by W. S. Penn
It was. Everything that he had ever thought or felt or imagined was equal to everything else, each event an equally important subset to the one grand set that was Grandfather’s life. The elf owls were as important to Grandfather as sunsets; he could slide from flint knives to skunks to cottonwood trees within the same sentence. Only Pamela’s death stood out separate and unequal. On the other hand, when Grandfather was in motion, when he was riding the three-wheeled bicycle with the same even concentration that he drove the Plymouth, he became almost lucid.
“It’s the natural process of aging. It’s not senility,” I explained to Rachel. “When Grandfather is sitting still and staring out at the gray line of the horizon, he’s staring through time. The years are like fan-fold transparencies with the words of past and future written into them. On each transparency are the signs and symbols that predict and decipher his own life along with the lives of his children and his children’s children.”
“Pah!” she exclaimed. “Such clever images. You gift wrap reality with images.”
“I don’t mean to,” I said. It seemed the problem wasn’t one of images but of trust. Like someone who knows he’s failed to live up to his own aspirations—like the self-appelled painter who keeps promising to take up painting again or the rich man who ignores the needle’s eye—Rachel refused to trust me long enough to consider whether I might be right.
“Eighty-odd years folding back on each other,” I said, “makes reading them difficult, if not impossible. You can hold them up to the light of the desert or the distant light of the stars, but when you try to read them aloud, you’re going to sound confused.”
“How do you know?” Rachel said.
I didn’t. Nonetheless, I did know that when I hopped along beside Grandfather as he pedaled the killer bike to the trading post, he was lucid. As in driving the Plymouth, riding the bike he was staring out on a horizon of distance and not of time, and I could understand what he said. When he said, “There is a tale of a man who went up the mountain and looked over at the promised land,” I could say, “Tell me,” and what he would tell me each time would be consistent in its meaning if not told in the identical way. Each time, I would understand the tale of a man who looked over the mountain and saw not the promised land but the narrow barrel of an assassin’s rifle and the inexorable darkness of Death—the only promise, as far as Grandfather was concerned, worth taking for granted. Without needing to close my eyes, I would know the man Grandfather meant was the same one Laura P. said had gone directly to the Multi-world.
“Directly,” I would say to Grandfather. “Without passing Go.”
“Without collecting two hundred dollars,” Grandfather would laugh. “Let alone, needing them.” He wasn’t making fun of Laura P.’s beliefs but offering me a hope in the face and fact of death.
I was so willing to accept that offer that I failed to understand the hope. But the offer was a beginning. And months later, emerging from the dark closet of a near-coma—a nearness as immeasurable as the gray line of Grandfather’s horizons when he parked at my newborn crib and inspected me with the beefy eyes of an inspector from the F.D.A.—I would recall what I’d seen and heard beneath the fog of sodium pentothal, and I’d understand. It was like a dream, but a dream in which I knew I was dreaming, outside of which neither the dream nor the dreamer existed.
The dream would begin with a butterfly, a brightly colored and delicately spotted monarch, flying in the monarch’s usual curly-cued but ineluctable way toward an emptiness that waited on the other side of the sodium pentothal’s peak. I wanted with all my heart to follow the butterfly into oblivion until a voice asked, “What are you doing here?” and the butterfly dissolved, disappeared. Whose voice, what voice, I didn’t know; to the dreamer it seemed as though the voice came from outside of the dream. As suddenly as the monarch vanished, it was replaced in the dream by landscape, by canyons and streams, by cactus and hawks and caverns.
When I awoke, the fish-eye lens of my brain opening as if for the first time, I would find Elanna holding cherry-flavored gelatin toward my mouth on a spoon that seemed miraculously large. I would be fascinated by the way the Jello wiggled, and I would be able to do nothing but smile as Elanna, and behind her Grandfather, came into focus. Their eyes, his eyes, would tell me emphatically what he’d been trying to tell me all along—that I was condemned to live. Smiling, tears beginning to streak my cheeks, I would sit up and begin to eat that Jell-o.
