A Phantom Herd

"And hurry before this gall darn rain sets in..." Mother said later that winter, ducking her head and leaning over toward the window beside her in order to peer at the gathering clouds which were directly above our station wagon as it skirted the edge of the Cactus Monument. "I've lived in the Midwest and I tell you I've got a feeling that this is not any ordinary storm."

  "I'm driving as fast as I can, as fast as a reasonable person ought to on a poorly graded dirt road," said Father irritably. He hunched over the steering wheel and squinted through the blue haze of smoke around his head, drifting from his own cigarette in the open car ashtray.

  "I meant," began Mother, "for the children to hurry and find one. I wasn't talking about you driving faster. They need to keep looking out the window, and not get distracted, if they really want one of their own. If they want one today." She was pretending it was us, the children, who wanted to become the proud owners of the dead saguaro skeleton. The idea was absurd, because she was the one who had organized the drive, filled her own thermos full of hot coffee, and tried to whip up in us the enthusiasm for this search saying that it was us who wanted our very own saguaro skeleton, wanted one sitting up against the patio wall in the corner of the backyard as a somber gray memento from 1962. We were terrified by the notion of what might come out of one of them; we knew perfectly well that they were full of tarantulas, scorpions, spiders, snakes and lizards. Hadn't she told us that a hundred times? Hadn't she warned us to stay well back from them? To keep our hands away from them? To shun them in every way possible? Now she was pretending we wanted one for a patio decoration.

  "I certainly wasn't telling you that you ought to speed up," she went on to Father. "That would be very dangerous out here. These dirt roads in the country are so frightening. Of course you shouldn't speed. Why the very thought of speeding terrifies me. All you have to do is hit the soft shoulder at the right angle and speed, and the whole car would flip suddenly onto its roof. It's happened to so many sports cars that I've read about in the papers. Just racing along until they hit a soft shoulder and flipped. Tragic? MGs and such. Sports cars. Well, I should say. People have been completely decapitated. On a holiday in the desert and their car flips right over on the roof. Off with their heads. Anyway, I don't want you to hurry. It's cold, though. The clouds are very dark. Darker than Billy-be darned. I wonder?"

  "You're wearing sunglasses!" Meredith protested.

  We all laughed loudly and long.

  "Oh yes, so I am," said Mother humorously. She raised her glasses to sit atop her head scarf. "No, it's still dark. I was right. The clouds are looking the way they do before... I'm worried that it might not be rain, but snow that's coming. I've seen clouds like this in Indiana. Worrying clouds," she added as an afterthought. She fussed with the knot at her throat. She wore a red and yellowy white paisley wool scarf on her head and a green car coat, a short coat of fuzzy lime green with silky lime green lining and bulgy pockets full of cough drops and bobby pins and tissues.

  "Snow! Oh, I hope it's going to snow!" cried Meredith. "It just has to snow tonight!"

  "It's got to snow!" shouted Jack.

  "Stop your shouting!" scolded Mother.

  "I will not have people shouting in this car!" bellowed Father, "and furthermore anyone who continues shouting might find themselves left at the side of the road in the snow!"

  It was me, the one who hadn't shouted, who was most stricken and then actually crying over the image of someone left alone in the desert when it snowed. I was susceptible to romantic concepts, as though I were living earlier stages of human literary evolution then and was stuck in the Romantic era and feeling the stirring loneliness of a solitary figure, striving against the world, the poor striver, the poor lonely deserted striver, left alone in the desert while it snowed, and there would be something spooky about that world for anyone. Even the beautiful way the snow stuck to the side of saguaros and the gay sight of snow on the tops of prickly pear cactuses would be no comfort for the poor person left sitting alone like that. Give me no image of a prisoner locked up in Schloss Chillon, with the cold floor and the rings and the chains, etc. I could not manage to think of the person left alone at the side of the road in the desert in winter. There was something very spooky about the desert plants coated with snow, there was no spot where someone might find cover, no comforting trees. Also the snow would drive animals down from the mountains, mule deer, and I was so timid that deer frightened me, which would be followed by hungry and cold mountain lions, and those were too terrible to even contemplate. That was not to mention the cold the person left at the side of the road would have to endure. Yes, the sight would be beautiful, but horrid.

  "Who's making that noise?" demanded Father, knowing full well that it was me. "Who's whimpering like a noisy pup?"

  "Little Running Water," said Jack, referring to me. That was Meredith and Jack's favorite moniker for me.

  "Anyone who is crying," said Father, "had better stop that crying as best as they can before they find themselves left at the side of the road. Then they can make themselves very happy by crying alone in the snow."

  "There's one!" called my sister, pointing out her window. "A dead saguaro cactus!"

