And why would anyone love this place?
So still it seems dead.
I wander across the yard to the orange grove that failed her when it froze. The frost line dropped down the way it does today, the way it did the other day when I came down to see Cross Creek. The frost line. There's a town just north of here called Frostproof, and for a reason. It wasn't supposed to come any farther south.
I try to find a single orange tree among the sweet gum and marsh elder and volunteer tropical almond trees soaked in gloom. A fat white possum walks cautiously across the glade that was once spangled with oranges under a winter moon. A small raccoon glides out of a sun shaft and into cool blue, shivery shadow.
The silence grows on me, the sense of being hidden, being bodiless, being A.W.O.L. from myself, my life, from anything human.
I am a shadow shedding shadows. I peel and melt. Walk dainty and glide. Like the possum. Like the raccoon. Like nothing, like nothing at all.
Mrs. Rawlings' woods are wet and I feel I am swimming again. The heat makes my neck prickle. Tribes of mosquitoes sing in my ear.
I come out of the dark into the light. Reborn. There, again, is her worktable shining in the sun, her typewriter -- surprisingly well-oiled -- sits ready for a clack, clack click. I understand why she sought the sun. She loved the rustle of palms of a winter night, the smell of fatwood sticks lighting the grove during one of the not-too-killing frosts.
The little low house, so low and unassuming, is silver-gold this noon that feels like rain. I would like to see the night sky all black and punctuated with white stars. I sit down on her porch, the porch at Cross Creek and sample the syrupy air.
The beauty of being Floridian wasn't lost on this great woman writer who'd fled New York and a failed marriage to wed words, as she might've put it, in a marshy grove sweetened with the fragrance of Confederate jasmine while she wrote about Jody and his fawn and the crippled boy named Fodderwing who was a real kid named Rodney Slater. (I bet there's Slaters on mailboxes to this day.)
"Well, it's all gone now," I hear a tourist tell his wife who holds an old copy of Cross Creek Cookery in her hand.
"What is?" she asks, wrinkling her nose.
"This is," he answers. Beads of sweat sparkle his blue-shaven jaw. "Look at those awful tract houses over there."
I didn't see them, neither did the wife, but now a whole bunch of people are staring with disgust and just like that, like that I tell you, the dream of the warrior woman novelist goes wispy up in smoke and fades, fades away in the clear blue sky.
I look to the grove. The grove that is now gone.
Marjorie Rawlings wrote -- "It was almost worth what it cost me."
What it cost her, in words?
What it cost her in living every day with poor little Fodderwing and hearing, in her Yankee head, the blast of the gun that brought down the fawn turned yearling, corn eater, crop decimator?
Cost her?
Yes, but a Pulitzer prize came from that writing, those words, this gone grove, this bright table in the sun with the hungry portable typewriter waiting the ghostly fingers to begin tapping again. Machines don't die they just get taken apart by time. They have souls like we do, don't they?
I see a rangy, skinny kid come slowly out of the trees, barefoot and long-striding. No one else seems to see him. Just me. I turn to see what he has, a bobcat skin over one forearm, a rattler skin over the other. The rattler's bronze broad hide is as wide as my waist and I remember my father-in-law saying one swamp rattler he saw was as wide as the shell road he was on.
I stare at the skins -- wanting them, not wanting them. Dreaming there in the sun for a moment, thinking I am back with there with Miz Rawlins, 1933, and a fresh squeezed glass of orange juice in my hand and antses all over the place.
He says hopefully, "You could tack 'em on your wall."
Dead to the World
You get good at seeing ghosts. At first, you just see them. But still you don’t really believe them, or rather, believe in them. They say, in Jamaica, "The mind can't see what the heart can't leap" and I accept that as true. My heart learned to leap what my mind couldn't see in Jamaica. During my years there, I learned to see differently. I also learned to write differently. In Jamaica, all storytellers speak from the heart, from the street, from wherever they are -- but from the heart first.
