The doctor recovered as quickly as expected from the surprise and reconsidered the prognosis. He guessed he could get the shot out without performing the kind of surgery that would probably take her life. He reached up with a sort of thin plier to enter through the opening and retrieve the shot from inside. Warren stroked the finally conscious Olive and poured shots of ouzo down her throat to dull the pain. She gritted and railed at the procedure and anyone on the upper deck might easily have mistaken the event for the birth of a child. But it was to be the opposite. Olive would live, but her reproductive apparatus would be rendered useless from then on. Warren stayed by her side as she drifted into a fitful sleep troubled by nightmares of being carried off into the skies by winged creatures. She murmured and purred, then jolted half awake before settling down.
As the ship pulled into the port of San Francisco just before the morning broke, the atmosphere on the ship was that of celebration. The fishermen had received their two cartons of eggs as payment and were enjoying omelets and eggs over easy, sopping the yolks with dry crusts of bread. The payment was minimal compared to the risk they’d taken transporting known thieves—known pirates, as Warren preferred. But the fishermen had long been resentful of the Pacific Egg Company and the brutal way they enforced their “ownership” of collecting rights. They congratulated their once-protégé Warren on a job well done and celebrated the defeat of the eggers, with whom they had so long been in conflict, with the clinking of morning beers and the sliding of eggs down greased gullets.
“That’ll change the meaning of ‘taking the egg’ now, won’t it?” a small, bookish deckhand said to Warren.
“What a bricky girl you have there,” said another to Warren. “She’s lucky to be alive.”
Warren sat quietly and finished his eggs unceremoniously, receiving each hard slap of approval on the back with a wan countenance the men mistook for fortitude, before heading below deck to check on Olive. He brought her an omelet and sat gingerly next to her small, hard cot.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. Olive eyed the plate of eggs and started to make a sort of gurgle from her diaphragm. She was thinking about her mother’s story and the poor boy’s body turned to dust on the Cliffs of Dover. She thought about how silly the whole thing was.
“Don’t make me laugh,” she said. “Not until tomorrow. Maybe the day after.” And with that she pushed the tin plate away and curled her small hand into a ball inside Warren’s warm paw. She wished she could curl up her whole aching body and stay in his mouth, maybe his chest, hibernate in the very chambers of his heart until the pain went away. As if he knew what she longed for, he told her, “I love you, little bird. It’s going to be okay.”
Heavenly Brass
Mojave Desert, California, 1941
Hitching an early morning ride heading east toward Arizona in the back of a pickup with a chicken farmer, Victor settled among the crates of chatty hens. He looked through the slats in the wood into their eyes and watched as they closed their lizard-like lids with each bump of the truck. Do they understand their fate? he wondered as he took out the present from the old man, looked at the eggs nestled in their velvet corrals, and rewrapped the collection in an extra layer, an old wool shirt that was getting too many holes to wear any more, even for a tramp. He adjusted the old glass case carefully in the bottom of the bag as they bumped along an unpaved portion of road, then let himself doze in and out of sleep as the hens clucked away, forgetting completely about the envelope the old man had given him the day before. Crystal and velvet trumps paper—the flashy egg collection had managed to eclipse the memory of the envelope.
After catching a couple more rides and a short sleep in the dark of night on a park bench in a small town on the east side of the Sierras, Victor was finally heading into the desert for the first time in his life. He could feel the dry air drawing the sogginess from his bones. He thought about what he’d left back in Washington and imagined he would hardly be missed. His wealthy Seattle banking family had always tried to sweep their sensitive and strange youngest son’s penchant for poetry and music under the rug. They grimaced when he broke into song at a fancy restaurant or in line at the movies, pulling him aside and threatening a beating if he didn’t stop all his grandstanding. “He’s a strange bird,” they used to say to important, buttoned-up visitors invited into their beautiful home. “Don’t mind him,” they demurred when their young son came to dinner wearing a cape clasped by butterfly clips around his throat. When he was a teen he wore ascots, pillbox hats, or T-shirts with so many holes his nipples peeked through. But his parents did mind him and he knew it more than anyone. His leaving town of his own accord had simply taken the burden off his family of ever cleaning up another of his social messes again. He had done everyone a favor, he figured, by hitting the road the first chance he got.
The constant rain of Southwest Oregon was a distant memory by the time he braced himself against the hot desert wind in the back of a hay trailer barreling through the Mojave. It was still morning when they arrived in Needles, Arizona. Victor got off, gave the driver a tip of his hat in the rearview, and looked up and down the dusty street for a place he might get a cup of coffee. The rejuvenating effects of the one full night of sleep on the old man’s couch had long evaporated into the desert air, and after the last couple days of bouncing around in various vehicles, he felt he might collapse without a cup of joe. The desert didn’t quite make him feel like breaking into song, but he hoped more than anything that eventually it just might. He did a little happy shuffle with his feet as he walked up to the Oasis Diner. Standing just outside the entrance, he counted the coins in his stained leather satchel. Seventy-two cents. A scrawny bronzed kid of twelve or thirteen wearing only shorts and sandals approached him and said:
“You want coffee?”
