by W. S. Penn
Rachel had refined her way of putting things, I could tell. Fighting back a desire to tweak her nose, I said, “Why don’t you kill him, skin him, and sell him as an authentic artifact?”
“Maybe I will,” she said, as Sanchez danced down the steps to the trading post, his limp carpetbags tucked beneath his arm. In his right hand, he held a wad of bills, two of which he peeled off before slipping the rest into a leather pouch that hung beneath the tail of his untucked shirt.
“Here,” he said, thrusting the two bills at me. “Some of my magic. The only known cure for the common cold.”
“What’s this for?”
“Information.”
Rachel scraped her moccasin in an arc through the parched earth.
“What information?” I asked.
Rachel gave me a narrow look, a look of hatred that could have been mistaken for love, if you stood on your head to make left right and right left.
“All right,” Sanchez said. “Call it an advance.”
“Against what?”
Sanchez pulled an amulet out of his shirt pocket, one of the ones made by Navahos which Johnny Three Feet sold to tourists who were willing to overlook the fact that the Navaho had few, if any, connections with the ancient Mexican civilizations, unlike the Hopi. This one was round. In the center was a cast relief of the face of Maya with bronze rays radiating outward from her crowned head. Sanchez flipped it to me like a quarter. “For figuring out an angle on this. A use for it.”
“Use?”
“Yeah. You see, things like this sell for different reasons. A husband who just wants to live out his golden years in peace will let his old lady buy one, figuring if it keeps the old gal quiet it’s worth twice the price. Or maybe a cheapskate—you know, the fun kind of guy who wears those stretch denims that would be the color of puke if puke were blue because they’re practical? He lets the little woman buy it because he doesn’t want to look cheap, and there’s nothing a tightwad wants more than to look uncheap in front of other people.”
“You lost me,” I said.
“Never mind. The point is that its potential is not realized. Sure, some people will buy it for bric-a-brac to toss into a flagging conversation with guests they wish would go home. But I’ll give you odds that two out of five husbands prevent their wives from buying it because it has no apparent use. That’s what we need to come up with. If it were useful, Johnny would triple his sales.” He thought for a moment. “Let me see that,” he said. Turning it over in his hand he said, “Like a cookie cutter. Maybe that’s it!”
“A cookie cutter?” I asked.
“Puts it into the wife’s domain. Makes it impossible for your basic husband to deny that it has practical applications.”
“What makes you think it’s women who buy those things?” Rachel said with the thudding insistence of people with a cause.
“Those ain’t your basic feminists in there, Gloria,” Sanchez said. “Those are meat and potatoes run-of-the-mill human units.”
To me, he said, “Imagine your basic husband asking his wife, ‘What are we going to do with that, Betty?’ and the little woman being able to say, ‘Use your thick head, Nigel. It’s a cookie cutter.’ Nigel can’t argue with that now, can he? And if Nigel complains about its cost, all Betty has to do is remind him about the barbecue tools he bought in Tucson, right?”
“You sexist,” Rachel said. Like mother, Rachel had discovered feminism; where mother’s had a mistaken odor like burned toast, Rachel’s could cut you in two.
Sanchez seemed up to it.
“There are plenty of husbands dumb enough to buy those things,” Rachel said.
“I think you’re right,” Sanchez said, containing his emotions with the fluid ease he had in handling tense situations. “Especially if they’re cookie cutters. We’ll get the cheap husband who wants to surprise his wife on Christmas with an exotic gift, the namby pambies who bake, and the little boys who want to buy a gift for mom.
“Tell you what,” Sanchez said, reaching for his money again. “How about if I make you a consultant, too?”
Rachel held her hands up like a Jamaican traffic cop trying to halt a freight train. An odd expression crossed her narrow face as though her contention with Sanchez was, while hateful, also a pleasure.
“May as well,” Sanchez said. He shoved some bills at her, making her bob and weave to avoid them. Deftly, he tucked them into the breast pocket of her work shirt.