  "Oh, maybe," said Mother dubiously studying the patch of desert rubble in a ditch outside the car window and slightly ahead of us. The mountains were far in the distance, but black clouds had covered their tops and it certainly was snowing up on those slopes. "It has the right length, I guess. You kids have better eyesight. It's you kids that want it," she lied.

  "Well, I'll pull over and maybe you can decide that it isn't," said Father sarcastically. He swerved the station wagon off the dirt road to the bumpy shoulder all clods and ruts and small boulders and strips of flayed cactus skin.

  "No, it is not one," said Mother.

  "It's not," said Meredith.

  "It's just an old heap of weeds and trash," said Jack, looking out the window.

  "All right," said Father wearily.

  He pulled the car out onto the road again.

  "It's getting awfully dark and cold," he observed.

  "Oh, that's one," said Mother immediately. And it was.

  "God dammit," said Father, struggling to pull over again.

  Then follow the trail of our outrageous behavior, our foray as grave robbers and find us moving in a line of diminishing height and wearing our thickest woolens toward the naked body of the thing. See us trudging around the trampled and rotting beds of prickly pear cactus, filled with bottles and trash, the pack rat nests exposed. Brushing back the scratchy limbs of the creosote which look lacey but scrape as effectively as an old ladies lacey cuff, wands of scratchy leaves that break off in your hair. The floor of the desert was spongy from the recent rains; dried joints of cactus, cholla mostly, were scattered by birds looking for beetles hidden underneath. The black form of a Phainopeplia perched high on a saguaro like a miniature alert undertaker. The witch world of a thicket of mesquite beckoned from the edge of an arroyo and you could see the thick clutches of mistletoe in its branches, making a witch's broom. The sharp edge of a palo verde limb tore into my coat.

  The loud call and flapping wings of a Gila Woodpecker mocked us for our search among the dead.

  We gathered around the fallen saguaro like the mourners at a grave site. Years earlier this saguaro must have been the victim of a severe frost or a potent microbe (borne on the light breeze) or a sudden, blinding lightning strike. At first this fallen saguaro cactus, one of the majesties of our corner of the world, must have been nothing more than a tipped over candelabra, that retained its green color for months and lay upon the ground as though it was only resting like some stallion in its bed of straw, still powerful, still inspiring and almost as though, if it chose to, it could get up. Then, gradually, the giant would begin turning yellow at the tips of its arms and slightly gray in the trunk where it touched the ground until, within a year, it is mostly yellow while inside it was a putrid pickle, rotting, attacked by fungus and mold, an sec
ret charnel house, eagerly explored by burrowing insects, fungi, geckos, and mold, undergoing years of decomposition, exposed to the elements like the naked body of a warrior by a vengeful enemy, and made food for the birds in the old blind (blind!) poet's favorite phrase, and this grand thing in the end when none of its green flesh remained on its bones was fated to be forced into a car by a family in search of a unique patio decoration.

  It now lay on the ground at our feet with all of its green skin rotted away and even the central guts gone.

  "It must have been a pretty big one," said Jack.

  "Six feet or more," said Father.

  After we had stood over the long dead thing that we had spotted from the road, Father ordered us to stand back. He planned to disinter it violently.

  Father grabbed the end of it which had a big knot and lifts it out of the weeds. He grabbed hold of the top and yanked it from its muddy bed where it had toppled, the long ribs of the skeleton splayed backwards like the gray fingers of ill old gentleman who delighted at the delivery of his first steaming bowl of broth, death being so narrowly escaped. Shaking it a few times, he dragged it aside from the place it has lain for so many years. We could see the hidden trails of bugs, spiders and lizards; the white grubs that had been sleeping peacefully in their chambers under the dead cactus writhed to see the light of day, even as dark as it is on an overcast winter afternoon.

  He dropped it once in the weeds, the yellow weeds serving as a cushion, but the drop still dislodged gravel, dirt, and spilling out more spiders. Walking, carefully, away. Then he dropped it another time, picking it up and pummeling it gently up and down in the weeds. A disoriented black beetle flopped out on its back and clawed itself upright frantically. Father shoved the dead saguaro to one side as we stood around watching and he began, with the low gray clouds spitting icy rain at us, he began to rock it back and forth in the brittle grass. He picked it up again and dragged it several feet with us following and then dropped it gently several more times.

  "That's right, that's good," said Mother, approving of the way he was guaranteeing that there was nothing left inside it. "That's exactly right. That's the way to do it. I'm glad it isn't too heavy for you. Be careful. Everyone be careful. We ought to have gloves. With this cold weather, though, I suppose nothing will come out too fast."

