by Baker, Scott
I dropped him back at his cabin after the funeral. The ceremony had been for him, not for either Alexandra or myself: anything I might once have owed him I had more than paid, and I had no desire to ever see him again.
The next day I put my aunt's collection of grimoires in storage and put my cabin up for sale. Some of the snakes, the local specimens, I freed; the others I arranged to sell to zoos and private collectors. Finally I called an old friend in Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, and arranged to sell him the coke.
The anaconda finished digesting the goat and excreted the surgical fingers of coke with which I'd stuffed the goat's body a week later, leaving me free to sell the snake. The new Orange County Zoo had ambitions of surpassing the San Diego Zoo's snake house and I was able to unload the anaconda, the sea snakes and a number of other specimens to them at good prices.
From Orange County I left for the East Coast. The cages in the van were filled with snakes for zoos in Boston and Chicago: I'd put the mattress that Alexandra and I'd used when we went camping in the back. Most of the coke was in two false-bottomed cages of South American rattlesnakes but I had a vial containing a little over two and a half ounces of coke for the trip hidden beneath the glove-compartment cobra cage.
I was in no hurry to get anywhere. Selling off what remained of my former life at a profit seemed the logical thing to do but held no great interest for me: Alexandra had always been the businesswoman, the hustler, the one fascinated by the status and money our coke dealing brought us. I had no plans for the future and no desire to make any, only a vague curiosity about some of the more inhuman geologic formations of the Southwest. Something about them—the bare dry rocks, the hot wind, the empty landscapes—felt as though it would be right for me.
* * *
Chapter Five
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I was sitting eating a burrito in a taco stand just off the freeway when I saw a slim, dark-skinned girl with shiny black hair streaming out behind her in the hot desert wind walk up to the freeway on-ramp.
She was wearing a long dress of dusty black velvet and carrying a green nylon backpack by one shoulder strap. She leaned the pack up against the freeway entrance sign and stood in front of it with her thumb out. I'd passed dozens of hitchhikers since leaving Big Sur but something about this girl broke through my deadness, made me notice her. I left what was left of my meal on the table and walked over to her.
Her face was strong but finely drawn, without trace of blunt-ness or heaviness, and her eyes were large and strange. They were golden—not yellow like the eyes of a cat but a true metallic gold, soft and shining, with strange shimmering depths, alive with an intelligence that made them seem for all their unexpectedness neither freakish nor bizarre.
"Would you like a ride?" I asked. "I'm going east."
"How far are you going?" Her voice was fluid and unhurried, with something odd in the way she pronounced her words.
"The Grand Canyon first, for a few days, then on to Carlsbad Caverns and a few other places like that, finally to Massachusetts by way of Chicago."
"Good. Is it all right if I ride with you all the way?"
"Yes, but—do you see that van over there? The yellow Dodge with the cobra painted on the side? I'm carrying a load of poisonous snakes. It's perfectly safe, they're all in cages, but a lot of people don't want to ride with them."
"I'm not afraid of snakes."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes." She pushed her left sleeve back so I could see a spiral of dull gold in the shape of a nine-headed cobra, an Indian Naga, twisting halfway up her forearm. The Naga's eyes glittered red with what looked like rubies; her skin was smooth, deeply brown, yet almost translucent.
"Is it real?"
"Yes."
"You're Indian? East Indian?" I picked up her backpack and we began walking back to the truck.
"My mother was, a long time ago."
"And you feel safe, hitching with something like that?"
"Very safe."
I unlocked the passenger's side door and let her in, then went around to put her pack away. When I climbed in on my side I saw her with her face pressed to the glass of the baby cobra's cage. The cobra was just on the other side of the glass, its head raised and its hood spread, absolutely still, seemingly as fascinated by her as she was by it.
She straightened, looked away; the cobra retreated to the flat rock in the rear of its cage. "He's very beautiful, your little cobra."
"Very beautiful," I agreed, somehow uncomfortable. "I'm David."
