Genuine Aboriginal Democracy

by Lorraine Ray

Genuine Aboriginal Democracy

  Lorraine Ray

  Copyright 2012 Lorraine Ray

  Table of Contents

  Uncertain Trysts

  His Faithful Companion

  Big Paper Skeleton

  Fantasy Artifact

  Genuine Aboriginal Democracy

  Mother's Woman-Marine Bra

  Work Out Your Own Salvation

  Consciousness-Raising

  Metamorphosis of Me

  Snake Dance Disaster

  On the Rio Mayo

  Uncertain Trysts

  Desertion claimed the edge of the place.

  In a flood of cold morning sunlight, she scurried around the chain link fence and scooted away to where nobody else would be, to where nobody else could see the boss' daughter coming around the goodies, the guys, the sheet metal workers.

  A foil gum wrapper glinted in the chain link, its silver teeth bared at the broken bits of filthy bottles beneath it in the Bermuda grass that nobody mowed. She skulked past the wrapper and the broken bottles and dove between Al Apadaco's service truck with its greasy red door and Phil Pascal's forklift with its hand painted self-caricature of an Indian in a black bowler and a cholla cactus G-string. Past the acid baths, past the broken compressors with their heavy stink of slug oil, she slipped unseen wearing that crazy alpaca poncho, that drab Peruvian thing with its lines of pack-laden llamas and snow-capped mountains and the fringe that always tickled her wrists. Underneath the poncho strode the woman with no name-though she did have one. It was Laura. Laura Stewart. Short and thin. Big brown eyes and long blonde hair. Laura.

  Marugh. Marugh.

  The shop yard cat trotted out from behind a tin shed. Black. An Arizona cat. A modest dreamer of scrawny lizards and acrid beetles and deep, deep ever darkening shade. He rubbed himself against her shin. What game is this, Miss? May I trip you up?

  Out behind and up against looming rusty metal. Over mud pits and piles of poles, Laura Stewart scrambled, feeling the overwhelming dither of the brain and the shiver of the soul when in pursuit of a loved one. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, after Miss Estee St. Germain dismissed her French class with an energetic au revoir, Laura left the university and drove down Parkview Avenue past the sleazy hotels, past the confusion of used car dealerships, to the desert and the collection of ramshackle sheds and Quonset huts called Pueblo Refrigeration and Heating, her family's business on Orphanage Road. Looking north of the shop, you could see a fine litter of broken glass and shredded tires and coyote-ravaged diapers all the way to the railroad yards. Looking south, the Santa Cruz River wound its way up from Mexico, and when it flowed a few days each summer it carved out the pink and chocolate striated earth and brought up a lot of toxic heavy metals. Once you could also say that the river had brought up some of Laura's relatives (they followed its course in an ox cart), and ninety years later her half-Scottish, half-Mexican grandfather had gone into business with a half-Irish, half-Apache named Clarke and formed Pueblo Refrigeration. Laura was writing a novel in the back of the biggest Quonset hut and her father had given her a desk to work at.

  Recently she had found another reason for coming there. On her way through the yard she spied on the sheet metal workers: those at work on the layout tables where the sheets were bent into ducts according to blueprints, others loading trucks with the finished ducts and equipment ready for installation. She never spoke to them; she was shy, and she thought them unobtainable, too good-looking, and sometimes (when she felt honestly snobby) too working class.

  Off on her spying mission that morning, Laura climbed a small hill between two buildings and lo and behold, there they stood in a circle in a certain sun-bright, hard-packed clearing. The goodies, the guys, the sheet metal workers took a morning break together, standing in the overalls cramming doughnuts into their skulls.

  That was a bad rhyme. Laura was subject to bad rhymes and bad thoughts about the overalls of the sheet metal workers, or rather what was inside their overalls: their bulging forearms, their massive shoulders, their mighty other members (gloriously unmentionable and delicious other members). Any young woman would be susceptible to so much male beefcake, not to mention their clever eyes and the way they sat in a circle on their haunches drinking beer at the end of the day. Intelligence didn't enter into it, but being eighteen and not having lost your cherry did. That was such a pleasant expression-losing your cherry-much nicer than saying she had never made the beast with two backs or gotten a bit of the goose's neck, and heaven knows if you lost your cherry you might find it atop your beefcake. Cherries and beefcake, overalls and skulls. Laura grinned at her own bad punning jokes.

  Thaddah-thump. Behind her, through the open door, came the sound of someone cutting steel for a duct.

