Desert Discord

by Henry D. Terrell

  When her student left, Dorothy Kellogg locked up the studio and crossed the yard to the porch door. The mail had just arrived, and King, her tiny terrier, was inside the house spinning in place and barking nonstop. Dorothy took the opportunity to let King out so he could bolt around the corner to try and catch a glimpse of the mailman from the side gate and bark at him some more.

  She passed through the living room on the way to the parlor. Her husband was in his chair hunched over a book on real estate law.

  “Usher, please let the dog in when he scratches.”

  Usher grunted and nodded his head.

  Dorothy went into the parlor to make sure everything was tidy. This evening she was hosting two guests for dinner—both former students. Andy Zamara and Carol Fleming would be coming at six o’clock for tea and appetizers, then stay for dinner at seven. Carol was second chair, second violin in the Duro Symphony.

  (With Andy on hiatus, Carol should have been first chair, in everyone’s opinion, but the orchestra was now shorthanded, and the only way Dr. Dietz had been able to get Peter Mathern to return was to eat shit and give the man his old job back.)

  Andy could not currently play the violin, which was heartbreaking in Mrs. Kellogg’s view. She had visited him once in the Duro hospital, and he had not even known her, not acknowledged her. The news that Andy was recovering was a huge relief, but she wanted to see and judge for herself in the elegance of her own parlor. Carol was invited too, mostly to fill in if there were any awkward silences due to Andy’s disability. Also, she could drive him.

  Mrs. Kellogg stuck her head into the kitchen to check on dinner.

  “Are we still on for seven, Leeza?”

  “Yes, Miz Kellogg.”

  The question was an unnecessary formality. Leeza was not the best cook Dorothy had ever employed, but she was punctual as an army sergeant, which guaranteed she would keep her position.

  “What are you making?”

  “Ragu chicken, Miz Kellogg.”

  “Excellent.”

  Carol and Andy arrived at three minutes till six, and Mrs. Kellogg greeted them at the door. She offered Andy her hand, which he took with his left hand. To Carol she gave a peck on the cheek.

  They took tea in the parlor. As expected, Andy didn’t say much, though he responded to direct questions and was pleasant. Carol talked about the frustrations of playing violin sitting next to a man with inconsistent timing like Peter Mathern. She said she looked forward to the day Andy could return.

  “How is your bow hand, Andy?” asked Mrs. Kellogg.

  Andy held up his right hand to show her. “My thumb,” he said. “It’s stiff.” He wiggled his thumb a few degrees. “It hurts … here.” He indicated the tendon that ran from the third thumb joint through the wrist.

  Mrs. Kellogg held out her hand. “Squeeze my hand,” she said. “Squeeze as hard as you can.”

  Andy took her hand and squeezed it with his long fingers, while his thumb stuck straight out to the side, like a hitchhiker.

  “You have good strength,” she said. “The problem is just your thumb. Wait here a minute.” She rose and left the parlor, returning a couple of minutes later with one of her practice violins. She quickly checked the tuning, then handed it to Andy, who took the instrument in his left hand. “Play something,” she said. “Just using your fingers.”

  Andy hesitated, then began to finger the notes for Bach’s “Concerto in D Minor,” the first violin part. It was a piece he hadn’t played in years, but his fingers still knew it.

  “Try to hold the bow,” Mrs. Kellogg said. She held it out for him. He tried to position his fingers on top of the bow, but his thumb couldn’t grip the curved part called the “frog.” He tried to raise the bow but lost control and dropped it into his lap.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Carol came and sat beside him on the small silk couch. She picked up the bow and put it into Andy’s hand, positioning his fingers across the top of the bow behind the pad, and his weak thumb under the frog. It was how a person would hold a violin bow if he had no idea how it was really done.

  “Try that,” she said.

  Andy raised the violin and bow, and drew a long, hesitant note on the D string. He tried it again, with a better sound. Then, slowly, he played a D-major scale all the way up to the highest string. After pausing a moment, marveling at the feeling of holding a violin again and playing real notes, he slowly played the Bach concerto, at quarter speed but with increasing surety.

