“We are here to experience time and eternity,” she said. “There are many names for the spirits we bring forth, but today we will call it ‘twelavelem’ and hope to bridge the divide between the dead and the living.”
“We do things a little differently here,” the redheaded old man joined in, looking straight at Victor as he did. “We are from different tribes, and so we have different traditions. Me? I’m Irish. My wife is Mojave. Our child is a daughter of the sun.” He held the hand of the woman next to him who had earlier been raking the sand and nodded toward a young girl sitting near the boy. “But together, from our different tribes, we have found common ground by incorporating the great tradition of John Sousa into the peyote ritual, by including songs as played on brass instruments. It is a way of making old traditions new and unified.” Victor’s eyes opened wide but he maintained his quiet. The sound of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” started up in his brain.
“There was a time not long ago,” the robed man picked up where the redheaded man left off, “when we welcomed the great trains of white men who arrived in Needles as they passed through to the west to make their fortunes. We sold our wares on blankets and welcomed the travelers into town. But many were vile toward us, kicking our pottery and our women. They tried to assimilate us and erase our traditions. But the brass band came in as a new tradition, bridging the gap, and we have taken in the instruments to our church and made them ours. It is a symbol not of our defeat, but of our triumph.”
There were murmurings of agreement among the people gathered. Someone shook a little rattle. The big-boned blonde woman shook her long mane like a beautiful pony.
“Here is the tea. Drink each cup slowly over the next hour.” The robed man poured a dark brown tea into small silver cups and passed them around. The crowd was quiet as he began to sing a wordless song. After a while, more voices joined in, and someone started a slow beat on a drum. The sound of each note raced along the wall above them, back and forth along the cirque, the smooth curve of earth, echoing back. Victor rejoiced that he had finally found a group of people who enjoyed breaking into song.
The songs worked in thirds and fifths, Victor noted, suddenly aware of the tile-type melodic movement and remembering his piano lessons as a child. His parents had abruptly stopped them when he started learning ragtime and filling their austere house with the sounds of the saloon. He let the music weave in and out of his ears and imagined it as actual threads of light, moving with the precision of a needle through the night. How did he recall that the style was called a tile-type? It felt as though something were opening up in his brain and deep buried memories were flying forth like bits of paper on the wind. Information seemed to be channeling itself out of the stars and straight into his head. The song began to unlock and unwind memories so long buried they were dusted and vague. He was a kid on a pebbled Puget Sound beach quietly singing dirges to the dead birds washed up on the rocks. He was a young man hiding in the shed to play his forbidden ukulele. He was a slightly older young man writing poems in the bathroom despite the fear of corporal punishment if he were found out by his father. Fairy, his father hissed. Weakling. Each memory rose up and evaporated toward the stars. The almost full moon poured down cool, luminous light that hung on the surface of the smooth succulent cacti like mist. The ground and everything planted in it took on a glow in the near night. He watched the fire for a while as it made the form of a ghost, a bird, a beating heart. Each image appeared clear as day, then fell back under a new wave of yellow as the fire licked the slate clean. He leaned his head back and let the rock pour secrets in his ears as he listened to the beautiful sounds of the player’s breath travel through brass and echo across the stone.
“I’d like to show you something,” Victor said to the robed father after the song had ended. “It’s a present from a friend on my journey.” He started to rustle in his backpack, the inside of his pack seemingly huge and full of strangeness as he wound his hand to the bottom and clasped the tightly wrapped egg collection. He unwrapped and laid it on the corner of the blanket in front of the shaman, who looked at it for a long time before saying anything. Finally, he put his sun-baked hand above the collection.
“This is an old and powerful artifact,” the shaman said, looking pleased with Victor for the first time. “There are many haly’a that have seen this little box. I can feel the force of its history.”
“I’d like to give you this as a gift,” Victor said.
“And I thank you. But I can tell that it is already tied to your story, so you should be the one to carry it on a bit farther on its journey. You will know when to pass it along.”