30.
Ten months before that bite of Jell-o, in the aftershock of Pamela’s death, my parents dueled over Elanna’s and my affections, while they filed for divorce. Pamela’s death had been an earthquake revealing huge faults which had existed since my birth but which had been bridged by the habit and duty of marriage. Now, when mother or father spoke to Elanna or me, they slipped easily into litanies of blame that began with the phrase, “Your mother …,” or “Your father …,” and balanced on the implication that love for one parent excluded love for the other.
Elanna stayed up in Berkeley for the summer and, left at home with mother, the inner workings of who was doing what evil thing to whom was as difficult for me to determine as the inner workings of her brand new heavy-duty washing machine. There seemed to be an abundance of bolts and screws in this machine, two for every one that should have been there, as though every extra bolt and screw would keep father from sneaking into the garage and tinkering with it.
“Your father,” mother would say, “always did more damage fixing things than if he’d left well enough alone.”
“So,” father would say, having received a credit card bill, “your mother is on another spending spree, eh? There was nothing the matter with the old washing machine. She’s going to bankrupt me if she keeps it up.”
“Elanna?” I’d say, calling her late at night. “The latest is washers. Don’t mention anything like dirty laundry,” I cautioned. Both of us had developed Distant Early Warning lines against the surprises that mother and father invented in their battle for our sympathy. We became adept at modern diplomacy, able to talk about anything in general which was nothing in particular.
The washer was merely a beginning, a mechanical sign of things to come. Mother, with newly acquired self-confidence, bought a new wardrobe of brightly colored blouses, tailored slacks, and short, waist-gripping jackets, and then began adding new bolts and screws to herself, steeling herself with notions of security. You needed to know a verbal code just to be able to talk about anything with her and, seeing the way in which everything emotional was a sign of the physical and vice versa, I could imagine a time when to enter mother’s house I would need an identification card to slip into a magnetic mechanism on the front door in order to release the lock. And mother changed the locks on her house as often as she changed her will—out of which I was being written because going away to college was a betrayal, leaving her alone to face my father.
Mother would be secure, no matter what. Taking a cue from the Vegomatic, mother took possession of nearly everything. “Except for the money your father embezzled from our mutual accounts,” mother would say.
Whereas the Vegomatic remained in my imagination a secretive woman, quietly exulting in the power she held over my uncle and willing to take him back, mother openly swore she would make father pay for all the rigid years frozen in the icebox of their marriage. A careful editing job allowed mother to feel good about what she did to father. She ignored the years father had invested and the time he had served in the fluorescent isolation of the corporate world, and toted up the household chores she had done without any help from him. When I reminded mother of the repairs to the family car, the plumbing, the mowing of lawns, the paying of bills, balancing of checkbooks, and figuring of taxes that father had done, her face flared with anger and she went around the house slamming doors and cupboards, yelling about the bottom line. For decades, it was true, mother had been stuck with toasters and vacuums as her only companions—an undesirable fate—but father had bee
n stuck with alarm clocks, hardhats, briefcases, and colleagues who were often less interesting than vacuums. So I was confused when mother called father’s keeping a little money for himself embezzling.
Years later, Sara would laugh at me for behaving like a chipmunk with money, floating a hundred dollars here or there by subtracting it from the checkbook’s balance while leaving it in the account. And when I heard Elanna talk about “her” money and not “their” money, I’d begin to realize how our parents’ divorce had affected her as well. Marriage seemed to be a lottery played with a careful and suspicious system for winning, with definite limits set on the amounts gambled.
Partly to escape such conclusions, I went to Chosposi Mesa. Mother dropped me at the bus terminal, and then went home and telephoned the locksmith.
