The Joshua Tree

by Robert Cabot

  Lights and shadows, comings and goings, dozing waking. Familiarity; no danger smells, even with the new presence.

  Innocences, Lily, in your heart

  Flowers, Lily, in your hair, pinned to your breast. Never mind that they’re supermarket leftovers.

  passing

  passing

  In the parks, jonquils and pansies, organized and neat. Along the dunes by the ocean, fat rubbery leaves, pinks, pressed down by the sea spray, the sand, the driving wind. Yellow poppies in the valley, laurel in the forests, silver sage clinging to the summits like and old woman’s hand, so small.

  Flowers turned sour in the airless pads of Haight Street.

  Or flowers of the desert, your first desert, low beyond the Santa Claras. Brought there by Perry.

  rape

  O Lily! Finally may you breathe deep the thin singing air, faint perfumes trembling in the heat? May you embrace the sun, let it penetrate to the heart, purify every cell, join, give life, bring forth the flower? Put your cheek down in the sand, Lily girl, into the enormous world of the tiny blue gilia with its yellow throat. Look up the purple beaver-tail, creased and spiked, to its flaming banner, a solitary desert bee, stuffing her leg sacks with pollen to feed to the brood. Higher, against the pink granite wall, the slender green fingers, giant feelers, specked with a million scarlet blossoms, the ocotillo. And against the sky the great shaggy arms of the Joshua tree holding out to the sun, over all, their handfuls of white lilies.

  the lily

  the lion

  Yet what holds you, Lily, why are you not dancing free in that air? Behind do you feel the shadow of the mountains reaching out in the afternoon sun, out onto the desert? Black and infinite against the light, a veil of mist hung on the sun’s rays. And in the pass, wedged down into the range, is the brown air, spilling over, flooding out onto the sand. Wherever you look, how can it matter? The corruption, the saturation.

  This is not the Nevada desert, with the north California mountains, touching heaven, hanging to the west, and beyond the great grasslands, pierced by volcanoes. Here the desert, the Mohave, is richer, its secrets deeper. It rises to the west in strange unfriendly peaks and shoulders, low passes, failing against the human blight behind. But it stretches east, up and forever.

  Lost Grail

  wasteland

  Behind, a death-in-life sentence, the creeping, the all-invading, the putrid breath of that vile man. How can you cleanse yourself? The foulness reaches even here, and do you carry it with you, is that your sentence?

  O why, Pa, why did you send her away, drive her from you and her dear mountains, her own country?

  Lily, crouching in that desert, the weight pressing on your back, your heart cold in the sun, your breath hardly stirring as the tears flow into the dust. Remember, try to remember.

  Emancipating you, Pa called it, freeing you. The tight ties of Valley Hope, its proper ways, its proper marriages, its proper poverties, its proper hopelessness. Opportunities, professions; agricultural economics and you’ll be someone, San Valentino Agricultural College. Little Liliana Tocca.

  O flowers

  of the

  sun

  The tears drop on your books, each evening, staring at the meaningless words and formulae. Temple Street with its Mormons at one end, its Aggies at the other, you in the middle. Second floor, one window, on the street. Always the clamor, still battering in your skull, from the milk and drunks and the meat in the black early hours, to the buses belching at you, the genteel shoppers with their Buicks, the great trucks endlessly hauling, the sports with their cutouts blasting. Always the miasma of the fumes, rising up into your window – closed and you faint of the heat or the stale smells.

  Tears shuddering in your heart, fevered, nerves jerking with pep pills. The poster photo of your mountains whirling on the wall, Swan Lake spinning in the clogged air. The bright patterns of your bed cover – Pugliese, woven by Ma winter nights – shimmer and ache behind your eyes. Your very floor bounces with the jukebox bass drum of the Ice Cream Parlor below.

  femme

  d’homme

  my

  innocence

  Tears, the sunshine dripping from you, left dry like the fragile skull of a fawn pulled down by the coyotes. The passions weeping from you. Alone, driven away to suffer for your gaiety. Each step you try is a trap to kill your heart: a smile or a touch of friendship or a word for his handsome eyes turns monstrous, an invitation to press hard on you till you vomit green from the pain in your soul. The kind and the good and the beautiful, they all turn to dust when you approach them.

  my

  prince

  Three days ago, four or five maybe – how can you count time under the smog and the roar and the sodium lights and with only a can of Pa’s honey, O dearest, dearest Pa!, to keep you from death? – their foods that cake in your belly and pound behind your temples and tear from you bloody spoor – countless days back. Slowly up the spitty chewing-gummed concrete steps into the smog-black brick. Late for your appointment, late, O why could it not be never? A groomed and glossy frog, with his charts and tables and built-in twitching leer for the classroom, his trembling hands and shifting eyes and voice like the dirty white cardboard Office Hours. How envied, to have as adviser the professor himself, how easy, the gut, the set-up, toady up and you’re in!