Victor nodded, relieved a little. He suddenly longed to possess the stories from each egg, to keep the treasure a little longer.
“Please. Choose an instrument,” the man said. Victor looked up at the sky just as the tuba began its first note. There was no melody to follow, only the layering of notes as the trumpet and euphonium joined in. Then a sackbut and serpent made their tones, like possessed, ancient versions of the trombone and cornet. He let the music fly into his brain and welcomed each bit of flack as it bounded around. He picked up a gourd rattle and shook it, listening to the sound of each seed inside and aware of each clink and curve of sound. The music was shaking loose in his chest the flak of being a strange kid, a freak, a worthless cur.
The cool night breezed as relief on his skin. All the troubles that had hung heavy since he’d run away from his life in Seattle began to lift out and into the darkness, as though leaping one by one from his very chest. The band played on in its drone song that morphed into a version of “The Invincible Eagle” and “Hands Across the Sea,” two of Victor’s favorite Sousa marches. The core band shrunk in size as some members dispersed to answer a message calling only them. Victor got up and walked the perimeter of the circle and out into the cactus garden, where he would continue the conversation about life and death with the plants under the woven sounds of the inimitable brass band until morning. Standing at the edge of the world under the moon and its new, visible fingers of light, he let go of some of the fear he’d been gathering like a dung beetle his whole life. He watched as all his anger and fear rolled down the arroyo and disappeared into the darkness, breaking apart into stars. His stomach heaved with the force of such an exodus, but as he had eaten nothing that day, nothing came up.
He peeled off his clothes piece by piece and folded them in a pile on a rock smooth as the very moon. Naked, he raised up his arms and let the world take over his skin. Everything he saw was new, which on some level was intensely frightening, but on another thrilling. He no longer knew what anything was, but allowed the strangeness and the unknowing to enter through his body like a ghost. The tuba sounded, louder than before, and the deep notes rattled his body and the cirque and the world shook a little for a moment, leaving traces of light in the air. He surrendered then and there to the desert, to the earth, and tendered his resignation to the prison of clothing. He would find a way to be new, to be free, and to never bend to the confines of a society that might dictate otherwise. He lay prone on the smooth rock, bathed in the baby blue of the desert moon, and lay for hours in a trance of the alive, until finally, just before morning light, sleep found him.
Victor awoke from his short, naked slumber on the flat of the topmost boulder. Someone had covered him with a thin wool blanket against the desert cool. His clothes were still in a neat pile at his feet. As he stretched his limbs and lay on the smooth rock, he felt as though he had finally found what he had left home looking for. He was free from the ties that bound him. He would find a way to remain naked from then on out. He kept the blanket around him for warmth as he rejoined the group and shared in a meal of corn cakes and stewed vegetables and beans that had been set up on the blanket near the smoldering fire. It was the most delicious meal he had ever eaten in his life, without a doubt. The memory of the hunger he had felt staring into the diner with its
vinyl booths and black coffee seemed like a bad memory compared to the pure bliss delivered with each bite of food.
After the meal, he packed up his belongings and came upon the envelope. The envelope! He laughed out loud at how long ago that night eating peppered pasta with the old man felt. He hadn’t noticed before how thick the letter felt. He opened it and inside was a stack of crinkled bills and a letter. He took out the letter and read its wavering handwriting.
Dear Wanderer,
Tomorrow is my last day on this earth, so I wanted you to have what is left of all I own. I trust I will not need it where I’m going. An incredible woman told me once that we could all use some kindness on this journey. I hope you find what you are looking for on the road. When you find something you love, trust me, hold tight to it and just let it be what it will.