"I'm Dara."
I started the truck, let it warm up a bit before pulling out onto the on-ramp. "Do you drive, Dara?"
"No. I'm sorry."
"It's not important. I don't mind driving."
"Thank you."
We fell silent then, neither of us speaking for the next few hours. I was intensely aware of Dara, excited by her presence in some way that only began with my consciousness of her beauty, her sexual attractiveness, and yet the excitement took me, not exactly away from her but somehow back into myself. Into the past that had only hours before been so dead and distant.
And yet nothing was the way it had been before. My whole life with Alexandra—the years of coke dealing and lovemaking, everything seemed false, empty. A desperate search for something we'd had at the beginning and then lost, yet looking back I could find no beginning, no time when we'd ever truly shared what we'd spent the rest of our life together trying to regain. The beach in Acapulco where we'd met, the two perfect months together in Yucatan—I remembered the sun and the landscape, the drugs and the sex, but beyond that, behind it, nothing. No one. Only the need to believe in something that had never happened.
And before Alexandra, only my family. The Bathorys. Not so much my aunt and uncles, my father and brother, but our history, our inheritance, the tradition that had shaped and marked them as it had shaped and marked me.
One of my ancestors had been a seven-year-old girl when her denunciation of her mother had resulted in the woman being hanged in the Salem Witch Trials. An earlier ancestor had been a Scottish "witch finder" who confessed on the gallows to having fraudulently accused and caused the deaths of some two hundred and twenty women. He'd been paid twenty shillings for every woman he'd accused. And there'd been crusading priests and ministers, sin and heretic hunters aplenty in our family tree.
But the family's previous history was far grimmer, despite the comic-opera names of many of its Central European protagonists. Some of them—Mihnea the Bad, Peter the Lame, Radu Mihnea, Vlad the Monk, and others—though well known in their day were now almost forgotten, but at least two of my ancestors were still famous: Vlad Tepes—Vlad the Impaler, the historical Dracula—and the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, whose fame was the result of her practice of luring young peasant girls to her castle on pretext of employment, then torturing and killing them, and finally bathing in their blood, supposedly in the belief that by so doing she would be able to retain her youth and legendary beauty. To which end she sac-rificed an estimated twenty-five hundred girls before she was arrested and imprisoned.
And they were real to me now, all of them, in a way I had denied for as long as I could remember. Real not in any stupid storybook way but in the fact that their cold crazy cruelty had shaped me as it had shaped the rest of the family, had been one of the elements making me who I was, limiting who I could become, determining who I would never allow myself to be.
It was getting dark. I felt lighter, somehow. Not free, but relieved at last of some of the strain that my lifelong refusal to see myself as who I was, as a Bathory, had put on me.
But relieved or not, I was tired and I wanted to make it a lot farther that night. Which meant cocaine.
I pulled off the road, turned off the motor. I hadn't spoken to Dara since I'd begun driving, respecting her silence, though I'd never lost my awareness of her presence. Now, reaching across her to get the coke out of its hiding place beneath the cobra's cage, I felt awkward, even
apologetic, as I asked her if she'd like some.
"No, thank you. I don't like drugs."
For a moment I hesitated, almost returning the coke to its hiding place, then went ahead and snorted six quick spoonfuls.
But then, back on the highway and driving again, I began to feel ashamed of myself, lost, as though the silence that Dara and I had shared with each other before I'd snorted the coke had been in reality a strange and perfect communion, an intimacy without reservation, that I had violated and then discarded. I started talking, going faster and faster as I tried to tell her everything, all about Alexandra and coke dealing and my family, but she reached over and brushed my cheek with her fingertips and when I looked at her, saw her eyes golden and shining in her dark serious face, all my shame and desperation were suddenly gone.
When at last we'd driven far enough for the night I pulled into a deserted rest stop and parked.
"You can share my bed with me, if you like," I said. "Or I've got a tent and an extra sleeping bag, if you'd prefer that."
"I'd like to share your bed."