The desert was a relief. Its exposure to the immense sky and its shimmering silences seemed to enclose and comfort me. Around my neck on a leather thong I wore the stone amulet Grandfather had once given me, reveling in the way it bounced lightly against the flesh above my heart as I walked, or the way it pressed warm and damp against me when I was still.
I hadn’t worn the stone for years, having taken it off when I made the high school basketball team and was allowed to sit on the bench and watch William the Black excel. But when Pamela died, I had stopped to consider where not wearing the amulet had gotten me, wondering what might have been different with an ounce of magic. Hoping for my stars to be rearranged, I’d begun wearing it religiously.
As I stepped down from the bus in front of Johnny Three Feet’s trading post, Rachel greeted me, fixing her eyes on the stone.
“What is that?” she demanded.
Rachel often derided the signs and symbols I wore around my neck to protect myself. I didn’t care for rings or belts or bracelets. For me, the neck seemed the proper hanger. Possibly because accidents had always happened to my head and hands, I instinctively kept the hands unburdened for swiftness while weighting the neck to help the head duck and dodge the tree branches which reminded me I had grown beyond the length of any and all beds, my feet hanging exposed to the night spiders and insects that never bit.
“My stone. The one Grandfather gave me.” I held it up to the desert light for her to see. Though it was plain, with little imagination you could see that it had a life of its own. It was that life that allowed it its stoniness, an inactivity that would seem to the unimaginative like death. “See?”
“See what?” she said, her black eyes squinting.
“Inertia. Tendency.” To me, that was what Grandfather had achieved, the tendency when at rest to remain at rest and the tendency when in motion to remain in motion.
“Look at you. You keep hanging things around your neck you’re going to be bent like a sapling before your time. Your mysticism is going to be the death of you.”
“No. My life is going to be the death of me. That’s why I need inertia.”
“Pah!” she spat in the dust.
“It’s good magic,” Sanchez said. He had climbed down from the bus after me, and had stood aside, watching this exchange. He was expansive. “The spirit of the fathers. The knife of Coyote.”
The way Rachel looked at Sanchez made me regret having told him the tale of Ilpswetsichs and Coyote. It had been a long and boring bus ride, filled with the breath of high-class bums, the compost smell of old people, and the ammonia of babies—all on their mutual way to London Bridge. Sanchez’s lemony smell of fabric softener had been a relief when he’d sat in the seat beside me.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Rachel said. Her eyes were as cold and hard as black diamonds.
“No problem,” Sanchez smiled. He was a well-built, handsome guy, about six years older than I. “My name’s Sanchez.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m a friend of Bert’s, here.” Sanchez, learning that Alley was short for Albert, insisted on calling me Bert. At first it had irritated me; but I’d forgotten the irritation by the time we reached Chosposi because it seemed natural for him to call me that.
Rachel ignored his hand. Like a pendulum rises to its rest and falls, it hung there for a moment before dropping back to his side. She raised her eyebrows at me and then gave Sanchez a look that seemed to say, “I know who you are.”
“So this is the Trading Post,” Sanchez said. Cupping his chin in his hand in a mime of thoughtfulness, he squinted at the squat cinder block building. “First thing it needs is a wooden facade. Nobody in the world thinks of a trading post as being built out of blocks. A horse rail in front and some wooden benches in front. We could hire some of the old folks to sit on the benches and look mysterious, and charge tourists four bits to snap their pictures. Maybe an American flag over the door … no, that might be too too. Well,” he said, “I’ll catch up to you later. Business calls.” He picked up his two carpetbags and disappeared into the darkness of Johnny Three Feet’s.
“So,” I said to Rachel, who was looking at Sanchez’s back with acupuncture eyes. “It’s good to see you. How have you been?” Rachel seemed harder and thinner than ever before. Her autodidacticism weighed like a block on her angular shoulders.
“Who is that?” she said.
“Sanchez. Have you seen Grandfather?”
“I don’t like him,” Rachel said. “He’s shifty. What do you think he’s doing here?”