  The long hall, disappearing in the gloom beyond the water cooler, woodwork, dirty brown plaster, transoms projecting yellow light and typewriter clatter and hollow voices onto the ceiling. Your footsteps are another’s, for it is not possible that you are here, you whose footsteps are always horse gaits, who laugh in whinnies. Walking into the vanishing point down that unending corridor.

  Blonde and perfumed, her made-up voice, “The professor has been waiting for you.”

  Frosted glass, the clammy doorknob. In the fluorescent desk light the white face, flushed pink when he looks up. “Ah! please sit down, Miss Tocca.”

  my

  tender

  colin

  Anywhere, look anywhere but at that gasping mouth, those eyes bulging under the fatty brows, those fingers, swollen, shuffling. The stuffed buzzard, hunched enormous on the radiator. The productivity graphs, the chart of the bugs and the poisons, the ribboned diploma with the college seal that always looks like a fox. And you know you must look now, just over his head, at the prize bull, great things dangling between his knees, the sheath like a fin on his belly. And from the right-hand desk drawer, those hands – you’ve smelt them sour when they’ve tried to touch your cheek – bring it forth.

  tempt

  you

  take

  Flicking, flicking, flicking, black forked flame, black eye of fear, body twisting steel, tail hissing. In the hot dust, rasping on the rock, still in the sun, straight, swelling to split the skin. Eye a drop of poison oil. Wake up, Lily, wake before it coils to strike!

  Brown, leathery, freshly oiled in his yellow hands, so cruelly huge and long, pointed, ripping inward. Once he said, the first time, when he brought it forth, “I do not show this in class, Miss Tocca, for perhaps some would not understand, but it is, as I know you – how exceptional you are, Miss Tocca! – will recognize, a most noble specimen of the forces of life, the phallus of a prize bull.”

  Phallus, what did he mean? The dry tremor of his voice, some stink in the airless dark room, some spasm tightening in your belly. You knew.

  innocence

  in the

  brothel

  Even now, the sharp pain of that tightening. Now as you sit in the clatter of the wind in the tin roof, the squeak of the bat, Will’s sighs as he stares through the darkness into the oil flame —longing, for past and future.

  laughter

  lightly

  Tightening as you watch again the hands taking forth that . . . try the words, will it help?, but you cannot. Somewhere, far in the distance, you would laugh, high, shrilly, at this obsessed creature, this pig, nasty with the foreign lisp. Not here. Somew
here you would feel pity for this grotesquery. But you cannot.

  I am alone, O my dearest Pa!, why why did you drive me away, down into the infernal dark? Why do you leave me? Alone, the cursed diploma, this wanting and wanting and wanting of men which leaves no place for being. Alone in the black, me, who would look for but a slit of pure sunlight as the greatest joy. O come to me, my cleansing sun! Alone midst these mad thirsts – facts and facts and facts and the reasonings, lusts, and they would throw me into their sucking whirlpool, and they would have me.

  Fear, the pee spurts and burns on your thigh, tighten, tighten, yet your legs – O tight so tight to the withers! – will not cross. Your eye will not move, your hand unclench from your books. Your breath will not come, the silent scream splitting the dark, splinters ripping the pudgy flesh, sour stinks and poisons.

  oil

  “Come now, Miss Tocca, have you no smile for your professor, Lily, may I call you Lily? We have your research examination we must work out together. Next week, I believe, yes, just so, just so.”

  and

  bitter bile

  Tap, tap, tapping on the desk.

  “We must be friends, Lily. We have so much in common. Our Europe, our perhaps being not completely understood in this country, our deeper awareness of the life processes. Emotional affinities, Lily. How important they are for fullest understanding! Come, we shall review the specimens together.”

  black

  The tapping stops. Yes, it is you, Lily, little Lily. Cold and the smell of wet wool, standing, moving, steps, quite away from the screaming and the trembling rage. Forward into the dark where he would point out life processes, bottled, graphed, pressed, dissected, stuffed, tapping again with his . . . O God, O God, O God! And turning to you again in the murk and dust, the stale air, the scream starting again from the far end of the room, crushed under the blue light.

  contains

  white

  “You see, you see, Lily, how our affinities work, confronted with these, this nature? Do you smile?”

  Wool, wet in the dark under the trees whispering to you. Blinking into the stars, whimpering perhaps from the cold place. Until he comes and you wiggle out and stand and reach above your fuzzy head to his great hard hand that leads you beyond the campfire and fumbles your pajamas. I kiss you, I kiss you, Papa kiss kiss kiss like all the stars.

  “Yes, yes, we shall be friends. We are so much alike. Look how your head comes to my shoulder. What pretty hair. Let me show you, here, your hand, how unbelievably strong and . . . ”

  pity

  laughter

  The tightening, it snaps through every cell – the flank behind the blue worsted, the greasy hand, the foul breath – the scream splits between you. Flesh scraped under your fingernails, the poison drips from his face, from his closed and naked eyelids, from his flaccid fingers.

  skipping

  in the dust

  Slowly, Lily, turn slowly or every muscle will snap like rods of glass. Turn slowly, with your books pressed tight to your breast, carefully, your thighs together, walking from your knees. Cold grease, the slippery doorknob, shocks you shivers to your heart. Ahead, another door, the blonde, how can she matter? Wool, and are there drops glistening on your stocking, and does the bulging glass, Seth Thomas clock behind your bloated head, fracture with the echo of the scream?