Best,
Warren
Inside the envelope were thirteen worn fifty-dollar bills, two twenties, two fives, and four ones. He smoothed his fingers over the bills and the memory of his father’s crisp, full billfold popped into his head. He had never been allowed to touch it as a child, though he longed to feel the mother-of-pearl clasp under his finger. It was the beauty, not the money that he was after. But that wad of dough was the apex of his father’s power—his totem. His father’s money was not alive, he realized, but a carcass of possibility. He wanted to do nothing with it but keep it in a moldering pile. There was no frivolity of spending allowed in his house. This money, Victor decided, as he filtered it through his fingers, would be different. He would dedicate its power to unlocking the secret voices of old things. He would collect all the world’s amusements and curiosities, its antiques and literature, and celebrate each item’s story by sharing it with the rest of the world. He would turn the money into an observance of all people and their curiosities. He would not let it become a symbol of greed. He also decided, looking up at the church members as they filed down the canyon, into the arroyo, and back into town, that he would wander no farther. Needles was his new home. He had finally found a place to be.
Monsters
Sonoran Desert, Arizona, 1988
Each day was melting into the next as the temperatures rose high, higher, highest. Well before noon, as Sal loaded up her kayak, the thermometer that bounced off her backpack read 109 degrees Fahrenheit—that point marking discomfort, even for the seasoned desert dweller. It was her one day off from surveys that week, so Sal had decided to kayak down the Gila River a ways to find a nice place to swim and escape the heat under the shade of some riparian trees. The solo mission required some planning. She dropped her kayak off a mile up the road, then drove down and parked her truck by the side where she would be coming out with her boat after floating the river, then hiked the mile back to her boat to start the journey. She would have to gauge the distance just right and portage her way back up through the riparian brush to the truck after, but the whole process seemed more than worth it. She was not averse to a little struggle and planning. She dragged the nine-foot kayak down a sandy embankment toward the river, the center resting on her hip, bees buzzing around the bright red plastic as though it were some enormous nectar pot of gold.
She crouched in the cockpit, settled her legs in the hull, and pushed away from shore, feeling the floating freedom of a seal jumping into the ocean from land as the boat rocked and found its balance under her weight. She spun a neat little circle in the boat as she moved the paddles in and out of the muddy water to orient herself. The river felt cool, so she cupped the silty brown water over her well-covered arms and neck, the cool water turning warm almost immediately on contact but still providing some relief from the heat. She paddled upstream a bit just to get her muscles moving, then let the current take her lazily down, steering with the paddle as need be. The particular breeze that sometimes seems only to exist on the water’s surface picked up and played with her wet, black curls, untucking one from behind her ear and flapping it in the breeze. She felt somehow less alone as the wind breezed up and over her wet clothes.
Rock canyon walls rose slowly out of shoreline’s sandy beaches lined by arrowweed, cottonwood, mesquite, and willow. The cliff grew higher as she floated downstream around a bend until she entered a box canyon, the river flanked by tall yellow-and-red streaked sandstone. Bright veins of electric-yellow lichen streaked the gradation of colored rock. She paused as she found herself squarely between two forty-foot walls. Looking up, she noticed a couple flowering desert agaves reaching their long flowered stalks out over cliffs at an angle over the river, their spiky leaves and roots miraculously wedged into the rocky crevasses many feet above. She glanced up at the magnificent plants and aimed herself upstream, paddling against the easy current in order to stay in one spot and to better see their tall stalks rising toward the heavens. After decades of hard-won photosynthesis and growth, this was their one chance to show off and reproduce before they wilted under the harsh Sonoran sun and died. It was in these places that no human on foot could possibly access that Sal found herself breathing in what she considered true privilege. She exhaled deeply and pointed herself back downstream, feeling a part of the place.
Ocotillo clung to the cliffs and scrambled its spindly, thorny arms skyward. Bright bunches of red flowers dotted the shore. The rock walls became shorter and shorter until they gave way again to sandy shores dense with green. Sal rounded a bend and found a small beach with a huge native willow casting shade, so she shored her kayak, hopped out with some difficulty, and dragged it up out of the murky water onto shore. She guessed she’d floated only a half mile at that point, but was more than ready for a swim, a snack, and a siesta. She stripped down to her underwear and jumped into the silted water, still muddied up by early monsoon rains.