  Mew. Ghhhatt. The cat cried and leapt away and Laura turned to see Cauhutemoc Grandillas standing less than thirty feet from her in a shed at a layout table. He was facing out, toward the open door, but looking down at his work.

  If there was one worker at Pueblo Refrigeration whom she obsessed about the most, it was Cauhutemoc Grandillas. He was a behemoth of a man, a Mexican Hercules. And she loved the sound of his name, the mystery of it. Unfortunately, part of the mystery was exactly how to say it. She would hear his first name pronounced by various Spanish speakers around the shop and, though she thought she knew how to say it, in a few days she'd forgotten. The sound slipped away. She wondered if it was a bad sign to be in love with a man whose name she couldn't pronounce. Oh, but it wasn't love; it was just a big crush. And he wasn't married; she knew that now for sure.

  But could he read a blueprint? She'd never seen him working there before, at the old breaker you moved by hand, no pneumatics, all manpower manhandling metal. Usually he delivered the sheet metal, counted the sheets or loaded the trucks with equipment. She watched him now; his big arm came back with the steel; his hips swung too, his shoulders twisted as he brought the silvery metal up to bend, to take the shape it should. Barely any strain showed on his body, and his feet were rock solid. Slam, bam. Slam, bam, almost effortlessly bending the steel. Laura drown in the sight of him. She imagined herself kneeling at the staggering man's feet, hugging his knees like a supplicant and asking very sincerely if he might be of a certain kind of embarrassing assistance to a young woman desperately in need of deflowering, and, in this scene of surrender, she imagined Cauhutemoc slamming the metal and banging it back again and again as she pleaded more and more earnestly and frantically for his favors and then, finally, when he pushed back his long hair and all his motion stopped...

  But Laura was a little horrified, more than a little horrified, to see the real live Cauhutemoc stop and look up. Laura tried to noiselessly slither away; he hadn't yet noticed her. She crouched down and waddled, but Cauhutemoc's glance followed the sound and he saw her.

  Horror of all horrors. She felt her brain bursting and her hands sweating and her stomach churning and her back going very, very stiff. It was the worst imaginable thing that she could imagine that she was not imagining-it was actually happening!

  Then he grinned at her, his gloved hands hanging down at his side. Rather elegantly then, he took one glove off and carefully smoothed, behind one ear, a few errant locks of his long brown hair. Was he winking at her or squinting in the morning sun? It was hard to tell. Oh hell, hell. He leaned against the bench and crossed his arms on his chest, his big boots at the ankle. Was he giving her a come-hither look? Laura didn't stay to find out. She stumbled, bumbled back against a metal post and ran.

  She fled across an open place with flecks of glinting metal.

  Marugh. Marugh. The cat was coming, too. Where are you off to so swiftly, Miss? Miss and nearly trip. Running and stopping. Ta
il high. Puss, puss. Grhew.

  Laura darted behind an abandoned cooling tower. On the far side of the tower there was a weedy dip and then a small hill that led to more sheds and ultimately, the big Quonset hut at the back of the yard. She climbed the hill and was halfway up when she thought she heard someone coming. Her heart squeezed up. Was the hunk behind her? Was Cauhutemoc really following her? It was too horrible. She thought she might vomit. But when she turned around at the top the hill, there was no one behind her, only the sound of the wind in the weeds and a cactus wren chuck-chucking from a nest in some nearby cholla cactus.

  Laura scrabbled under a mesquite tree at the back of the first shed and plumped down on a black stump. Such a narrow escape; it had worn her out.

  She petted the cat. The desperate thing made a shivery arch and wiped his whiskers on her jeans. A spider wed, caught on his face, dangled comically at the end of his whiskers. The cat flicked his paw up and shook his head, making maniacal eyes. "Messy thing," said Laura, teasing the web off. "Messy old mussed-up monster." His tail, bent at the tip, tickled her face. "I'm at a precipice, puss."

  A precipice. What precipice? It was this. Stay where she was and she would become-what? A mad old nun, a virgin lunatic? Jump, and she would be doing the scariest thing she'd ever done. Well, if thoughts of mad virgins weren't enough to drive her to it, there was Cauhutemoc's astonishing body. There was a smooth bulge of muscles in his upper arms and a triangular shape to his back that Laura had seen the past summer when he stripped down to his waist and walked into the big Quonset hut complaining of a bug bite. She still remembered the way his brown back twisted and his big hand felt for the bit mark. The top of his orange overalls had slipped down slightly below his waist to reveal the wide elastic band of his underwear. It had been difficult for her to watch all that.

