Well in Time

by SUZAN STILL

  He thought again of his home in Copper Canyon far to the north and sighed. He knew that his waiting should be active, not passive, that his attention to the question at hand was required as part of the web of power being woven out in the desert by the whirling winds. He pulled his legs under him, straightened his spine, centered his mind, and quieted his breathing. Whatever the outcome, he would have to be part of its making. The westering sun began to burn the back of his neck but he sat still, his eyes half-closed, staring at nothing and everything as his ghostly blue shadow stretched longer and longer before him, also waiting.

  §

  An old man came out of the god-house and approached him. Javier knew him—Jeronimo González, Alejandro’s uncle and one of the clan’s singers, who tended the god-house and took part in all the rituals. He was a small, bow-legged man dressed in white cotton pants and tunic, both embroidered in red with Huichol symbols.

  “Ha, hombre!” he greeted Javier. “Come over to Grandfather Fire and I will brush you. Then you can go pray in the god-house.”

  Javier knew a great honor was being accorded him, so he stood. “Thank you, amigo. I would like that.”

  He and Jeronimo approached the fire and the women retreated. All fire was sacred to the Huichol, Javier knew. It was a source of visions during peyote rituals, and no Huichol felt either safe or at home, day or night, until a fire was lit. Once beside the fire Jeronimo produced a brush and began a ritual cleansing of Javier’s body.

  “What kind of feathers are those in your brush, Jeronimo?” he asked, to be companionable.

  Jeronimo did not stop brushing. “These are not feathers,” he said in his soft, cracked voice. “This is a wolf’s tail.” Javier was shocked. Several of his recent dreams had featured wolves, the shy, seldom-seen gray, white, and russet ghosts that sometimes haunted the plateau around the ranch. “Camóquime, father of the wolves, came to me in a dream,” the old man said, “and told me to do this brushing for you.”

  “I had a dream about a wolf, too.” The old man stopped brushing and stepped back, looking Javier deep in the eyes. “I was sleeping near a spring and a wolf came and whispered in my ear.”

  “What did he say?”

  Javier grinned. “I have no idea.”

  Jeronimo shook his head. “Too bad. A wolf only comes with important information. Wolf is related to Father Sun, and his light will help Alejandro on his quest. It was careless of you not to remember.”

  “I’m sorry.” Javier was genuinely chagrined.

  “Chaos comes when the taboos are violated and there are transgressions,” the old man said. “We must be very careful to do everything in the right way, as the ancestors did. The mining is disrupting everything. All the spirits are unhappy—the wolves, the beaded lizards, xraiye the rattlesnake, the black cloud snake, tohue the jaguar, the puma, even Grandfather Fire. You are right to come seeking vision.” The old man resumed his slow, careful brushing.

  Javier had worked for years with the Mexican government, trying to secure Huichol lands against the depredations of mining conglomerates. Lately, however, with the passage of NAFTA and investments by the World Bank and big multinational corporations, Huichol lands were being nibbled along the edges, with vaster intrusions always threatening. With the Huichol, he always walked a fine edge between the spiritual world they inhabited, and the hard facts of political advocacy.

  Jeronimo stepped back to inspect him and then nodded his head toward the entrance to the god-house, where the stones of power were housed. Javier tried to collect himself, to focus, before ducking to enter the low doorway. For this small bit of time, he vowed, he would let the machinations of the greater world rest, and dedicate himself to that other world that, in Mexico, always lay behind so thin a veil. The ancestors and the spirits were agitated, of this he was certain. What to do about it was a secret still hoarded in the Great Mystery.

  §

  Three days passed. Jeronimo sang to evoke Ea’ca Téihuari, the Wind Person, sprinkled water from a sacred spring, and did other rituals to induce the spirits to help Alejandro on his quest and to reveal the information Javier sought. The two men ingested sacred hicouri, the peyote that is sacramental to the Huichol. Under its influence, Javier was brought once again into close understanding that all aspects of creation are sentient, powerful, and alive with meaning and importance, and that reciprocity between the human and spirit worlds forms the basis of sustainability for all life.

