A Phantom Herd

by Lorraine Ray

The first part of our adventure that day ended when the yellow Cadillac swooped into the opening of an underground parking lot and a grimy chain barrier, like the portcullis of a medieval castle, came creaking down from some dark greasy slot in the ceiling above and before we could get down the incline and wriggle under it, the ugly thing had banged closed in front of us.

  "Whew," said Meredith, breathing hard as her body careened down the incline and stopped just short of slamming into the chain fence. "We lost him. Dang it! He got away from us. Our best chance at a treasure and we didn't make it in time. Boy, he looked pretty damn rich to me. That was a good chance right there. Phooey! We could have talked to him and made him be impressed with us. I was thinking of some stuff to tell, but we lost our chance."

  She wove her fingers through the links for a second and then pushed off. Jack did the same, but I stopped short of shoving my hands into the greasy gate. Pacing the pavement in front of the chain barrier in a slow circle, Meredith shoved the palms of both her hands into the small of her back. "I'll just bet that was that old Wagstaff bozo. He owns about half of all Arizona. He splits it fair-and-square with the fed-er-al-lay government back in Washington. Nobody knows where to find him and we almost got our hands on him today. Gee-whiz, we were lucky! We were close to getting to talk to him. Just his lawyers and the governor know where he is all the time. The governor's got to know 'cause if he makes a law Wagstaff's got to say yeah or nay to it as it strikes him. He's the head honcho, see. He's the Jefe Supremo. They say he has to mate with a heifer, mostly brown and white ones are his favorites, and he ships them in from Show Low, twice a week or he goes completely bonkers and starts foaming at the mouth and then they have to hop to it double quick and get a siphon and make sure a whole gallon of the finest tequila flows directly into one of his stomachs as a source of comfort. He's got four of em, stomachs that is, just like any old cow. His mother was a Jersey from Minnesota. Pretty interesting gen-e-ol-o-gy."

  Meredith, you see, really knew the authentic facts on a lot of Arizona's famous people, including, it seemed, half-people, half-cows; she was sort of a walking repository of fascinating information about the city and the state; I could never match her for all the things she knew, but I was shocked years later when she couldn't repeat any of these interesting facts, and yet I recalled most of them, even the most trivial details of the stories, by heart. But I know I didn't believe her about Wagstaff being in the yellow Cadillac because in my vague ideas about who really was inside that car I imagined all sorts of odd combinations of children and deformed adults, linked together like puzzle pieces.

  "God, I wish I had his dough," said a wistful Jack, flopping his scrawny back with its protruding shoulder blades against a crumbling adobe wall. He fell into a breathless, dazed stupor, thinking about Wagstaff's mountain of money or else the mating of heifers with human beings. "I could get a lot of models. Planes, mostly. That's what I'd buy. I'd get that big old model kit of a B-52 they have up on a high shelf near the door at the model store. Right as you go out or come in you can see it. I seen it a hundred times. Or a P-32. That a nice model too. They got it in two scales. I don't know which is better. If I had his money I could buy them both! I wish I had that model. I wish I had his money."

  "Doesn't everybody," said Meredith, awed herself by the contemplation of so much wealth.

  "All those bucks," said Jack admiringly.

  "If you had his dough, you could really get some neat-o stuff, but you'd probably be crazy," Meredith said, delivering a choice bit of her usual pithy and world-weary wisdom. "You be about as crazy as anybody could be and not be automatically thrown in the state nut house. Actually, you would get thrown in, because you are a nut." She punched Jack on the arm.

  "I wish I had twice what he has," I chirped merrily. This silly remark erupted out of my mouth because at age six I often confused twice something with half of it. My blurted observation brought the conversation to a screeching halt as surely as if I had thrown down a live hand grenade. My old rule of never talking for days appealed to me again as it would throughout my life; whenever I talked I was good at providing the comment which stupefied everyone with its supreme idiocy, and apparently I had done it again, though at first I was uncertain what mistake I had made. My brother and sister studied me thoroughly, intently, and in the most unflattering manner and for such an excruciating period of time that I thought I might die from their profound disapproval; "half" I said, correcting myself, "half, half, half." They ignored my correction and continued to assess everything about me with those cold stares of superiority; they seemed to be wondering if it would be worth the effort to throw me under a passing car or whether it would be better to wait for the rainy season and drown me in the arroyo the way you would a blind, three-legged kitten.

  The decision, while not really in my favor, was to do nothing then; Meredith and Jack, without so much as a casual adios to me, took to the jammed sidewalks, roistering and swaggering, pointing out assorted oddities to each other. Our town had a lot of oddities to point out in almost every direction. I followed them at a respectful distance, conscious of my own relative inadequacy.