South of Elfrida (6 page)

In the no-man's land between sleep and wakefulness, voices speak languages I don't understand. Images of people I don't know flash by. It isn't the fault of the bed, I conclude toward morning; it was the damn moon. At home, I always hide from a full moon because if it spots me, it influences my sleep or dreams; I've always known it. Last night the full moon saw me all right—she was in full view and, daring fate, I stood before her.

Myrna makes Bloody Marys for breakfast, adds a spoonful of canned green chiles to the eggs as she scrambles them. “If Cochise hadn't run out of Mexican horses to steal or lived in another century, he would have laughed at us last night. God. The energy here is so confusing. You saw the local gals.”

I catch the toast and butter it. “Mmm. I thought they were down with it.”

Myrna says, “Down with it? They're posers. Doesn't matter how much turquoise you wear. They're just skimming the surface. They want something they've never had before, and this is what we do.”

“Who are they? Knitters?”

“Weight watchers. Collectors of photos of grandchildren. I couldn't get my Yay ha way ha's straight.” Myrna takes the plate of bacon from the microwave. “When I lived in the east, I took lessons from a Cree singer. The singing's syllabic, but you can tell the real from the fake. We were just wailing, making fools of ourselves.”

“It had a certain synergy.”

Myrna laughs.

Nibbling toast, parts of the dream come to mind. “I had a crazy stupid night. There was woman wearing a really strange hat. She had a message for you.”

Myrna cuts the crust off a piece of toast, tears the crust into pieces, and places them one at a time into her mouth.

“I think you'd call my dream a real honest-to-God New Age dream.”

Chewing slowly, Myrna raises her eyebrows.

“You don't think I'm capable of having a message dream?” No, actually, she doesn't, but I plow on. “You don't want to know about the hat?” Myrna loves hats; she'd had a good business designing hats.

“If you insist.”

“The hat was wide-brimmed, decorated with feathers.”

“You mean a hat from the Victorian era, with stuffed larks and warblers?”

“In my experience, in Arizona the birds would be grackles.”

Myrna gives me a look and tosses her hair over her shoulders.

“The woman was stately, tall, proud. She said you really want to make love to an Indian and maybe you loved an Indian in another life, she isn't sure.” I know I sound like a simplistic idiot. I tear up the last of my toast and imitate her and delicately place it piece by piece in my mouth.

Myrna suddenly becomes busy, brushing crumbs into her hand, spinning around the kitchen. I recognize that these are evasive moves on her part and wait, licking my fingers. She turns on the tap, adds detergent, looks over her shoulder at me. “Those women last night were packing. It's strange living out here. Usually they put their guns on the kitchen counter. Last night . . .”

Okay, so she wants to change the subject. I'm willing to humour her. “Guns? Come on.”

“Their husbands are mostly ex-military. Look around. It's lonely. What do we have, realistically? Some free-ranging cattle, houses acres apart, illegals walking through. The war on drugs has escalated the violence, brought in organized gangs. Eyes are everywhere.”

I think about eyes. A creamy mound of scrambled eggs calls out. I stab it with my fork. “Baby watched everything I did.”

Myrna collects her plate and the cooking pans and slides them into the sink. “Think of it this way. Baby was like the weather balloon near the border. It only looks like a weather balloon; it's really a spy camera, and now, in your case, it's gone.”

“Damn, I hate you.” Snatching the last piece of bacon, I open my mouth, snap my jaws.

Myrna plans to drive us into the Coronado National Forest, adjacent to the ranch, to the hideout used by Cochise. After the breakfast feast, we dress accordingly: long sleeves and lightweight pants that tuck into hiking boots. This hideout isn't the famous one, the stronghold on the east side, where the Chiricahua Apaches and their families eluded the
US
Cavalry for so long, she tells me as we pack a cooler with sandwiches, pasta salad, bottles of water, and wine into her
SUV
. “I'm taking you to the real hideout, the place the men lived, the warrior braves, when their freedom was lost and they knew it.” She heaves the trunk shut. “And I haven't forgotten your dream. I'm thinking about it.”

