I wanted to reel around and demand the man-in-doeskin's name and where he was from and why he was doing what he was doing – to stamp the dirt to protest his taking me from Mogollon without so much as a whisper of my permission, and shout at him for tying me so intimately to his body. By what right, I wanted to ask? By what right? And …and …I was utterly and completely mute …filled with a rare calm.
Calm and
awe. We rode down through the gentle corridors of cottonwood and sycamore which lined Silver Creek towards Glenwood. I watched crested blue jays swoop and squawk at our intrusion. Purple lupine and brilliant, red firepoppies danced hypnotically in the steady breeze. Tiny mountain finches skidded from tree limb to bush to tree limb, engaged in their incomprehensible gossip. Sunlight glowed through the branches.
III.
I WON'T WORRY YOU with all the usual, how lonely it is, how tiring it can be, how boring it can get – oh, yeah, and how glamorous and how exciting and how full of intrigue and passion; and, you know, the mysteries of the dark, the cruel knowledge of the light, and so on, and so on, and so on, and ... five generations worth, five fucking lives worth. Girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, confidantes, partners, bosses, bartenders, blacksmiths, drugstore clerks, plumbers. I mean, it gets to the point, and a rather depressing point at that, you basically see most people as one of two things:
Enemies or food. And the rest of world just kind of falls into rank. But that's only part of the formula, loved-ones. There are enemies, there is food, and then, there are ... doctors.
You see, as much as I would love to claim the holy powers of transfiguration and magically appear to you as the whole and complete image of "Woman" which I have so ardently dreamed of within my flat, boyish chest – the body I was born with is, very sadly, the one I've got forever. Forever.
If I had been born with webbed hands or stunted legs, or a headless, withered Siamese-twin skewed to my belly, or some such other known misfortune of disheveled physiology, you might feel at the very least, some desolate, twinging pang of sympathy for me. But for that boyish flat chest and the very man-sized phallus that's stuffed beneath my crotch to be claimed as my great and lonely bodily grief?
How many male children are born to this planet so well-endowed with health and life and, and ... such great membership? Shouldn't I be just a little bit grateful to be so gratefully blessed? Or, how many women, raped, beaten, burned, cast aside, trapped within the suffocating confines of their gender, who without much more than a second thought, if not a third, would gladly give up their wombs and teats to enjoy the born privileges of men?
And I should be different? Yes. But tiresomely yes, achingly yes, fucking yes, for that matter. I've been after a good sex doctor for the past sixty-some years, sixty-some odd years since I read about Einar Wegener trying to get a womb transplant in Denmark so he, and I mean "he" very thinly, could become Lille Elbe. And the sob story there, sisters and brothers, was that she, she, died a few days after her final operation, her promised future as a new woman lost forever. But at the very least, she had those few days, those handfuls of precious hours to, dare I say it, realize her peace. Her outside finally looked like, felt like her inside, and when she awakened those few mornings, she did not awaken to some strange, hard alien body, but...
But trying to find a doctor to work on me? The examination always stops about the time the poor nurse tries to find my blood pressure. Only the Holiest of Holies knows what she would find next! Just too much explaining to do... You see, sweetheart, I don't have what you'd call blood pressure… Do I have a pulse?... Pulse. Is that the same as circulation? Hmmm, well, I do breathe, would you like to check my breathing? You see ... and then, well, her mind starts getting cloudy, the doctor's memory goes vague (no surprise there, at least), the receptionist suffers a profound lapse of recall, and I'm gone ... done ... good-bye. Once, again.