  “Look deep into Tatewari,” Jeronimo said, gesturing toward Grandfather Fire. “Ask him to remind you what the wolf told you in your dream.”

  The brilliance at the heart of the fire was kindled in Javier’s own heart, and he knew himself to be a luminous being with love at his core. Deep in the red embers, he saw his dream replayed, and heard the wolf’s voice in the crackling flames. “Wolf walks with the woman,” it said, “as guard and guide.”

  Neither he nor Jeronimo could interpret this, but Jeronimo insisted it was an assurance of spiritual aid in some situation still to be. “There are many dimensions,” the old man explained. “They circle and spiral back upon themselves, creating the pattern of the universe which is always dying, and being reborn. Nothing is a straight line. Therefore, somewhere the future is already known, and the spirits are preparing it for us and preparing our protection and guidance so that we learn and grow in safety.”

  “Does this mean that some danger will come to Calypso?”

  The old singer shrugged. “¿Quien sabe? Who knows? Mystery is the deepest reality of all.”

  §

  Sleep evaded Javier in the freezing Sierra night, as he curled around the inner fender of his truck, thinking of Calypso and their last night together at Rancho Cielo. At her vanity, brushing her hair, she had set down her brush and come to him, an undulant flow of white gown and black hair in the lamplight. Sitting beside him, she reached a hand to his face, and held his eyes with a penetrating look.

  “You are the rarest of men, my love, the most generous-spirited man in the world. It’s why I can’t keep my hands off you!” She slipped her cold hands across his bare chest and thrust them into the warmth of his armpits, her knowing smile saying that the reaction was predictable.

  “My God, Caleepso!” He laughed and grabbed her wrists. “You trying to kill me? You need some warming up!” He rolled back on the bed, pulling her on top of him, and gathered her hands together to begin nibbling on her fingertips. “I’ll start on the periphery and work inward.”

  Calypso laughed and struggled to free herself, then submitted. “I’m your captive. Do with me what you will,” she said, with a sigh that was more delighted than resigned.

  Javier held her cold fingers to his lips and kissed the tips. So many years they had been together. So many struggles and cares. Still, contact with this woman’s body never failed to move him. Something electric, yet deeply grounded, flowed between them at the smallest contact, as if all joy resided in their conjoined flesh.

  On sudden impulse, he drew her body closer and held her tightly. “Caleepso, Caleepso…” he breathed.

  She sensed something unusual in his touch. “What is it, Javier?”

  He shook his head, his chin resting on the top of her head with a somber weight. Words could not express the painful sense of longing that coursed through him. “It’s as if I have to leave you for a long time,” he said at last. “As if…I don’t know.” He held her even more tightly to him.

  “You sound so sad, my love.”

  “I just could not bear to lose you, Caleepso.”

  She struggled from his grasp and turned so she could see his face. “Lose me? What are you saying?”

  “It’s just a feeling I have. I can’t explain it.”

  “Sometimes people say, Like someone is walking on my grave. Is it like that? Creepy?”

  He gazed into her eyes with a look bordering on despair. “I don’t know, Caleepso. I just don’t want to lose you.” And he had pulled her into his chest again and held
her fiercely.

  The emotion was so urgent that it blasted him out of reverie. Above him, the frosty stars burned and glittered. If they were gods, he thought, pulling the sleeping bag closer around his neck, they were far too remote. How could they know or care what befell men on earth? A cold wind rattled through the surrounding brush, and he listened to it until he fell asleep.

  §

  At last, Alejandro returned. He had run for three days, fueled by hicouri, following the whirlwind as it blasted and sucked and twirled its way through the desert.

  “Ea’ca Téihuari is angry,” he avowed by the fire, his thin face glowing like oiled wood within the wild snarls of his hair.

  His body looked sunken, depleted, and one foot was swollen from a cactus thorn inside its battered sandal. “The wind spirits are gathering. The mining is disturbing them. But worse still are the narcotraficantes. They are bringing violence to our peaceful land.”

