Mojave Desert, California, 1941
Hitching an early morning ride heading east toward Arizona in the back of a pickup with a chicken farmer, Victor settled among the crates of chatty hens. He looked through the slats in the wood into their eyes and watched as they closed their lizard-like lids with each bump of the truck. Do they understand their fate? he wondered as he took out the present from the old man, looked at the eggs nestled in their velvet corrals, and rewrapped the collection in an extra layer, an old wool shirt that was getting too many holes to wear any more, even for a tramp. He adjusted the old glass case carefully in the bottom of the bag as they bumped along an unpaved portion of road, then let himself doze in and out of sleep as the hens clucked away, forgetting completely about the envelope the old man had given him the day before. Crystal and velvet trumps paper—the flashy egg collection had managed to eclipse the memory of the envelope.
After catching a couple more rides and a short sleep in the dark of night on a park bench in a small town on the east side of the Sierras, Victor was finally heading into the desert for the first time in his life. He could feel the dry air drawing the sogginess from his bones. He thought about what he’d left back in Washington and imagined he would hardly be missed. His wealthy Seattle banking family had always tried to sweep their sensitive and strange youngest son’s penchant for poetry and music under the rug. They grimaced when he broke into song at a fancy restaurant or in line at the movies, pulling him aside and threatening a beating if he didn’t stop all his grandstanding. “He’s a strange bird,” they used to say to important, buttoned-up visitors invited into their beautiful home. “Don’t mind him,” they demurred when their young son came to dinner wearing a cape clasped by butterfly clips around his throat. When he was a teen he wore ascots, pillbox hats, or T-shirts with so many holes his nipples peeked through. But his parents did mind him and he knew it more than anyone. His leaving town of his own accord had simply taken the burden off his family of ever cleaning up another of his social messes again. He had done everyone a favor, he figured, by hitting the road the first chance he got.
The constant rain of Southwest Oregon was a distant memory by the time he braced himself against the hot desert wind in the back of a hay trailer barreling through the Mojave. It was still morning when they arrived in Needles, Arizona. Victor got off, gave the driver a tip of his hat in the rearview, and looked up and down the dusty street for a place he might get a cup of coffee. The rejuvenating effects of the one full night of sleep on the old man’s couch had long evaporated into the desert air, and after the last couple days of bouncing around in various vehicles, he felt he might collapse without a cup of joe. The desert didn’t quite make him feel like breaking into song, but he hoped more than anything that eventually it just might. He did a little happy shuffle with his feet as he walked up to the Oasis Diner. Standing just outside the entrance, he counted the coins in his stained leather satchel. Seventy-two cents. A scrawny bronzed kid of twelve or thirteen wearing only shorts and sandals approached him and said:
“You want coffee?”
“Yeah, kid, I sure do.”
“Well, I’ve got something better than coffee.” The kid held out a hand with a little shriveled brown button of some plant matter, maybe a cactus.
“No, thanks.”
“You sure? This will change your whole world.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I’m a shaman.”
“Ha!” Victor laughed. “The world’s tiniest shaman.”
“Well, that just shows what you know.” The boy recoiled his hand and looked away. “I’m a road man in training.”
“Okay, kid. That’s more like it. I’m a road man, too.” He patted the kid on the arm, realizing he’d offended him. “How much for one of those buttons? What is it like? Will it wake me up? Slow me down?”
“All of the above. How much do you have?”
“I’m not giving you all my coin, but, seventy-two cents. That’s en total, jellybean.”
“Then give me one cent and we’re good. I’ll give you this if you want.” He held out one button and paused before dropping it in Victor’s hand. “But you’ll have to come with me to take it. I’ll show you a real shaman. I’m only inviting you because I was watching you and I get the feeling it will do you good.”
“Okay, then. What do we do with this one-cent not-coffee miracle turd?”
“Don’t make me regret inviting you.”
“I’m sorry, little man. Really.”
“We will eat it to clear your mind.” The kid narrowed his eyes at Victor as if to make sure he was worthy of his efforts. “Follow me.”
Victor looked back wistfully at the coffee shop with its inviting blue-and-white rounded booths and coffee percolating behind the counter. A girl in a crisp uniform walked briskly to a table with plates of steaming eggs, sausage, and buttered toast. Victor looked back at the boy and said, “Will there be something to eat at this shindig? Because there’s a plate of eggs in there calling my name.”
“There will be many things calling your name. Better not to eat now, though. But there will be a meal after, yes.”
