Three Novellas

by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

“The wind made sounds like footsteps in the house, not random like wind but purposeful like death. At first I thought it was mine, I think about death a lot in the night. I play solitaire by the fire to stay away from the cold in the back bedroom and the constant sense I have of that presence that I know is death. I used to read cards, the tarot, but always they came up death so I got one of the decks my husband used to play poker with and now I play solitaire, sometimes I cheat. I’ve been doing this for twenty years now, twenty years a widow and twenty years waiting. And then a few nights ago, or maybe weeks, ah hell, maybe months, I’ve lost track, he knocked, the strange man with the old woman and the little boy and the dog and this parrot who seems to have taken a shine to me. The house is crowded with these travelers, the back bedroom is hot now with the body heat of the boy and the man and the dog and the old woman is sitting across the card table from me, like me she sleeps sitting up, afraid to suffocate if she lies down. The parrot, well that parrot never sleeps at all that I can tell.

  They walked all the way from New Orleans, saw that flood coming and he, that man who’s name is Noah as it happens, funny thing that is, well he had this canoe that he called an ark he’d been trailing around after him for forty years to hear him tell it and I believe him, why not? All the time I was watching the news about the flood on the television set, he was paddling up this street and down another rescuing folks with their beloved dogs and cats and caged birds who’d forgotten how to fly. They had some stories to tell about the flood and then later the hard times in the city: swarms of mosquitoes and rats coming out from everywhere, gangs of boys with machetes, a man watching them walk down the street with a shotgun and a large dog, just watching. He was afraid of course and so were they, the strange little crew. Why they decided to come out here, I’m not sure but decide they did. They marched along the roads still dragging that canoe and now it’s out front in the yard all decked out for Christmas, boughs and wreaths and candelarias, and those little carved statues my husband bought me in Santa Fe back in the days you could still buy things in Santa Fe. All the Mexicans around here come by on Sunday after church to look at it like its some kind of shrine. They’d rigged it up so the man and the boy each carried an end of it with some tarps over top to make a kind of movable tent to protect the old woman from the rain and the hot sun and she sat on a seat they’d contrived to attach to the wheels meant for the canoe. She held onto some belts that were attached to Noah’s waist so he was dragging the woman on her seat and carrying the canoe like a tent overtop with the boy bringing up the rear and the dog prancing on ahead and that parrot flying around in circles to report back whatever news he thought they needed to know about the road ahead of them. They looked like a circus menagerie coming up the road and I heard about them long before they knocked on my door.

  I heard the story from her, the boy, the parrot, only the man, Noah, was quiet. They were all excited, traumatized really after seeing a man shot in Texas or thinking they saw a man shot in Texas. To hear them tell it, they hightailed it straight for the border as soon as they could. He had a thing about New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, everyone comes here with illusions, it’s just a place, full of people who are just people. I’ll never forget the commotion of that night, the boy and the woman and the parrot all telling different parts of the same story.

  “Pedro!” (that would be the kid yelling at him, telling him to shut up, which he sometimes does when he just can’t stand it anymore) “Hey Pedro pendejo, you birdbrain” (the kid calls him that all the time, but of course between friends it’s a term of endearment) . . . . .” Pedro we are fast approaching a remote farmhouse in Texas and we have no idea what kind of folks are in there or what they might be up to: starving maybe and dreaming about parrot soup, you never know, so SHUT UP!”

  That would have been when the shot rang out. They’d have been pretty alarmed by that unless they thought it was a truck backfiring. Truth is, I can’t tell the difference myself and both those events occur with a fair amount of frequency in these parts. Well, I can just see them, everyone all of a sudden real quiet and trying to turn slowly and quietly back in their tracks when they hear the big beefy guy yelling “HEY YOU” and them pretending they didn’t hear and trying to be invisible and walk away and the voice yelling again “Hey you folks with the canoe and the parrot” and there was just no mistaking who he was yelling at then, their game was up, their cat was out of the bag, their goose was cooked, they were beyond the point of no return and they were up shit creek without a paddle. That voice was a cop who wanted to see their identification cards and of course they had none. Over there in Texas those people just go crazy thinking swarms of Mexicans are coming over the border illegally. Legally, schmegally, who cares? Didn’t useta matter but now the poor bastards got more than river water wetting their backs, blood, its blood, no joke, they’re killing people for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and having no papers. Every time the government has something to hide, they make people afraid of the Mexicans, always blame the Mexican. I was married to one so I know, lived with it for years. Well of course my guests had no papers, homeless folk that they were, but heroic too. That quiet man with his crazy little boat out rescuing those poor souls caught in the flood in New Orleans. I still can’t get over it, while I was watching it all on television, he was out there, a wonder I missed him. The boy told the cop about it, that boy is a sweet talker; no doubt about it and the cop must have figured he’d do himself no good gunning down a retarded man, a crazy old woman with a talking parrot and a boy with a dog. Must a ruined his day. They wanted to ask about the shot, the parrot saw the body and the dog had actually run into the bushes and was sniffing around it. But Steven said he had more sense than to let on they knew anything and he only heard later from Pedro that the man was lying face down with a bullet in the back of his head and bullet holes going through both hands as though he’d been holding them behind his head. They were just glad the man with the badge let them leave. When they were all talked out and I could get a word in edgewise I just said “welcome to the west” and they’ve been here ever since.”