  Only a gimpy middle-aged man with a lisp, an astigmatism, and a receding hairline would have the unmitigated gall to stand up in front of a class of horny eighteen-year-old women and proclaim that the characters of Ulysses and Hercules were outdated and irrelevant in the twentieth century. Laura's English teacher at the university had said that and everyone seated around her, the ass-kissing robots, had copied it into their notes and oo-ed and aw-ed and how profound that statement was. Laura hadn't agreed with them at all, but she said nothing. What her professor said had made her angry. She'd sat at the back of the classroom, rolling her eyes, glaring at her professor's white hands and his long clean fingers draped over the lecturn. Such pristine fingers. She bet he kept them squeaky-clean by stopping at every washroom between New York City and Arizona on his drive out each autumn. This would be his ironic, twentieth century idea of a Herculean task. Well, she was one female who responded to a healthy male body. And when some girl in the class with the improbable name of Miss Marlowe Wolvington read aloud that Marvell poem about the coy mistress and kept gasping and tossing her hair back off her face, Laura was hard pressed not to raise her hand and ask, "Hey, was this guy kind of effeminate or skinny or yucky or something and that explains why he had to work overtime getting laid?" Laura knew if the man in Marvell's poem had looked anything remotely like the sheet metal workers at her father's shop, his mistress without a doubt would have climbed atop him eagerly. Once she realized this, Laura wanted to lose her virginity to a sheet metal worker more than anything in the world. The idea appealed to her, but she wondered if she would be using the sheet metal worker. Well, she wasn't so bad looking, maybe the right man wouldn't mind?

  Quite possibly she was unfit for college. She was too rebellious for the place. A person in college shouldn't have the kind of thoughts she had day-in, day-out. They should be like the rest of the undergraduates: ass-kissing robots. That was what the whole college scene was about. If you wanted to be a real rebel, you had to get out of that place and go out with men and machines, or run away to Mexico or something. You had to strike out at the system if you wanted to be creative.

  She should quit and get a job someplace really interesting like a tortilla factory downtown or the tallow factory or that mysterious livestock yard near the freeway that she'd blundered into while aimlessly driving around town after class. There was something inside her that drove her toward honest work and that found intellectual tricks repellant. She liked the way people worked with machines. She liked it when men and women transformed simple things like sheets of metal into useful objects like air conditioning ducts or a plenum below a furnace.

  Laura studied the ground around her feet, the yellow litter of dried mesquite pods, diminutive mesquite leaves, and pinwheel weeds. This was the soil where she'd spent her childhood. As a party of warriors with Geronimo, she'd raided from this hill, running down the innocents, skewering them as they arrived for work. She'd ground mesquite seeds on the old metates. Laura looked over at them, sitting side by side against the shed. She hadn't noticed them in years, the pinkish oval metate and the black metate with its four stout legs, which always looked like some swarthy beast about to scuttle away. In the future, when she was a very famous writer, she would have to remember to mention metates as her childhood inspiration for her writing. That would shock many people who would not know what metates were. But after she thought this, Laura began wondering what she meant when she said metates inspired her. Did a metate symbolize grinding away at something endlessly? Or monotony? Or worse yet, the way she slowly transformed every absorbing image into an unrecognizable dust?

  She ought to stay away from the shop; there was no real reason to come there, but writing in the back of the Quonset hut at the desk that her father lent her was-inspirational. Not that she wanted to write about machinery, but there were moments and colors, impressions of the shop which stayed with her, like the way the glowing tip of the welder's touch stood out against the turquoise sky and the sound of the whoops of the service men when they arrived back at the yard on a Friday afternoon. There was an honesty and integrity that she admired. The big men were workmanlike, diligent and clever. Laura needed to become workmanlike. And what an atmosphere the old Quonset hut had with its high arched ceiling and the black and white photos of her grandfather's trips to Mexico, photos of jaguars and sea turtles and duck hunting on rice fields, old cars, and old employees. The photos climbed to the ceiling where two surprising squares of sky, two windows, were set high in the north side of the roof like mournful eyes.

  And out of the blue, staring up at the blue of those squares, she'd found the opening for her new novel. "Couched against a guave crate..." Laura repeated it again with pleasure. The rest of the novel, after the beginning phrase, was unwritten, but it had something to do with the tormented existence of the son of the owner of a banana ripening plant. Lots of writers had written novels about tormented young people, but no one, absolutely no one in the entire world to her knowledge, had ever thought of writing a novel about a tormented young person at a banana ripening plant. That pleased Laura. She planned to throw in a lot of symbolic crap and the meaning of life and some biology and the whole bit, and make it a sort of a prose-poetry anthem written in a style no one had thought of yet.