I’d seen men do that with topless dancers or waitresses, leering the whole time with sexual insinuation. Never had I seen a man do this asexually. Sanchez—thank heavens—managed to, and even Rachel whose head swayed like a coiled rattlesnake seemed to understand this. She did not strike him. She did reach gingerly into her pocket with her finger and thumb, extract the bills and hold them dangling at arm’s length over the ground shimmering from the heat and dust of tourists snapping pictures, and drop them with an exaggerated gesture of distaste. She turned and walked away.
Sanchez only grinned. He believed in the power of money, but that was divorced from any notions of power over people. “Money,” he said, “is the key to the kingdom. It doesn’t make you king. Though it can make you stupid,” he added as he bent over and picked the bills out of the dirt and handed them to me.
“I think I’m in love,” he said loudly. Whether Rachel heard him or not, her hips stiffened and her walk contracted with self-consciousness. He watched her recede into the sharpness of her own dignity.
“Some lady, that Rachel,” he said. “The funny thing is that she’ll give me her opinions for free as long as I make her angry.”
It didn’t take long to find out how true that was. Where I could predict the whats and hows, Sanchez instinctively knew the wherefores. Rachel pretended to despise him, and when she was around him she would make remarks aimed at provoking him, as though she felt a bitterness as ancient as her race. Caught between her and Sanchez, I felt like the victim in a silent movie, tied to the planks of my friendship with Sanchez as the planks slid into the sawmill of Rachel’s cutting mind.
“Watch out for her,” I told Sanchez.
“Wherefore?” Sanchez replied. “She’s only dangerous if you bite, if you take the bait.”
“Whereas,” Grandfather would say when I asked him about that, “the bait may be the bite. There is a tale that tells it happened that way.” How many hours and days I waited patiently for Grandfather to tell me that tale, to give me the clues that I could bundle together likes sheaves of truth. How many times did he remove his belt and lean back into the overstuffed driver’s seat of the Plymouth and begin to snore, the pores of his nose expanding and contracting as he fell asleep. I began to despair of ever hearing it when Louis Applegate drifted through from the East.
“He can’t tell you,” Louis said.
“Why not?”
“It’s not his tale to tell. It doesn’t belong to him.”
“Whose is it?” I asked.
Louis’ face went through the entire rainbow of emotions before he managed to say, “It’s Laura Pamela’s. Your grandmother’s. Only she can tell it. Only she knew ahead of time how it ended.”
Wanting to hear the beginning, middle, or end of this tale, I spent extra time with Laura P. She accepted the novelty of my increased presence as though she was the center of things and everything naturally returned to her, as I sat waiting in silence for her to tell me the tale she wouldn’t.
Pamela’s death had not aged her the way it had Grandfather. She threw her pots, now, with a vengeance and the heat of her concentration seemed as though it could fire the clay while it was yet on the wheel. Sometimes in the middle of shaping a pot she would lurch to a halt and raise her head like a bird that hears the bell of the cat and chant “Pa-me-la,” pounding the clay flat onto the wheel with every syllable. She’d work the clay anew and begin throwing a new pot, renewing the chirping soliloquies which she used like a metronome to keep a rhythm to her wheel.
After meeti
ng Sanchez, she began to acquire a faraway look similar to the one Grandfather now wore like a papier-mâché mask. At first, she was content to claim that Sanchez had no shadow. Then she began to grind her potter’s wheel to a halt and look up to sing to the wall, “Up, down, round and range. Give progress up and you’re surprised by change.” As her words seemed to bounce like bees off the adobe wall, her face alternated between amusement and innocence, as though she were seeing something that happened or something that will have had to have happened, and just watching her facial expressions made me feel pluperfectly confused.
Each day, when she was finished painting the east or west spirals on her pots, Laura P. inspected the palms of my hands, patiently fingering the reddish spots which had appeared, grown larger, and begun to itch like a rash. One day, tracing the path between the spots on my right hand, she looked up and said, “Shit! Louis has replaced himself.”