It didn’t take more than a few seconds for Victor to decide that the adventure of following a tiny shaman trumped a hot breakfast. His stomach had grown accustomed to the raking and gurgling of hunger. No need to confuse the poor organ. He followed the boy past one stop sign and out of town. As they marched along the road, the growing heat of the afternoon filled up the wide-open spaces of the desert with the weight of an anvil, the oppressive sun making any meaningful communication completely impossible. Walking through that kind of heat can make the mind churn—thoughts become irascible, then quiet. Victor cursed his blistered feet and heavy boots, lamenting his decision to follow the kid, and then, just as quickly, forgot his aches and pains as one moment melted into the next. There’s no turning back, he figured, as the road shimmered ahead like a black-and-silver lake. Back home they had always called him too soft to survive, but he liked to think he simply forgave the discomforts of the world. He rolled with the flow. He squinted his eyes at the shimmering vanishing point of the earth in the distance. It seemed to him that the boy was leading him to an expansive waterway somewhere far away. But the lake never seemed to get any closer as the two walked along the highway shoulder for a good hour. The illusion was untouchable.
As the heat unlocked the memory from his brain, Victor suddenly remembered the letter the old man Warren had given him. How had he forgotten to open it? He must be more exhausted than he even knew. He made a mental note to open the letter when he and the boy reached their destination. Despite the heat, they were moving at a good clip along the desert highway, rivers of sweat running down their backs. They walked past rubber rabbit bush and blooming orange globe mallow, the boy pointing out the names of the plants as they passed by, punctuating the silence to point: desert star, monkey flower, lupine, penstemon, ghost flower. Victor thought that “ghost flower” had all the makings of a cautionary children’s tale about what might happen when a fool traveler wanders off into the desert with a stranger. He tried to let the poem form in his head, but as soon as it began, the heat wiped its heavy hand over the words and they were gone.
When they finally left the highway, it was to climb up into an arroyo with a wide sandy bottom and short cliffs on either side. Floods had marked where the water wore a clear path from the top of the mesa down the arroyo and into the wash, but it was hard to imagine any large volume of water in the hot, dry, spring landscape. Alluvial fans of brightly colored eroded sand lay with impermanence in semicircles emanating from the middle of the mesa like a dancer’s skirt fluttering in waves. At the mere idea of rushing water, Victor stopped and meted out a few, precious sips from his canteen.
“Watch for snakes,” the boy said, not asking to share in the water. It was the first the two had spoken in a half hour.
“Duly noted,” Victor said, taking a look around as though there might be a gang of rattlers already underfoot.
“They don’t want to bite you,” the boy said. “But if you are careless, they might just be forced to let you know they care.”
As they walked up the canyon, the pink-and-yellow streaked cliffs grew higher on either side of them, closing them off from the creosote flats. It would take quite a scramble to get up one side or another. There’s something strange about that boy, thought Victor as he followed the spritely kid in a zigzagging pattern up the arroyo. The young man’s skin was such a deep golden brown it was as though he had spent his entire short life naked under the sun. The sun had worn in his forehead the even lines of a much, much older man. They pressed on and Victor considered the boy some more. He looked like a child, but he had the confidence of an old man. Almost the certainty of a grandfather. They traveled uphill until the canyon narrowed and they came to a place where the sandy ground gave way to a mass of loose boulders. The sun was starting to get low and Victor wondered briefly if he was being drawn into some sort of trap.
“It’s not dangerous,” the boy reassured him as if reading his mind. “Unless you make it.”
“Okay, boss,” Victor said, pulling himself up awkwardly onto the top of the first boulder. They scrambled up for another half hour through the slot canyon as it became steeper and harder to navigate, until finally the boulders seemed to be stacked right on top of one another. The boy stood above on a mysterious ledge out of Victor’s field of vision.
“Almost there,” the boy said. “This way.” He waved him up.
Victor was muttering to himself something about the kid having said that an hour ago as he struggled to pull himself upright onto the boulder. Finally he stood up, pulling his sweat-soaked backpack up behind him, his knees cracking with the effort. He had a line of salt showing through his shirt where he’d been sweating profusely for the last two hours. As he straightened up on the boulder, what he saw up there was a surprise, to say the least. The slot canyon opened up into perfectly flat ground to either side and in front of the boulder. The even ground was protected by a red earth cirque that sheltered the area from the winds that blew strong along the top of the mesa some 150 feet higher. He could hear the wind rattle through the sparse vegetation up above but could not feel it from where he stood. All around him was stillness.