  He stopped, let down the violin, and grinned at Mrs. Kellogg. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t even very good. But he was playing again! It gave him a drug-like rush.

  “Andy,” she said, “you used to come over to this house for lessons every Wednesday for … how many years was it?”

  Andy calculated. “Nine years,” he said.

  “How would you like to take lessons again? I think you and I need to … let’s say reinvent … reinvent how this cigar box is played.”

  “I’d love to come here again,” said Andy. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Very well, then. Wednesdays are not currently available, but I could do Friday afternoons at four o’clock.”

  Andy thought. “I have therapy until four.”

  “Four thirty then? I could pick you up at the clinic and take you back to Ramona Piedman’s house when we’re done.”

  “Okay.” Andy smiled, delighted. He raised the violin again and played slowly. It was a Scottish reel, played at half speed, with lots of double stops. It was happy dancing music.

  Carol and Dorothy listened to Andy play for several minutes, not wanting to interrupt him. They noticed Leeza standing in the parlor doorway.

  “Yes?” said Dorothy.

  “Dinner, Miz Kellogg.”

  “Very good. Come, friends. Let’s eat.”

  Andy handed the borrowed violin back to Mrs. Kellogg. “Do you have … some staff paper I could borrow?” he asked.

  She put the violin and bow into the case. “Of course,” she said. “Are you thinking of trying some composition?”

  “I have ideas,” he said.

  Mrs. Kellogg led her guests into the dining room, where a slightly impatient Usher Kellogg sat, awaiting his evening meal.

  – 30 –

  An Electric Fence or Something

  The second week of July, the heat came at last. The people of Duro had spent much of the previous month making themselves miserable in fear of the heat to come, though June proved quite temperate. When the hot winds blew out of the southwest, with 100-degree air made worse by Pacific Ocean humidity, they all turned to each other without irony to commiserate.

  My God, have you ever seen such a hot summer?

  Not since last summer.

  The squatters at the little dope farm on Saturn Lane watched helplessly as their crops wilted in the daily furnace blasts. They watered the plants copiously every evening after sunset, but by five o’clock in the afternoon, with a further two hours of punishing sunshine left, the proudly erect bushes succumbed to plant despair and drooped alarmingly.

  There was no choice. While the heat crisis lasted, Reed and Douglas had to resort to risky midday waterings. Every day after lunch they fortified themselves with two beers apiece. Douglas put on his floppy hat, while Reed was content to add to his endless sunburn. They looked around to see if anybody was watching and scuttled across the hot, dusty road to save the crops. They worked as fast as possible and stayed low. It was critical that they not be seen out here—any neighbor would rightfully wonder what two guys were doing every day on undeveloped property in the middle of the bejesus heat.

  Standard procedure was for one of them to open the cover to the meter and turn the handle with the big iron key while the other attempted to control the ungainly two-inch hose. The water flow had only one setting—fire hose. It was either off or it was on. Moving so many gallons per minute, they had to be careful of washing away plant roots. At least the job went quickly—the three stand
s of plants with four rows apiece could be flooded in minutes. There had been two other stands, planted farther east near the remains of the old windmill, but there the deer victory had been total, and the two gentlemen farmers focused their efforts on the more defendable plants closer to the front of the property.

  Once, more out of curiosity than anything else, Douglas had recorded the meter readings to calculate their water usage in one week. It was 11,000 gallons. He swallowed hard and subtracted the numbers again. Holy shit. He hoped Jerry was right about the water department’s carelessness. But so long as the high-pressure heat dome sat cruelly over West Texas, they had no choice but to continue the risky soakings.

  At this rate, however, water usage might be a moot point. Each night, they lost a few more plants to the deer, or found them so damaged in the morning they were sure to perish in the daily scorchers. Douglas did the math—their outdoor crop wouldn’t last another month. He needed help. A desperate solution was called for. Perhaps they could spray the illicit plants with something foul tasting to deer, the equivalent of coating a nail-biter’s fingertips in soap. He needed some kind of noxious substance that would repel deer but not contaminate the harvest. Did such a thing exist? He knew somebody who would know.