Letting my hands drop as though the spots were leprosy and I was contagious, she sank onto the wooden seat of her potter’s wheel. Her body expressed defeat like a young boxer staggering crablike to the mat after a blow, joint by joint relinquishing to defeat so that his torso begins to topple even before his knees begin to buckle. Defeat is like Death. We think Death comes all at once when really He is running us down from behind all along. The effects are slow and can be ignored until with age the geometrical accumulation of effects makes them unavoidable. We have moments in which we see our own mortality which, fleet of foot, we sidestep; we even have moments as adolescents when we thoughtlessly wish we were dead. But all these are only warning signals as the vessels of ourselves empty into shapeless puddles and evaporate, drying us out, making our skin wither and crack like parched earth.
Sometimes Laura would regain her composure enough to ask me not to let Sanchez handle her pots, and I hadn’t the heart to tell her that Sanchez had become partners with Johnny Three Feet. Before long, Laura P. began to walk more and more sideways, glancing askance at the ceilings of rooms or the empty skies, and demanding that someone precede her through doorways. Pot after pot was ruined, corn piki was burned and crumbled, and she became increasingly silent and distant. By mid-August, she was walking backwards, her head tilted up and her eyes darting with fright as though she feared ambush from above. The shadowless shadow of a fieldhawk (a hawk has a way of disguising its shadow as nothing more than a faint and formless interruption of light) would make her jump. One day she jumped literally out of her skin, and by the time I’d helped her up off the ground, she had regained her old composure. Taking my hands in hers and inspecting the palms, she’d said, “Dad had hands like yours when he was about the same age.”
“She meant Grandfather,” I said to Rachel, proud at least of that small knowledge.
“You idiot,” Rachel said. “Don’t you know? Since they were children, Louis Applegate was always going to marry Laura. They were engaged. Your Grandfather had agreed to be best man and he and Louis had already been to Phoenix to buy a ring which out of superstition your Grandfather was keeping until the wedding the next spring. That winter the snows were heavier than anyone hoped for. An anthropologist from the east showed up in Chosposi, and Louis took him in until the blizzard passed. Took him in. The blizzard lasted thirty days and thirty nights. It took another ten days for the roads to clear, and by the time the man could be packed off on his way to wherever, he had fallen in love with Louis’ sister, courted her, and bought Louis’ compliance with promises of a life free from sin and drudgery. When the man left, Louis’ sister went with him. Louis had sold his own sister into the slavery of boredom.”
“Did his sister love the man?”
“What would that have mattered?” Rachel said. “Boredom is worse than death. Nothing survives it. That’s where Louis goes off to—the east coast, where his sister exists, staring out the penthouse window like a lost peregrine falcon at the skyline of manmade mesas where people never sleep. He goes out of regret and stays with her as long as he can stand it, before he has to return here for cardiac regenesis.”
“So how did Laura P. come to marry Grandfather?”
“She couldn’t live with Louis’ regret. Your Grandfather had the ring. After a postponement or two of the wedding, your Grandfather stepped into his friend’s shoes.”
So that was how Louis Applegate came to be able to recognize Death crawling along on his knees in East Texas, I thought. Death on His knees looks an awful lot like regret in disguise.
CHAPTER EIGHT
32.
Sanchez came and went that summer and it was not so much him but his approach to the desert that I clung to like climber’s rope as the voices of past and present gusted through me. To Sanchez, everything in and of the Sonoran Desert was new and he was constantly amazed by even the smallest of things. Elf owls moving into the cactus holes drilled by woodpeckers; the tiny tracks of kangaroo mice that we would come upon in the silent hour of the false dawn, when the hunted had hidden and the hunters had closed their eyes against the white light of the desert sun; these were as large and exciting to Sanchez as the oceanic waves of clouds that would be highlighted by the sunset that preceded the nightly scurry of hunter and hunted like a secret signal to a jailbreak.
“This,” Sanchez would say expansively, “this is paradise.”
I could only laugh, tickled by his childlike feeling that everything was potential—unnamed, malleable, and waiting only for him to forge it into something different.
