Moonlight Water
Page 1
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To our family and friends and everyone walking in Hózhó
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: In Which Robbie Meets Creation
1. A Choice of Worlds
2. Standing in the Door to Hell
3. Destruction
4. How Do We Get There from Here?
5. The Lightbulb Blows
6. Funeral Arrangements
Part Two: In Which Red Arrives. Somewhere.
7. Lost or Found?
8. Adventure and Catastrophe
9. Moonlight Water, a Feathered Spy, and the Law
10. Madhouse and Refuge
11. The Lonely Ranger and Tonto
12. Serpent House Magic
13. Tonto to the Rescue
14. Celebrating
15. Night Water
16. Enter the Feds
17. Troubles to the Left of Us, Troubles to the Right
18. Zahnie and the Cops
19. Stranded
20. The Ranger Rescues Tonto
21. Busted
22. The Hosteen Hop
23. The Past Leaps Up to Bite You
24. Tell the Truth
25. Lukas Gulch
26. Cannonballs
27. The Hunt
28. Ugly Business
29. The Bar of Justice
30. Surprise!
31. Is It a Deal?
32. Lickety-split
33. Venturing Forth
34. Confession
35. Now What?
36. The Bird Leading the Blind
37. Apocalypse
38. Buzzards and Dancing
39. Struggles
40. It’s Been Waiting for You
41. Gianni Productions, Unlimited
42. When the Spirit Dances
43. Struggles and Uncertainties
44. Apocalypso Now
Acknowledgments
Tom Doherty Associates Books by Win Blevins and Meredith Blevins
About the Authors
Copyright
TEACHINGS OF THE NAVAJO BLESSING WAY
Be generous and kind
Haáh wiinit’í
Acknowledge and respect kinship and clanship
K’ézhnidzin
Seek traditional knowledge and traditions
Hane’zhdindzin
Respect values
Hwił iłi
Respect the sacred nature of the self
Ádá hozhdilzin
Have reverence and care of speech
Hazaad baa áhojilyá
Be a careful listener
Hazhó’ó ajíists’áá’
Be appreciative and thankful
Ahééh jinízin
Show positive feelings toward others
Há hózhó
Express appropriate and proper sense of humor
Dłoh hodichí yá’átéhígíí hazhó’ó bee yájíłti’
Maintain a strong reverence of the self
Ádił jídlí
Maintain enthusiasm and motivation for your work
Hanaanish ájíł’íinii bízhneedlí
Have a balanced perspective and mind
Hanítsékees k’ézdongo ájósin
—from a poster in the elementary school at Moonlight Water
PART ONE
In Which Robbie Meets Creation
1
A CHOICE OF WORLDS
Roiling and rebellious. Gray water heaving with great white sharks. Ships sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge packed with mysteries from China. Fortunes earned and burned. Writers and millionaires made. Mark Twain and Mark Hopkins. San Francisco has eaten giants and ordinary dreamers alike. It has sculpted them from legends and landfill along the Barbary Coast.
Crushed, reborn, or created. The city does not care. Rock musician or railroad magnate, all the same. San Francisco was built on visions. Dead dreams, shiny ones, those unspoken, and those stillborn. Rob Macgregor was just one more soldier in the city’s army of waking dreamers. One night, sleeping in his boat, Robbie was handed a possibility from the city’s ancient chest of dreams.
* * *
Cruising. Dark highway punctuated by the two headlights of his Alfa convertible. In the distance a bridge teetered toward the east side of the bay, a span that always made him edgy.
Up the steep angle toward a summit. He knew perfectly well that from there the bridge simply curved out of sight, downward. But he often imagined, teasing himself, that at the top it ended. Simply ended. And, in this particular dreamscape, his fantasy turned to reality. When he got to the apex, he flew off the end of the bridge into empty air.
Fear bolted through his veins like a psychedelic nightmare. The Alfa hit the water like a missile and slid toward the bottom. Robbie felt the water rise in his body from his feet to his legs to his belly and on up. When it flowed into and out of his nostrils, he knew he was about to die. He was paralyzed.
The convertible bumped onto the sandy bottom nose first, then tail. As it settled to horizontal, the water gushed out his throat, his mouth, and his nose. Rage to live rose with it.
Spasmodically, he tried to jerk in breath, knowing it would drown him, and …
The miracle happened. It was air. He was breathing sweet air.
As quickly as a lightning bolt is gone, water was air, and life was death.
Relaxing, he looked around. Sea urchins. Small fish. Off to the left, a bed of kelp. The cells of his body calmed, and he felt welcome here. He opened the door of the car, put his left leg on the bottom of the bay, and stepped deeper into his dream.
He saw himself climb out of the bay on the east side. He was buck-naked. In front of him all the towns of the East Bay had disappeared. In that direction, toward the middle of the America this urban man barely knew, he saw no streets and no houses, only hills cloaked in trees and darkness. He turned, sat, and looked back at the watery grave of his fine car, oddly at peace.
People gathered, walked around the edge of the bay, and pointed. Their mouths moved, but he heard nothing. They didn’t notice the naked Robbie.