I was lying in a bed on a second floor open window veranda overlooking the sea on the North Coast of Jamaica when I saw my first ghost. She was a little girl with long hair, what people used to call tresses. She was the color blue. Soft blue. A bluish light on boat lost in fog. That kind of blue. Bluey-bluish-nighttime-foggy-blue.
The thing that surprised me was this – I wasn’t afraid. No prickly hair. No fright factor. I just lay there in the blue moon that came in through the open Bahama shutter and I felt, well, I felt a little blue. Not so I’d want to cry about it. Not that kind of blue, but when you come face-to-face with a blue ghost, you instantly realize there is such a thing as a spirit world, and that a particle of it is right there in your other-dimensional space.
One thing about the little girl. . .
When I looked at her to sort of scope her features, she got fainter and fainter.
And disappeared.
Apparently, as I found out, this kind of ghost resisted being studied. You could look but you couldn’t stare. And I’d wanted to stare. I wanted to see if I could I identify the color of her eyes – were they blue like the rest of her?
The place where I was staying with my family was an old estate and the caretakers said it was “full a duppy dem.” The man’s name was Roy. He told me he’d seen his share of duppy. “One time I see a crab--” Roy spoke and when he spoke he made his hand into a land crab crawling on the sand. Roy’s eyes got wide. “Crab get big.” Roy extended his hand so that it was huge, but the very end-knuckle bent down, crab-like. “Then him tun.”
“Him, what?” I asked.
“Tun.”
“What’s tun mean?”
“Him change-up him shape.”
“Oh, I see. Into what?”
“Inna shape of a dahg.”
“What kinda dog?”
“Ugly dahg yuh nevah wan fe see, mon.”
“Big teeth?”
“Big teet,” he answered.
“Red eyes?”
“Yah, mon, red yeye.”
“Why is the dog so scary?” I asked. I wasn’t really afraid of the dog, more so the crab. Roy’s hand-crab was fearsome. But I still wanted to see it again. He wouldn’t do the crab, though. Or the dog.
While Roy was talking, he was crushing almonds out of their shell and we were both eating them. Little tiny hermit crabs were popping out of their tiny stolen shells and Roy lined up a dozen or so, and we made bets on which one was going to be the winner. A little bitty baby, beeby, Roy said, won. Beat out all the big fat crabs because, of course, they had heavier shells. Roy said, “A lesson in dat.” Same time, on the radio, there came a song called Long Shot about a horse that was running a race and died right before the finish line, and so, got the name Kick-e-Bucket. I felt so sorry for that horse. I still feel sorry for that horse, and for all horses, and crabs and dogs, for that matter.
Roy was pounding almond husks and he said, “Kick-e-bucket go fe heaven, Ger. But crab dem, dog dem – dat two dat I see, dem go noplace. Dem just live like you see dem until the day come when dem dream you and tek your soul wid dem.”
“What happens then?”
“Well, dem become you.”
I thought about that for a long time before I fell asleep. I thought the little girl might come back but she didn’t. I fell asleep, and woke into a dream. At first I was all air and light and color, a pink streamer flashing through the night. It felt good. I was out of my body into the body, if you’d call it a body, of some animate, unearthly thing. Some alien form of life. If you can imagine the way it looks when Olympians throw that tight-wound crepe into the air as they tumble around, we
ll, that’s what I felt like – that paper streamer. But the more I streamed, the lighter I felt. Soon I was invisible – still streaming but with only the slightest of light emanating from me.
I could go anywhere I wanted.
I soared past some ginger lilies and scared the night-drunken bees waddling on the fronds. I zipped by a fruit bat hanging upside down under an eave, a croaker lizard with huge glassy eyes on a porch rail, a crab, a dog . . .Roy sleeping flat out on his back on a cement bench, arms hanging all the way to the ground.
I flashed through an open window leaving a vapor trail of pink dust in my wake.
And there I was. Yes, me. Sleeping like Roy.
I sniffed my way into myself, and I woke with a sniffle. My entire body was glowing, especially all around my chest and heart. I felt wonderful. It was the best feeling I’d ever had. It was – I couldn’t describe it if I wanted to. I stayed awake for a long time, waiting for it to happen again. It didn’t.