“Look at that,” he would say, out on one of our walks through the desert, pointing at sandstone arched by erosion. “That’s a souvenir stand if ever I’ve seen one. Could even sell a few burgers. Cokes.”
My laughter lacked sarcasm and instead was gay and light-hearted.
Sanchez threw his arms wide and his body’s frame would shake as his laughter rolled across the hard-packed desert, creating a shimmering mirage of sound. It was a laugh that would interfere with the thoughts of people nearby, causing people in movie theaters to “sshhh!” and the desert animals to dart for cover. Hawks and eagles would tilt their heads in question from their high perches when Sanchez passed below them laughing, seeming to take pleasure in his joy the way I did.
When he wasn’t laughing, Sanchez wanted to know the names of things. When I told him, he would silently repeat what I’d say, licking around the edges of the words with his tongue. Coming to some irremediable conclusion about the nature of the flora or fauna, he would rename it. Most of the new names had apparent reasons. Collared Lizards were Roadrunners because of the way they evaded capture by running on their hind legs. Leopard Lizards were Lowriders because they were low and mean. And Hook-Nosed Snakes he called Jodies because he’d known a woman, once, who had a nose like that. “Her eyes twittered, vibrated back and forth when you talked to her, like she was overdosing on speed. Or like she saw danger, constantly, over your shoulder.”
When I didn’t know the names of things, Sanchez didn’t mind. He simply made one up.
So it was that we emptied and refilled the desert with the detritus of civilization, and we could walk for hours talking in our own patois about Edsels and Isettas, Sonys and Hondas—and I will always laugh at Sanchez’s saying that Gilas were like Hondas.
“They plod along,” he’d say. “But when Honda bites into a market, they never let go.” He said that with the same joyful admiration he had for Hawks, the X-15s of the desert: “It will be the Japanese who clean up the carrion of American industry. You watch,” he’d say.
Sanchez’s humor infected Rachel, but in a different way. When he built a magazine rack into the corner of the trading post, it was a matter of days before Rachel had a card table set up outside. Displaying covers from Penthouse and Playboy and pictures of bondage that looked like they were left over from the days of Cortez above a sign that exclaimed “Porn is Woman Hate,” Rachel solicited signatures on a petition against some of the magazines sold inside.
Sanchez loved it. “You’re great for business,” he told her. �
��Do you know that in a week you’ve tripled our sales of Penthouse?”
Undeterred, Rachel bought a second card table and tried to engage Sanchez in discussions of pornography. “Pornography is violence,” she would say.
“Pornography is writing about prostitutes, and both writing and prostitution are time-honored professions, though the hourly wage is higher for prostitution,” Sanchez would say. Seeing the scowl on Rachel’s face, he would add that he didn’t much care for violence and that if she could convince him that the magazines encouraged violence, he would remove them.
“But,” he’d say, if her face became too hopeful, “I wonder if what you’re calling porn is more self-hatred than woman hate.”
“It’s pure lust,” Rachel would say.
“Lust, Rachel, is a force in the universe. Like it or not. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t the repression of simple lust that leads to violence.”
“It’s degrading,” Rachel would say.
“I’ll be fair, if you want, and sell Playgirl. On one condition, though.”
“What’s that?”
“That you tell me why men don’t feel degraded by Playgirl.”
Rachel didn’t get many signatures. Her friends, mostly. The women who came to the trading post weren’t the kind who would sign a petition against what they accepted as history. The one man who signed was a young priest.
“Listen,” Sanchez said to her, seeing how angry and depressed she was becoming. “Why don’t you give this up and help me do a calendar with photos of you as January and December?” Rachel started to swing at him. “Clothed!” he said. “With your clothes on. A calendar of Chosposi life.”
“It would sell,” I offered, meekly. Rachel gave me a look not unlike the First Look she’d given me as a boy when I’d reached for the Gila monster. It was as though I was a kaleidoscope and she was looking at something through me.
“Who would want pictures of people like me?” Rachel asked.