  Grappling with the facts about a banana ripening plant had proved difficult, however. From what her father had said, casually, months earlier, she'd learned that the banana ripening plant on Toole had a chamber which was pumped full of ethylene gas (to ripen them) and that gas killed tarantulas, which for some reason took up residence in most banana bunches. After the bananas were gassed, the floor of the place was littered with black tarantulas and yes, that was it, the prior Friday her mind had seized onto that, held onto that great opening image, the black hairy bodies of the tarantulas stricken in death poses here and there, there and here. Flipping her poncho over her head and dropping it onto the back of the chair, she had fallen upon her work eagerly and written about the dead tarantulas. Words, words, squiggly words in shorthand filled the pages of her red Big Chief tablet. (She had taught herself shorthand because the secretaries used it and she liked the secrecy of it.) She'd scribb
led continuously all afternoon. At the end of the day, at five o'clock when the shop quit, she stopped and read back through her work.

  Her disappointment had been gradual, but devastating. The black shorthand words were a little too much like the lifeless bodies of the tarantulas she was trying to describe. They didn't go anywhere. In fact the whole thing had seemed like a B-grade horror movie. The great symbolic meaning of it was lost to her and she could only see a lot of rigid tarantulas, legs in the air, on their backs, paralyzed.

  But there was something to the sound of "a guava." Or maybe it was "couched against" that she liked? She tried the whole phrase again. Then she began to wonder what couched meant. It had something to do with lions. It had been in the beginning of an old play by Aeshylus. A watchman couched on the edge of a palace waiting for the sign that Troy had fallen. Could you couch against a crate? Maybe it should be "couched atop a guava crate." Oh, but that changed the sound of the thing, and it was the sound that Laura liked.

  Behind the cooling tower, through a waving mass of pale orange globe mallow flowers, Laura saw someone mounting the hill. For a mad moment she thought it was Cauhutemoc, but instead the figure which appeared was tiny. Chopita Teetum, the old executive secretary of Pueblo Refrigeration, walked stiffly across the shop yard.

  In a shaft of morning sun that sliced up her torso to her face Laura saw the face of an ancient abused doll with long gray hair left loose and flowing. Her big baggy brown eyes glowed yellow in the morning sun. She wore a black and purple plaid blazer and black polyester slacks with a sharp crease ironed up the front. Chopita was more Mexican than Laura, but some other nationality, too, perhaps German because she collected Hummel figures: a sweet red-cheeked boy in lederhosen with a little pointed green hat on a fence eating an apple, a girl in a smock with a lamb on an Alpine slope. Chopita kept those two on her desk at work and as a little girl Laura had played with them. Laura wondered again what she wondered every time she saw Chopita, whether the old lady thought Laura was a little peculiar in the sense of being interesting, destined to become a famous literary woman living in San Francisco and dressing in black with gobs of eyeliner, or, in what seemed far more likely, a little peculiar in the sense of being simply a little peculiar.

  Laura looked back at the cooling tower, her eye attracted by a slight movement. She nearly fainted. Someone else was coming up behind Chopita.

  It was Cauhutemoc. Laura stood up. She kept her eyes on him, but stood still. And just when he could have disappeared, and not seen her at all, he glanced over. Looked over at her. Looked over and smiled and changed his course toward her.

  Go. Go. Take off. Bound, bound the cat flew off in front of her. Mew, swish. Awkward and armless in her poncho, imprisoned under alpaca, Laura scuttled away, hugging herself. She crunched through the mesquite pods at the back of the shed. The ground was thick with them, slick with them, and she skated on them past a painted window. Marugh. Marugh. Here came the cat, loving the fright, ready to run along under her feet. "Get away, puss."

  There were spider webs, sticky long thin ones she had to break through. She put her hand against the wall to steady herself. She cracked dead mesquite branches and something sharp jabbed her scalp and ripped into her hair but she kept moving. Trotting now. On the far side of the shed the barns were sparser and she took off. Don't look back; don't look back, she told herself, but she did. Cauhutemoc paced up the hill, whistling and grinning. Some song. He was whistling some ridiculous song. What was it?

  Down on the border, down Meh-hee-co way.

