat, trot, renege. They could bark. They could give themselves over to the objects of their affections.
If she kept Polly in her consciousness she could relax and concentrate on the time she was spending with Charles, the man she already liked. He was becoming an object of her affections.
When she skipped ahead to read more about Polly, she noted Francis’s remark about Charles teaching Polly to catch a biscuit off her nose. Think of all that was involved in teaching and learning the art of catching of biscuits. The timing. The flexibility and range of motion. The patience. The concentration.
And then the payoff, after misses and near-misses. The praise and affection of the teacher. The affection of the successful student. And above all the pleasure, first, of the perfectly balanced biscuit on the nose and then of the anticipation of the bite and then of the bite.
Sophie had heard that fox terriers knew how to savor. They knew the joys of delayed gratification.
Her nephew had a terrier named Demoiselle, who would snap up crickets and hold them in her mouth. The cricket would sing in that warm, small space as if it were in a Chinese cricket cage. It would sing and sing in that tooth-slatted dark until the crunch. Singing in the very jaws of death, as William Blake had done.
Sophie imagined Polly crunching her biscuit and then barking with the crumbs still clinging to her muzzle. She barked again. And again. “Father!” she was saying. “More. Again. One more.”
Bark, bark, bark. “Please, please, please.” She wagered that Polly had often barked in threes.
The more Sophie thought about Polly and Charles, a man who could be affectionate and mock-solemn, the more her lonely moments seemed to diminish. She could, perhaps, talk to Charles, but then he would have to answer her—he seemed to be a courteous man. And then putting words into his mouth would turn her into a ventriloquist or a fabricator. Which wouldn’t be fair.
He belonged, like Abraham Lincoln whose birthday Charles shared, to the ages. She would not make up what he did or did not say. Besides, most of the time—if he actually lived with her—he would be off somewhere else, perhaps working on the geology of the Santa Ritas or dissecting, opening up the gullets of as much road kill as he could find. And he would need all those meals: breakfast, and a packed lunch to put in with his geology hammer; and then dinners. She loved cooking, but three meals a day! Exhausting. She didn’t want to fool with that. She had mysteries to write. Leave him to heaven.
But she could try talking to Polly. Children talked to imaginary creatures. Sophie remembered an adult doing the same—who was it?
Charlie. That fictional character, Charlie Citrine, had talked to his actual dead in the Pensión La Roca in Madrid. He even read out loud to his dead, prompting them. Or were his dead prompting him? People out in the corredor heard Charlie’s mutterings.
Polly was dead. Sophie began. She tried it.
“Polly,” she said. “I am beginning to see why you loved him.”
And then the creature of Sophie’s imagination appeared. It started with a white stub of a tail which flicked back and forth like the false flame of a battery-run tealight. Polly. She would be a little revenant. She was a phantasm, but still—
“Polly,” she said, “Can you speak to me?”
And Polly said: “Whereas, what do you think I am doing with my tail?”
Then she sniffed. “Whereas, what is this place? No Kentish smells.” She sniffed again. “Instead, collared-lizard urine; pack-rat and scorpion poop with cactus oversmells, whiffs of mountain laurel, waftings of mother bobcat and her bobcat-smalls.” She turned then to watch a pair of Gambel’s Quail hesitate and duck under a gigantic rosemary bush outside the sliding doors of Sophie’s study. She whined and pressed her nose to the glass. “Is it done? Whereas, can they be eaten, can they be eaten, can they be eaten? Let me out.”
“Polly,” Sophie said. “Stop it. Listen. What was your master like?” Silence.
Later, Polly looked at Sophie’s car keys and said, “Whereas, can I naught go with you?”
“Not to the grocery store. Naught. I’ll take you outside when I get back.”
Her tail drooped. “How I do hate it here. I can naught go out by m
yself as I was wont to do in Kent.”
“I’m sorry. Snakes. Bobcats.”
JJ Agave
The grocery store, “JJ Agave,” a few miles south and west of Green Valley, seldom had anyone under fifty-five in it. Here an ancient woman leaned on her shopping cart and took one slow step after another. There a stooped man turned sideways to look up at frozen dinners. You often saw people with neck collars, ribcage-protectors. A man with a patch over one eye smiled in a winsome way.
