A Phantom Herd

A PHANTOM HERD

  Lorraine Ray

  Copyright 2014 Lorraine Ray

  CHAPTER 1

  No sign of mashers, yet, and my trusty Big Chief tablet in front of me, I began by thinking about what first attracted our attention to the pale man and woman on a late spring day in 1962.

  The day turned out to be significant because my sister made up an important fib, one that I repeated and embellished later. The fib happened when Meredith claimed we owned a ranch and scads of cattle. It was important, the kind of whopper you need when you're a writer trying to give the reader something to hang on to, something that will interest them right from the start. That's called the hook. You need myths and lies to tantalize them, to hook them, but to get those lies, unfortunately, you have to meet scary people and do a lot of spooky things. Nobody tells you that. Nobody tells you how really scary the things you do will be. Like talking to weirdoes and folklorists, who are really, really dangerous people, and trying to give cowboy movie stars LSD and being threatened by nutty special collection librarians who tell you they have little knives and send you green plastic scorpions and promise to show you the surprise at the end of the Surprise Symphony. These are the forces of chaos in the herd of stories which the writer is tasked with corralling. A writer also has to keep track of their strays, stray stories, that is. A writer has to be good at roundups, and also avoid stampeding the reader with a herd of cowboy-inspired symbolism.

  The day of the big fib in 1962 begins with us crouched under a palo verde tree, a vantage point used to watch a pale lady flounce away from a big old shiny automobile. Every step that lady took led her away from the dirt road toward the place where we'd hidden ourselves. The way she was walking was crazy, though as I write that, I realize it was hard to tell precisely what made us think she was so nuts, because it involved a lot of things about her lumped together, and she was seen such a long time ago in an Arizona that has since vanished and which I can barely conjure up for you, though I desperately want to. Her craziness showed in the way her high heels jabbed the sand and sunk in, setting her white ankles wobbling, and in the sound of her la-de-da voice (who was she talking to and what was she saying anyway?), a voice that belonged on a yacht out in the Atlantic and not in our desert near the border with Mexico, and finally in the fact that she acted as though she owned the place. Yes, she owned Arizona shortly after leaving her car, which was being parked beside a boulder, and this business of the shiny automobile parking itself (the sun was so bright on the windshield that we couldn't see anyone sitting behind the wheel) seemed mysterious until we noticed the lady coaxing the driver to come out and join her using a big scooping motion of her arm, a white arm, all of her glowed like a hunk of cold alabaster.

  "Bring the camera, will you, sweetie?" said this crazy lady. "I want a photo here, in the cactuses. Come on. You know you promised me photos. I like the way it looks here."

  The driver eventually complied, shoving his door open and emerging from behind the windshield glare with a camera in his hand. I remembered watching the door teeter and swing and hearing it close with a dull, ghostly thud. When the man strolled around the back of the car, I noticed that being out in the desert in his business suit made him look nutty too, like a rumpled gray rock that had heaved itself out of a hill somewhere in upstate New York and was then crossing in front of a backdrop of nine thousand feet of lavender, pink and gray rocks, which was the Catalina Mountain Range seen through the hot and dusty atmosphere of an afternoon in early April.

  Pursuing the pale woman, zigzagging through the dense, towering saguaros and the smaller desert plants, this rumpled rock avoided a jungle of cholla cactus, what we then called jumping cactus, and lime-green and yellow palo verde trees, which were leafing out with tiny oval shaped leaves and blooming, pale yellow star-shaped blossoms, their branches humming with black bumble bees, wasps and ordinary honey bees. "What do you have in mind?" we heard the man ask, suspiciously. "I'm all for a little hike, but not that hill. Don't break another heel. Didn't those shoes cost you enough?"

  "Where are you?" he asked after she hadn't answered.

  He ducked his head under the branches of a tree. "Oh, there you are."

  "Why don't you wait for me?"

  "Where are we going?"