  Cassandra

  “Everything happened like a dream or some vision I sometimes have of the future but now I remember it is the past. The waters rising, you keep thinking there must be some end to it, it cannot keep rising like that but it did and we ran for the canoe and It’s a good thing Steven is so small and Noah so thin because that little slip of a canoe was not meant to carry so many of us, call it what you like, its no ark, not really. But it was miraculous that day how it held us all and we paddled until Noah could put us someplace for safe keeping while he paddled back into the midst of it and Pedro flew overhead calling him here and there to rescue people he could see sitting on their roof tops or struggling in the water and Noah always brought them back to where we were waiting and I would be amazed sometimes at how many folks he did fit into that canoe. One time he came back with a woman must have been three hundred pounds but the canoe held her, it was a miracle. Noah did this rescue thing until it got dark and then someone found him a lantern and he set it up at one end of the canoe and it was magical how he slipped smooth as silk through that dark night, the lantern sending a shimmer of light out onto the water like a sign. Pedro went on finding folks who needed rescuing and we all wandered around talking to those folks he let off about their plans and people were saying Noah was an angel sent by god and that they would never forget him.

  And then it was over, for us anyway. All kinds of people starting arriving: volunteers to help, journalists to report the news, insurance adjusters to assess the damage. No one needed us, we didn’t want to be interviewed, we were just in the way. And then the street gangs went wild looking for easy pickings and easy prey. We walked around our old neighborhood but it didn’t feel like a home anymore: some people were barricaded behind gates with guns and everywhere you looked you could see eyes peaking out of windows from behind curtains or shutters.
Where the flood hadn’t caused damage the winds had and the rubble in the streets made it look like a bombed out neighborhood in one of those countries you see on television news shows at the local bars. Noah told us he’d promised his mother when she was dying that he would see New Mexico one day although he didn’t explain why that was important and we didn’t have any other better ideas so we set off on what turned out to be an extremely long walk, Noah’s last and longest but the first really long walk for the rest of us. I had this thought then that god really did want to destroy mankind because of all the evil, just like in the biblical flood and that our own Noah Brown was a biblical character, good enough to be saved and strong enough to save us. Of course in the end it won’t be god that destroys mankind but mankind that destroys its own sources of essential nurturance: just like Midas who wished that everything he touched would turn to gold and then starved to death (or should have, now I can’t remember how that story ends, maybe he repented and got to touch food and eat again).

  Crossing Texas was as surreal a trip as any journey through the tarot, through dream, or memory could ever be. We met the priestess who ran a truck stop café and took us in and warned us about all kinds of strange goings on in the land, and gave us each a talisman for our safe passage: to me she gave a charm from a child’s bracelet, interestingly a little golden boat, to Noah a red plastic chili pepper on a green string and to Steven a rabbit foot on a key chain that made him sad thinking about the poor rabbit but she told him it would bring him luck, luck indeed, that child was his own luck. Then she fed us in the front and took us back to a little apartment and locked us in which freaked us out but we decided to trust her and in the morning she let us back out and fed us huevos rancheros and chorizo and we ate ourselves sick.

  Most of the knights in this land drove beat up old trucks but there was a small band of cowboys on horseback, one of them for each of us and they hoisted each of us: Noah, Steven, and me behind their saddles, put Cory in front of one of them and pulled the canoe on its inflatable rubber wheels across the land, galloping to beat the wind and I thought I was young again. They took us to a ranch where an old man sat on his porch and watched his sons and grandsons drive old cars around the mud yard packed as dry and hard as concrete, putting parts from one into another. From this collection of wrecks they were building a chariot while the old grandpa planned a journey, going to town to carouse and get drunk most likely.

  They carried us far away and then let us down in the middle of nowhere and said “this is as far as we go” and they pointed us down a road that looked like it had no end and all we had was that canoe to give us shelter from the sun if we turned it upside down and wriggled under it but Pedro thought he saw a homestead in the distance and urged us on, yakkety yakking all the way.

  As we got closer I saw a man walking in front of another man who had a gun aimed at him. The man in front had his hands held up and behind his head but I was hot and tired and not at all sure that I wasn’t dreaming. Later Steven told me he’d seen the same thing. Noah never did say anything about it, but became so sad for so long that I am sure he must have. Then we all heard the shot and decided we were headed in the wrong direction. The land was flat, not a single vertical thing on that vast horizontal horizon, no way could we suddenly become invisible, no matter what direction we moved in or even if we stood as still as we could and closed our eyes and pretended that whoever we couldn’t see couldn’t see us, no, that was just not going to work. The shooter saw us and called out to us and we had to wait while he approached and introduced himself as a man of the law. I didn’t mock him, not while he had that gun hanging down so loose and casual by his side, like it just sort of grew out of his arm.