A tow truck backed to the water’s edge. Cop cars wheeled in. Divers put on wet suits, and still no one noticed the naked Robbie.
Before long the Alfa was cable-hoisted to the bank.
Robbie felt a tremolo. Who or what might be in the driver’s seat? Robbie Macgregor, the once-celebrated rock musician, now a corpse?
He couldn’t look.
But he did look.
Nothing there. No one. Seat empty.
Robbie felt a pulse of sweet exhilaration. I am invisible. I am a no-man. I could …
He peered into the waters and wondered. Never mind. Why examine a miracle? Why try to wrap it in puny words? I am free.
Photographers showed up, the crowd swelled, and not a soul saw Robbie Macgregor sitting there.
He stood up and held his hands high. He shook his hips. He laughed into the sky. No one heard, and no one noticed.
He turned and looked at the darkened lands, the unknown eastern side of the bay across from the city where he had grown up, become a
man, learned music, got rich, and got … Never mind.
I could walk over those hills into a new world and do anything.
He started to shiver. Fear? Excitement? Didn’t matter.
I could do and be anything, anyone.
* * *
When Robbie woke in the middle of the night, he couldn’t get back to sleep. He sat on the deck of his sailboat and waited quietly, drank coffee through first light to the dawn, and let images from the dream play in his mind. They faded some and got jumbled in their order. But he held its core in a pocket of his soul. He knew he’d been carrying the shadow of this dream for a long time.
* * *
Later that day Robbie walked the shore of a half-moon beach to the south, and then far to the north. He let the dream play like a musical score in rhythm to his steps while he turned his life around and around in his mind.
When he got tired, he sat on a low stone, took off his sneakers, and wriggled salt-sand between his toes. The tide was out, and the anemones on the seaward side of the stone had closed. Wondrous anemones.
He picked up a stick of flotsam and drew in the sand. He loved drawing, and he’d let himself drift away from it. In fact, he’d drifted away from many parts of himself. Fallen into doing music he didn’t love, playing it only for other people, living out other people’s fantasies. He wasn’t sure exactly what his own way was anymore. One hell of a predicament.
He rubbed out the drawing and started a new one. After a while it grew, it had life, and he thought it wanted to be a man dancing. Robbie danced a lot onstage. That sketch felt pretty good, but he rubbed it out, too. One day it might be easy again. Could be.
He walked to a beach shack, bought a hero sandwich, found another boulder to sit on, and ate slowly. The tide was starting in now.
What do I know? Nothing.
He ate.
If I knew something, what would it be?
That my dream was about me dying. And an invitation to being born.
He wadded up the sandwich paper and stuffed it into a jeans pocket. Put his shoes back on. Walked again. He walked all afternoon. The incoming waters slushed around his sneakers. He looked at the sun, setting far to the west. Which, he said to himself, thinking of Japan and red paper fans, was also the East. He smiled at how many possibilities each direction held.
He took a few steps onto drier sand and walked toward the parked Alfa.
What do I know?
I want to walk over those East Bay hills, low and curved like lion paws. I will go as a new person, a blank slate, waiting for a life to be written.
As he walked, he carried that knowledge in each step, and he knew it in his flesh. Felt it the way a man feels his desire to meld himself heart and soul with a particular woman. Knew.
2
STANDING IN THE DOOR TO HELL
Several weeks earlier, just north of San Francisco
Denial. Robbie had been fending off reality for years, and he never needed his denial fix more than now.
So there he was, sitting at the kitchen counter of his fancy house, Anchor Steam at hand before breakfast, toying with the break in a new song. “You’ll come,” he said. “Just one simple break, why are you holding out on me?” He could have been talking to his wife. Music was like that sometimes.
Robbie often talked to his songs as he wrote them, especially now when it was getting harder to bring them into the world. Frustration ate at him as lyrics and melodies hid in the shadows. Sometimes he whipped his songs into being, his words a charging team of horses. Other times he seduced them into life. Performing under the name Rob Roy, he threw his tall, burly body around the stage with the madness of a Scot warrior going berserk, and he belted out songs like battle cries.
Robbie played half the musical instruments known to man, sang choruses with the brassiness of a trombone, and wrote every kind of music imaginable and some that wasn’t. Rolling Stone once wrote that his songs resembled classical music gone Grateful Dead. Robbie thought they meant something positive, though he didn’t know what.
So get at it.
His band, the Elegant Demons, had to have a new song for its upcoming tour. If personal life was hellish for Robbie right then, so what?
The guitar break was coming. He could feel it now, a gentle interlude before a pagan-blast chorus. At the end of the second line, where the verse made mention of the lost lover, he tried a B minor in place of the D major. “Nice,” he said. He crossed out “D” on the lead sheet and wrote “Bm.” Tried it again— “Grabs the ear.” This didn’t feel like a great song, but when the band had it going on, when the moment and the music fused with the energy of a huge crowd, any of his songs could turn magical. They were a jam band, not known for their studio recordings but for their break-down-the-wall improvisations.
He took a deep breath and let the tune run through his bones. He coaxed the first phrase along, it was just about there.