  She was like some horrid woman delighted at the fate of a noble advisory, chop up the prey, good, good. Then he picked it up for the last time and dragged it across the clearing. We followed him as he made his way around cactus piles and palo verde trees. Opening the station wagon tailgate, he thrust the thick knotted end of the poor thing in the bed of the wagon. It screeched against the floorboards as it slid in and it dropped a trail of gravel, brown mesquite beans, teeny yellow and gray leaves, and the shiny brown carcass of a beetle first down the floppy ribs and then onto the station wagon bed.

  And there stretched the dead thing, blubbering awfully, chattering its teeth, a smear of mud, pink on the dry edges and brown in the wetter parts on the floorboards and then up the tailgate showed where it had been dragged.

  "Got it up inside without breaking it. Goodness me, it's a large one, isn't it?" Mother said, admiring the corpse. "Up on the tailgate. That was it. Slid it in carefully. Well, well. We did it now. Are you kids finally happy? Will you stop asking for your own saguaro? Now this will be something. This will look interesting in the corner of our patio. What a good conversation piece. I can have people over and have them look at the patio wall. A very interesting form, indeed, and I was trained in art appreciation. I learned to appreciate form in nature."

  My father picked me up suddenly and hoisted me into the back of the station wagon. "Keep your eyes on that. And let us know if anything crawls out," he said.

  My mother, lingering at the tailgate, pinching together the neck of her blouse, peered over the top of her sunglasses at certain ominous crevices of the cactus skeleton, while Father closed the tailgate and whistled his way around to the front of the station wagon jiggling the key fob and expressing his fond wish to be home soon with a beer. "I wonder..." Mother said weakly, her voice trailing off with indecision.

  'I wonder' is a dangerous thing to say, but nothing dangerous is forever, certainly not wondering, and there is an end to that when the last thing we wonder about is finally revealed. The world may not be forever, and art, oh hell, art least of all. Yes, there is a way to escape art; it isn't a permanent disability, it's impermanent, stealing away, illusive, escaping, always slipping through your fingers.

  I sat fearfully on the wheel well across from the dead cactus, ready to discharge my duty to let out a very loud yelp if anything should start to crawl from it.

  But I did not want the job of watching that thing.

  Out of those dark crevices and cracks, the narrator, a talented teller of tales, could make almost anything creep, could make anything slither slowly, joint by joint, any alien, animal, snake or vapor. Tellers of tales are of such a disposition.

  The ribs, I noticed, which formed the skeleton of the cactus and kept it upright, curled backwards slightly. The root end of the saguaro formed a bulbous knot and the curling wood made a whorl on either side like empty eye sockets, like the single eye of a squid, or a horrible Cyclops' eye, which heroes had to poke out in order to make their escape from doom ridden caves, yes, I wanted to punch out that single threatening eye that watched me impassively from its position on the floorboards of the back of the station wagon. I had been charged with watching it, though I would have rather looked anywhere else but there, and that eye contemplated me with the wisdom and coldness of inanimate things. It seemed to project my death, happily. It saw through my confidence to my flaws and fears.

  Perhaps the job of a writer is to pay attention to cracks and crevices, like the one where the scorpion fled and the barrel cactus grew, to stare into the holes where the dark details of life germinate, for their fantastic potential to deliver the goods, the hook the reader needs. Yes, the meat of any story is in the teeniest cracks. This is the lurking substance like the Cocky Egg. The awful dawning future that tantalizes you into looking where you shouldn't, the dreadful yawn of the grave being the darkest place the mind tries ceaselessly to penetrate. You have to make friends with destiny no matter how scary and unfriendly it is, you have to embrace the material given you, and the frightening things that happen, the annoying people. The insistent people, who come in your life and seem to be stopping you from writing, are the people you find you must write about. Later.

  That day the skeleton of the saguaro cactus shivered on the floorboards of the station wagon. The long spines shook with the terror of being in our car. It was a naked and wretched thing pulled out of the desert the way it had been; we had violated it.

  "How's it back there?" said Jack. "Seen anything yet? Seen anything...crawling OUT!"

  "No," I replied.

  "Well then....up jumped the Devil!" He lunged violently in my direction, shouting his favorite exclamation in my ear, grinning a freakish face over the seat back. Lips drawn back like fangs. Fingers stuck from his head to make two devil prongs.

  "Quit it," I muttered miserably after my legs shot out and I caught my own arms and kept them from flailing wildly. "Quit trying to scare me or you're gonna get it."

  "Says who?" replied Jack. "You?"

