Untitled (We pass a sequence...) / Margaret Connor

Untitled (We pass a sequence of gas stations ...)

Margaret Connor

We pass a sequence of gas stations rising out of the dry, red earth, each more phantasmic than the last, signs in the windows announcing Ice 10¢ and Mustang Blaze Cigarettes 50¢. The air cries out for a thunderstorm. Somewhere in the distance, the warped, tortured shapes of the local flora cross the horizon into the sunset. Beside me, Isaac lies limp in his seat, head slumped sideways onto his shoulder. His lips are parted. I can see the white scar trickling down the inside of his bottom lip.

I stop the pickup at a PetrolExpress. We’re the only car there, save the bluish green truck I assume belongs to the redfaced man seated in an old lawn chair at the attendant’s station. “We’re not too late, are we?” He shakes his head emphatically. “The shop’s closed, pumps are still open.” The red faced man looks over his shoulder. Someone’s emerging from the cinderblock building designated as the women’s toilet stall. She’s about his age, half his size across, walking gingerly across the gravel in her lambskin boots. The woman, brushing her straw blonde hair over her shoulder, smiles pleasantly at us. “You two need a fill-up, sugar?” she drawls. The man nods to her as well as he can. His neck is subsumed under a double chin and a broad, barrel-like chest. “If you please, dear.” The three of us get to talking while she fills the gas tank. “There’s Beauregard Hotel, down in Batersville, but it’s a mighty fancy establishment. Most of the gentlemen there are bankers or lawyers or some-such on business trips,” the man tells me, arms crossed in thought.

“Now, Donald, you know how the Batersville people can be. You two would do better to keep on until Waltner and find a place there.” Her eyes dart from my face to my hands, divining from their color my prospects across the county. “Waltner, Chester, Sidner, and I suppose Riviera might be best, but they’re not so much a place for out-of-towners. Chester’s real nice. You won’t pass through it going south, though, you’ll have to get off in ten miles at that big gray sign that says ‘In Honor of So-and-So.’” Donald and the woman—Posie, she tells me—throw out a few more place names that blend together into a soup of ville, beau, and Saint. Posie mentions that they’ve a daughter, Meg, who’s married to a mechanic in Provenance. I hit the road with a full tank and a handful of lodging suggestions. The ibis-red sun is a thin sliver between the mesas, winking goodbye before slipping beneath the desert sand. Its last light dyes my hands scarlet. The people who lived in this part, the people before the ham-faced gas station attendants, made red dyes from the roots of the yucca palm. They used it to color their pottery. Some of this pottery, or its imitation, is sold at curio shops along the lowland basin. The bulbous, gordlike things with narrow flared necks sit languidly on their side next to soapstone camels and turquoise beads marked with yellowing price stickers. Ask for assistance with items on top shelf, the sign reads. Neither camels nor soapstone dwell within a hundred leagues of the air conditioned clapboard cabin. Yesterday, on the advice of a waitress, we stopped at a longhouse-style building known as the Museum of Northern Cholla Valley. Here, everything, including museums, is a gift shop. Culture, history, the landscape itself. Buy a yucca-frond sandal, just like the natives used to wear. Buy a scale plastic model of the Tablelands. Buy a genuine bullet casing from the War of the Bluffs.

Isaac stirs, bringing his outstretched arm to his chest. You can see the powder burn marks on the back of his hand, too small and too clustered to be freckles. He’s wearing a pale chambray shirt, army issue. There’s a sweat stain in the shape of a crescent below the collar. I exhale as we pass a mile marker, the first in half an hour. Everything is far apart in the desert. The night is dark and cool. I roll the windows down despite the cranks’ protests. I have to reach across Isaac to get the passenger-side one. Even asleep, he flinches when my wrist brushes against him. Twitches pass over his face. The wind smells sweet. I feel it on my cheeks. I feel it in the sweat stains under my arms. There was only one person at the museum. She was thirtysomething with the pessimistically placid expression of a single or near-single mother. Sitting behind the information desk, she reminded me of a pharaoh in his throne, or the doomed terminal ruler of a verdant island kingdom. This museum was her territory, her land in lieu of her land. She had the tall, convex nose and the copper skin of the sandal weavers. A blue silk scarf held her gray-black hair in a low ponytail. It tumbled over her shoulders and down her back, twisting and turning with the churning flow of a river. The desert guards its water like a mother guards her young. The desert’s children are her yucca palms, her onceblooming orange blossoms, her myriad cacti. This is to say nothing of her grandchildren. The coyotes slink in the shadows of the cholla, rat tails swishing. Rust red beetles, emerald hummingbirds, patient rattlesnakes, gargantuan clearwing hawk-moths, jumping mice. Every desert denizen inherits its share of bitter water, but none take it the same way. Twenty miles from anything, I bring the Landeater to the side of the road, slowing to a stop across from a burned out shack. The split rail fence, even if it wasn’t flame-scalded and

