“Sounds like our Hank,” the tiger said. “One time we were up in the Sierras and a lightning storm struck, and I turned around and there was Hank climbing a tall tree—I said what the hell are you doing? and he said he wanted to get a better look.”
Said the rooster, “One time we went to Yosemite and climbed to the top of Yosemite Falls, and Hank, he walked right out knee deep to where he could look over the edge! Three thousand feet down!”
“Hey,” Hank said, “how else you gonna see it?”
They laughed at him.
“It was October, I tell you, the water was low!”
“How about that time we were on top of that water tower on the Colorado and these crazies hauled up in a motor boat and ran up the tower and dove off into the river—must have been fifty or sixty feet! And soon as they were finished Hank just leaned out over, and kept on leaning till he dove in too! Sixty feet!”
“I woulda done it before,” Coyote said, “but it didn’t occur to me till I saw those guys do it.”
The rooster crowed with laughter. “Once we were riding a ski lift at Big Bear and Hank says to me Don’t this look like a great take-off point, Gabby? It’d be just like dropping in on a big wave, wouldn’t it? And before I could say no it wouldn’t be anything like dropping in on a big wave he had hopped out of the fucking ski lift, dropped and turned thirty feet through the air and hit the slope flying!”
“Actually, I cut my forehead on the front of my skis on that one,” Hank said. “Don’t know how.”
“What about the time you took Damaso climbing in Joshua Tree—”
“Oh, that was a mistake,” Coyote said. “He got freaked and came off when we were crossing Hairball Ledge, and fell so fast I had to grab him by his hair as he slid by. A hundred feet up and we’re hanging there by two fingertips and Damaso’s hair.”
“I feel comfortable again,” the eagle announced, head bobbing on the water’s surface. “Or at least safer.”
She floated over to the horse. Instantly Kevin felt a dizzying stallion’s rush of blood coursing through his side as hers touched him. Knees, whole thighs; she stayed there, pressed against him. The blood poured through him, spurting out of his heart in great booms, flushing out every capillary in his skin, so that he had to take in a big shivery breath to contain all the tingling. The power of the touch. Their shoulders brushed, and her newly emergent wet flesh felt as warm as the water. Steam caught the rose light from the TV screen. They were showing a close-up of Mars. The horse considered the idea of an orgasm through his side.
Oscar and Doris, frog and crow, were discussing the most dangerous things they had ever done, in a facetious style so that they spoke only of accidents. Getting caught under a bronze mold, flying with Ramona, wrestling the Vancouver Virgins, trying to rescue a college paper from a burning apartment…. Their claims for their own stupidity were matched only by their claims for the other’s. Hearing this from across the pool, the cat nudged the turtle and made a tiny gesture in their direction. The turtle shook his head, nodded with his round head toward the horse and the eagle. The cat shrugged.
“I think it’s time,” Coyote declared. “Isn’t Mars getting closer?”
“Should I turn up the sound?”
“NO.”
Flute and Chinese harp, and the wind in the trees, served them as soundtrack for humanity’s first touch of another planet. So often delayed, so often screwed up, the journey was finally coming to its end—which was also a beginning, of something none of them could see, exactly, though they all knew it was important. A whole world, a whole history, implied in a single image….
From orbit the expedition had dropped several robot landers, in Hellas Basin where they planned to touch down, and all of these robots were equipped with heat-seeking cameras, which were now trained on the manned lander as it descended. The directors of the TV program had any number of fine images to choose from, and often they split the screen to provide more than one. The view from the lander as Hellas, the biggest of all craters, got closer and more distinct, its floor a rock-strewn plain of reddish sand. Or the view from the ground, looking up into a dark pink sky, where there was an odd thing, a black dot in the middle of a white circle, growing larger. It resolved to the lander and its parachute, then bloomed with white light as retro-rockets fired. The view shifted to a shot from orbit, in super telephoto, the lander a white spot of thistledown, drifting onto a desert floor. Ah yes—images that would become part of history forever and ever, created in this very moment, in the knife-edge present that is all we ever inhabit. The TV seemed huge.
Coyote shaman started chanting again, and some of the other animals provided the purring background hum. Everything—the stars shivering overhead, the black leaves clicking in the black sky, the deep whoosh of the wind, the wet chuckle of water, the weird Chinese music, their voices, the taste of cactus, the extraordinary square of rich red color, over against the dark mass of the pavilion—all fused to a single whole, a unit of experience in which nothing could be removed. The turtle, pulling out of it for a moment, had to admire the shaman’s strange sense of ritual, of place. How better to be part of this moment, one of humanity’s greatest? Then the lander fell closer to the ground and their voices rose, they saw the sand on the desert floor kick up, as if in a wind like the one swirling their wet skin, and the turtle felt a surge of something he had almost forgotten. Grinning inside his mask, he howled and howled. They all were howling. The lander dropped lower, throwing out clouds and clouds of dust and red sand. They screamed at the stars as it touched down, jumping and cheering wildly. “Yaay! Yaay!”
There were people on Mars.
After that the action on screen returned to the business of astronauts and commentators. Hank ran to the cabin and came back with a couple of light beachballs that he threw in the pool. They batted the balls around in volleyball style, talked, drank, watched the continuing drama of the astronauts suiting up. “What will they say, you know, their first words?”
“If they say something stupid like on the moon, I’ll throw up.”
“How about, ‘Well, here we are.’”
“Home at last.”
“The Martians have landed.”
“Take me to your leader.”
“If we don’t turn the sound up we’ll never know.”
“That would be an odd thing to say.”
“We’ll find out tomorrow, leave it down. We’re doing better than they will anyway, you know astronauts.”
A ball in the middle of the pool rolled over slowly on the water, pushed seemingly by the steam that curled off the surface in lazy arabesques. Foggy yellow light. Images of raised arms, flexing shoulders, breasts and pecs, animal faces. They glowed in the dark, their bodies looked like translucent pink skins containing some sort of flame.
They sat in a circle, silent, resting, feeling the water flow over them, the wind course through them. Muscles relaxed to mush in the warmth, and minds followed. The eagle crossed the pool to sit by the horse again, moving slowly, in a sort of dream dance that threw up a wake of steam streamers. A sudden flurry of sycamore leaves spiraled down onto the pond, alighting it seemed just a fraction of an inch over the water on each side of the eagle as she turned and sat. Powerful torso twisting, revealing wide rangy shoulders, lats bulging out from ribs, flat chest. Glowing pinkly in the dark. One leaf perched on the eagle head.