Sometimes her patience was tested by the slow-motion person square in the middle of an aisle but mostly she was full of admiration for the grit of these people who felt like lying down all the time but who instead went out to the grocery store.
As she looked at the bananas, she prayed that most of these remarkable souls were not actually driving themselves to this store. When she turned and started walking she met a defiant gaze.
A man in a motorized shopping cart. He was overweight and looked to be close to eighty but she couldn’t be sure as he wore a dun-colored canvas hat with both a visor in front and a flap at the back, as if he needed to keep the sun off his neck in JJ Agave. His jaw jutted to the left. It was not so much, Sophie realized, that he was staring at her as it was that he was staring at someone, and that he had an angry question that had long been unanswered. Not, “Are you my mother?” More, “Why are you not serving me as my god-damned mother never willingly did?” He appeared to have more of a malign focus than John Updike’s “A&P” witch-people and pig-people had.
Sophie moved away, over to the organic section, where the fruit and vegetables overflowed their discrete nests of brown-paper curls. The items looked far from fresh; one produce-stocker could probably have said to another: “That stuff just sits there, day after day. These old geezers can’t afford organics—doesn’t the boss know even that much? Besides they have more to worry about than how many years it would take a pesticide to kill them. They’ll die of something else way ahead of that.”
She actually felt empathy for the stockers. If only Updike’s three young women in nothing but bathing suits would walk into the produce department of this store when the younger men were on duty. Just once. Sophie thought she might cheer.
She slid a bunch of green onions into a green bag, put it in her cart, and turned to walk to the back of the store and then on to the canned goods aisle. As she did, she saw the Motorized Man’s back was to her: he had on a beige T-shirt that said, “Desert Healthcare.”
While she was reaching for dried pinto beans in the next aisle, she heard a roar not unlike the rumbling at the start of an earthquake or of a train being pulled by a vintage locomotive. But the roar also had the character of a snarl, as of a wild animal. Had the produce aisle turned into a jungle, a veldt where vines were growing?
The snarl was loud; everyone in JJ Agave must have heard it. It continued, then stopped, and then started again. Now it had a new character: the snarl was ending in a choking sound. Something like what the character Hans Castorp must have heard in The Magic Mountain.
Somebody had perhaps choked on an item they were surreptitiously sampling—cherries? Grapes? A bite of celery? A chunk of the apple itself? A handful from the walnut dispensing-bin? A fair number of people in her area were marginally poor; they lived on Social Security; in one of the richest countries in the world they needed therapies of all sorts but couldn’t afford them. Maybe they got their food in stolen bites from the JJ Agave?
Sophie wondered what to do. Then she had it. It was the sound that Hans had heard in the sanitarium: someone was trying to bring up mucous, sputum, with a vengeance. It sounded like an evil angel with asthmatic bronchitis trying to blow a stopped-up French horn on Judgment Day.
Then the noise ceased. A man in her aisle looked up and then at Sophie in unutterable relief as if a deafening TV ad had just been muted. The man shrugged.
Then it came to Sophie. The person who was so clogged and yet so aggressive in trying to free his lungs of something could be none other than her Motorized Man.
And, yes, here he was, steering around the corner. He had a wad of Kleenex in his hand; he glared at her but showed no signs of the rack, the wracking he had just been through.
The funny thing was, he didn’t look sorry for himself because he had nearly choked to death. He was all set to boss his wife about again from his comfortable seat; making her take things off shelves for him, making her put them back. “Too expensive. I don’t need that. What are you looking at now? No good. I don’t LIKE that. Get that instead.”
Shaking his head “no,” he was poised to order the world around, even from the depths of his incapacity. He was the kind of man who startled his doctor—the doctor who mostly had pliant, grateful patients—by saying “How much the hell do you drink for Chrissake?” He eyed the doctor up and down and said, “You’ve got a belly on you, and you’re giving me fuckin’ lectures on eating?”
