On Sundays monks came down from the mountains. They draped their saffron robes on the reeds around the wild springs and played their radio too loud. It seemed there was a place for me.
* * *
—
Though the inevitable deterioration was mild in the wider genre of utopia-to-dystopia implosions, the scene at Villa Anita went south almost overnight. Carlotta and Erin asked me to pay them Airbnb prices for the nights I’d been in the bottle cottage—an extraordinary fee to which I agreed, occasioning another email from Theo re: $.
Soon after, Mari and I returned from the wild springs on a windless day, itching mud mite bites at our ankles, and discovered a Park Service truck parked outside the compound. At the gate was a paper bag filled with my belongings.
Mari went inside and came out a long while later with her eyes red and puffy. The park ranger had read her diary. Carlotta had deemed me “volatile” and “insecure,” bad for Mari’s recovery and a bad mom.
I said, “The owner of fifteen dogs says I’m a bad mom.”
Mari apologized. “She says you gotta go.”
“Go where?”
She considered, said hold on, went back into the compound and after a long while returned with a sleeping bag, a tent, two gallons of water and a box of granola bars.
“I’d get a stick,” she said while locking the gate. “For the coyotes.”
“What stick? There are no trees, Mari!” But she was already gone.
I found a length of rusted metal pipe and considered vandalizing the park ranger’s truck.
It was February, freezing and dark, the waxing crescent moon behind rare clouds. I wasn’t going to hitchhike to Vegas—that’s no solution to any problem ever. So, feeling brave and white and territorial from my wounding, some latent Libertarianism in me perhaps inflamed from being jilted by a federal employee, I walked down Stampmill Road in the dark. There, I layered on all my dry clothes and pitched my tent under the salt cedars near the trash heap I still thought of as the Tecopa house. In the dog-smelling tent I took an inventory: Uggs, Caruthers, toothbrush and toothpaste I’d bought from the gas station in Shoshone, my wallet, granola bars, jugs of water, keys to I didn’t even know what anymore. I arranged these beside the sleeping bag and hung my towel, still damp from the wild springs, on a branch of salt cedar.
The coyotes went berserk that night. I lay awake listening to them yipping closer and closer, clutched my pipe in my sleeping bag as they sniffed around the tent.
I woke well before dawn and while I did not remember sleeping I knew I’d had a bad dream about childbirth. Pain ran through me, as if from the teeth inside. I wondered where their roots went. My water jugs had frozen solid. I held one to my pubis, quaking, waiting. When the sun finally came up, I said, “Thank you.” As in for another day on this rock.
* * *
—
I walked the canyon, saying aloud every nightmare thought I’d stuffed down inside me back in civilization. I let everything that was wrong with me bounce off the canyon walls. Me and others. I ranted at Mari for not wanting me, at Noah for not being there beside me. I conjured him a new girlfriend, younger, brilliant, without child. She only made me want him more, want him so bad he appeared as my thoughts in his voice saying J curve, saying tamarisk. If only Noah would walk beside me in the date grove at China Ranch, or swim with me at dusk in the Shoshone pool with bats swooping overhead, he’d see plainly that he loved me back.
I tried summoning the beloveds: Noah, Ruth, Theo, Lise, anyone. I had no phone so I used the old ways. I regretted not loving Theo better, said so in the canyon. I apologized to him and to Ruth for the ways I had “prepared” for her, that is, by buying shit. I apologized for the care and grief and attention I poured into various pieces of plastic, the deliberation I had taken in their purchase, the grotesquery of this agreed-upon ritual, what a doofus I’d been for doing that as a way of getting ready to receive her when all along I should have been doing this.
I was doing the best I could with what I had. Or was I?
Days got warm fast. I spent the hot part of the day in the tent, reading, crying, masturbating, napping. My favorite chapter of Caruthers was, predictably, chapter thirteen, “Sex in Death Valley Country.” It began, “Sex, of course, went with the white man to the desert . . .” Here I learned how my trailer school came to be.