After a good swim, she lay splayed on her towel, soaking wet from her curls down to her boy shorts. She pulled her requisite day-off gear out of the kayak’s hatch (mini-cooler of water and beers, towels, books, binoculars) and stacked them in the shade, cracking a miraculously still-cold Tecate. Aware she would be dry in a matter of minutes, she enjoyed the brief reprieve from the heat and let the week evaporate off her form. Even in the shade, the heat had a brain-melting effect. She lay supine with all her strong muscles relaxed and thought of nothing at all.
She had only a moment to be quiet and enjoy the stillness before she found herself distracted by a chorus of begging calls as they bounced around above her in the willows. Against her will, as if possessed by her training, her eyes darted from bird to bird, measuring their tail length by sight. Two full-grown willow flycatchers were trailed by three juveniles with little stub tails less than half the length of their parents’ tails. They were excellent beggars, these little birds with their still-wide gapes, and were making the most of the only time in their lives when they would be given sustenance for free. These food deliveries—fat insects dropped right into their open-gaped faces by a mother or father bird on hyperdrive—were their one leg up on a brutally difficult road to survival. Sal wondered if being a human parent was like that. Did it feel like you were running around trying to grab all the resources in a sort of desperate way to feed the mouths of your progeny? Her thoughts instantly turned to Alice. It had been almost a year since she’d written to or heard from her. The thought of her brought tightness into her chest, as though longing for a cool climate in the midday desert heat.
Wrested from her cool daydream of Alice, Sal sat up as something caught her eye in the water on the far shore. What she saw emerging out of the very same swimming hole she’d just spent a half hour splashing around in was, to say the least, surprising. A Gila monster, a huge pink-and-black mottled lizard, emerged from the water with some difficulty, heaving itself up the bank and holding on with long claws as it scrambled to right itself. She watched it rest a moment in the sun as the water rolled off its chain-mail skin in round droplets. The lizard, about a foot-and-a-half long, moved its fat tail back and forth slowly. Its beaded, armored skin looked
slick and fresh after the swim. Above, the parent flycatchers raised alarm calls to the juveniles who had been flitting in a bush near where the Gila monster emerged from the water. The juveniles stayed put but continued their manic, begging calls, seemingly unsure how to respond. The youngest hatch, with hardly a tail to speak of, jumped around on the ground, attracting the attention of the lizard. The lizard moved slowly over toward the bush the young birds were in and paused not far from the youngest. The adult birds came in making a racket and darted directly at the Gila monster to draw its attention away, flying in and out of the lizard’s striking range. The monster showed the parent birds its long fangs and opened its black gaping mouth with a hiss to warn them off, then moved slowly closer to the juvenile.
In a flash, the lizard caught the baby bird in its jaws. Sal felt stunned and numb as she watched, as though the venom were coursing through her own blood. The lizard devoured the bird in only a few swallows, not even a trace of blood spilled, swallowed and flicked its black forked tongue as it walked slowly off toward the rock shelf, its dotted pink-and-black skin wrinkling at its neck with each slow step, its very fat, rounded tail wagging slowly behind. Sal had been crouching on the other side of the creek as she watched the hunt unfold and sat back on her heels in a sort of relief when it was over. She looked around for someone to share in the strangeness that witnessing predation in the wild creates in the chest. Her heart raced a little faster, her brain moved a little slower. Her eyes darted around, but there was no one to talk to but the trees. One of the flycatcher parents called over and over for the rest of the time Sal stayed by the river, a sound as steady as a car alarm. If there were such a thing as mourning in the bird world, this surely had to be it. Sal cracked her neck, her muscles sore from always straining her posture upward. The breeze would just not do as a conversation partner this time, and seeing as there was no one to talk to, she decided to write Alice a letter. She took a data sheet out of her watertight clipboard, the only paper she had with her, and flipped it over.
The Wild Birds Page 20