  You will not pass, Miss Tocca.

  From the black behind you, the black before you.

  Ladies. Ladies go there with their fish smells and their perfumes and their bitter piss. Lily, with her tears bleeding down her cheeks, vomit searing, dripping, a curled black hair on the white porcelain. Sobbing, her knees sharp pain on the sticky floor, her head raised, bowed again in the dry convulsion under the graffiti of men’s enormous things.

  sun’s

  path

  across

  the sky

  Will you ever know, Lily, will it someday come to you in a dream or a revelation or a stranger’s word, how you left there, how you found your way in the stifling smog and the dingy streetlight glow where no one walks? Where the music pulses from open doors and tires slap and wince on the streetcar rails. Where newsboys are orange metal racks with smeared windows and ten-cent slots. Where rats peer from the drain grills in the gutters, and mankind is motionless behind the glass, tweeds and two-pronged sweaters in the glued-up autumn leaves and shellacked cornucopias.

  How did you get there, Lily, where you looked across the room, strange to you, loathsome with its clinging smoke and its humidity of beer, as if you’d known he’d be there? Eyes that greeted you, that told you it was all right that you hadn’t found your room at all, that made the wool all right and the scream fade some, that knew how you’d scrubbed and scrubbed your fingernails in the slimy liquid soap, that could see with no shame where the tears ran astringent on your so cold cheeks. Eyes that came toward you, bright blue, help where nothing nothing else could . . . Eyes wide to the burning sun, eyes filling with desert sand, eyes drawn closed to their hateful chapel music – so few months, Perry distant at my side.

  He took you to your rooming house, he left, asking nothing.

  So you sit here alone, Lily, at your table piled with open books, digging in the pine wood with your ball-point. Blind with tears and anger. You will not pass. Again you will go up there, up those same steps and down the same corridors and past the Ladies. The blonde, the greasy doorknob, the murk. The Project Committee, three, he’s one of them. He will trap you among the specimens and the explanations. You will not pass.

  my

  rainbow’s

  “We’re sorry, Miss Tocca. You are rather weak here. You must prepare another project for next term. You know the Department’s rule, no degree without a satisfactory project.”

  gold

  So you will choke on the smog. You will take your last few dollars that Pa sent you and will buy a bus ticket out onto the Mohave, Quail Springs beyond the mountains. Somewhere the sun must still be burning, the air be pure, and people touch the ground.

  He will come again, Perry, with his steady blue eyes, just as you are leaving. He will take you.

  Flowers from the ruins, Lily. Perry a tree of a flower, you a little lily. His long blond hair, his huge eyes, his cowboy walk with all but his thumbs shoved into his back jeans pockets so his elbows idle, tall in the Joshua trees. You, to wander off in the yellow flowers of the cholla, to crouch in the sand, and feel the breathing about you, the sun flowing, the birds singing for themselves. The calming.

  But this desert keeps its secrets, withheld, not yet for you, my Lily . . . Come with me, Liliana, come with your Colin, to old Wills, the high desert. You’ll learn the secrets. The sun will flow into you, the birds will sing for you, the flowers will bloom in your heart.

  Return to where he’s sitting, staring out across the hostile sand.

  Forest

  bride of

  the sun

  Let him tell you of his country, of his Canada, high against the northern Rockies, the wilderness. Where his horses range free through the winter, to paw grass in the deep drifts, coats grown long against the sixty below and the mountain winds. Where bears and wolves and cougars pull down the old and the sick. Where the elk and moose and the caribou lick salt at his doorstep. Where the glaciers rumble through the summer and the avalanches can uproot trees a half a mile away with their blast of wind. Of rodeos, of packtripping for weeks at timberline, of canoeing the wilderness rivers with the beaver swimming under your bow, the trout as thick as the mosquitoes, a coyote pup playing on the sandy bank.

  my

  pauper

  Of another life, his life in San Francisco. Burlingame, the Pacific Club, the parties at the Mark. Yachts with the Golden Gate vast against the sky. Europe. This car of his. College, his fraternity, his basketball. The floating blondes, the Jewesses, his sisters in their snobby school, the black girl who taught him how to dance. Debutantes and champagne and five-dollar cigars.

  And
now, animal husbandry, keep the foreman from gouging: Recreational ranching, but how does it touch your world? A plaything of a livelihood. Pa, the black fatigue on his face from a foaling or a colt lost on the back pasture or taking off honey from eight hundred hives when the nectar runs heavy. Perry, so tall and at ease, who outfitted a pack train – ten five-hundred-dollar riding saddles, the pack saddles, the tents, the grub, the horses he was short-just for the fun.