In the morning I told Roy what had happened.
“Dem dream yuh,” he said with a smile.
“Who?”
“The spirit dem.”
“What kind of spirit?” I asked Roy.
“You don’t see it? Good spirit, Ger. Dem was the water moomah what guard the whole water under dis island.” He nodded and touched me on the shoulder. “No all de spirit dem bad. Some good. You feel irie?” Irie is the Jamaican word for feeling good, and I felt better than I ever felt in my life and I told Roy that. He laughed. “So you do see it.”
“Yes, I said. "So will it happen again?”
Roy said, “Me no know.”
It didn’t happen again.
Just that once.
But in that once, I felt the potentiality of all things.
I am waiting to be dreamed again. For one of those good entities to breathe me into a dream of its own and take me out of my body for a whirly, swimmy ride in heaven on earth.
And it seemed to me that people who do not fear life should never fear death. I had learned that, even without a body, I was more fully alive than when lying in bed asleep.
For asleep and undreamed, I was nothing if not dead to the world.
Man Taken Aboard UFO
The story was begun on the Mescalero Apache Indian reservation in Southern New Mexico in the late 1970s. My friend Etienne said there was a bear outside our tent. Was it a bear, or an alien, as he'd first said? A bearlian? Two previous publications of this story -- first in the novel No Witness, then years later, in the novel Stargazer. Twice I added odd facts that came back to me. There won't be a thrice.
I don’t know why I was doing this – camping on the Mescalero Indian Reservation with a guy I barely knew. I guess I thought I was going to get a story out of it. I needed one. Hadn’t written anything in years and when Etienne said, “I have a feeling this weekend I will be taken aboard a space craft that comes from a distant planet and …”
This was enough for me. I didn’t need to hear the rest – just the idea that Etienne Saronier believed he was The Little Prince, or something.
I don’t know how he did it. His whispery French accent, I suppose. When he spoke it sounded like the narration of a journey already begun—and, oh well, so it had.
While we were making a campfire under the ponderosa pines, I listened to him talk. “I have this feeling, you know, that ever since I was a child, that it would happen to me – one day I’d be taken. When I was a little boy living in France, my best friend at that time had a very disturbing dream. He got up from his bed and looked out his window--”
“In the dream he did this?” I asked.
“Not in the dream. He had just had the disturbing dream. Now he is at the window looking out.”
“Got it,” I said. But I wondered what the dream was. Etienne went on.
“So my best friend looks out of that window, and what does he see?”
“I have no idea.”
“He sees a flying saucer, all silver and bright, sitting in his father’s cow pasture. And who do you think is standing in the open hatch door of the saucer?”
I shook my head, shrugged.
“My friend was astonished.”
“Who was it then?”
Etienne touched his thumb to his chest. “Me! My friend could not believe his eyes because it was me inside there, with the doorway open, and waving at him. And here is the funny part – I am also lying asleep in the bed opposite my friend.”
“You were spending the night?” I asked.
“Sleep-over sort of thing, you call it. Yes, me asleep in the other bed. And me waving from the portal of the saucer.”
Then, for a little while, Etienne busied himself with helping me make supper over the fire. It was dark by then and the fire was cheery. Soon we had some tomato soup starting to bubble and the wind came up and crept around the camp and I remembered that we were on Apache land.
“Look, quickly – there!”
I turned my head in the direction Etienne pointed towards. Just in time to see a little scribble of light that streaked downward from the night sky and ended up somewhere on the desert floor some sixty miles away from our campsite. White Sands Missile Base was down there and, no doubt, there were things we didn’t know about their little missions with satellites.
“What was that?” I said, “satellite?”
Etienne gave me a dreamy lemur stare. “Maybe we will be taken together,” he said, casually stirring the soup with a fat spoon. We slurped in silence. The temperature dropped. It was autumn in the high country. The wind got more playful and threatened to toss our tent down into the desert. I pounded some extra stakes in the loopholes, and nailed the little cocoon tight to the earth. Then I got my down jacket; Etienne was already wearing his. We went from soup to hot chocolate. Etienne's eyes never left the heavens.