The phone outclanged the music. “Shit!” he snapped. But he flipped the damn thing open. Only his wife, the band members, and his manager’s office had this number.
“Speak,” said Robbie, the greeting he always used.
“It’s Nora.”
“Yes.”
“Georgia and I are on the way. We’ll be there in ten minutes.”
* * *
He put his guitar in its case, thumped back onto the stool at the counter, and pulled on the beer. This was wrong, all wrong, more of the hell he was denying.
Two days ago his wife, Georgia, had lost the baby—three times they’d tried now, three miscarriages. He’d first gotten the call about the baby catastrophe from Nora: “Get down to the hospital. Georgia’s lost the baby, and she wants you.”
He spent the short drive furious at Nora. His wife was in deep trouble. Why hadn’t anyone, why hadn’t Nora, called him until it was over?
He brushed by Nora toward the hospital bed, ready to yell back at that damned woman, but—
One look at his wife’s face stopped all words. He felt like he was inside a walk-in freezer. Her pallid cheeks, her hands lifeless on the sterile white sheets, the chrome IV stand, the tubes, the needle—the thought of the dead child—this region of grief struck Robbie dumb. He had no words for anything as brutal as the life the gods threw at human beings.
Dr. Packard talked to him. He explained. When the doctor discovered that the baby in Georgia’s belly, their baby, had no heartbeat, he gave her a shot that forced her to issue forth a dead thing. You couldn’t call it a birth. Robbie had no energy for questioning anything. The sorrow, the bitterness, the weariness gonged in his head. Three tries, three miscarriages.
Dr. Packard threw Robbie and Nora out. “There’s more bleeding than I’d like. I’ve sedated her heavily. Go home and let her sleep.”
Robbie gave his wife’s hand a squeeze. Though the grief belonged to both of them, they were ice cubes in separate trays. Even her closed eyelids seemed to shut him out.
“Robbie,” Nora whispered, as if to tell him everything would be all right. He shook his head and barged out of the room. He couldn’t bring himself to talk. Nora had been their business manager for a decade, and the band’s accountant. Robbie liked her fine but had never felt as if he knew her, not really. Georgia’s best buddy or not, he couldn’t get close enough to hear her rhythm. And recently things with Nora were off, way off.
The next day at Georgia’s bedside was a jumble of half-toned memories. Their decade together, Georgia all scarves and bangles and bracelets and gaiety. Georgia the explorer, meditator, practitioner of feng shui, devotee of Pilates and yoga, connoisseur of fine wines. Georgia, who loved to dance, Georgia the whirligig of fun. For years they had everything but the children they wanted. In the last year or so, less fun, but he didn’t know why. Hadn’t asked, either.
The second half of the day was a shuffle of comings and goings of people who called themselves helpers when their world was beyond help, actions that were useless, occasional words from Georgia. He sat numbly in
his bedside chair, unable to talk to anyone, unable to talk to Nora. He felt like he was wandering through endless corridors looking, looking for something he would never find. And the corridors meandered on.
Dr. Packard put an end to it. “Clear out, both of you. Tomorrow after I’ve checked on her, maybe ten o’clock, I’ll call and you’ll probably be able to take her home.”
Now the heavy front door of their house opened and broke his reverie. He swigged on the beer. I’m drinking too much, but fuck it.
3
DESTRUCTION
From the front archway, one set of high heels clicked their way, and one pair of slippers shushed, across acres of Mexican tile. Robbie set the bottle on the counter and waited. Two days ago the death of their child. Yesterday silence. What now?
They stopped ten steps away, Nora a step in front of Georgia. “We’re in love,” Nora said. “Georgia and me. We want to get married.” She looked hard into Robbie’s eyes, Georgia looked at Nora.
Those words stopped his breath and his heart. Robbie couldn’t open his mind or his throat.
She went on. “You two … It’s been over for a long time.” She waited, as though he might say something. “Things like this happen, you understand.”
He was going to suffocate.
Nora went on and on in a businesslike tone, drivel about financial and legal work to be done—truckloads of it—how her office and their lawyers could work it out.
Robbie couldn’t listen. He was fighting for breath. He wanted to charge into battle with Nora, or Georgia, or himself, but he couldn’t even move.
He looked into Georgia’s eyes and saw grief. She looked down. He forced his body to pull over a chair for Georgia, then took her hand and helped her sit. Nora stood still, watching, but only for a moment.
“Naturally, Georgia wants the house,” droned Nora.
“House is mine,” Rob mumbled.
In California a spouse could keep the wealth he came into the marriage with.
“The lawyers will work it out. There’s no reason things can’t be settled quickly and amicably.”
Breath finally came in a heaving gasp, as after a blow to the diaphragm.
Robbie willed himself to be quiet inside, and looked around his house, what was in sight and what wasn’t. Odd things, the over-sized shower with twin showerheads, the bamboo garden and koi pond. His state-of-the-art recording studio. Georgia’s collection of contemporary art, odd, sterile stuff. Except for his studio, Georgia had made the house her own. With his money.