“Yeah, kid, I sure do.”
“Well, I’ve got something better than coffee.” The kid held out a hand with a little shriveled brown button of some plant matter, maybe a cactus.
“No, thanks.”
“You sure? This will change your whole world.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I’m a shaman.”
“Ha!” Victor laughed. “The world’s tiniest shaman.”
“Well, that just shows what you know.” The boy recoiled his hand and looked away. “I’m a road man in training.”
“Okay, kid. That’s more like it. I’m a road man, too.” He patted the kid on the arm, realizing he’d offended him. “How much for one of those buttons? What is it like? Will it wake me up? Slow me down?”
“All of the above. How much do you have?”
“I’m not giving you all my coin, but, seventy-two cents. That’s en total, jellybean.”
“Then give me one cent and we’re good. I’ll give you this if you want.” He held out one button and paused before dropping it in Victor’s hand. “But you’ll have to come with me to take it. I’ll show you a real shaman. I’m only inviting you because I was watching you and I get the feeling it will do you good.”
“Okay, then. What do we do with this one-cent not-coffee miracle turd?”
“Don’t make me regret inviting you.”
“I’m sorry, little man. Really.”
“We will eat it to clear your mind.” The kid narrowed his eyes at Victor as if to make sure he was worthy of his efforts. “Follow me.”
Victor looked back wistfully at the coffee shop with its inviting blue-and-white rounded booths and coffee percolating behind the counter. A girl in a crisp uniform walked briskly to a table with plates of steaming eggs, sausage, and buttered toast. Victor looked back at the boy and said, “Will there be something to eat at this shindig? Because there’s a plate of eggs in there calling my name.”
“There will be many things calling your name. Better not to eat now, though. But there will be a meal after, yes.”
It didn’t take
more than a few seconds for Victor to decide that the adventure of following a tiny shaman trumped a hot breakfast. His stomach had grown accustomed to the raking and gurgling of hunger. No need to confuse the poor organ. He followed the boy past one stop sign and out of town. As they marched along the road, the growing heat of the afternoon filled up the wide-open spaces of the desert with the weight of an anvil, the oppressive sun making any meaningful communication completely impossible. Walking through that kind of heat can make the mind churn—thoughts become irascible, then quiet. Victor cursed his blistered feet and heavy boots, lamenting his decision to follow the kid, and then, just as quickly, forgot his aches and pains as one moment melted into the next. There’s no turning back, he figured, as the road shimmered ahead like a black-and-silver lake. Back home they had always called him too soft to survive, but he liked to think he simply forgave the discomforts of the world. He rolled with the flow. He squinted his eyes at the shimmering vanishing point of the earth in the distance. It seemed to him that the boy was leading him to an expansive waterway somewhere far away. But the lake never seemed to get any closer as the two walked along the highway shoulder for a good hour. The illusion was untouchable.
As the heat unlocked the memory from his brain, Victor suddenly remembered the letter the old man Warren had given him. How had he forgotten to open it? He must be more exhausted than he even knew. He made a mental note to open the letter when he and the boy reached their destination. Despite the heat, they were moving at a good clip along the desert highway, rivers of sweat running down their backs. They walked past rubber rabbit bush and blooming orange globe mallow, the boy pointing out the names of the plants as they passed by, punctuating the silence to point: desert star, monkey flower, lupine, penstemon, ghost flower. Victor thought that “ghost flower” had all the makings of a cautionary children’s tale about what might happen when a fool traveler wanders off into the desert with a stranger. He tried to let the poem form in his head, but as soon as it began, the heat wiped its heavy hand over the words and they were gone.
When they finally left the highway, it was to climb up into an arroyo with a wide sandy bottom and short cliffs on either side. Floods had marked where the water wore a clear path from the top of the mesa down the arroyo and into the wash, but it was hard to imagine any large volume of water in the hot, dry, spring landscape. Alluvial fans of brightly colored eroded sand lay with impermanence in semicircles emanating from the middle of the mesa like a dancer’s skirt fluttering in waves. At the mere idea of rushing water, Victor stopped and meted out a few, precious sips from his canteen.
“Watch for snakes,” the boy said, not asking to share in the water. It was the first the two had spoken in a half hour.
“Duly noted,” Victor said, taking a look around as though there might be a gang of rattlers already underfoot.
“They don’t want to bite you,” the boy said. “But if you are careless, they might just be forced to let you know they care.”
As they walked up the canyon, the pink-and-yellow streaked cliffs grew higher on either side of them, closing them off from the creosote flats. It would take quite a scramble to get up one side or another. There’s something strange about that boy, thought Victor as he followed the spritely kid in a zigzagging pattern up the arroyo. The young man’s skin was such a deep golden brown it was as though he had spent his entire short life naked under the sun. The sun had worn in his forehead the even lines of a much, much older man. They pressed on and Victor considered the boy some more. He looked like a child, but he had the confidence of an old man. Almost the certainty of a grandfather. They traveled uphill until the canyon narrowed and they came to a place where the sandy ground gave way to a mass of loose boulders. The sun was starting to get low and Victor wondered briefly if he was being drawn into some sort of trap.