  We were flying down the dirt roads of the saguaro monument. The skeleton of the great giant bounced in the back of the station wagon where I was sitting; the long ribs laying out wobbled as the wheels of the car fought to stay on the humped dirt road. Suddenly, my father's wild driving set up an intense vibration, the old gray thing seemed to be jittering itself to bits, and in the jumping shakes it began to slide. Caked mud dropped off it. Father spun the wheel and the whole skeleton slid across the back of the car, it began careening toward me slowly and in that time I opened my mouth and the true horror of what I was seeing flowed out of my mouth without any control of my mind.

  "Wha...ah...!" I began to scream
, with no control of my mouth, but with an overwhelming sense of horror and fear. Something could be coming out of the thing, something could be potentially living inside that old saguaro, for I had seen what was under it when my father turned the thing over and that horror house was not something I wanted to think of coming out at me, but, no, the thing inside, in the deepest center, could be much worse and no amount of running through my mind of the scene of us dropping and rolling the saguaro could convince me that everything inside there had agreed to come out. There might be a something-or-other which obstinately clung to the inside of the dead cactus and was looking out at me now, studying me, waiting for the opportunity to shock and appall me when it finally crawled out. Maybe whatever lived inside could still be there, could still be looking at me and waiting for me to shift my gaze to something outside the car and when I was preoccupied with the look of the storm clouds or of the weeds at the side of the road or was looking for the shimmery distant waterfalls in the lower ranges of the desert mountain, that would be when the thing would decide to take a crawl toward me. I didn't even have to be really near it to know that it would scare me out of my mind. It would drive me mad to see it. I knew it was watching me, waiting for an opportunity to start out toward me. I couldn't take the suspense any more.

  "What is that noise about?" says Mother, sharply. "What am I hearing back there? Something odd? Whimpering and whining, perhaps?"

  "She's just screaming her head off, but it's coming out all quiet," said my sister, who was watching me all the time. My mouth was open and the crying scream was coming out and tears were running out of the corners of my eyes.

  "What's back there to make her scream?" Mother asked urgently, turning around and lifting her sunglasses. "What's coming out of the cactus at her? Tell me now and we'll stop the car."

  "I can't stop the car," said Father. "Don't even ask me to stop. There is a truck right on my bumper and I am not stopping this car for anything."

  Jack looked around the back where I sat. "What is it?" he asked me. "What do you see?"

  He watched the dead saguaro skeleton for a moment.

  "There's nothing coming out," said my brother shrugging. "She's an idiot."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes. She's just opening her mouth and there isn't any noise coming out and there isn't anything causing it. There's nothing back here," Jack explained.

  "It's hysteria. Hysteria." And my mother became grim with the thought that as her last act of birthing she has given life to a hysterical child, one subject to great emotional swings, to fancies, to wild imaginings and vivid fears. This child of hers was not logical and lacked the intelligence necessary to snap herself out of deep feelings. She indulged herself in flights of fancy and did not come down out of them. Mother was a librarian who liked her imaginary tales, but knew how to keep them tamely on the shelf. She never let terror possess her completely. She never dissolved into actual tears.

  "There's nothing coming out. There's nothing happening. In her book, so far, there's nothing happening. She's lost track of the hook and lost the reader," said my brother in total disbelieve at my open mouthed, silent, crying. He stared at me up close to see if he could get me to blink. He put his head in front of mine which blocked the dreadful image of the cactus. He looked closely at me and said, "Up jumped the Devil." At last, with my brother's face totally covering the image of the cactus, I was able to close my mouth and my tears dried.

  In my mind there was everything about to happen, things crawling from the saguaro, indescribable horrors, creeping fiendish animals and small demons jumping and diving over the dried gray ribs of the cactus that were flopping and wobbling on the floorboards. The dark reaches of the cactus held frightening shadows, shades that took the shape of unimaginable humans and animals, which writhed and wiggled and beckoned me to join them in some fiendish rites or horrible antics. It was like that art of Hieronymus Bosch. This unknowable mass of things inside the cactus skeleton threatening to spill out the unnamed plenty of terrors; no village in Salem could have held worse ghosts and demons and witches than that cactus skeleton did for me. It was the embodiment of evil intentions, the home of manifold mischievous terror. Any witches familiar could have found itself a cozy home or dark retreat inside the long fingers of the fallen saguaro. The rattling fingers seemed to be the stretching digits of a witch, a witch working her magic over her boiling caldron, mixing up her horrible concoctions out of just the sorts of things that we'd seen crawling out from under the cactus. It seemed mad that my mother who was so worried about anything living coming into her own home, and always went into such terrors over the scorpion that nearly struck me, could put me in the bed of the station wagon with a skeletal cactus only four years after that happened. Where was the over-protective mother we knew and loved so well? Where was the lady who four months later would go on and on about the three of us climbing the hill at the Cactus Monument?