years decaying, would not pose much of a barrier. The top rail, where it hasn’t fallen down, only comes up to my hip. It might be enough to keep the cows on one side and the vagrants on the other, though. And Isaac would find it more of a challenge, if he wouldn’t decide to slip through the slats. A muscle in my side burns as I approach the hand pump. My legs are stiff with sitting, my feet clumsily trampling the inch-high chaparral brush. I’m lucky I don’t step on an aptly named night snake. Even in the scant light of the stars, I can see the coral snake burrows in the corner of my eyes. I don’t dare look. I’ll scream, and that will wake Isaac. Remembering the garter snakes who curled around the spigot back on the Mendale family farm, I reach for the hand pump with great trepidation. Trepidation comes from the Latin word trepidare, to tremble. There are tremors in the sky as air molecules rub against one another, exciting themselves into an electric charge. There are tremors underground, deep beneath the burrows of even the most reclusive kangaroo mice, invisible streams of filthy water nourishing the roots of prickly pears. I tried one that grew on a bush in the museum garden. It was fat and robust in my palm, less a fruit than an unusually pink lobe. Isaac said he thought that it tasted like warm watermelon. I didn’t say what I thought, that it tasted vaguely like ‘pink.’ Later that day, after vacating the museum grounds with a novelty beach blanket, we stopped at a roadside tent for cold drinks. The boys running the stall, the farmer’s sons, introduced themselves as Bucky and Hunter. Both were heavily freckled and neither wore a shirt nor a pair of shoes. Hunter poured us prickly-pear juice with a handful of melting ice while Bucky played with a smooth beige dog. “How old’re you boys?” I asked. Hunter squinted at me. “Twelve and thirteen.”

I wouldn’t have guessed. They were small scrawny things with pinched faces and sloped shoulders, nothing like the hardy-stock farm boys in Asher. Malnutrition is not uncommon in these parts, I think to myself, drinking from my cupped hands. The underground streams are never too warm, never too cold. They move through the red earth with the speed of mustangs, but despite this are somehow stagnant. The water is tangy with iron. When I dry my hands on my jeans, I half anticipate the red of bloodstains. Above me, every star in the night sky is burning, surrounded by half-visible companion stars seen only in the dark of the desert, against the not-seen-but-felt glow of the Milky Way. Stars, textbooks would tell you, are unfathomably hot. And in their own realm they are, but here upon Earth, they shine cold as ice, glint like the iron point of the pick. I have thought about taking an ice pick to Isaac’s temple. He is still deep asleep when I return to the pickup. The engine turns over, and we continue down the bare, silent road. I am grateful that the headlights did not give out as they threatened to do in Anapac. The moon is new, my car is old. The chill of the constellations does little to illuminate the brave and suicidal wildlife making their late night crossings. It is now well past midnight. The air no longer smells of agave nectar and far-blooming wildflowers, but coalesces into cold itself, a dry, raw sensation in my lungs. The sandal weavers have a psychopomp in the desert. His job is a necessary one not unlike a patrolman or a divine civil servant. By a burnt-out telephone pole, three brown vultures hold forum around the body of a dead fox. The headlight lingers on the scavengers for no more than an instant. I have a great respect for these birds, stewards of the sands. In the flash of light, they appear as a photograph, three noble creatures about to take wing. I swerve just in time, preventing

them from meeting the same fate as their fox friend. My mother was terribly nightblind when she was alive. What I’m really hoping to see, what Hunter and Bucky told me to look out for, are desert quails. Bucky, the younger one, informed me in a very serious tone that while quails look like grouses, they are rather gamey and not so good to eat. Sometimes they travel at the side of the road, between the cracked asphalt and the dry desert buckwheat, in a caravan of ten or twelve, little pilgrims on their way to the holy land. The Museum of Northern Cholla Valley possesses one thousand three hundred and fifteen baskets and basket-like woven objects, approximately fifty of which were purchased legitimately. The gray haired woman had a purple lanyard clipped to her trousers, from which she produced a ring of keys. “These baskets,” she explained, unlocking a great glass cabinet, “are the smallest in the collection—not woven to serve any real purpose, more for showing off.” She gestured to a vessel in the shape of a squat tomato, about the size of a chicken egg. “Basket weaving was a social thing, remember; women would be working on a piece for hours, days, even weeks.” She noticed the one I was examining. “That’s one of the newer pieces, made by an artist down in Donesa. If you look on the inside, you can see the pattern better.” “Butterflies?” “Or moths. She made the beaded ones on the lower shelf, as well. Her name is—gosh, what is it, Marion Alfonse?” In the corner of my eye, I saw Isaac fixed on something with his monomaniacal glare, deaf to my conversation with the guide.