  At one enormous barrel cactus, which was at least five feet long and which had toppled over, the lady waited, evidently for the man to bring the camera. The cactus was sticking out of the sandy soil, at a low angle, slanted almost the same way that the buried prow of a boat might emerge from a beach. It was an eerie wreckage that served as a warning to humans.

  Not that this particular lady took any warning from it. While she stood there, the lady amused herself by playfully jabbing the fallen cactus in its side, in the green flesh where the barbs gapped a little, with the pointy toe of her high heel shoe!

  We were shocked to see anyone kicking one of our cactuses. There lay one of our gorgeous barrel cacti, dying, the roots were torn out of the soil, and you could see gravel and rocks gripped in the net of the roots as though it had made a last desperate attempt to stay upright, and this evil lady stood above it just kicking it for all it was worth. She was kicking it even though the thing was down, tilted on its side like some animal in distress. In fact the whole scene was worse even because the cactus had managed a final act of extraordinary beauty. During the prior August, before its downfall, I suppose, it must have bloomed, and now in the spring it wore a hat of bright yellow fruit, a sort of wreath of waxy ornaments, each fruit shaped like a teeny pineapple with a black straw crown. With all these pineapples on its tip, the big barrel cactus was a corpse decked out for its funeral in a straw party hat. Any ordinary human would have seen something poignant in this, but she kept right on kicking it. I tell you the lady was a monster.

  "Sweetie, I'm waiting," she wailed.

  I think the shock of seeing her doing that explains why we didn't leave right away. I don't think my older sister, Meredith, my older brother, Jack, or I had ever seen anything like that before, certainly not at the cactus monument; hurting anything there was illegal, not to mention immoral, and the monument rangers patrolled the dirt roads and scrutinized visitors with binoculars, or at least our teachers and our parents threatened us with those facts. While we could have climbed the hill and joined our parents, who were picnicking at a ramada, instead we kept watching, in horror and anger, these disreputable strangers abusing our desert.

  "The park ranger oughta come out here and arrest them," said Jack.

  "Yeah," agreed Meredith. "They're asking for it. Who do they think they are anyways?"

  An appropriate distance back (although to my way of thinking you might have had to travel a long way into Mexico to get far enough away from her) the man hiked up the fabric of his slacks at the knee and knelt down, not to pray over the body of the dying cactus as any decent person would have, but to make a thorough examination of the spot where his expensive trousers would come close to touching the ground when he set up his shots. After examining the ground, and with a distasteful look on his face, he used his thumb and forefinger as though he was about to play a game of marbles to flick away several palo verde beans, and they rattled to the side nervously like embarrassed old stagehands who had unintentionally interrupted a performance. I suppose he didn't want those things anywhere near him; he thought himself quite special, and he thought the beans were filthy. As soon as the beans were out of the way, he began setting up his shot. In those days, with that type of camera, it would have meant aligning the sliced images of the woman in the lens so that her torso and her head graphed onto her legs. His camera was one of those old Leica jobs in a brown leather cover. A pretty good camera.

  "Okey-dokey," he said finally to the woman. "Do something from a
bullfight, a whatever-you-call it, a veronica, or something, will you? The saguaros look great in the background and I've got a part of those purple mountains peeking out just above your left shoulder." His voice came from somewhere in New England; not from anywhere in the West. Yes, I'm certain he was a New Englander.

  Gathering handfuls of her wide skirt, the woman spread the turquoise squaw dress she wore, with its festival of silver and black rickrack running around like electrified railroad track. First she made butterfly wings beside her, while he took several shots, and then she spread the skirt at the side like a curtain behind the long-suffering cactus.

  "Whee! Whirly, whirly. How's this, sweetie?" she asked happily, stupidly, evilly.