  Javier sat gazing into the fire, listening solemnly. It was not news that the drug cartels were disrupting things. All of Mexican culture was suffering. Thousands of people had already lost their lives in drug-related violence. Every day there were new reports of the growing power and menace of the drug mafias. Their power even threatened to overwhelm the central government of the country.

  Jeronimo, too, listened carefully, nodding his head. “What would the spirits have us do?” he asked at last.

  Alejandro began a detailed explanation of the rituals that were to be performed, in rapid Huichol. Javier, whose Huichol was rudimentary, sat staring into the coals, lost in thought, so that he was jolted when Alejandro suddenly turned his attention on him and said, “The Wind Person has a message for you.”

  “What is it, please?”

  “The message is this: there is no time to lose. Danger is everywhere. Protect your home and your loved ones. The times are dark.”

  Javier stared at him in alarm. “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” said Alejandro grimly, “that you’d better get your ass out of here. Get into your truck, now, and go home. The spirits do not speak in vain.”

  §

  Rancho Cielo

  Hill unpacked his small suitcase into the hulking Colonial-era armario in the guest room, smiling to himself. It felt so familiar to be here. Memories of his last visit, now more than two years in the past, rose to reassure him that he was welcome.

  He thought of the final night of his last stay, when they had sat in the courtyard on the very edge of the canyon, chatting into the night. There were no city lights, no traffic noise. The abyss of the canyon was a cauldron of ink, the sky a poppy field of stars. The world was reduced to firelight, shifting shadows, soft voices. Contained in a cocoon of reminiscence, they scarcely stirred.

  “Picasso said that everything you can imagine is real,” Hill had offered into the conversational pot already simmering among them. “If that’s true, then I need to tell you that this night—being together with you both—has happened before. I remember it. Is that real or imagination? Or is there a difference?”

  Javier stirred up the embers in the fire pit and dropped another log into the flames. “Here? What were we? Indigenous? Conquistadores?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not here. Maybe somewhere else.”

  “Maybe you’re remembering Chiapas. Sitting in the ruin around the cook fire,” Calypso offered.

  “No. I don’t think it’s that. But I’ve sat with you both, just this way, in just this energy.”

  “Energy? Are you becoming a New Ager, Walter?” Calypso’s voice wafted out of shadow like a moth, delicate and pale. Teasing.

  A bird muttered as the night wind lifted the branches of the alamos. Firelight washed adobe walls with rose. “Say something, Walter,” Calypso spoke into the silence. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “There’s nothing more to say.” His tone was stubborn.

  “Now Walter…” she began sweetly.

  “Caleepso”—Javier cut in—“you talk about energy all the time. A group of people. The mood of the weather. Your sense of a new horse. So why question Hill about it?”

  Calypso leaned toward the fire, her beautiful face framed in her shadowy mane, like the white moon emerging from cloud. “Because Walter is so rational, and I always think he judges me for saying those things. Do you, Walter?”

  Toward the front of the house, a guard coughed, then was silent. Hill leaned back in his chaise lounge, and stared at the starry sky tented over them, taking his time to answer. It was this woman’s genius to bring the hidden parts of him to light. If she were to know this about him, he wanted it succinct and accurate, just like the facts he collected for his newspaper articles. He didn’t want to have to explain himself later, in some muddled search for understanding.

  “I believe,” he began at last, “that we live over and over again. We die. We are reborn. And we meet certain people in those lives, doing the same thing. Reincarnating. Working through karma, if you will. Struggling, lifetime after lifetime, to learn lessons that are important to their souls.” He clamped his lips, determined to leave it there.

  “Hill, you surprise me.” Javier turned to him, although their eyes, lost in shadow, were as unknowable as the abyss before them. “You’re talking like one of our local shamans.”

  “I met a Buddhist monk in Cambodia, couple of years ago. We talked for two days straight. By the time he was done with me, I was beyond a reformed-Presbyterian-slash-closet-Catholic. I was cosmic.”

  “So I wonder where we were, the last time we gathered around a fire like this?” Calypso’s voice was dreamy, slathered with the cream of imagination. “Maybe we were players, camped in some forest between castles, planning our next production for a count or a king.”

