A Phantom Herd, Page 3

The sky at the zenith above domed the world that day with a ceiling the color of a pale sapphire. In this sacred dome, a buzzard circled lazily in an updraft. Various minute and filmy clouds puffed nervously past the sun. And that same sun blazed atop our desert which spread beneath us. A complete picture of earthly loveliness.

  "They're down there," said Jack, talking about the pale man and woman. "Darn them stupid people."

  "Ah, don't let them worry you. We're safe. They're not gonna follow us," said Meredith, breathlessly reaching the summit. "They're gonna stay right down there where they are," she said, dismissing them with a wave of one arm. "Dummies, that's what they were. Gee, I thought...ah, well, they were dummies, for sure."

  "Yeah," said Jack. "I don't give a hoot for em. They ain't worth a hoot or a holler. They didn't know nothing about nothing. They thought they could scare us, that's all."

  "Yeah, no hoot," I echoed unconvincingly, slicing the air with a disdainful wave that copied Meredith's. I was struggling to join them on the summit.

  Meredith and Jack's laughter cut at me sharply.

  "No hoot," said Jack mocking me to Meredith. "Whatta nut." He shoved me gently off the summit. I stood down.

  "I'm a nut," I said complacently.

  In every direction around us, a thousand saguaros all standing sentinel, all standing proud, rose up from the desert floor and mounted the rocks and the foothills on the south side of the mountains. Saguaros climbed into the canyons and marched toward the arroyos. The near vertical light caught on the crook of the huge cactus arms and made the pleats of green skin glow as a verdant shaft. Coming straight down, because it was noon, the light showed the seams on the cacti, as though the giants were large stuffed toys bursting at their seams with millions of loose threads.

  They were our giants, and we loved them. Our southwestern cacti were glorious; the great green giants, the blazing candelabras, showing the way to Mexico, showing our land, stretched out beneath us and all the way to the haze of the horizon.

  And we loved the purple mountains thrusting high into the sky. They were ours, too. Their sides concealed innumerable caves in canyons, their ridgelines showed dark blue saddles, and there were small brooks and oaks and pines hidden at the top. To us, no lofty cathedral in Europe built by man had the impact of those mountains, stretching 9,000 feet upward and spanning the whole northern horizon with lavender and gray and pink rocks, jumbled and jammed together. I didn't care that our town looked sprawling and dusty at the foot of those mountains. We had not built anything to rival the mountains because we were at peace with them and allowed them to dominate the landscape. We could run along parallel to them, playing in the city's arroyos and vacant lots and I always considered them part of my games.

  The Santa Rita Mountains were in between us and Mexico. Then due west, the sharp black backs of the Tucson Mountains reared up. To our right, the Santa Catalina Mountains stretched away in a northwesterly direction. Along the base of that range were the old ranches and mines. Behind us were the Rincons, the lowest range, the one with caverns.

  "Look at those fat green cactuses," said Jack, still wheezing, but a little less. "Some are growing outta rocks! Right outta rocks and into the sky."

  "Sure," said Meredith, "they can grow atop a rock lot'sa times. They're tough. Nothing's too hard for them to do. They fall over and squish people pretty much regular as clockwork. It's in the papers all the time. You gotta watch out for those if you're hiking. I'll warn you if one's about to fall. The Apaches used those to kill people. Soldiers, mostly. That was a good trick they had when they used cactuses as weapons and stopped the United States Army in its tracks. A dog gone good trick. Apaches could take to the rocks, and how. Water? Shoot, they didn't need it. Or food. They didn't need it, either. They could chew rawhide and stuff. Eat cactus buds. Boy, there's a lot of green stuff out there. Mexico's thatta way behind the mountain and a ways further on. Wish we were in Nogales today. Like to shop for some toys and puppets and junk. They got a lot of good junk down there in Nogales. I like those shops down there. Pretty neat stuff. Damn, that's a good place. Or I'd like to be out catching lizards. Think of all the lizards down there. If we could get em. We could have em."

  "Yeah. A lizard factory," said Jack.

  "Yeah, a million of em. We could probably fill up a lot of terrariums and stuff. Have our own bunch of lizards and take care of em and everything. We could be experts and stuff," said Meredith.

  "That would be something," said Jack. He hooked his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans. That was a thing he liked to do. His pants were kinda loose and he could keep them up better.