  And I realize now that another crazy, weird thing about her was that squaw dress. Squaw dresses swirled through my childhood on the bodies of women, the big pleated skirts, running at the bottom with rickrack like electrified fences. In colors, they ranged from pink to brown, from mustard to turquoise. They had a mandarin neck with a modest slit, and rickrack ran down and up that slit, too. Squaw dresses rasped children like barbed wire. It was the metallic rickrack that did that and sometimes the starch in the skirts or the slips that women wore to push the skirt out. Squaw dresses had gone out of style by 1962, if they ever were in style, but I suppose tourists still bought them and wore them around the Old Pueblo. Or have I lost control of an aspect of my story?

  "How's this?" she called again to the man. She swirled the pleated fabric of her skirt in the air, in the face of the cactus, and across her body like a bullfighter's cape. She pouted her red lips, raised one penciled brow and posed, head on, and at profile. "They're going to love these at the club," she said. "I don't think anybody's been to Arizona. Not that I can remember. And on our honeymoon, too. That makes it extra special. Everybody's going to be positively green. They're back there now, in the snow, shoveling their cars out, aren't they, sweetie?"

  "Sure are, honey."

  "I can't wait to have our first dinner party together and show these slides."

  "Ah huh," he said.

  The man snapped pictures of her steadily, grudgingly, then eagerly as she grew more playful and pretended to be a big game hunter with one foot on top of the carcass of the downed cactus. "Good. Keep going. Love it. Zowie, kitten! You are something else. I don't think I can show these at the club. These are going to be strictly for private use."

  The big game hunter pose was the limit for us.

  "These are people from the East," whispered my big sister Meredith as this outrage was going on before our eyes, and as she spoke, her glasses, with their sparkles on the corners, twinkled at Jack and me, twinkled magically, as she imparted her whispery wisdom to us. "They're from Back East in our country, a part where we've never been, but it's a good thing, too, that we haven't. Look at them real good. How they act when they get out here in Arizona is something you really ought to see up close. It's real sickening. They don't have any respect for the desert."

  "Fabulous!" the man exclaimed. Something about what she was doing stimulated him.

  After throwing her head backwards several times, she contorted herself into a ridiculous pose and held it. Her lower back arched painfully, her chin stuck to her collarbone, and her face turned toward the camera with her breasts jutting out. It was hard to imagine how anyone could get themselves into that position, not to mention holding it. It was sort of a fifties glamor model shot, I guess. "Do I really look good? I don't think I do," the lady asked coyly fishing for a compliment. "I don't really have what it takes to make an impression. I could never be any good as a model."

  "Good? Baby, believe me, you're the cat's meow." He eagerly snapped another picture.

  "Prrrrrrrr," went the weird woman slashing her fingers out like a paw and pretending to lick the back of her hand and clean her face. He took photos as she froze while swiping one eye.

  This was one of the strangest performances we had ever seen. Our librarian mother certainly didn't behave like that.

  "Look at them carefully," Meredith continued, still whispering, and she had a lovely way of making it seem that you were important enough to hear some secret facts that she was privy to, "and you'll learn to know them when you see them and stay far, far away. You see their pale skin? It's terrible, isn't it? Scary skin. That's skin like a grub when you've dug it up from the ground with a stick. They're like grubs. All of them. You wouldn't ever want to touch skin like that, would you? It would be very bad if you did. Skin that white carries diseases. You wouldn't want to catch what they have, would you?" Jack and I shook our heads which was hard to do when you were four years old and squatting on your heels and it made my head dizzy and I had to put my fingertips down on the layer of old palo verde beans underneath me. "There's only one way to get skin like that and that's if you ever go back East and live. So whatever you do, don't do that. You see the way they will treat our cactus? That's the way they always are when they're on vacation out here. They don't like our stuff. They don't really like the desert at all. The only reason they come here is to go back and brag to everyone about how much better it is in New York. They only like their own place, but we're only supposed to like theirs. We have to read about their maple trees and their lobsters and their mansions and know everything about them in school but we can't read anything about our desert 'cause it's not worth anything to them. These people control everything you read, practically. All the school books come from there. All the books come from there. All from the same place. They tell us what we have to think. Look at them. They're just plain old dumbos."