  He called Andy Zamara over at the hippie house.

  “Andy, we’re losing them,” Douglas said. “The goddamn deer are killing us.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Andy.

  “I don’t know what to do. Either me or Reed has to sleep in that field every night, and they still come. I drifted off for about ten minutes last night, and I woke up and there’s this fucker standing twenty feet away from me, munching down, ignoring me. Shit, I’d electrify the fence, if I could.”

  “Don’t think that would work,” said Andy. “You’d … electrocute yourself.”

  “I wasn’t seriously suggesting that,” said Douglas. “We don’t have any power on that property. But we have to do something. We’re gonna lose the whole crop.”

  “You might. They can eat a whole garden in a week.”

  Douglas was exasperated. “How about some kind of deer repellent? I read that deer hate Tabasco sauce. What about that?”

  “Tabasco sauce?”

  “Yeah,” said Douglas. “I read about it in Southern Gardener. You mix eggs and hot sauce and spray it on plants, and supposedly deer won’t eat them.”

  “Hmmmm,” said Andy.

  “You don’t think that’s a good idea?”

  “Sounds hard. There’re a lot of plants. That’s a lot of eggs and Tabasco sauce. How would you spray them?”

  “I don’t know!” said Douglas. “Jesus, man! You got a better idea?”

  “Sure,” said Andy.

  “What?”

  “Dog. Get a dog.”

  That afternoon, Douglas drove to the Ferris County Municipal Animal Shelter and paid five dollars for a license and rabies tags for what appeared to be an English bulldog/beagle mix with a short, stubby tail and squinty face. The guy at the pound said the dog had been trained as a hunter but wasn’t any good at it. That sounded fine to Douglas, so on his way back out to Jupiter Lane, he stopped by the Palace Discount store and picked up a forty-pound bag of Best Buddy dry dog food.

  Reed named him Leary. He was amiable enough but proved to have the worst traits of both his presumed breeds. He wasn’t very bright, had an unpredictable and startling bark, drooled continuously, and growled at anyone who approached his dog dish, even when it was empty.

  The first couple of nights in the field, the dog charged back and forth from fence to fence, barking so loud that Douglas and Reed could hear him from their living room hundreds of feet away. They feared a neighbor would complain and bring in the authorities, but after two or three nights, Leary was mostly quiet. The deer had been spooked.

  He spent the daylight hours indoors asleep under Douglas’s bed, except when he would nose his way out the back screen door to mark the perimeter of the house, then stand at the door barking until he was let back in.

  But henceforth, out in the dope patch, not a single leaf was lost to foragers ever again. Inside the house, fleas got into the couch, but Douglas figured it was a tradeoff.

  – 31 –

  Not Quite What It Looks Like

  Andy’s sleep schedule was completely whacked. Coming from a family of early risers, and being a punctual, early-morning person himself, Andy found this odd. As long as he was taking his prescribed regimen of Darvon, getting to sleep was no problem. As his shattered arm and head slowly healed, he took fewer and fewer pain pills, and the deep, drugged sleep he had experienced every night was replaced by a strange insomnia.

  Sometimes he was reluctant to sleep, because he might see the face. It was coming more frequently in his dreams. Always, the dreams involved Andy being paralyzed, unable to defend himself as the face stood above him. He could see that face so clearly, a young man towering over him, eyes filled with hate. Or was it fear? Sometimes hate and fear look the same.

  Much better was the spontaneous music that still came to him as he lay awake in bed. It seldom was a bother, and usually he welcomed it. Sometimes, lately, the pieces he heard were dull, repetitious etudes from a book he’d owned for years, Forty Advanced Studies for the Violin. When that happened, Andy would sometimes get out of bed and put a record on Saskia’s little lo-fi stereo, playing the music quietly so as to not disturb the household. Usually, this was sufficient to drive out the mindless fingering exercises, but sometimes he had to play a couple of records in a row to fall asleep.