It's not like I haven't tried to explain it to a doctor before. Doctors are used to the out-of-common, the unusual, the strange, if you will. A person with a seemingly male body wanting to have a seemingly female body? What? No problem? Just three hundred hours of senseless psychiatric screenings, a grubstake in the pharmaceutical hormone industry and about twenty grand to drop into a surgeon's personal retirement account. Then all that awaits is snip, snip, snip and sew, sew, sew... No, no problem at all! Until, that is, I get to the place where I start explaining what he will eventually find in his physical examinations, like how my metabolism has slowed to something akin to a granite boulder or a Galapagos tortoise- not to mention my most essential nutritional needs. And when his staunch disbelief is gradually replaced by wide-eyed, bulging terror and his immediate response changes from calling the little men in white suits to calling the big men in blue suits ... well, then I only have one choice: Lunch. And at that point, sweet ones, it's justice, pure and simple. Justice.
One might suppose, at four o'clock in the morning, sitting in this dirty little downtown pocket of stink with a dead, barely identifiable human body lying at my feet, that I may have become jaded, even cynical. That the Gift given to me those five generations ago was a shameful waste. The thought has crossed my mind.
But shame has not been a foreign feeling in my lives.
And when the ceiling is about to collapse in upon me, when the earth threatens to open up and swallow me wholly and vengefully, when the very air turns to smothering mud – then my reaction is to sit, just sit, light a Viceroy, study the cracked paint on the windowsill, cross my legs, stare at the buzzing cafe sign across the street ... the blurs of pulsing blue light ... listening to the sirens ... dreaming...
In the distance, the sirens sound like sorry, mechanical imitations of coyotes – the coyotes who hung on the perimeters of our camps when even the hearty kangaroo mice and spotted lizards couldn't survive the drought.
The air was thick with dry, gray dust. Sometimes a whelping bitch would slowly zigzag her sagging, hunched frame towards our fire, begging food.
The proud, wild coyote was not above shame, if it meant life.
IV.
THE MAN-IN-DOESKIN didn't speak another word to me until dusk when we reached a craggy, dark ravine which forked wildly off of the creek canyon. Fifteen minutes up the ravine we came to a large outcropping of purple rock – beneath which lay an impossibly f1at plane of hard, yellow clay maybe thirty feet wide by thirty deep. In the center of the perfect clay square was a large spiral of smooth black river stones, four long paces across, each stone almost identical to the next, each weighing about eight pounds. My jaw trembled at the sight of it. I slid off the side of the Appaloosa and stared.
"This is my
dreaming ground," the man-in-doeskin said. "We can camp here for now. You'll be safe." "Safe from
what?" In the overwhelming strangeness of my new surroundings, I found my tongue, "...and who are you?" "My name is Jonathan Rainbow,
" he replied "You'll be safe here, that's all I can guarantee you right now. "This is the place where I come to dream and pray,
" he made a reverent, sweeping gesture encompassing the expanse of the broad ravine. "This is the place where I first saw you – during my dreaming – and I knew through my dreaming that you needed my help. " "Your help? How can you help me?" Mistrust was an inborn quality of mine. "And what do your damned dreams have to do with me?"
"I know ... you do not think that dreams mean anything – that the only ones you remember are your nightmares,
" he explained steadily. My heart seemed to slow a few hundred beats. "But dreams to me are another way of seeing a person, understanding a person … a place and a time. Then I know how to pray. Then I know what to do." "I start there when I begin my dreaming," pointing to the center stone of the black spiral. "And then I go to there," his finger tracing the graceful curves to the end stone. "And then I go to there," Jonathan Rainbow, the man-in-doeskin, pointed directly to my heart, laughing until his generous brown eyes crinkled into a hundred tributaries of thin, dark crevices.
>
I was shocked at his familiarity and confused by his meanings, yet at the same time, comforted by his attention and his, at least apparent, attraction to me. I had been an object of desire and lust often during my young life, but expressions of genuine interest or affection? Those were as foreign as France.