  He was downright friendly, as if he hadn’t just killed a man, maybe two, maybe more than that before we happened on the scene. We couldn’t actually see the body although Cory seemed very interested in something in the brush. Steven called Cory back who obeyed rather reluctantly and also responded to the man who requested to see some kind of picture ID: he could tell we had no need of drivers’ licenses and I’m sure we didn’t look like the kind of people who take their birth certificates with them whenever they go out. Hell, we must have looked like what we were: homeless people for whom “out” is home. So Steven started in to talking, telling the fellow about the flood which of course he knew all about, the caravans of trucks with aid still passing us on the endless roads. And my smart boy pointed out that the weird tent thing over my head was in fact an upside down canoe and when he talked about Noah saving all those people back in New Orleans, the guy just laughed his head off and told us to go on, just go on. He didn’t even have to tell us not to say anything about what we’d seen; he realized no one would listen to such as us.

  After that we got a lot of rides in semis. Those truck drivers wanted the company and didn’t mind Pedro running off at the mouth. I ‘d warned him not to mention anything about what we’d seen on the farm and he stuck to parrot talk to amuse the truckers, Steven slept like the dead and Noah just watched everything as if he was in shock.. They all wanted to get their futures told of course and I told them all romantic nonsense to keep them happy. Some things never change. The married men wanted to know if their wives were cheating and I always told them hell no, their wives loved them more than they let on and the single guys wanted to know if they would find a beautiful woman who would love them more than life itself as if they deserved this sort of devotion. Of course I always said they certainly would, probably somewhere in New Mexico and sure enough one fellow was fool enough to go out of his way to take us to New Mexico just on the off chance he would meet the love of his life over there. We ended up in a little town just off the interstate called Maxwell named for some thief who was a governor of New Mexico territory and used his authority to steal a lot of land from the Mexicans.

  The land is truly beautiful. We just walked around and considered what door to knock on and I, being the seer, chose one. There were exquisite roses growing by the front door so I took that as a sign. It was a good one. The woman who lived there had been a widow for too long and was glad for our company. Ironic that she was playing with a deck of cards when we knocked on her door and when she heard where we’d come from, she invited us to stay with her right then and there. She fed us and put us to bed and we all slept like the dead until the sun woke us up and we watched the mountains on the horizon emerge in the dawn.

  I’d never seen mountains like those, in the morning they were so shrouded in mist and cloud I thought I only imagined their contours in the sky but later they would emerge as if marching from a great distance. Some mornings I’d see stars everywhere and knew we’d have clear skies but those mountains made their own weather creating their own cloud cover. On windy days when the trees down here blew about drawing a dance of black lines against a blue background, those mountains wore a halo of blowing snow and if you watched carefully sometimes you’d catch a whirlwind of bright snow lift up from a dark mountain crater and linger in the sky before being absorbed into those permanent clouds. It all moved, the trees, the clouds, the mountains. I lost my interest in the future. I made one last prediction at the request of our hostess because of course I could not turn her down. She wanted to know when she would die and I could tell she had been obsessed with this question for a long time. The first card to come up was the Hanged Man and the first person to speak was Noah. “Oh my” he said “I remember now the people hanging in the trees” and he looked frightened. I knew then, just a gut thing, a true premonition that had nothing to do with the cards, that Noah would be the next to die and soon.

  He was too gentle for this world and the world continued to play out its cruel plan all around us. Sheltered though we were in that kind woman’s house, we were more aware of wars and disasters and tragedies than we had been on the street or the shelter of the church basement. The television, it brought all that bad news into our house and our hearts. That is when I remem
bered what it was drove me to the street in the first place. I’d forgotten the big house and the fancy quiet car like a hearse and how I felt like a corpse myself riding it in it with my cruel husband at the wheel. He had run over a cat, someone’s beloved pet no doubt. I‘d seen it and said nothing knowing he wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t care, would only say vicious things to me.

  I left the next day, left that car in traffic and walked to the ATM and got out what cash I could and took the first bus out of Washington D.C. and ended up in New Orleans. I remembered all that before my mind closed the curtain on other memories that would hurt too much. I remember his name still because sometimes it would rise to my lips like a curse whenever something bad happened. It took my breath away all that remembering and when I looked up the woman was watching me, waiting for her answer. “You will live to be a hundred” I told her wanting her to forget about death for a while. Then Noah walked outside and I told her about him. “Don’t try to protect him” I told her because I knew the poor man was ready and that he had always walked to his destiny with a willing and innocent heart like Isaac with Abraham to the mountain. I knew he would die in those mountains and be carried with them on their march through time.”

  Noah