I turned my attention back to the cabinet. “Christ, how were these made?” Six yellow-and-black baskets, each smaller than the last, the first as wide as a cherry and the sixth no larger than a

hummingbird’s white egg. Woven from fine tan leaves, its weft was as smooth and uniform as any of the ornamented bridalgift baskets hanging on the far wall. The woman smiled to herself, recognizing this part of the script. “Some young woman with incredibly thin fingers. And a competitive streak. Most of these would have been made as a sort of contest.” She stepped to the side. “Look closer.” I stood in the spot she left vacant, pressing my face to the cabinet window. There, on the inside of the basket, I saw it. “Arrows?” “Yessir. Even on a piece the size of my pinky finger, she managed a pattern.” “I can’t imagine.” “Me either.” She sighed. “She’s long dead. Those’re from over a century ago, bought by the museum when it first opened.” A frown crept onto the woman’s jaw as she shut the cabinet. She spoke softly. “I’d like to meet her, though.” I turned to look at Isaac. The sun was high above us, shining in through the skylight and onto the cherrywood floor. Though the museum was no larger than a cabin, something about its architecture made it seem much taller than it actually was. “Shall we head along?” He did not appear to have heard me. “Izzie, let’s move along.” His brow was taught, jaw was set. In the heat of the afternoon, a bead of perspiration had broken on his forehead. I stood perpendicular to him. Following his gaze, my eyes settled on a particular object much like its neighbors, save one characteristic. It was no larger nor smaller than the head-sized pieces to its right and left and did not vary from their rounded, squat shape. But its form was obscured by the adornment of perhaps two hundred dark feathers jutting out between the tightly woven beargrass stitches.

“Quail topknots,” he murmured. In the gift shop, which occupied half the building and seemed to be its true purpose, I bought a beaded owl charm and a women’s teeshirt that read I Left My Heart at Cholla Springs. At the register I picked up a postcard photo of the Desert Maiden rock formation. The postcard I would send to Damien, instructing him to go fuck himself, and I thought the shirt might look nice on Isaac. Or, if need be, I could strangle him with it or use it to wipe up blood. I pull the car over to let a troop of coyotes cross, and finish the scant handful of salted peanuts rattling in the tin can. I have a feeling I’ve overshot Sidner by now. The desert’s lack of landmarks always leaves my head spinning. It’s strange how opaque the rust red bluffs are. What should be a god’s trailblazes upon the land are no help at all in distinguishing mile one-hundred-fifty-two from mile three-hundred-ninety. The coyotes haven’t moved. They’re sitting in the road, staring at me with the intent to commit insurance fraud. The horn doesn’t work, so I unclip my belt and step out of the Landeater. I can feel the ozone-scented night air build up in my sinuses. “Scram,” I tell the coyotes. The largest one turns to me and bares his teeth. It looks like a yawn—he’s no larger than a beagle, and while I would be worried if I were a housecat, I’m not intimidated in the slightest. “Shoo.” I approach them slowly, flapping my arms in front of me. Languidly, the pack rise to their feet, and, tossing me a nonplussed look, meander across the roadway, their rat tails swinging in annoyance. I’m almost sad to see them go. I’ve interrupted something, ruined a coyote-family vacation. I watch them slip into the underbrush, the last glimpse of beige disappearing behind a tuft of slipbush. I stand in the night. The slipbush grows in a long line, each plume like a stepping stone. Casting a final glance to the

truck, Isaac is slumped back in his seat. Beatific. It’s looking more and more likely that we’ll be sleeping in the Landeater again. I need to clear my head. I take a step toward the slipbush, then another. The chaparral grows low here, and I follow its path a hundred yards off the road. Here, away from the car, the sky is a river of silver lights. I try to remember the guide stars I learned in the army, but all I come up with are constellations. The plow, the maiden, the little fox are shining bright above me. Every culture, from the basket-weavers to the red-faced gas station attendants to my brown-eyed great grandparents who raised olive trees and okra, have looked to the stars and watched their stories playing out. Someone is watching me. He’s standing to my left, perhaps fifty paces back. Now that my eyes have adjusted, I can see his form dark against the celestial urn-bearer. Steeling myself, I move to face him. “Who’s there?” I call out, shattering the porcelain stillness. “Who?” he echoes. The man is tall and lanky, a scarecrow shadow. I take a step toward him. “Where are we?” “Who?” Two more steps. He isn’t moving, save a jostle of his

head.

“I said, where are we?” “Who? Who?” Something compels me closer. Dry summerweed crunches under my boots, its thickly sweet sap protesting. In the constellations’ glow, my bare arms shine silver. Somewhere, a dozen coyotes are watching this play out. The vultures have alighted on a nearby felled yucca palm. They smell death, and will fight the coyotes for the first cut. I think of Isaac, dead

to the world, and of my mother, dead in the ground. After thirty-two years, this is how it all ends, under a moonless sky, twenty thousand leagues from anything. I take a step forward. Lightning strikes. There, on the saguaro’s highest bow, perches the psychopomp, his yellow eyes wide and his claws glinting with starlight. “Hoo,” he says. And with that, he takes silent wing, rising, vanishing into the desert night.