  Another building. She slipped behind it. Run, move, claw, stomp on a black branch lying in her way and the old thing was rotten and cracked down with a pop, dropped her down fast and jarred her jaw, but she kept on and saw in a tangled blob, someone's underwear, green, silky, prophetic perhaps. She was breaking branches, snapping them back in front of her eyes and the mesquite popped and flung black bark out.

  Finally, she saw the vending machines. Coffee and soda machines huddled together under a hut with a tin roof on top. Chopita was there. Cauhutemoc wasn't. Laura gasped for breath when she stepped onto the concrete apron of the hut. She wanted to shout for help, to tell Chopita that Cauhutemoc was pursuing her. Instead she stuck a hand out from under the poncho and dropped a quarter into a slot. Coffee with cream and sugar. At another machine Chopita waited for a cup to fill with glutinous soda.

  "Good morning, Mistress Laura," Chopita said. She always called Laura that. Or worse yet, Missy. "How's your French?"

  "Oh, um, good. Pretty good, I guess."

  Cauhutemoc came up. To another machine, looking sheepish. He dove deep in his pocket for change, staring at her all the while. Laura had never seen him so close. He fascinated her and yet she couldn't look him in the eye for fear he would read what she was thinking.

  "You like learning French?" asked Chopita.

  "Well, some," Laura lowered her voice. "It's just a language." Laura wanted to get the French class out of the way. She didn't want to be discussing French when he was there beside her.

  "You don't want to take Spanish ever? Learn some Spanish? That would make your Dad proud. He works so hard on his." Chopita's cup was nearly full.

  Oh, and now the Dad!

  "Well, it's not that I won't ever, um, ever."

  "You're probably tired of hearing it around here." Chopita sipped the soda.

  Laura shot a glance at Cauhutemoc, and he grinned a grubby smile. He'd bought a bag of potato chips, and he opened it and popped several in his mouth. "It's not that. I thought I'd do something different."

  Laura looked back at Cauhutemoc. His smile returned and widened. He was grinning like some weird Cheshire cat. But he was so handsome.

  She went to the edge of the hut and hugged a smooth tree trunk. The cat came and rubbed itself off the edge of the concrete. Rolled into a ball. Set near her like a sphinx. Cauhutemoc got himself a coffee. He went with the hot cup to the other corner of the hut and scraped his shoe on the concrete edge. A triangle of mud dropped. Laura stepped back to get a napkin. Cauhutemoc bolted back, too. So they were there together, but all she could manage was to look at his hands. A wooden stick to stir her coffee with. Bring up her eyes. Their eyes met and he smiled. They changed places. The cat got up and came around. With some disgust.

  "That's the way my daughter was. Sick of Spanish. She took French, too. She could speak it fluently before she left even. She went to live in Paris in '73. For two years, she told me then. 'Two years, mama.' Now it's been five. I keep saying, 'When are you coming back?' Ay, maybe you'll live there?"

  "No. I'm not going to live in Paris."

  "But you know the language?"

  "I'm not going to live there."

  "Maybe you will. You'll be living there and speaking French and you won't remember Arizona or any of us at Pueblo Refrigeration."

  Cauhutemoc coughed.

  Laura couldn't look at him. At times he appeared to be a half-wit, prowling, moronic. At other times he looked like a sly genius. She'd never spoken to him or even overheard him. Perhaps he didn't know English. She imagined him saying something half-witted in Spanish to her while he imprisoned her in his immense arms. El blubo y blubedy con blub blub blub blah blah. She imagined him tossing back his head and laughing like a maniac.

  Why was she thinking these awful things about him? Oh, it was horrible, horrible to decide to throw herself at a man. The fact was she had to do it or face not doing it. She didn't want to end up like the nuns she'd read about, mad nuns sucking pennies. And it was an adventure. And real things, at last, were happening to her. Passion. Illogic. She was loose on a stream of fervent madness. It would give her things, real things, to write about because real things would happen to her. She wouldn't be imagining tarantulas at a banana ripening plant. She wouldn't be describing dead tarantulas for pages on end. She would be doing something real.

  She could stop the whole thing then by walking to the Quonset hut with Chopita and getting on with her novel
full of dead tarantulas. But what a defeat that would be.

  She shifted her feet. He shifted his feet and began whistling again. Like a gravedigger's whistle it was, a gravedigger swinging his pick up over his shoulder, merry to be doing the deed of finishing her off.

  Finishing her off? Wasn't it the start of something?

