A Phantom Herd

"Hey," Meredith said suddenly, stopping the funny little hopping hitch she sometimes had when she walked and shooting out an arm to stop Jack when we got near a department store, "there's something really, really weird in that window over there." She pointed at a crowd pressing themselves closely to a large plate glass window on the eastern side of Rosefield's Department Store. Without waiting for Jack to respond she ran ahead to a spot right behind the crowd where she stood on tiptoes to catch a glimpse of what was in the window in front of the sea of adult bodies.

  Jack and I rushed to her side.

  "You know something," Jack began, "there's some old creepy guy in there doing something." He had found a vantage point under the elbow of a tall skinny man who was slowly unscrewing a small bluish bulb from the silver flash disk of his large, leather-bound camera.

  "Where? I can't see anything," I moaned. A wall of zippers and pleats, creases and tucks presented themselves to me. No bending or stretching would grant me the slightest glimpse of anything but a mass of adult posteriors.

  "What's he doing?" Meredith asked Jack.

  "Uh, I don't know, but he's kneeling over something," Jack reported.

  "We've got to get in there," said Meredith with a determination verging on obsession. "I'll bet he's doing something real neat-o."

  She began ramming her way to the front of the ogling adults; Jack and I traveled in her wake. We pushed our way past the ladies' purses, which were rather like store turnstiles, and wedged our bodies through gaps in the wool suits and linen slacks that were as steamy and as stinky in the desert's warm winter sun as any pasture of sheep or field of flax on a hot day in June. The tweed on one man's suit bristled with so many loose balls of various colored wool that he resembled a molting llama. The cloth seams on either side of a zipper placket at the back of the skirt of one large woman had turned out and the silver zipper writhed like a hideous centipede that had been partially stomped on and was trying to squirm away to die.

  We were rather amazed, when we had squashed our way around the various drab New England grubs, to see on the other side of the department store window, an armless female manikin in a cashmere twin-set and a tweed skirt, and underneath the spooky manikin an old Navajo man crouched on his knees on the stage-like platform. He leaned over a plateau of sand that had been carefully leveled and smoothed on a board.

  The Navajo gentleman who was on display in the window that day wore a long-sleeved black velvet shirt and white cotton trousers. A red sash adorned his waist and a smaller black sash cinched his hair at his nape into the shape of a bone or a bow tie. Another red sash crossed his forehead. A fat chain of heishi beads, the thickness and color of moth caterpillars, and separating to those lengths, was strung on cotton string and encircled his neck. Loose skin folds, coppery reds and golden bronze, trickled down under his chin like the maze of canyons in his high home. He had a sad, tight, thin lipped mouth and heavy turquoise earrings so weighty that they had pulled holes through the lobes. Deep gullies ran under each of his brown eyes and down the sides of his nose, these were tributaries to the canyons on his neck. His shoulders fell away quickly to his waist.

  A door behind him had been left partially ajar and when I peeked through it I could see an ordinary lady considering the purchase of underwear. For a while she puckered her lips in a silent pantomime and screwed up her eyes, then she began puffing out her cheeks; she flipped the band on one pair of underwear over several times, stretched the elastic on the leg and laid it down; she patted the underwear and checked the tag after carefully lifting her glasses, which were on a neck cord, and placing them on the end of her nose. She finally selected three pair, turning them over like leaves of delicate parchment and lifting them with the support of both hands; at the register she gave up her money reluctantly, counting the dollar bills and delving into a little stamped coin purse for her change. While this drama took place off wings, so to speak, the Navajo performed in his artificial case.

  It was as though he were some exquisite butterfly pressed under glass, or, because of the sand and the fact that we were outside, a better analogy might be a zoo exhibit, some fascinating case of rare lizards that the ghoulish tourists to our desert delighted in. Such cages were cottage industries and hand lettered signs at the side of the road would draw passerby to the shade of a mesquite or a cottonwood tree where the family had placed the chuckwalla or collared lizard in a wooden cage with a sign asking for a dime from for the privilege of peeking at it.

  I remember seeing his tightly closed fist, held upright, which was moving up the side of the rectangular picture and as the fist skimmed above the perfectly flat sand surface it dribbled a faint flow, like a wispy miniature cataract, but of rust-colored powder. The falling red on the buff background was enough like blood to make you think for a minute that he had slit his own wrist and was letting his blood squirt onto the sand. I noticed he was careful to color inside the lines, something I never could manage with my uncooperative crayons. And I can recall the sand painting had paramecium-shaped green corn bodies held in the hands of corn maidens who were like black building cranes hovering above a big striped squash. The squash hung on an oddly angular plant. The whole thing disturbed me; it seemed to me to be an apocalyptic vision of dangerous plant life.

  My brother and I didn't waste much time watching him before we tapped on the window pane and made the sign of the dead and desiccated forty-niner (which involved sticking out our tongues and pulling our bottom eyelids down) to see if we could rattle the old coot. Those forty-niners many of whom had died while making a big sweep toward California through Yuma in the farthest southeast corner of Arizona came in for a lot of ridicule from us then. I guess it was the idea of adult failure, great desire followed by great defeat, which we relished; we enacted their death throes enthusiastically in the alleys behind our home, forming whole wagon trains of the gold driven, mop-headed madmen. We had alarmed more than a few adults who had come out to the alley at twilight, with their trash neatly bundled in string the way they did then, only to encounter a line of scruffy children moaning, gibbering and clutching at their throats. So, used to our usual success at disturbing adults, we were quite disappointed by the lack of reaction from this stolid Navajo; the sand continued to flow from his fist uninterrupted.