  Andy was back to playing the Dodge again. He wasn’t particularly precise with the bow control—in fact, he was downright clumsy. Mrs. Kellogg had assigned him to work on some of the pieces in Forty Advanced Studies, which had an unfortunate side effect on his spontaneous mental music, but helped him immensely with the overall stamina of his hand muscles.

  Holding the bow was crazily difficult. He was forced to grip it like a fencer holds a sword. One problem was there wasn’t enough surface to grip. Reggie suggested wrapping friction tape around the lower part of the stick and pad, so they tried it, using Andy’s less-expensive spare bow. Reggie added tape until the end of the bow was comically fat, but it worked. Andy still couldn’t pivot the bow the way he needed to, but Mrs. Kellogg showed him how he could shift his whole elbow up or down to change the angle. Andy was afraid this would look awfully stupid, but it was a working solution.

  Sometimes, when his hand hurt too much, he would put down his instrument and pick up a pencil and a few sheets of blank music paper. Often, he would simply stare at the pages. The music was there, somewhere, but it was like trying to remember a dream. Other times, he would scribble furiously, the low parts first then the violins on top. If he worked hard enough on one part, then sometimes he could hear it in his head, and that would be the music that would come to him in his half-sleep.

  On one particular night, the insomnia was relentless. He had practiced for most of an hour, trying to get ready for his lesson with Mrs. Kellogg the next day. He had overdone it, and his right arm throbbed. He was too tired to sketch out musical notes. There were still a couple more Darvons left in the pill bottle, but he wanted to save those for severe headaches, which came infrequently.

  In addition to music practice, the therapists at St. Cecilia’s gave him homework for his brain, and sometimes these exercises brought on splitting pain. Each night, he sat at a table with sheets of paper and a pencil and answered questions. Tonight, the exercise had focused on vocabulary:

  Write down five things that are usually blue:

  Let’s see … sky, water, jeans, berries … He thought a long time, then wrote … northers.

  Write down five words that rhyme with pants:

  Dance, lance, grants, ants, sense … No, that didn’t work. He erased it … Trance.

  Write down five words that contain silent letters:

  High, thought, island … This one was really hard for some reason. His head hurt. He put down th
e pencil and rubbed his eyes. He needed to go to bed.

  It was tedious but necessary, he supposed, retraining his damaged mind. So far, Andy had made a lot of progress. Words came more easily, and the paraphasia was less of a problem. He hoped the doctors would discharge him in a couple of weeks. For one thing, his parents were getting socked with a stiff bill, which they had to pay in weekly installments. For another thing, St. Cecelia’s was a sad place. Andy was their star pupil, but many of the old stroke patients had little hope of improvement and shuffled about the corridors confused, led by loved ones. (The old woman who held her purse close never did speak, though she didn’t seem unhappy.)

  Also, it was a little awkward living with the Piedmans during the week. They were kind and gracious, at least everybody but Apollo, but he still felt like a burdensome child. Since the recent family crisis of Erycca’s disappearance, he had felt particularly in the way.

  Andy went to bed but lay awake, trying to conjure a Brahms concerto to lead him into sleep. The mental music was growing more elusive since he had started playing again. The music he was trying to compose was still not close enough at hand to respond to his commands. So it would have to be Brahms. He counted off slowly in his head, eyes closed.

  One, two, three, four …

  Etude 21 from Forty Studies started droning monotonously in his mind.

  Ah, shit!

  The only way to break the cycle was to get out of bed. He sighed, pulled on his trousers and a white T-shirt, and went into the kitchen. Maybe milk would help. Then perhaps he’d put on a record. He poured a cup and sat at the kitchen table.

  He had almost finished his milk when he heard the front door open. It was barely audible, creaking ever so slightly, then clicking shut. Somebody was trying to sneak into the house very quietly. He sat in the semidarkness, holding his cup of milk, and waited. Janey came in the room, walking carefully.

  “Hi, girl!” said Andy.