Out of the dark, he whispered just over the wind. “I can sense danger. You know that I can.”
That gave me a creepy feeling. “Why do you tell me that?”
“I am picking up your fear,” Etienne said. He drained the last of the cocoa in his cup. He was still staring at the sky. The fire was down low, just red coals which the wind would breathe upon and turn a ripe orange. From where I sat on a round stone, Etienne looked like a sprite, an elf. Even his ears, large and lemur-like, looked odd in the dimming afterglow of the fire.
I said nothing in return to Etienne’s offbeat comment about my fearfulness. But I had to chuckle because he was right, I was feeling weird, to say the least. But not much worse than that. Just weird. I looked into the space of sky between the pines. There was a round hole full of stars, and I gazed in that direction.
As if Etienne had commanded it to happen, there appeared a steadily moving, lightly glowing object, like a kind of uncertain star. It moved in an arc and began its descent along the curvature of space. “What is that?” I said aloud.
“Satellite,” Etienne said, then: “Why don’t you admit you’re afraid?”
“Because I’m not.” Saying that unnerved me.
I glanced at my watch. The luminous dial said it was 11:13. The wind picked up and growled around the tent. “If it makes you happier, I’m scared,” I said. To no one, as it turned out. Etienne had risen without a sound and was peeing on a pine tree. He was a ways off and couldn’t hear anything I said with the wind moaning.
I unzipped the cozy nylon tent and slipped into my cozier down bag, but it had gotten so chilly, I kept my sweater on. Etienne appeared seconds after I nestled in, and got into his sleeping bag. “I heard that,” he said.
But he didn’t say what.
I was so tired from the long day’s drive from Santa Fe to White Sands and then to Mescalero that I found myself almost laughing myself to sleep. What was I nervous about anyway? Etienne was crazy. Big deal. Who isn’t? So I had no story. Big deal. I was safe and snug. I loved camping and this was camping. And Etienne, well, he was a friend just the same. Crazy or not. I slept, and dreamed. And saw a little boy standing
in the portal of a flying saucer and he was waving to me, and it was Etienne. I woke with a start.
I looked at my watch. It was twenty-six past three. I was hot, sweaty. Unzipping my bag, I let the cold, crisp mountain air circulate on my fully clothed body.
My heart gave a shudder. I lay there, feeling the rush of fear fly from my adrenal glands and take further flight through my bloodstream. I was wide awake. And frightened. There were two unison breathings. One came from Etienne. The other came outside the tent. Two distinct bodies of breath. Within and without. I listened. Could the thing outside the tent hear my heart thunder?
My mind was working hard to reason it out. The sound of breathing inside was obviously Etienne. But what was the breathing outside the tent? My mind deserted me. Deer, bear, elk, coyote?
I sucked up my own breath, and held it, so there was no distraction.
Listening, I heard two things. Etienne with his deep intake, followed by a rattle-snore as he let go of his breath. Or as his breath let go of him.
Outside the tent – same exact thing. It was as if there were two Etienne’s, one within, one without. I placed my index finger over the entrance of my right ear. The outside breathing stopped. The inside continued drawing and rattling. I released my finger and the outside breathing resumed.
At that moment it would’ve been a relief if the exterior sound had moved. If it had proven itself to be that of an animal. Even a bear would be a relief. As it was, my fractured mind was forced to accept a single conclusion – Etienne had a doppleganger and that double being, so to say, was right outside, waiting for one of us to do something. I lay and sweated it out for quite some time. Maybe an hour. Then, all at once, I unzipped the tent flap, and rolled out into the starry night. For a moment I sat in starlight, breathing deeply of the pine-scented air. Then I poked my head back into the tent. Etienne was sawing logs, in out, in, out.
I chuckled. There is such a thing, I reassured myself.
It’s an auditory illusion, I told myself.
THE AMERICAN STORYBAG Page 9