  I suppose seeing an Eastern lady kicking one of our cactuses did feed Meredith's prejudice against the East Coast; she felt we were the victim of a grand conspiracy against the West. Truthfully, we were denied the ability to educate ourselves about our local environment; there was not a single book about the Southwest in our school library, and almost all the books were published in the East. But it was Meredith who cultivated this visceral, negative reaction to Easterners; not me.

  "They're a bunch of creeps," whispered Jack back, pinching the seam of his baggy jeans. "I wish I could push em outta Arizona. If I had a big hand, I would push em a long ways away from here."

  Now the crazy lady really began to perform, in fact, some of the ways she was arranging herself above the long prone cactus were coy, and others were downright suggestive, and the man loosened his collar. "You're making it pretty hot out here for me," he said with a laugh. "I guess I'll have get us back to the motel room and cool you down."

  "Yeah, baby, you'd better. You'd better take care of your baby dolly," and now she had descended to producing a very nasal baby talk, "Oodly woodly baby girly wants her scutum uptummy man to wuv her uppy good-good."

  Though the three of us couldn't then understand what she was suggesting by all her weird baby talk and peculiar poses above the cactus, these last coy photos would be useful to prove that squaw dresses were worn in the Old Pueblo in the sixties and I suppose you thought I was going to say the photos would prove that two ordinary adults, a male and a female, are capable of almost anything when out in the open and when they think no one's looking. Nobody would want to prove that, because everybody knows it's true. But maybe you think I mentioned her squaw dress because I now want to change what she wore, to change her into a light sheath dress, lifting the tabs and sliding the dress off and replacing it like a paper doll outfit. But did you notice that squaw dresses aren't the real issue? I suppose you understand that I am telling you about her squaw dress to avoid telling you something interesting about the art I'm making. Her squaw dress was not interesting, and it wasn't what happened next.

  "Isn't it gorgeous?" gasped the woman, suddenly speaking coldly, normally, and stepping away from the cactus and folding her arms on her chest. She was squinting at us, in our direction, I should say, because it wasn't clear yet whether she had seen the three of us where we were crouching under the hazy shadow of the palo verde or whether perhaps she had hea
rd Meredith when she was whispering her lengthy warning about New Englanders. Though the broken light and shadow from the branches above cast a complex camouflage, we were beginning to suspect that she knew we were crouching there, watching.

  "Oh, those lemony fruit! What lovely things!" the woman exclaimed. "Lovely, lovely. They're as yellow as newly blooming daffodil. I wish I could pack them up in a teeny tiny box and take them home with us."

  Besides being crazy and stupid-only stupid women and folklorists used teeny and tiny together-we now knew she was completely evil, pretending suddenly to have a respectful attitude toward the cactus that she'd kicked and stomped earlier. It was an act for our benefit. But I hope you aren't expecting these Easterners to become dangerous gangsters and go after us. There are several things about them that we already knew with confidence: they were Easterners; they were cruel and thoughtless, and therefore they were undoubtedly rich. They were crazy, stupid, rich people from the East who enjoyed kicking our cacti.

  The woman lifted her chin and her eyebrows together, indicating there was something interesting going on behind the man. She meant us.

  "What's wrong?" asked the man, pulling the camera away from his face and leaning it on his knee. "You blow hot and cold."

  "Ah hem," she said. She lifted her chin and eyebrows again. "Behind you."

  "Huh?"

  "There are some children. Hiding. Behind you," she said. The baby doll act was gone and she was angry.

  We understood her better than the man and had already begun concealing ourselves in some brittle weeds that were growing at the side of the palo verde trunk, but to do that, because the branches under a palo verde are so low, we couldn't stand but had to walk on our heels in a waddling fashion like a troop of ducks. But who was stupid there? During one of my shuffling waddles, a dried palo verde bean snapped under my foot.