We undressed in the darkness of the truck, slept naked but untouching, keeping to the outside edges of the bed. There'd been no sexual tension to resolve, no need to establish ground rules or make promises: the silence we shared was more precious than any back-seat coupling could have been and I would have done nothing to endanger it. Yet when I awoke for a moment in the middle of the night I found we were in each other's arms.
* * *
Chapter Six
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The sunlight slanting in through the panes of the stained-glass window in the right rear door of the truck—the one window Alexandra had completed during her brief fascination with stained glass—lit Dara's face and shoulders with rich mustards and rust-oranges. When she opened her eyes they shone like tiny suns.
I'd awakened huddled in the far corner of the bed, my back pressed against the empty snake cage in which I kept my clothing, as though I'd been trying to escape from Dara in my sleep. Yet as we lay there, I in the shadow and she in the light, I remembered awakening in the middle of the night to find her in my arms. I wanted to reach out for her and take her in my arms again, but something restrained me, held me back, as though I had awakened from my dreams to find myself in the midst of a dance as measured and stately as the unfolding of a flower or the slow drifting of clouds across the moon, a dance which could not be hurried in its inexorable progression towards completion.
"Good morning," I said, feeling awkward, not knowing what else to say.
"Good morning," she said and within her voice, behind her grave smile, I felt again the silence, the intimacy, the communion.
"I'd like to start driving again in about fifteen minutes," I said, relaxing a little when I found that the banality of what I had to say didn't seem to matter. "I've got enough food in the cooler to last us till lunchtime and we can shower and wash your clothes if they need it when we get to the Grand Canyon. OK?"
She nodded. I put on a pair of jeans and a heavy turtleneck—the morning was still cold—then slipped into my sandals and pushed past the curtain into the front of the van.
The sun was just breaking free of the horizon. There was only one other car in the rest area, a station wagon, and it was parked at least a hundred yards away. I got out the coke and snorted my breakfast ration.
"David." Dara's voice surprised me. She pushed back the curtain and joined me. She was wearing the same dress she'd worn the day before but it no longer looked dusty: it clung to her, emphasizing her breasts, her narrow waist, and her hair fell black and silky down her back.
"What, Dara?"
"If you hadn't taken your cocaine you would have known I was going to speak to you before I said anything. Like you knew that I was going to open my eyes before I opened them this morning."
It was true: I had known.
"And I knew you were watching me. But you've cut yourself off from me now."
"With the cocaine."
"Yes." Her eyes were luminous and strange, beautiful.
"And you don't want me to cut myself off from you? It's important to you?"
"Very important. It—doesn't matter that much now, while we're still here on the surface of the earth, riding in this truck. But it could be very dangerous for us to lose each other later."
"You mean, in the Grand Canyon? Or Carlsbad Caverns?"
"Yes, and afterwards."
"Why?"
She started to say something, decided against it. "I can't tell you, David. Not yet."
I shook my head, said, "I don't understand, Dara. Please tell me what you're trying to say. What you really mean."
"I can't, David, not yet. When I can tell you, I will. I promise."
"And until then I just take this—whatever it is—on faith?"
"Yes."
It would have been easy enough to explain away the little she'd said, implied: she was another chemical casualty or a follower of the new messiah in Fresno, or perhaps just a young girl driven touchingly schizophrenic by the pressures of parents and society. I could have explained it away, but only by denying what I'd felt behind her words, what I'd known. I didn't try.
I started the truck, concentrated as best I could on my driving. There were no other cars on the highway. Every few minutes I glanced over at Dara, trying to read her expression, trying to figure out what she wanted from me. In the distance I could see mountains like rain-smoothed heaps of gray slag, on either side of us rippling scrubland where only scattered gray-green bushes grew. Dara was as alien and inaccessible as the statue of some twelve-armed Hindu goddess.