On the lower level, the calm air was cooling rapidly as the sun dipped close to the horizon in the distance. A giant mass of beavertail cactus bloomed in bunches of papery hot-pink flowers near his feet. The cactus and plants spotting the pebbled sand were evenly spaced in such a way they appeared as though a tended garden. Victor walked slowly in a snail’s trail among the plants, pausing to look up at the pastel pinks, purples, yellows, and blues swathed across the sky, marked by thin clouds glowing in hues as bright as the cactus blooms in color, as bright as a fire. As he gazed down the arroyo and out over the creosote flats punctuated by the outline of the inscrutable Joshua trees, the serenity of the place caught his breath in his throat in a way he had never before experienced. He exhaled long and deep.
“Glad you like it,” the boy said, looking up at him with his bizarre sense of grandfatherly approval. “I’d like you to meet my family.”
The boy led Victor over to a small cave at the base of the cirque. A man in a linen robe tied at the waist with a cord arranged objects in front of him on a blanket. He didn’t seem to notice the two approaching until they were very close. He sat back on his heels, his back still to the two.
“Well, what do we have here, son?”
“You told me to choose someone to bring to the ceremony this evening.”
The man turned around to face the two sweaty travelers.
“And I thought you might bring one of your cousins from town. But I see you have chosen instead this blue-eyed stranger.” He looked at his son with what could only be interpreted as judgment.
“I think you’ll see he is a good choice.” The little boy stood tall against the stare of his father. The man sighed and stood up with some effort. He was barely taller than his son, bent with age. He picked up a small gourd rattle off the blanket and shook it in the direction of the stranger.
“Hatchoq, traveler,” the man said. “We will see.”
The man walked away and over to the cave to talk to a woman raking the sand with a flat stick. He bent down to whisper to her and she looked back toward the blue-eyed stranger without expression before returning to her raking.
“White people have not always been kind to us,” the boy said. “So you can imagine why they are suspicious of you.”
“Don’t blame ’em,” Victor said, setting down his backpack gently in the sand. “White people haven’t always been kind to me either.”
“Good.”
“I can leave if you think it’s best,” Victor said, looking uneasily back down the wash. “But I’m dog-tired from that little stroll you took me on.”
“Don’t go,” the boy said. “Stay here.” And he went over to the woman and whispered to her. She motioned into the cave and the boy went in and came out with a few hard cases that looked like they housed some sort of instruments. He opened a smallish case and took out a trumpet. He played a few notes and the sound made its way around the cirque as though it were rolling along touching each side, echoing over and over like a softer, further away version of the first note. Then the woman took out a tuba, and Victor smiled the smile of the delighted madman at his first circus.
More and more people, some of them carrying brass instrument cases, clambered up onto the topmost boulder and filtered in toward the raked sand, making their way across the flats and toward the cave. Not everyone in attendance looked like they belonged to a tribe. There was a large-boned woman with long blonde hair and a redheaded older man, his ginger hair and beard speckled with bright white. The robed father of the boy had started a diminutive fire and stoked it while waving a fan made entirely of feathers. Victor looked at the faces of the people as they arrived and clocked their distrust of his grimy, tattered clothes and his baked-blue hitchhiker’s eyes. He made himself small as he squatted near the fire with his feet still on the ground, long legs tucked up under his body like a roosting heron. His bleached blue eyes flecked with gold as they glowed in the firelight. The group of fifteen or so collected around the fire naturally and without any prompting. Some picked up an item from the blanket, a gourd rattle, a feather fan, while others took out their brass instruments and laid them quietly in their laps.
“Thank you for coming to church this Saturday evening,” the robed father started, placing an arrow onto the cloth with the other items from the box. “Any fool knows none of us will live forever. But as soon as we die we live on through our children.” The man looked at his son as he said this. “My son has chosen to bring a guest tonight to our ceremony. And so we must welcome him as one of our own.”
All eyes fixed on Victor as he shifted his heron legs beneath him and raised his hand tentatively in a wave. The woman who had been raking the sand spoke up to pick up where the robed man left off.
“We are here to experience time and eternity,” she said. “There are many names for the spirits we bring forth, but today we will call it ‘twelavelem’ and hope to bridge the divide between the dead and the living.”