  The man swung around, toward us, and then stood up. Using his hand as a sun visor, he scanned a larger palo verde, where we weren't, and a gravelly clearing beside us which was glowing with yellow desert marigold blooms, each held up to the sun on a long pale green stem. The bright flat heads bobbed above their fuzzy pale green bodies in a slight breeze as though to bow and scrape and say "it's not us, not us, not us." These blooms in their clearing had their backs against the steep red rocks of a hill. We had come down that hill on a path, walked into the clearing, and hidden ourselves under the small palo verde when the lady and the car first appeared.

  "Hello?" he said, walking slowly toward the clearing with his eyes searching vaguely everywhere for any sound or movement. All the buzzing bees made that difficult. His head kept zipping around at the noisy black blobs.

  "Hello?" he said again tentatively.

  I watched a stiff black beetle crawl out of some weedy gray grass near my feet. It fought to drag itself over one of the bent stalks which my foot had flattened. Its glossy body had specks of mica dust on the sides and the effort of pulling itself up made it shake like a drunken sailor.

  "Don't answer him," Meredith whispered to Jack and me. "Whatever you do don't answer. Just ignore him. He's trying to draw us out and get us to talk to them, but we're not gonna fall for it. They're evil, the two of them. Very, very evil. About the worst I've ever seen come to visit Arizona."

  "Where are you?" the man asked.

  "We can't let them get any information from us," Meredith whispered. She was full of fierce warnings that day. "Whatever happens, if we're captured by them, we have to remember to tell them nothing. Stay strong no matter what. What they want is information. They'll use it against us. Who knows what they're up to? No good for sure. They're some of the worst people I've ever seen, kicking a cactus like that. If they get holda any of us, there's no telling what they'll do. Remember, keep quiet. Don't tell em anything. We might have a chance if we stick together and be quiet."

  The man's head jerked around at the sound of a bumble bee droning its way, bumping and bashing along the sides of a rust-colored, lichen-splotched and peeling boulder. Then a cawing bird dove through some underbrush near the road, causing our pursuer to twist his head around several times and finally spot the three of us in front of the boulder crouching in weeds under the see-through bright green canopy of one of the smaller palo verde trees.

  "Oh, hello." His voice sounded raspy and unsure and he hurriedly fumbled to fit the leather cover over the camera as though he sensed that we thought they have been doing something despicable. "What were you doing?" he asked, both flustered and irritated, and I noticed, before he had time to fit the cover over it, that the dials and levers of his camera were like the legs and eyes of a horrid, prying insect.

  "Hello?" said the man again.

  Their usual buzz was the bees' nonplussed reply.

  The man stood with his hands on his hips. "We can see you, you know. We know you're there. Why don't you come out?"

  "Yes," said the woman, more bluntly, stepping closer to where we were hidden, "come out of there now. Come out from where you are hiding. You aren't fooling anyone by staying there. You're being silly." Her steps toward us frightened a young whiptail lizard and it shot from the shade beside a stick to the shade of a pincushion cactus. The lizard froze there with its small bright eyes glowing like tiny stars.

  We waddled back further in the weeds, though there were spider webs dangling from the tree limbs and one sharp green shoot skewered my arm and left a red scratch and another poked my head and lifted a section of my blonde hair straight off my scalp.

  "Where did you come from? How did you get here? Where are your parents? Are they parked near?" said the man, now crashing through the marigolds and the bees toward us. I wondered what was going to happen if he reached us, if he was planning to impose a punishment on us. At the drip line outside the palo verde tree's canopy, he stood, then suddenly slid around a small green patch of jumping cactus. Too late, we realized they planned to flush us out and corner us in the marigold patch.

  "Were you spying on us?" asked the lady. Our faces turned toward her.

  "I asked where you came from," said the man, crashing in at us from another direction. We turned our faces toward him. "You should answer adults when they ask you questions," he continued, stooping under the branches and snapping them off in front of him.

  Then she stepped in to help herd us out.

  "Answer him," she barked.