Once Shoshone faced the desperate need of a school. There were only three children of school age in the little settlement and the nearest school was 28 miles away. Parents complained, but authorities at the county seat nearly 200 miles away, pointed out that the law required 13 children or an average attendance of five and a half to form a school district.
Like other community problems it was taken to Charlie, though none believed that even Charlie could solve it.
The time for the opening of schools was but a few weeks away when one day Brown headed his car out into the desert. “Hunting trip,” he explained.
In a hovel he found Rosie, a Piute squaw with a brood of children.
Rosie’s children were five, six, seven and eight. “Rosie was a challenging problem,” wrote Caruthers:
She would have taken no beauty prize among the Piutes, but when along her desert trails she acquired these children of assorted parentage, Fate dealt her an ace.
With the few dollars Rosie wangled from the several fathers for the support of their children, she lived unworried. She liked to get drunk and the only nettling problem in her life was the federal law against selling liquor to Indians. So she established her own medium of exchange—a bottle of liquor. Unfortunately she spread a social disease and that was something to worry about.
“Rosie has Shoshone over a barrel,” Joe Ryan said. “If we run her out, we won’t have enough children for school.”
Then there was the economic angle—the loss of wages by afflicted miners and mines crippled by the absence of the unafflicted who would take time off to go to Las Vegas for the commodity supplied by Rosie.
Charlie arranged for Ann Cowboy to look after Rosie’s children and called up W. H. Brown, deputy sheriff at Death Valley Junction and told him to come for Rosie. Brownie, as he is known all over the desert, came and took Rosie into custody. “What’ll I charge her with?”
“She has a venereal disease,” Charlie said.
“There’s no law I know of against that. . . .”
“All right. Charge her with pollution. She got drunk and fell into the spring.” Then Charlie called up the Judge and suggested Rosie have a year’s vacation in the county jail.
The paths that radiated from Rosie’s shack in the brush like spokes from the hub of a wheel, were soon overgrown with salt grass. She served her sentence and returned to Shoshone and the paths were soon beaten smooth again.
Eventually Brown declared Shoshone out of bounds for Rosie and she moved over into Nevada. There she found a lover of her tribe and one night when both were drunk, Rosie decided she’d had enough of him and with a big, sharp knife she calmly disemboweled him—for which unladylike incident she was removed to a Nevada prison where the state cured her syphilis and turned her loose—if not morally reformed, then at least physically fit.
That’s all Caruthers has to say about Rosie, except that one of her “patrons,” a known “total abstainer,” left her $50 in his will “to buy whiskey.”
I walked to China Ranch for food and to the wild springs for wanting—wanting Mari, wanting Noah, wanting Ruth, wanting to know what I wanted and why and wanting it now. Instead I got aspiring influencers from LA or, often, a grisly, undertoothed local soaker with a pet wolf named Osiris. Osiris’s dad worked for the Nature Conservancy. In one of his unwelcome history lessons he informed me that what I called the wild springs was in fact a trough scraped into the marsh by a backhoe hired by a pharmaceutical company in the eighties. I was half listening. When eventually it became
clear that he needed something from me and perhaps that something was my name, I admitted it to be Ann Cowboy.
“A real pleasure to meet you, Ms. Cowboy,” he said, gifting me one of the bikes racked on the back of his van. It was a bad fit for me, one of those absurd adult tricycles, but it had invincible tires and seemed it would carry me as far as the Timbisha dispensary in Amargosa Junction and back.
It was hellishly hot the first time I set out for the dispensary, so hot Mari’s park ranger gave me a ride. It was pushing a hundred and ten or I wouldn’t even have accepted. The ranger, A. Adams his name tag said, tossed my trike in the back of his truck before he realized who I was. We rode in silence until I said, “Here,” indicating the dispensary, a shipping container set in a gravel lot before three rows of Quonset huts ringed by razor wire.