"You were on the edge of death, dear one, one way or another,
" he recounted. "Either a hungry miner, or a woman jealous of your ways, or the Mescaleros' revenge would have been your death. I saw this in my dreaming as right as you are now breathing. No doubts. None. But I also saw you as a worthy – and as a worthy you must come with me. That is your destiny … not just my desire ... maybe not yours either ... just your destiny ... and mine." He did not wait for another question. The man-in-doeskin quickly dismounted and walked across the clay, behind the stone circle to the back wall of the outcropping, laying his bedroll and saddlebags near a small black fire pit below the overhang of purple rock. Jonathan
turned toward the wall and reached up into the shadows to unlatch a wooden meat-smoking crib suspended from the rock ceiling. He produced several strips of venison backstrap and layed them across a spit. The gamey smell brought me across the smooth clay floor with no second thought. By sight, the meat hadn't aged more than a couple of days. I stiffened and turned to face my "rescuer." "So you think food will buy me?" I fired at him. "Shit, even old Banker Reagan didn't think of that one when he had me kidnapped as his whore!" My voice trailed off. "…Tried just about everything else…"
Jonathan raised his palm quickly. "Eat if it suits you, then leave if it suits you. Take my mare. You choose.
" I stared intently at the-man-in-doeskin for what seemed like hours. My eyes flooded in grief and confusion, my shoulders quaked, but I did not cry. All of the voices in my head had their say, all at once – the skeptics, the adventurers, the naysayers, and the rosy-cheeked Pollyannas – a full, discordant chorus of conflicting thoughts and feelings. And as deeply as I mined these jumbled inner voices – which, granted, kept me alive the past five years – I couldn't find the brilliant, unmistakable red flag of danger that would put me into immediate flight, a flight which I had traveled so breathlessly, but so gratefully, many times before.
Instead, the arguments between my head and heart silenced themselves like two drunken debaters in a bar at closing time. The feeling which enveloped my consciousness was that of a warm, but odd homecoming, akin to walking through the familiar, sunlit front door of my childhood home, but seeing the furniture rearranged on the ceiling. My knees slowly buckled my body into a sitting position. I lowered my eyes from Jonathan's gaze.
"I have no wish to
use you," the man-in-doeskin responded to my thoughts. "Yours is not to take like a thief. Yours is not to take by me or anyone else … at least … that is, not simply." He laughed at his own ironies. My face flushed and the tears which I so stubbornly held behind my eyes, welled and poured over my cheeks. And at the same time, I smiled widely, and laughed with this complex and strange man-in-doeskin. Honesty was far too rare in my young experience not to be appreciated – and fully. Jonathan rose, silently mouthing the word "firewood" to me and disappeared into the nearby brush. My eyes wandered along the yellow clay floor. One set of footprints led from the right flank of the Appaloosa to where I sat. My set. I could not see another. Jonathan had walked across from the left. My eyes quickly followed what I knew to be his trail to the brush. No footprints. I could hear the sharp snaps of dry willow branches. Jonathan emerged a few moments later carrying a large bundle of gray tinder.
"We'll eat soon, then you can sleep," he pronounced.
"My name is Temple Doolin," I barely offered. He tipped his head slightly and smiled.
Jonathan lighted a fire and seared the spit of venison. "You are a Two-Spirit, a Man-Woman, eh?" He glanced up at me from the corners of his eyes. I stammered and looked away from him. "What the Chiracahua call
Mahoe... The Lakota would call you Winkteh. The Dineh would call you Nadleh. The whites don't have a respectful name for you. There is no place in their world for those such as you. That is their misgiving." I didn't know what all those strange names meant, but Jonathan's term "Man-Woman" was pretty unmistakable. My eyes widened with exposure and shame. I had run away from Chicago at fourteen after my father was sent home early form the stockyards, ill one Saturday, and paid a surprise visit to his three daughters and one son playing in the cramped backyard of their southside brownstone. What he discovered, however, was his four daughters playing in the cramped backyard of their southside brownstone. And in a brief moment, my mother's and sisters' fourteen years of secret, loving insulation from the real world unraveled in chaos. I escaped bruised, torn, exhausted and heartbroken the following Monday. "Man-Woman" and "Two-Spirit" were easily the nicest names thrown at me since.