  The way the two of them questioned us reminded me of a Nazi interrogation scene from a bad World War II movie. We swung our heads around and discovered her coming in at us too. From our low angle near the ground she seemed to be nothing but a big triangular turquoise squaw dress skirt, stiff, pleated, edged with black and yellow rick rack, sweeping dangerously near us. In my opinion, repugnant was the best description of squaw dresses.

  Meanwhile, the man had come closer and suddenly he lunged forward and we were forced to fly out from under the canopy or be caught.

  "Go, go," said Meredith, pushing Jack. "Get out ahead of them. Run. Get!" We fought our way through the sharp branches and bees, shoving and wriggling out to the marigold-filled clearing.

  All around us the heads of the brilliant yellow flowers bobbed dumbly in the breeze. Which way could we run? I touched the sweaty back of Meredith's shirt in a panic to send her somewhere so that I could follow. Not only was I afraid of these people, but I hated bees. Before Meredith could decide where we could go, the woman blocked the route past the tree. Then the man stumbled out between us and the boulder, our only other way out. They had trapped us in the clearing.

  The moment we stood still, any bees we had disturbed returned to their flowers; busy with their work, they never noticed our conflict.

  The man shot a quick glance at our clothes-my brother's dusty, baggy jeans, my shrunken top of phony red, white and blue bandana cloth with a zip pocket in the front and mismatched green shorts, and the worn, puckered face of Mickey Mantle on my sister's T-shirt. I was conscious for the first time in my life that we wore the clothes of a lower class, that
something about what we wore was not quite right. I had always thought before that we were just right, that the age and fit of our clothes suited us, but something about this encounter took away my confidence. I was ashamed.

  "When an adult asks a question you should answer it. I want to know where you came from," said the man peevishly. "And why were you spying on us?"

  "We weren't spying on you," replied Meredith coolly. A surge of pride coursed through my body. To think that my own sister was so brave as to speak back at these people, these scary, belligerent adults, adults from the East, who we didn't know and who were challenging us and cornering us. I stared at her open mouthed. She was nine years old and she was my hero.

  "Nobody was even looking at you," Meredith continued calmly. "We came over here from our big old ranch," she said lying loudly and with a great deal of boastful pride. She paused for a moment; I suspect now that she was thinking up a name. "It's called the Bar X Circle 9 Supremo Rancherito by most people, but we just call it the Circle 9 for short. We got about 129,000 head of prime cattle grazing out here in the old Rinconerones. What with the valleys and the mountain tops there's plenty of room for em. But I guess you didn't know that. You're pretty much surrounded by our cattle out here, but don't be scared, they's harmless. We just left the old chuckwagon over that there hill you see behind us, but it's bout time we moseyed back to it. We mightta left the campfire burning and somebody oughtta see to that pretty doggone soon because something like the beans might be burning up and burnt up beans stink, I hate em like a curse, dagnabbit, and you can't be too careful with fire it might just burn down the old chuckwagon, doggone it, and then we'd be in a pickle..."

  Imagine, I thought, I owned about 129,000 head of prime cattle! It was as though, through her words to the man and woman, Meredith had painted our herd on the side of a cave, shown it to me, a sketchy horde of cattle grazing or running, tossing their heads, as shadows and dust. That was something to note. Something of might and purpose. And here I was thinking I was just an ordinary kid living in a lousy tract home without much furniture and, as I had then realized because of my encounter with these terrible people, wearing shoddy clothes. I was astonished at this information, our vast secret wealth, which was being revealed to me for the first time, at least it was the first time I had been conscious of ever hearing it. Maybe people had been talking about it all along, and I hadn't been listening properly? I would have to review carefully a lot of conversations that took place around me. Doesn't a writer have to listen properly, even if she's going to lie about what she's hearing later? How can you lie effectively if you don't know the truth? But it was hard to believe what Meredith said, though I figured it had to be true. To me at that time she stood as an absolute authority figure, the person you asked about anything in the world, because she would have worked out the answer already, concisely. She spoke with confidence and calm about anything in the world about which I needed information and her self-assurance was contagious; it was the kinda cool that infected kids. Well, weak little kids like me.