“It’s not dangerous,” the boy reassured him as if reading his mind. “Unless you make it.”
“Okay, boss,” Victor said, pulling himself up awkwardly onto the top of the first boulder. They scrambled up for another half hour through the slot canyon as it became steeper and harder to navigate, until finally the boulders seemed to be stacked right on top of one another. The boy stood above on a mysterious ledge out of Victor’s field of vision.
“Almost there,” the boy said. “This way.” He waved him up.
Victor was muttering to himself something about the kid having said that an hour ago as he struggled to pull himself upright onto the boulder. Finally he stood up, pulling his sweat-soaked backpack up behind him, his knees cracking with the effort. He had a line of salt showing through his shirt where he’d been sweating profusely for the last two hours. As he straightened up on the boulder, what he saw up there was a surprise, to say the least. The slot canyon opened up into perfectly flat ground to either side and in front of the boulder. The even ground was protected by a red earth cirque that sheltered the area from the winds that blew strong along the top of the mesa some 150 feet higher. He could hear the wind rattle through the sparse vegetation up above but could not feel it from where he stood. All around him was stillness.
On the lower level, the calm air was cooling rapidly as the sun dipped close to the horizon in the distance. A giant mass of beavertail cactus bloomed in bunches of papery hot-pink flowers near his feet. The cactus and plants spotting the pebbled sand were evenly spaced in such a way they appeared as though a tended garden. Victor walked slowly in a snail’s trail among the plants, pausing to look up at the pastel pinks, purples, yellows, and blues swathed across the sky, marked by thin clouds glowing in hues as bright as the cactus blooms in color, as bright as a fire. As he gazed down the arroyo and out over the creosote flats punctuated by the outline of the inscrutable Joshua trees, the serenity of the place caught his breath in his throat in a way he had never before experienced. He exhaled long and deep.
“Glad you like it,” the boy said, looking up at him with his bizarre sense of grandfatherly approval. “I’d like you to meet my family.”
The boy led Victor over to a small cave at the base of the cirque. A man in a linen robe tied at the waist with a cord arranged objects in front of him on a blanket. He didn’t seem to notice the two approaching until they were very close. He sat back on his heels, his back still to the two.
“Well, what do we have here, son?”
“You told me to choose someone to bring to the ceremony this evening.”
The man turned around to face the two sweaty travelers.
“And I thought you might bring one of your cousins from town. But I see you have chosen instead this blue-eyed stranger.” He looked at his son with what could only be interpreted as judgment.
“I think you’ll see he is a good choice.” The little boy stood tall against the stare of his father. The man sighed and stood up with some effort. He was barely taller than his son, bent with age. He picked up a small gourd rattle off the blanket and shook it in the direction of the stranger.
“Hatchoq, traveler,” the man said. “We will see.”
The man walked away and over to the cave to talk to a woman raking the sand with a flat stick. He bent down to whisper to her and she looked back toward the blue-eyed stranger without expression before returning to her raking.
“White people have not always been kind to us,” the boy said. “So you can imagine why they are suspicious of you.”
“Don’t blame ’em,” Victor said, setting down his backpack gently in the sand. “White people haven’t always been kind to me either.”
“Good.”
“I can leave if you think it’s best,” Victor said, looking uneasily back down the wash. “But I’m dog-tired from that little stroll you took me on.”
“Don’t go,” the boy said. “Stay here.” And he went over to the woman and whispered to her. She motioned into the cave and the boy went in and came out with a few hard cases that looked like they housed some sort of inst
ruments. He opened a smallish case and took out a trumpet. He played a few notes and the sound made its way around the cirque as though it were rolling along touching each side, echoing over and over like a softer, further away version of the first note. Then the woman took out a tuba, and Victor smiled the smile of the delighted madman at his first circus.
More and more people, some of them carrying brass instrument cases, clambered up onto the topmost boulder and filtered in toward the raked sand, making their way across the flats and toward the cave. Not everyone in attendance looked like they belonged to a tribe. There was a large-boned woman with long blonde hair and a redheaded older man, his ginger hair and beard speckled with bright white. The robed father of the boy had started a diminutive fire and stoked it while waving a fan made entirely of feathers. Victor looked at the faces of the people as they arrived and clocked their distrust of his grimy, tattered clothes and his baked-blue hitchhiker’s eyes. He made himself small as he squatted near the fire with his feet still on the ground, long legs tucked up under his body like a roosting heron. His bleached blue eyes flecked with gold as they glowed in the firelight. The group of fifteen or so collected around the fire naturally and without any prompting. Some picked up an item from the blanket, a gourd rattle, a feather fan, while others took out their brass instruments and laid them quietly in their laps.
“Thank you for coming to church this Saturday evening,” the robed father started, placing an arrow onto the cloth with the other items from the box. “Any fool knows none of us will live forever. But as soon as we die we live on through our children.” The man looked at his son as he said this. “My son has chosen to bring a guest tonight to our ceremony. And so we must welcome him as one of our own.”
All eyes fixed on Victor as he shifted his heron legs beneath him and raised his hand tentatively in a wave. The woman who had been raking the sand spoke up to pick up where the robed man left off.
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