At the gate she punches in four numbers on the security box; we pass over a cattle grate, and she hops out to shut the gate. “One time I found hunters in here. In a nature sanctuary! They were wearing camouflage gear. Beer and rifles. They were not Border Patrol taking a break.”

I admire the way Myrna rants, as she always did, this time expressing incredulity that anyone would even think of trespassing into a nature sanctuary, much less do it.

Soon we enter the opening of a canyon where oaks, junipers, and manzanitas are watered by a creek. The mountains' flat breaks, like stacks of crispy bread, and the lichen on the granite that make the reddish rock appear pistachio green or like rinds of lemons are stunning. As we grind along a gravel road about as wide as a walking trail, I hold the Thermos of coffee away from my lap. My hair brushes my face, retreats, brushes, retreats; I like the wiry, overprocessed feel.

“Cochise was a Chiricahua Apache. The Chiricahua were different from the Apaches to the east. In the long run, retaliatory raids against the army were futile, but Cochise knew Doomsday was coming.” Myrna is in her anthropology professor mode, her first career. “The man was mythic in his capacity to vanish. You won't see the place until we practically fall into it.”

The morning blue of the sky shifts to greys that look heavy, weighed down; in Colorado I'd be thinking snow. The road is disintegrating into washboard; we bounce, and things rattle around in the back. I remove my sunglasses, place them on the seat. Myrna is still talking about Cochise, but I don't mind. My friend is obsessed, and there's that past life to consider.

Myrna says, “I do love it here, and I would like to stay. Sometimes, though, this solitude scares me. Then I decide that fear is necessary for an interesting life. Then I go so far as to think I wouldn't be apprehensive if I had a man around.”

“With your luck, you'd have to take care of him.” I speak reflexively, forgetting Myrna's second husband, who was great-looking but a gambler. It cost her a fortune to get out of that one.

The
SUV
veers as the right front tire hits a rock. “Shit,” she says.

“I didn't mean it that way. Oh, hell.”

“Mean what?”

When my skull knocks against the passenger window, she takes her foot off the pedal. “Sorry.”

I touch my temple, check for a lump, mull over an angry response, then consider one that's prim or even pitiful—I can go there—but laugh instead. “You are such a brat.”

We pass a standing pool of water where sycamore and sagebrush exchange black-throated sparrows, the birds made flighty by the car. I remember Baby's little brown eyes, his butt-wiggling when he snuggled in my arms. “Baby licked my chin but not my face.” I mention it as though the behaviour was a virtue. “He was cute.”

“You loved him. Case closed.”

Being the good friend that I am, I press my lips tightly together—Myrna can be such a pain—turn my mind back to wondering about precipitation and the sky and whether it snows in Arizona at five thousand feet altitude this far south and why, despite all Myrna's explanations, I don't know much about where I am, though I sense running all around me—rabbits, or quail, or something else in the deep canyons, chased by coyotes with narrow faces and piercing eyes.

“Damn.” Her voice makes me jump. “I missed the turn. We're too far south. I tell you, if I didn't know this place existed, I'd never find it.” The bottles clink in the cooler as she whips around.

I snort. “Well, it is a hideout.”

“I wish you'd take this seriously. I am leading you to a spiritual moment.”

In university we studied art history and fought the good fight in radical politics. We travelled in Eastern Europe before it was easy. Despite what I think about Myrna's attitude, one that borders on good-old-fashioned churchy rectitude trimmed with fur and feathers, the fact that we've know each other so long makes our friendship feel charmed.

“Here.” She brings the
SUV
to a skidding stop, flings open the door, and bats her hat at the cloud of dust. “Wear your hat and put those sunglasses back on. The light will ruin your eyes.”

I obey—“Whatever you say, oh leader”—and scramble out. She leads me along a crevice, so tight we turn sideways to slip through. I follow her as the crevice opens along a flank of rock, touching warm slabs as I pick my way upward through a winding, narrow canyon, low mesquite and grasses growing out of gravelly soil, until, as we climb to the right, a trail gradually appears and I find my feet stepping on flat rocks. I'm panting from exertion and take a moment to scan the width of the steps. “Cochise must have been tall.”