I said I didn’t know. I didn’t, not really, although I had a pretty good idea. On the bus, Sanchez had told me that he was from Oklahoma. He worked for a company that invented time-saving products like the Vegomatic, one of those hand-driven devices which cut, chopped, and diced vegetables almost as well as a paring knife. In fact, Sanchez had been the inventor of the Vegomatic; and he had developed the way to market his device.
“It works a lot like televised religion,” he said. “We offer them something to believe in. Something that works. For a while, anyway, until they figure out that switching the blades and cleaning the damn thing without dicing your fingers makes a knife a lot easier to use.”
The company made a huge profit on the products themselves. But where they really got the people—a fact which seemed to give Sanchez real joy—was in the shipping and handling charges. When I questioned overcharging people for shipping, or charging them at all for automated handling, he said, “Hell, everybody does it. Order from one of those discount catalogues and you’ll figure out that by time the merchandise arrives, it costs as much as it would in any store, if not more. You’ve just been allowed to wait several weeks longer in anticipation. The fact is, most people look at the price of the stuff without the shipping or handling and believe they’re getting a real deal.”
I had to admit he was right.
“It’s the feeling that they’re saving money, getting a deal, that mail order companies sell people. We add to the feeling, selling them faith by telling them that the Vegomatic is not sold in stores, implying that it’s too good for stores. For the two months we delay before shipping out their new Vegomatic, until they open the carton, they get to believe.”
When I asked, “Believe in what?” he burst out laughing. The bus driver watched us warily in his mirror.
“There is no what,” he said. “Faith is faith. When those old ladies mail checks to Oral Roberts they don’t get God in return. They simply get worked up into a frenzy of faith and express it the only way they know how. We do the same thing Oral does. We work them up into a frenzy. They send us money. You know, I bet you’d be surprised how many repeat customers we get after their first Vegomatic breaks, sometimes for another Vegomatic, sometimes for our Eternosharp Knife Set, which comes with a set of eight screwdrivers, a universal wrench, and a set of wooden kitchen utensils, all of which they get to keep even if they return the knives. You think Americans are just too lazy to return the knives, once they try to use them? No. They don’t return the knives because to do that, they’d have to give up the faith we sold them. Cheap, I might add.”
31.
Sanchez was a sort of enterprising Wovoka, a man who coul
d use faith to make ice flow down the corridors of commerce in summertime. But of this, I said nothing to Rachel. Already Sanchez was no better than a Gila monster to her, and the turquoise jewelry he sported on his arms and around his neck and waist was cheap imitation and not the real thing. The turquoise was real enough, as was the hammered silver. But real to Rachel meant soldered together by someone with credentials that suited her. A piece of jewelry, regardless of its design, was more authentic the greater the number of Indians who had handled it. When I asked Grandfather whether that mattered, he chewed thoughtfully on the inside of his left jowl before he concluded, “De Toro of the Mad Eyes was played by Ron Stein,” referring to “The Magnificent Seven Ride.” A Jew could play a Mexican if his eyes were up to the role.
“So,” I said to Rachel as we stood uncomfortably together outside the trading post.
“We don’t need his kind here,” she hissed, obsessed with Sanchez.
“I don’t know …,” I began. Maybe it was the deleterious effects of experience, combined with the sometime loss of lucidity on Grandfather’s part, but the older I became, the more Chosposi seemed an empty place, saddened by the immensity of its emptiness. Where once I had loved the slow, even pace of Grandfather’s walk or the chirping complaints of Laura P. as she worked over her potter’s wheel, lately I had begun to feel the hopelessness of the place. It was as though the process of birth had reversed itself and slowly, the blood was returning to Ilpswetsichs, the wound healing, and all that would be left was the Trickster Coyote himself, disgorged from the toothless mouth of the monster.
“You don’t know shit,” Rachel said. “Do you? You’d make a Gila monster into a pet. Or worse, let him make a pet out of you.”