  And I had never caught her in a lie before. What would make me suspect she was lying to the pale woman and man? And as you'll see, Jack had seemed ready to chime right in, to know all about it himself?

  But why hadn't she ever told me that we owned a ranch and a lot of cows? That was the kind of information I needed. I always seemed to be out of the loop. Why were we trapped living in our lousy house and not our fabulous rancherito? What was its name again? I'd already forgotten! Did some mysterious, romantic fact that I was unaware of keep us forever from fulfilling our destiny, from claiming our fantastic inheritance?

  It was a marvelous myth, the ranch story Meredith had spun. It made us important, and powerful. In it, I was part of an influential family, part of the authority over 129,000 head of cattle, with a supremo rancho and all the trappings, cowboy hands, branding irons, chuckwagon even, yes, Meredith had said that. I wanted to keep the myth, the lie, to remember it, and keep it.

  Meredith tried to make a move around our interlocutor, but he blocked her path. "Stay here," he said, studying her like a toxic spill.

  Meredith smiled, a squinty smile that wrinkled her nose and pulled her lip up showing the gap between her front teeth. She shoved the frame of her glasses up her nose and behind the glass you could see her gray eyes which were wise, wild, and skeptical. Her brown hair was curly and cut short. It sprung off her face at the sides, and an important lock of it lifted off her head at her brow, a bit like the curly hair on a calf that the mother cow licks. She liked to call herself 'Bill,' but the sparkling corners of her cat glasses gave away her sex every time.

  "You're lying," said the woman. She narrowed her eyes at us and stood with her arms crossed on her chest. "You don't live on any such ranch. You're a big liar. Why are you going around like fools telling people you meet utter nonsense like that? Anyone can see you aren't living on a ranch. And there aren't any chuckwagons anymore, for your information. They got rid of those about fifty years ago. Any fool knows that. You sound like a bad television script. Gunsmoke or Rawhide or that malarkey that's on television every night." She was touching a raw nerve there; those were our favorite shows. To block even more of our escape, she stepped to a place beside the man. Her voice betrayed the fact that she was frustrated to feel her temper rising over such an insignificant encounter with three poor little messy kids.

  "We do so live on a big old ranch," said my brother Jack suddenly. "It's the hugest anywhere around these parts. Everybody knows our ranch. Everybody who's from here. Our cattle brand is famous. We call our old station wagon a chuckwagon, that's all. I guess you don't know everything."

  "You're lying. There aren't any ranches out here," the man pointed out. "This happens to be a national monument. No one can live within miles of this road. Tell us where your parents are. I want you to take me to them."

  It was hard for us to keep the shock off our faces when he said that. Now we knew we were really going to be in for it, if we didn't get away from these crazy pale tourists. Our parents never took our side if an adult accused us of anything, no matter how absurd the accusation was. These adults weren't going to let up. The fact was we actual hadn't done anything wrong, unless you consider blundering into a private moment between two adults a crime, which apparently they did. They were going to demand to see our parents. Because we'd watched them being jerks!

  "We do so live on a big old ranch, but it's not real nearby," said Jack obstinately. "You don't know nothing about nothing out here. You can't know about it because you aren't from here, no how, so you never know nothing about anything that's here. You can't know stuff cause you aren't from here. Anybody knows that."

  While Jack talked, using his usual funny string of negatives (nothing, no how and never) and it seemed to me that he might be making sense to the adults, although in fact he was talking in nervous circles about what people ought to know, Meredith gave me the eye-the significant eye, a sort of peculiar twitchy wink she had in her lazy eye-she'd had to have an operation on that eye that kept going out and Jack was going to have to have the same operation-which meant we were going to have to skedaddle, make a break for it and head for the rocks. As I said before, over the rocky hill at our backs our parents were picnicking under a ramada. We'd climbed the rocks, though we had been told not to, and had been watching these people joke around with and photograph the dying barrel cactus, but we'd had enough. Meredith knew the scenic road this man and woman had driven on looped around several more hills before it reached the other side of this hill. With any luck, the man, though he was angry, wouldn't get in the car and try to follow us and neither of them would feel like climbing the hill, which was steep and covered with cactus.