“Fast,” Myrna says. “Like wind.” Her silhouette is dramatic against the sky; her black hair catches the sun and for a moment looks ablaze. I'm about to applaud but she turns and bounds upward and I have to pick up my pace, keep my eyes on the toes of my heavy boots, footwear unlike anything Cochise would have worn. Then she extends her hand and tugs me around some brushwood. I can't see an entrance until she tells me to duck and pulls me inside.

“Wow.”

We stand listening to each other's breathing as we recover from the hike. The cave is bigger than I'd imagined it would be and smells cool and clean.

Myrna has been before, obviously, and, just as obviously, she has analyzed the three rooms. The one we're in must have been for sleeping, she says, because it's the most concealed and has no view. “The walls are polished, notice? As though men had nothing to do for long periods of time but chip rock, smooth it, and dream of the women left behind.”

Discreetly I roll my eyes.

In the second room, I lose my footing and Myrna catches me, murmuring, “You can float away if you're not grounded.” When I'm upright, she switches to tour-guide mode and swings her arms in a slow arc. “Don't you think this room would be perfect for supplies?” Again she reaches for my hand, this time to lead me to the entrance of a low passageway. “Keep your head down, eyes forward. I'll go first.” We trundle, one at a time, through the darkness and emerge into a space, a horizontal fissure in the rock, like a clamshell open to the sky.

The vastness of the plain below—stippled with dwarf trees and dusty green brush and the occasional ocotillo cactus—is so astonishing, I am speechless.

Myrna says, “You are safe here. You can see everything.” She moves to one side and places her arms around a standing rock. The rock is odd because it's about four feet tall, and looks as though it's grey and white, a piece of granite—wrong time, wrong place.

She gestures for my attention. “Notice the hollow at the top. This would be a grain-grinding rock. Years of grinding corn into meal. Makes me wonder if a woman lived here.” Now her mouth twitches. A glow seems to rise around her.

For a minute I stare hard at my friend, her features shyly veiled between the curtains of dark hair, before I get it, but I want her to be the one to say it. “And?”

She throws her head back with what I take to be some pride, as she displays her lovely throat and neck. She says, “Your dream suggests I was that woman, the woman who was not a wife. The woman who stayed for the warriors.”

“Aha.” I exhale the word as though I've triumphed. The lopsided grin on her face, a face that's seen a lot of years and a lot of sun, brings words to my lips. I hear myself say, “The Victorian dreamer, the collector of, well, she says they're priceless, the birds for her hats, thinks you're in love. She told me to tell you that you're in love.” I have no idea what I mean, but as soon as the words are out, they seem plausible.

Myrna bows, pressing her hands palm to palm, and then she giggles—it's uncommon and unsettling to hear Myrna giggle—and says coyly, “Am I?” Then she falls into what I can only think is a ceremonial rendering of what she feels based on what I've said. I watch like someone at a private performance, the performer herself self-conscious, aware that I'm watching. Myrna lowers her arms to her sides, drops her head, and stands perfectly still. The silence streams through my mind like stars pulsing in a desert night. The words don't belong to me; what do I know about desert stars? She says, “Yes, I am in love. Don't laugh. I'm in love with a person who lived in another life. When you love, you're not alone. I am not alone.” I notice the tiny spot at her crown where she was hit by a rock when she was a child.

I love the idea and want to follow her words all the way home. I, however, have no such feeling of being not alone; I feel like poorly made fabric about to unravel. My hands ache, miss sorting through textiles, intricately woven rugs, and cloth made almost entirely of beads, shells, and little pearls. I miss the markets, the bazaars, the noise and purposeful merriment of Malaysia.

“I want to live in these mountains,” Myrna says. “I do not want to leave here.” When she has held a few seconds of silence, she crosses her ankles and folds her body down to sit on the ledge. She rubs her hands along her upper arms as though to stop the shivers.

I sink into my own truth. What I want is not to sit on any ledge but stay as I am, hugging the wall. But if she's out there, I will be too. I take courage and lower myself on all fours, creep to the ledge, sit carefully, not letting my legs hang over as Myrna's are, and lean back on my arms. A hawk soars below us. “Redtail,” whispers Myrna.