His eyes took in everything as if he were a secret agent. He was an angry cat or he was like the rooster who had once chased eleven-year-old Isabelle around a campground outside of Florence. The kind-hearted child decided she had finally to turn and ward that Italian rooster off, defend herself, hit him in the beak with the water pail she was carrying. It was a brilliant moment for her daughter and she was still swinging her water pail handily at some ill-suited men.
Sophie considered. Even Motorized Man, even this Ancient with the phlegm caught in his throat; even this man on the verge of being a thug—was up and moving in JJ Agave. Moving is the thing. Whatever he was doing—and it wasn’t pretty—he was refusing to just lie down.
The Objects of Her Affections
For now she was happy that she was not a biographer, but an amateur. In your older age, she thought, you could finally relax and be an amateur. Good enough. With Polly, she could sniff things out.
And—sniff what out?
Sniff out what was there. What was interesting. What her instincts told her to, that’s what. The objects of her affections.
Well, for now she had Polly’s approach. She would sniff out Charles Darwin.
Right. Sophie felt like whislting. Bad as she had been at it.
Her mother used to whistle, even though she said she had been taught—at a St. Paul convent-school—that every time little girls whistle, the Blessed Virgin cries. Consuelo had had a rebellious side. In the ‘20s, she had resided with her family at the Commodore Hotel in St. Paul where Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda also lived. Her father told her to please not continue to go down to the bar there and peer in at them. But she would not stop.
If her mystery turned out to be related to Charles Darwin and if she wrote that down in a book and called it fiction, would anyone care? Wait a minute.
I would care. But besides herself? Maybe people who loved Darwin might care, especially if Sophie stuck—in Charles’s case—pretty much to the facts; to his writing, to his letters, to the record.
Ted would say everybody already knows all about Darwin and his life. Ha. That was a joke.
Sophie reading Darwin in the Sonoran Desert, he would say. Sophie and Charles. Weird.
Weird. That’s it, Sophie thought. What is weird if not the mountainous desert?
The mountainous desert—basin and range—throws everything into high relief and low comedy. Some of the cowpokes are loons. Some of the actual loons, the birds, are cowpokes; these vagrants ride in like ghost-riders in the sky.
Here, grasshopper mice eat scorpions like popcorn. Charles would have loved it. There was space here to really see adaptations and surprises in every species. Metamorphic rocks.
Alain had brought himself to the Southwest partly because of the Tintin story. Maybe he would like Sophie’s book. Maybe Flannery O’Connor would like it —all the grotesqueries. And where you were expecting wrinkled, bugged-out people—you sometimes found wrinkled and smooth-skinned, gracious and sharp savants.
Get on with it, she thought. Get with it. Move.
Sophie thought she would try whistling again. And she had Polly. And her Darwin biographers. Virgilian guides.
Do Not Tell the Pea Spitter
Sophie discovered in one biography that young Charles had developed a secret code.6 He sent messages down to his sister, Caroline, from his hiding place up in a favorite chestnut tree: the means of delivery were ropes, colored rags, weights, and pulleys he had devised. He made a sketch of it.
The possibilities. Just think of what, perhaps, he wrote that has been lost to us. She considered and then did her own variation on his code:
Meet by the Owlo
But do not fall into Locaho.
Do not tell the pea spitter
Nor Squirt aught
But that we are going to Ly rachilo
By zorum quello.
Bring no ab zorum
But bring Dello.
—Sophie Nordlund,
after Charles Darwin, Youth
And to call his father Squirt. To call Dr. Darwin, that impressive and difficult being, Squirt. Wonderful, to make him more manageable in that way.
Here she was then. Sophie had found objects of her affection that were also objects of Charles’s affection. Codes, contraptions.
As a child in St. Paul, Sophie had made up her own codes and contraptions. On Goodrich Avenue, she and her friend Mary Patricia had made a pulley of sorts by threading lengths of string through ice-pick-punched holes in a tin can. They somehow dropped weighted sets of empty creamed-corn cans out of their second-story bedroom windows; then they raced downstairs and tied the ends together.
Back in their respective bedrooms, they pulled the strings up and up until they were taut. Now messages went waggling back and forth between the Dutch Elms high above the 1950s Oldsmobile 98s and Chevy Bel Airs as they moved quietly below.
The Crossings Page 6