  “With you as the heroine and me as the Fool.”

  “Or maybe we were shepherds on some hillside in Sumeria,” Javier volunteered, “naming the constellations.”

  Hill pointed languidly toward the Big Dipper. “Yes, I remember calling that one Aunt Agatha, because it’s small on top and big on the bottom.”

  Calypso pointed southward, to where Gemini’s twins, hand in hand, were just stepping over a horizon of black barrancas. “And I named those two Javier-and-Calypso-With-Walter-Trailing-Along-Below-the-Horizon-In-Some-Foreign-Land-All-the-Time.”

  “It probably sounded more poetic in Sumerian.”

  “That makes me think, Hill,” Javier said, his face turned terra-cotta in the firelight, “aren’t you getting tired of traveling all the time? Isn’t it about time for you to retire? You’re welcome here, you know. We’ll build a house for you. There’s a good flat place, just back from the cliffs, about a quarter mile from here.”

  “What? And leave Paris?” Hill struck his chest in mock grief.

  “You’re never there anyway, Walter. You’re always off in some God-forsaken land where cholera is killing more people than the resident dictator. Javier and I worry about you.”

  “I think about retiring, sometimes. But I always imagine myself in the apartment. Strolling down Place des Vosges, mornings, to my favorite café for coffee. Maybe getting season tickets to the opera. Taking the Train à Grande Vitesse to the south and getting a tan on some part of me besides my face and forearms.”

  “Oh, that’s a good one! I can just see you lounging topless on the beach at Saint-Tropez. You and your laptop. And your cell phone on speed dial for the closest airport, in some little pocket of your trunks. You wouldn’t make it past the first minor skirmish! You’d be out of there like you were shot from a cannon.” Calypso laughed and swatted Hill on the knee. “Be real, Walter.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it now.” Hill’s tone was petulant.

  “Did you know,” Calypso volunteered, apropos of nothing, “that the word constellation comes from the word stella, and means star togetherness? It makes me think, when I look at the night sky, that they and we are linked somehow. We form a togetherness.”

  “Yes, the onl
y thing vaster than our own interior spaces is that vastness out there.” Hill’s voice was unusually soft and thoughtful.

  “We touch this world with our bodies,” Javier volunteered, equally serious, “but that one out there—we can only reach it in our minds, when we let them dream.”

  “Or when we worship,” Calypso added. “Even in prehistory the stars were seen as divine figures. Gods, prognosticating the future, not just of mere mortals like us but of entire cultures and civilizations.”

  “Caleepso, how do you know these things? You never stop amazing me.” Javier reached to stroke her cheek.

  “I’ll tell you something else she knows.”

  “What?” Calypso and Javier asked in the same instant.

  “The story of that locket.” He pointed his chin toward Calypso’s chest.

  “I thought Father Roberto told you that story while we were in Chiapas.”

  “Only part of it. Just the very first part, when he was a boy. But you know the rest—I know he told you.”

  “Well, I can’t tell it to you tonight. It’s too long.”

  “Ha! See how you are? I’m never going to get to hear that story, am I? I have to leave in the morning. I’ll go to my grave wondering about this thing that dangles around your neck. How it came to be. Or what its powers are. I ask you: What are friends for? Shouldn’t you be obligated by the very bonds of friendship to tell me the story, whether you want to or not?”

  Calypso had laughed. “Okay, you! Now you’ve done it. But it means you’ll have to come again. We can’t possibly do the story justice tonight.”

  He had promised then, he mused as he hung his trousers on hangers and thrust them into the maw of the armoire. Promised to come back soon and hear the tale in its full richness. That was over two years ago, and what had he accomplished in the meantime?

  War, war, and more war had been the bill of fare, until his enthusiasm for his profession had begun to wane and his heart to feel empty, where once it was charged with the energy of investigation and reporting. It felt right to be again in Calypso’s presence, in her indefinable aura of magic. He had to admit to himself that in some very real sense, he had not come in response to Calypso’s call at all, but in search of renewal.