A. Adams sighed and pulled over. “They promised the Parks they wouldn’t do this.”
“Oh? Did those mean Indians break a promise with the U.S. government?” I got out and slammed the door behind me. A. Adams pulled away, both of us forgetting my trike in the back until I ran out to the highway and waved him down. When he circled back I tried mightily to get the tailgate down and then once it was down I wrestled with the trike for an eternity before finally climbing up into the truck bed and body-slamming the trike to the ground. I stumbled down, slammed the tailgate closed, and when it fell open I slammed it again.
The dispensary had a total of two strains, an indica and a sativa. The prices were astronomical. Veganic, the signage boasted.
“Vegan, organic and humanely farmed,” said the Native guy behind the counter. He was huge, wore a headband and a flamboyantly tie-dyed sweatshirt (sweatshirt!) reading may the hózhó be with you. “Shade-grown here on-site.”
“Shade-grown? In the Quonset huts?”
“That’s right,” he said, “in the shade of the Quonset huts. We even have fans in there to simulate the wind.”
He rang me up. “Cash only.” When I griped that the ATM fee was extortion, he stared at me in serene silence that I took to mean, Reparations, Karen.
If my parents could see me now! I thought, smoking weed on the side of the highway at the entrance to Death Valley National Park on marathon day. What pioneers those old hippies had been! I gave thanks to all the rappers who marched for my freedom to enjoy a blunt in the shade of a salt cedar and behold the spectacle of the ultramarathoner in all his palpable pathology, the pinnacle of Progress sitting on my trike unwashed, watching the runners with an inner monologue voiced by Jim Breuer: What are you running from, man?
I rediscovered my love for smoking in the desert. Being high was a delight, obviously, but I loved the physicality of smoking just as much, couldn’t get over the mundane magic of pinching a little fireball between my fingers. Smoking at my campsite, I felt as pure as an early human. Barely upright. I found I could commune with my mother by smoking. I felt her as kinetic memories rising in my gestures, her gestures if you replaced the Marlboro Lights with veganic prerolls.
I rode my trike to Shoshone, bought food and toilet paper and calling cards at the gas station, got drunk at the Crowbar. Sometimes before I got drunk I took a calling card into the pay phone in front of the bar, closed its accordion door for privacy and called one of my old therapists, the woman one. Sometimes, after therapy, if no one needed the pay phone, I called Lise. Together we tried to remember the first things that burned away before everything was on fire.
Sometimes I called Theo. “Where are you?” I always asked. “Living room,” he always said. Still I envisioned him at our dining table, hunched beneath his cross to bear. One time he said, “In the garden.”
“I miss my plants,” I said.
“Which ones?”
“The ferns. All my houseplants. The aloe. The lavender, the begonias. My little Japanese maple on the hill,” I said. “The black walnut.”
“Begonias are dead,” Theo told me. “Spiky pink things? Yeah, dead. Hydrangeas are dead. Houseplants, too.” As for the black walnut, he spent his summer evenings raking them where they dropped on the lawn, trying to scrape them up before they rotted into a tarry stain wormed with maggots. He said, “I won’t visit the black walnut in the tree zoo.”
Somewhere, an air horn farted. “Game day,” Theo said wearily. It was fall then, late where Theo was. I saw him raking black walnuts in the dim. It wouldn’t be dark there like it was dark here. There there were porch lights and streetlights and a string of café lights stretching across the backyard. Or there had been when I left, so many months ago. Surely Theo had winterized. During these conversations I frequently had to remind myself that while I was on my Oregon Trail, Theo had kept on existing.
“Where are you?” he asked, then answered. “The bar.”
“You should come out here,” I said. “If you’re done with trees.” Theo was silent, then said he had to go.
For a time, our story ended there. Theo in the garden, me in the desert.
* * *
—
A few days later I walked to the Tecopa post office. I wanted to stop living like a coyote. My phone was still gone and I didn’t miss it. There was no service and I didn’t want any. I sent Theo a postcard. This coyote has clawed her way back from the grave with my new address. About a week later I opened the P.O. box to a rockslide of forwarded mail. The volume was wrathful, included slips for several packages that turned out mostly to be books. I made space for these packages’ woeful carbon footprints, but truthfully, I’d never been so happy to see so many unsolicited galleys.