Jonathan snapped his fingers above the fire pit. "You are blessed, but you see it as a curse!" His eyes riveted on mine, his voice became concentrated, intense.
Blessed with the power of both woman and man – not cursed! If you were born into the world of the red people, you would hold the office of ceremony, you would be called the mediator between women and men, between earth and sky, between the powers of death and life. You would be held in esteem and attend births and weddings and dyings. You would be wealthy." Jonathan offered me a skewered length of blackened venison. My
eyes did not leave his as I took it from him. "But to live among
your people, who long ago were my people too, you must choose. You cannot be both woman and man. No other path is made for you there. Your woman's soul will betray your man's body, or your man's body will betray your woman's soul. To live in their world you must choose between being a woman or a man. There is no other path for you there except that of struggle or … madness … or … sickness…" I stretched to follow his frightening narrative while nervously trying to eat my fill of the welcome meat. My mind flooded with visions from my past which proved out the man-in-doeskin's dire warnings: The relentless singsong tauntings of my childhood schoolmates which evolved into near daily beatings as those gentle, delicate boy-children grew into rough and tumble youths, while I remained gentle and delicate or how, later, my fellow boxcar stowaways, convinced that I was a girl, tried to have their way with me and wound up pummeling me within an inch of my life when they discovered that my anatomy didn't meet their expectations – or in St. Louis when I was arrested and placed in a boys' home where I was made out to be the nightly amusement until I figured out that the front gate had no lock on it and I made an uneventful, indeed casual, broad daylight "escape" three months later. (I'm certain, to this very moment, that the dormitory masters just looked the other way while offering their sincere and devout prayers of thanks.)
In Tulsa, and two years later in Austin, I learned to ply my misfortunes in order to eat. Cattlemen and buckaroos were generous enough, but they were also skittish – not wanting to appear soft on young "boys" to their trailmates, I frequently suffered a swollen cheek or black-eye that took weeks to heal as I retreated to a backroom job washing dishes or scrubbing floors where my damage was hidden from view. Mogollon, though much smaller, was not much safer … but it was
still a living… Jonathan stopped speaking. I was lost in a fog. I attempted to refocus my eyes.
"Hearing the truth will do this to a soul,
" he grinned and stood up. "In the red people's world, Two-Spirits are allowed to be complete," he paced back and forth opposite me across the fire pit. "The men Two-Spirits may appear as women, but they may also join the warrior men. The Brave-Hearted Women may go to war as warriors and marry women, or they may weave, or cook, or marry men. Their paths are free.
"Osh-Tish, the Crow, wears dresses with the patterns of flowers, but he is also known as
Finds-Them-and-Kills-Them! As both, your world only allows you to sell yourself to men's beds." "You're not Indian?" I asked exhaustedly.
"No. No, my people are older than the red people.<
br />
My people are called the Old Keepers. "Jonathan replied in a slow, measured meter. "My people are not related by birth … but we are related by blood." He paused. "I will wake you in the morning and we will talk then" I sunk back onto my elbows, and then my shoulders. My fatigue penetrated to the center of my bones. The fire's heat drained me of any further resistance. My eyes fluttered closed. I felt the weight of a large animal skin tucked around my shoulders.
Then began an old familiar ritual which visited upon me every night since I left home.
My sleep was dreamless, like stone, always like stone. In the early morning hours, inextricably, like a dynamite blast, I startled awake, every inch of my body soaked in my own sweat. I did not know where I was and reeled about in my bedding. Lost, I gasped, and trying to claw my way out of the enveloping panic, felt something … someone … breathing … very close to me … very close, very deeply, very slowly, very measured breathing. My eyes emerged from the dark purple of night to see the man-in-doeskin, his huge body appearing to completely encircle mine, radiating an aura of peace and calm with every cavernous breath. Inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling. My breathing started to match his. My heart stopped racing. I started to relax and cautiously lowered myself back against his massive shoulder, slowly dropping back asleep … seemingly, for the first time in many years … safe asleep.
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