  "We got a lotta good stuff here. Good stuff we can do and good stuff we can see. Everybody thinks this place is no good. They don't know nothing. Like those people down there. Those dummies. Whatta couple of pale, sickly dummies. They didn't even try to run after us. Whew. I thought they were tougher. They seemed like pretty tough characters. I wasn't really scared of em at all. Not really. They didn't have me worried. I saw the pale skin and knew they were unhealthy people. They don't even understand this place."

  Meredith liked to think that we were of another place, the edge of our country, the farthest removed you could be physically and culturally from the power centers of the East Coast. But instead of being ashamed of this fact, Meredith had somehow trained us to project an obtuse pride at our removal from any place of importance. She promoted the idea of the importance of our alien nature, the way we had been stuck off by ourselves and made different; we wanted nothing of the world of wealth and power in our nation, though Meredith had never exactly explained why this was so. Mexico lay in a blur to the south, the lovely city of Nogales yielded rum for my father, giving us the black plastic bears that hung on each rum bottle, the black and the special, smaller silver bears. We were of a place somewhat comfortable with its neighbor, Mexico, when the rest of the country had absorbed little of their culture. We were comfortable with deprivation, the desert was as inhospitable to visitors as we had been to the pale man and woman. We were so far from the Puritans there was no longer any connection to that stuffy, cold world of Homburgs and woolen coats. We had stripped ourselves of artifice and were cured of the American disease: material ambition. We were of another place. And we were proud of it.

  And I was proud to be with Meredith and Jack, though they acted ashamed of me for my many obvious weaknesses. Though the encounter with the Easterners had been horribly frightening, though we had come close to being in big trouble with our parents who would never take our side against the strangest claims of a persecuting adult, we enjoyed the idea that we had shown those rotten Eastern people a thing or two about the spunk of a bunch of Arizona kids. We had taught them to appreciate us. In our minds our encounter was the pinnacle, the zenith of success. Never mind that the woman had ridiculed us for our obviously manufactured tale about the fabulous ranch we owned. Collectively we seemed unable to question the wisdom of lying to these people. It seemed that we had made the decision to do anything to maintain our face.

  The woman had commented favorably on our rock climbing abilities; until then we had always hoped someone would think we were as good as the Native American Apaches at that; they were notorious for fleeing from the U.S. Army by dashing up into the rocks and disappearing before the cavalry could tie up their horses. Although the lady had said nothing about us and Apaches, in our minds she had. Meredith began claiming the pale lady had compared us favorably to Apaches.

  "Did you hear what she said? She said we were running up in the rocks like Apaches. She couldn't believe it. She thought we were namby-pambies, a bunch of babies, but we weren't. We ran away from them and took to the hills. We weren't stopped by a little cacti and sharp rocks. No siree, Bob. We know how to take to the rocks and climb em. We know how to stay outta the cacti, sure. She was shocked at us. Did you hear her? She didn't even know we could do stuff like that. Sure, we do it all the time."

  But I knew better, at least regarding my own feeble
efforts. Compared to what an ancient, even critically wounded Apache warrior could have done with that hill or even a toddler of the Apache tribe, we were pathetic, me especially. I whimpered as I moved downhill. We might imagine ourselves as prototypical mighty Western children. We might pride ourselves with the notion that we were rugged, outdoorsy type children who were tanned and lean and energetically xenophobic, meaning that we hated the entire East Coast, but I knew better.

  For years we remembered this encounter with the horrible man and woman as our greatest moment, our mythic, childhood triumph over the East.

  And with our triumph, that scene was gone, the story cycle finished. The pale man and crazy woman were done, whisked off stage and out of the theater, the curtain fell, though I was still digesting the facts, from the authority of Meredith and Jack, that we owned a ranch, 129,000 head of cattle, and a chuckwagon I had never laid eyes on. I was hoping I would be able to see it sometime. Where, I wondered, was it located? Were we keeping it hidden for some reason?

  And I was still afraid of our persecutors.

  But you need scary encounters like that, like the pale man and woman, if you're going to write. You need to have awful things really happen to you, and not just hear about them happening to others. Then you need to remember them, and cut them out, one by one, not losing a single speck of the real in the wilderness of the unreal. Cut them out, and bring them in, bring them home at the end of the trail, to the expectant reader.