  "Listen, don't get smart mouthed with me," said the man. "Children who disrespect adults need to be brought into line. That's what I think. And the three of you were spying on us. I caught you doing that. There's nothing I hate more than sneaky kids. They always need to learn a lesson. Bu
t liars, children who make up stories, are probably the worst. They are going to grow up to be a bunch of terrible Americans who will ruin this great country..."

  "Run!" Meredith commanded. Simultaneous to her giving us this order, her plump waist twisted and she swung around. Her dark blue Keds sneakers shot sand at me as she fled clumsily toward the back of the boulder.

  "Up jumped the devil!" shrieked Jack at the startled man and woman and he ran away, too, following Meredith. This was a favorite saying of his, which did not have any particular meaning, but he always delivered it well. It startled many people because he shouted it without warning.

  The stunned man's hand clamped down onto my shoulder; I was the only one left near him. Luckily, I was four years old and therefore I didn't happen to have much of a shoulder yet.

  "Now you! I have you," he said victoriously.

  But I dropped down quickly and wriggled my teeny shoulder free. He hadn't figured on such a small shoulder, you see, and it was easy for me to drop it away from him. I did it rather well and was able to scramble away from the horrid Easterners and scamper behind the boulder to a narrow opening Meredith must have seen on our way down the rocks earlier. Meredith was running up the trail we'd come down, moving wildly, her arms pumping, her legs twisting, and her shoes slapping the rocks and dirt, raising puffs of smoky dust. In the shadowy gap behind the boulder, we cried "hurry, hurry, hurry" to one another and squeezed through desperately.

  "Hey, hey. Hey. Come back!" shouted the man and it sounded as though he were right behind us, about to grab somebody from behind. "I was talking to you. You kids! You should stay when adults are talking to you. I want you to take us to your parents. Come back here, now. I want your parents to know what their children are doing. You don't get away that easily. I'm going to tell your parents a thing or two."

  Boy, that was not what we wanted.

  Meredith found more of the faint path up the hill on the other side of the boulder and Jack and I followed her somehow, though we were spending most of our time craning and cringing to see who was coming behind us. We doubted the woman with the wobbly ankles would chase us, but the man might.

  Rocks, rocks, we ran up into the hot rocks and the cacti. Hands on the rocks, hands off the cacti. Hands on the rocks, hands off the cacti. Partway up the path, I started to turn around again.

  "Hey, hey! You kids!" the man yelled. "Lying will get you nowhere. Your plot is stupid. You've forgotten the hook of your novel. I'm going to have to-"

  "See you in the funny pages!" Jack shouted back at the man.

  "Keep running," Meredith extolled us, "Keep going up. Don't look back until we've reached the top. Don't stop. Just look ahead. Just go, go! We're getting out of here, darn him, and he's not gonna get us. We're gonna get free of them. They aren't even following us. They can't follow us. They don't know where we're going. They're a coupla dummies! Don't look back!" Meredith's chubby figure ordered from above. She was gasping and Jack was already wheezing. Real bad asthma, that was what Jack had. I felt the shadows darken and the ground lighten and my head pound, but I kept going, I kept lifting my knees and finding a new place where I could exactly fit my foot. The process of fitting my foot brought me up the steep, rocky hill.

  Near the summit, I braved a second glance backward. There stood the angry man and the crazy woman in the squaw dress, now only a squashed turquoise dot with a puny pink head on it, but her la-de-da voice carried in the dry desert air and I think I heard her say, "Look at that! Those kids can run straight up into the rocks. I'll be damned, John. They're running straight up and over the top of those sharp rocks and all those cactuses."

  Up, up, up to the summit of the rocky, saguaro-studded, Arizona hill.