  Where would they have it off? In his trailer at the Circus Trailer Park (why was she so mean, accusing him of living in the Circus Trailer Park?) or a dreary little apartment above Five Points? She tried to imagine the kind of hovel he would live in and the slumped, unmade bed where she would make love amid porn, dirty dishes and cockroaches. She reminded herself that she had to be very nice to him and not say insulting things about the place he lived in when he took her to the place he lived in no matter how awful a hovel it was. A hovel, make love in a hovel? With a Hercules?

  "Well, I'll see you up at the office," Chopita said, stepping away. Did she sense something between the two of them or wonder why Laura was still standing there?

  "Good bye," said Laura sadly.

  What should she do? Not be a mad nun? Not be a virgin lunatic? Embrace this off-kilter kind of love? The fact was she wanted to do it. The fact was she was ready to do it.

  A great breath and a step. Down. Eyes at the back of her head. She would lead him around the welder's hut.

  Laura slipped around the back of the hut and squatted on the very edge of a buggy old couch that someone years prior had dragged to the north side of the hut. What color had it been originally? It was the color of Arizona dust now, like a coffin, and almost her size. Great rips navigated the ancient, rotting material.

  Maybe he would take her right there in the open air on that buggy couch with dust puffing up all around her. Laura's heart squeezed up sharply twice. Any minute now he would come around the building. This was the moment before the big thing. And throwing her thin legs out on the couch she stretched out and folded her arms across her chest. Her head against the armrest was bent at an awkward angle as she prepared for Cauhutemoc to come around the building and ravish her.

  The seconds ticked by. On the other side of the chain link fence, her father's old fishing boat, minus most of its bottom after a landing accident in the Sea of Cortez, sat on concrete blocks, abandoned on a strange sea of dirt and surrounded by barrel cacti. Someone from the shop must have planted the cacti there years earlier, judging from their size. A vandal with a baseball bat or a two-by-four had shoved over most of them the prior summer. Nothing but skinny roots supported them and no one could get them back up; they were too heavy, and so, left uprooted, lying about like booze butts hurled down in a speakeasy, they waited to die. Desperately mournful, those knocked-over plants, those barrel cacti, lying around like large, confused men, toppled down. Men tumbling, men stumbling.

  It was the fate of every living thing to leave this world in a confused state. But why think so much of death at this moment? Was loving death? Maybe it wasn't good to go through with it with so many misgivings?

  But where was he? Had he gone back to work?

  Get up; get out, she thought. Get up now and run away before he comes.

  More seconds ticked by. She didn't get up.

  Where was he? My God, he wasn't coming! She had misinterpreted the signs. Perhaps he hadn't really been giving her come-hither looks. He probably wasn't even interested in her. She might have been imagining the whole torrid non-affair.

  Did that seem true?

  She thought he had been interested in her, but maybe he would do nothing about it today. Maybe right now he was back in the shed working. He might be taking a chance with his job if he did anything else.

  But he had to do something! Doing something now was the absolutely most important thing that he had to do.

  A fly landed on her knee and her hand was posed above it, but the fly was blithe and unaware and went on, second by second, living.

  Minutes, seconds, so much meaning in the smallest moments that passed, but without any notice until the confusion of death. Like the barrel cacti. Shortly after they had been uprooted and were destined to die, they still bloomed and she remembered seeing the bees pollinating the blossoms on the downed cacti. And silly little pineapple fruit came later. She looked out at the sea of uprooted barrel cacti. Like silly tourists on vacation, spilling down a gangplank, with the gaudy yellow pineapples still attached to their heads like decorations on a hat, a New Year's party aftermath, celebrants strewn over the landscape, motionless, waiting for their inevitable death. Like everyone and everything: helpless, hopeless.

  But she wasn't hopeless, no, for any minute he'd be coming around the building. And if he came, she would give herself to him fast, if he wanted her.

  But it made her so sad to think that later that night the old barrel cacti would still be there staring up at the velvet blackness and the pinprick stars, the globs of milky multiple worlds spinning above them and her. Was there anything dying on the surface of one of those worlds and was it staring up at them? Fastened to the same lonely spot. But she would be gone and everything would have changed unless Cauhutemoc didn't come.

  God had to make sure he came.

  God had to see to this one little request.

  She was praying for that, pressing her hands together and praying straight up to the azure vault of the sky. She was thinking of that, of her prayer, when who should come around the building but a certain big body, whistling.

  # # # #

  The End

  # # # #

  His Faithful Companion