The only package that wasn’t a book was even better than a book. It was a shoebox full of letters. Theo had sent them, but before that my mother had. My mother had written the letters to her cousin Denise decades ago, when both of them were girls. Denise had sent them to me in Michigan months ago, after reading my clown motel novel. All of this I learned in a short letter from Denise to me taped inside the lid of the box, mostly apologies for not sending the letters sooner, and for not sorting them.
Yet I find the letters have been sorted. They’re in chronological order, the earliest, on personalized stationery reading mirth from martha, is dated April 1968. I do the math. My mother is ten.
Hello Dee,
Nothing happened today. A boy named Keith called me he didn’t say much. What’s going on up there? Do you think Nick still wants me? Nick is so handsome his belly button fell off! Do you see him often? I really miss everyone up there. Oh well, that’s beyond the point. I talk to you just like I talk to my friends.
My birthday was the 28th. Cynthia’s was the 21st. Chris and Kathy gave us a party on the 24th. It was a lot of fun. We played a game called Kiss, Slap, Hug. I can’t explain it, so I won’t.
Cynthia likes Kai Neilson. I like Brad Neilson. They are cousins. I kissed Brad. Cynthia kissed Kai. For my birthday I got this stationery some perfume, a ring, some other paper, two dollars & a new outfit. I have the books about pop music also. They’re good.
Say hi to whoever said hi to me. Also to everyone else. Got to go.
Flower power!
Black is beautiful!
White is wonderful!
Green is very groovy!
Watch out for Blue Meanies!
Bye,
Martha
P.S. Write back. Mirth means joy.
Your Misery Was Nothing
As I read and reread my mother’s letters, the heat broke. Fall came to Tecopa. The pain faded. The teeth inside me loosened and came out with my menses. I’d pour my deathless neoprene cup out onto the dirt and watch the earth swallow the blood, a tooth or two left behind. I felt the space inside me where they had been and it was velvet.
Lise came out for a soak on her days off. She’d gotten a second job and was looking for a third, trying to put a dent in her impossible debt.
“Lyn says since I’m already in default I should jo
in the strikes, but I feel like it’s only a matter of time before they bring back debtors’ prisons. Now that I think of it, for a lot of people they never went away.”
“Did you bring my phone?” I asked.
“Darren.” She shrugged. “I left G-ma’s truck unlocked and he drove it into the McDonald’s. Not to. Into. He’s fine—I mean, he’s in jail and the truck’s in impound—but he’s alive.” She shrugged again. “So no, I didn’t bring your phone.”
We soaked. I meditated on driving a truck not to but into a McDonald’s. Lise brought more news from the city. Someone had been gluing cowboy hats to pigeons. There had been several sightings across Vegas so far, many of a notoriously evasive and almost taunting pigeon known as Cluck Norris, who had recently found a mate. Lise had seen a video and even downloaded it for me. She rose from the spring and dried her hands, then showed me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so honored. I watched a pigeon in a red plastic cowboy hat strutting around a parking lot. Another in its flock, a female, wore a pink hat. They were perfect, the hats, the birds, the proportion, the body language—pigeons like smug yet impotent mobsters, same gait as every man my G-ma had ever brought around. I couldn’t stop watching. The fucking birds have hats on, bro! a voice on the video said, awash in wonder.
“PETA hates it,” Lise said. “They’re no fun.”
As night fell, we speculated about how long the pigeon project would take, how many pigeons you’d have to capture, how many hats one would presumably have to glue (PETA had particularly objected to the glue) to how many pigeon heads until one was seen in the wild and documented, let alone two. A decade’s work, easy! It was something Rust would do. I thought about the things my girl-mother had said in her letters about love. I thought of my element. I thought, it goes almost without saying, about Ruth.
I guess, to answer your question, Dad/God: neither. I do not want to continue to rape, pillage and plunder. But neither do I particularly want to get back into the productive mode. I want to be always moving on and coming home.
I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness Page 23