We were riding along on a dirt road, the pure solitude like a chaperon between us.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t want to go to your village.”
There was no village in sight, nothing but a distant pile of low hills like rubble.
When we got to the edge of the pile of rubble, you could see that we were suddenly on the edge of a large canyon. The truck descended a bumpy dirt road that sloped gently into the mouth. The sky was turning rosy, and in spite of the dust the air was cool and smelled like water.
“My mother will want to meet you.”
You want to drink the last drop of wine in the cup. But if it spills, it spills. “What for?”
“Because she can help you.” Alonso raised his right arm aloft and pointed at the side of the cliff, where the canyon wall rounded to accommodate the bend in the stream. There was not much of a stream now, but later in the season, when the snows melted, the snows of yesteryear, perhaps the river would run.
I studied the side of the cliff, and then realized that what you took for an interesting rock formation was really a stack of pueblos.
“Cliff dwellers!” I was excited. The concept had always had charisma for me, like the Bay of Fundy.
“We are Pueblo People.”
After the truck was parked at the base of the main pueblo, we hopped out. Several people stood around the brace of ladders. Two Indian girls about my age were wearing bellbottomed jeans and smoking cigarettes. A couple of older men greeted Alonso in whatever the language was, the tone of voice and mock punch to the shoulder seeming familiar enough.
In response to Alonso’s nod, I followed him up the first two ladders and past a group of older women, who were slapping together tortillas and chit-chatting by the open fire. We crossed some roofs and then Alonso stopped before a doorway and motioned me inside. “You can sleep here,” he said. “You can wash down there.” He spun around and pointed back to the valley, where the trickle of the stream was a silver thread on a dusty tablecloth.
Then I was down there on the edge of the stream. The sun passed over the lip of the canyon wall and the sky bruised up like grapes.
I took off all my clothes except for the gris-gris around my neck. The water was warm against my skin and the brace of cottonwoods shielded me from anyone in the pueblos who might be looking down. The stream, which had appeared larger from above, was actually only a few feet across and shallow. When I sat down, the coarse sand was pleasantly rough.
But suddenly someone was standing there. You couldn’t see anyone but my vertebrae prickled, as if the air had become thinner.
“Who’s there?”
KEE-AWK! A huge bird winged out of the branches and took to the sky.
“Who’s there?”
BA-ROOG! An unseen animal cried out from the other bank, scuttling of stones.
I stood up and the water rolled like silk off my body.
Standing across from me was Alonso. He stretched his hand out toward me, I thought he was going to touch, but then he opened his palm and there was my gris-gris.
The air was dark all around us, as if it were an infusion of foreign, inky matter.
“That’s mine!”
He held it aloft, like a star. “Now it’s mine.”
“But—”
“Shhh!” He held his finger to his lips.
“But—”
“Ask my mother!” he cried, swinging to the left and pointing his arm. His body followed and so did mine and then suddenly we were back at the pueblos, only they felt different. The old same-but-not-the-same.
A woman stood by the campfire, if that’s what Indians call it, and her face was lit from below, like the witches in Macbeth. She threw something on the fire and it poofed up into colored clouds of smoke.
She muttered in whatever their language was, monotonous and guttural.
“She says you’re on a journey,” Alonso explained.
Then I realized I was still naked, and then I wasn’t entirely naked anymore—I was wearing black bikini panties. Great way to impress somebody’s mother, I thought, trying to cover my breasts in a casual way. The gris-gris was there again. Had it ever left?
The old lady shook her head, mumbling. She wasn’t all that old but the dignity imparted her in being foreign made her seem wiser and therefore older.
She flung her arms open wide, as if catching a beachball.
“What’s wrong?”
“Shhh,” said Alonso. “She’s receiving.”
“She wants to change me into an owl!” I screamed. The whole thing was so clear—my feet ran desperately but there was that sick feeling you get when you know you’re going nowhere, when the legs propel you forward but, it’s impossible and it happens anyway, you stay right where you are.
“No!” Alonso shouted, holding on to my bare arm. “Don’t run! Don’t run away!”
I was sweating hard and my mind screamed RED.
“The nineteen layers of the soul!” he shouted. “My mother wants to trade you for the juju!”
“What’s a juju?” I yelled, running harder, feet sinking in.
Bingo! I was awake. The bus was dark gray inside with all the different shades of gray representing many bodies sleeping in many postures.
A smoky headache, like a marijuana hangover, hovered on the edge of consumption. Also, my legs, and the edges along my inner thighs where they touched, throbbed slightly.
Alonso—then he wasn’t imaginary!—was still slouched down in his seat, hat shading his eyes from nothing.
Now, this was a dilly to record in my dream journal. Trying not to disturb my companion, I reached down into my duffel and rifled around until my hand closed on the familiar slick cover. I also pulled out my fountain pen with the tiny lightbulb.
Carefully, I printed:
Then my eyes got real heavy again.
Chapter Twenty-Three
1. The blue membrane
2. The hypnotic shell
3. Memory
4. Leather extremities
5. The fatal body
6. Red eyes
7. Interplanetary travel
8. Hair
9. Moving through the seven colors of the wind
10. Mathematics
11. The hysterical wall
12. Sex
13. The odor of trees
14. Walking as if on feathers
15. White noise
16. Owl
17. Serendipity