The countryside had begun to take on a stark beauty, the gray-green scrub giving way to occasional trees and green bushes, while the ground itself was breaking into delicate beiges and red-oranges. I was beginning to come down from the cocaine. As the excitement, the sense of unnaturally extended alertness, faded to a dull headachiness I found myself becoming more aware of those things I wasn't looking at or paying attention to. Concentrating on the road or looking at Dara I found the granulated surfaces of the dead mountains and foothills, the sound of the wind whistling in through my half-opened window, the smell of the sun-heated dust the wind brought with it, all coming together, becoming part of what I felt and knew. When a trucker honked at me to let me know he wanted to pass the sound was as much part of the landscape as the trees and hills, no more jarring or intrusive than they were.
And Dara. We sat without speaking, without needing to speak. Without having to watch her I was becoming aware of her slightest movement, beginning to anticipate even the most imperceptible gesture or change in her expression. And with this anticipation came the excitement, the sense of your life opening onto a new and unexpected future, that always accompanies the discovery of another person, yet at the same time it was as though I were remembering things I'd known my whole life, as though I were an old man reunited after a long separation with his wife of seventy years, an old man who finds her every action reawakening long forgotten familiarity. Yet I did not feel old. I felt young, full of energy, excited.
I was driving deeper and deeper into a dream, into a new reality that obeyed its own strange imperatives and owed nothing to the world that had ended for me with Alexandra's death. A reality in which everything that Dara and I shared—a flock of birds wheeling by overhead, two cacti by the side of the road, the horizon huge around us and a car passing us on a blind curve—had a resonance and a meaning that it had never had before. A reality in which I was beginning to feel the hope and fear behind Dara's silence, to know them and share in them without understanding or needing to understand the reasons behind them.
I remembered the way Dara and the baby cobra had stared at each other, sharing something I'd been unable to perceive, remembered the way the bushmaster had stood guard over Alexandra's body until it was too late to save her. I wanted to ask Dara about the blue cloud, the satanic man-goat and his dancing worshipers.
Instead I sai
d, "You were waiting for me there, by that freeway entrance."
There was no need for her to say anything: the answer was there, in her silence, in her eyes. I didn't understand the necessity driving her, couldn't even guess at its nature, but I shared in her acquiescence, in her submission to a purpose not her own.
And I trusted her. There was no way I could have not trusted her.
We made it to Grand Canyon Village by eleven. We did our wash, showered and ate, then arranged for hiking permits and campground space, finally repacked our packs for the next day's hike.
The rest of the day we spent studying the canyon.
It was not just a piece of landscape, a pretty view, a monument to blind erosion. It had spoken to me in Big Sur, drawn me to it despite my paralysis. And now, looking out on its immensity, looking down on its malachite green domes, purple temples, colored spires, down to the dirty ribbon of rushing water a mile below that was the Colorado River, I knew that the canyon was alive, an entity, a potent force, and I respected it.
I could feel Dara's longing, her fear, and not knowing why or how I shared them.
We held hands, Dara's palm dry in mine, as we watched the sun setting over the canyon. We were lost in the canyon and each other, paying no attention to the gawking tourists around us, but just before the sun vanished completely and the tourists began to drift away I heard a woman exclaim:
"Jim! Look at her eyes!"
"Don't stare, Mary. Probably contact lenses."
We stayed staring out over the canyon long after the trace of the Sunset was gone. There was a half-moon and in its light the canyon was shadowed and strange, blue and mysterious. Yet its nighttime visage was less terrifying, less threatening, than its daytime grandeur, and for all Dara's fears I felt that it was not only alive and powerful beyond imagining, but something I could trust.
We returned late to the campground, undressed in silence in the darkness of the truck. We reached out for each other, tentatively explored each other's bodies with our hands, yet even as we touched we knew that the time had not yet come for fuller sexual union. The desire was there but we sidestepped it, yet as I stroked her hair and held her breasts cupped in my hands, as she pressed herself against me and I kissed her gently on the lips, I knew the time would come when our lovemaking would be complete, and I knew that that time was coming soon.