“We do things a little differently here,” the redheaded old man joined in, looking straight at Victor as he did. “We are from different tribes, and so we have different traditions. Me? I’m Irish. My wife is Mojave. Our child is a daughter of the sun.” He held the hand of the woman next to him who had earlier been raking the sand and nodded toward a young girl sitting near the boy. “But together, from our different tribes, we have found common ground by incorporating the great tradition of John Sousa into the peyote ritual, by including songs as played on brass instruments. It is a way of making old traditions new and unified.” Victor’s eyes opened wide but he maintained his quiet. The sound of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” started up in his brain.
“There was a time not long ago,” the robed man picked up where the redheaded man left off, “when we welcomed the great trains of white men who arrived in Needles as they passed through to the west to make their fortunes. We sold our wares on blankets and welcomed the travelers into town. But many were vile toward us, kicking our pottery and our women. They tried to assimilate us and erase our traditions. But the brass band came in as a new tradition, bridging the gap, and we have taken in the instruments to our church and made them ours. It is a symbol not of our defeat, but of our triumph.”
There were murmurings of agreement among the people gathered. Someone shook a little rattle. The big-boned blonde woman shook her long mane like a beautiful pony.
“Here is the tea. Drink each cup slowly over the next hour.” The robed man poured a dark brown tea into small silver cups and passed them around. The crowd was quiet as he began to sing a wordless song. After a while, more voices joined in, and someone started a slow beat on a drum. The sound of each note raced along the wall above them, back and forth along the cirque, the smooth curve of earth, echoing back. Victor rejoiced that he had finally found a group of people who enjoyed breaking into song.
The songs worked in thirds and fifths, Victor noted, suddenly aware of the tile-type melodic movement and remembering his piano lessons as a child. His parents had abruptly stopped them when he started learning ragtime and filling their austere house with the sounds of the saloon. He let the music weave in and out of his ears and imagined it as actual threads of light, moving with the precision of a needle through the night. How did he recall that the style was called a tile-type? It felt as though something were opening up in his brain and deep buried memories were flying forth like bits of paper on the wind. Information seemed to be channeling itself out of the stars and straight into his head. The song began to unlock and unwind memories so long buried they were dusted and vague. He was a kid on a pebbled Puget Sound beach quietly singing dirges to the dead birds washed up on the rocks. He was a young man hiding in the shed to play his forbidden ukulele. He was a slightly older young man writing poems in the bathroom despite the fear of corporal punishment if he were found out by his father. Fairy, his father hissed. Weakling. Each memory rose up and evaporated toward the stars. The almost full moon poured down cool, luminous light that hung on the surface of the smooth succulent cacti like mist. The ground and everything planted in it took on a glow in the near night. He watched the fire for a while as it made the form of a ghost, a bird, a beating heart. Each image appeared clear as day, then fell back under a new wave of yellow as the fire licked the slate clean. He leaned his head back and let the rock pour secrets in his ears as he listened to the beautiful sounds of the player’s breath travel through brass and echo across the stone.
“I’d like to show you something,” Victor said to the robed father after the song had ended. “It’s a present from a friend on my journey.” He started to rustle in his backpack, the inside of his pack seemingly huge and full of strangeness as he wound his hand to the bottom and clasped the tightly wrapped egg collection. He unwrapped and laid it on the corner of the blanket in front of the shaman, who looked at it for a long time before saying anything. Finally, he put his sun-baked hand above the collection.
“This is an old and powerful artifact,” the shaman said, looking pleased with Victor for the first time. “There are many haly’a that have seen this little box. I can feel the force of its history.”
“I’d like to give you this as a gift,” Victor said.
“And I thank you. But I can tell that it is already tied to your story, so you should be the one to carry it on a bit farther on its journey. You will know when to pass it along.”
Victor nodded, relieved a little. He suddenly longed to possess the stories from each egg, to keep the treasure a little longer.
“Please. Choose an instrument,” the man said. Victor looked up at the sky just as the tuba began its first note. There was no melody to follow, only the layering of notes as the trumpet and euphonium joined in. Then a sackbut and serpent made their tones, like possessed, ancient versions of the trombone and cornet. He let the music fly into his brain and welcomed each bit of flack as it bounded around. He picked up a gourd rattle and shook it, listening to the sound of each seed inside and aware of each clink and curve of sound. The music was shaking loose in his chest the flak of being a strange kid, a freak, a worthless cur.
The cool night breezed as relief on his skin. All the troubles that had hung heavy since he’d run away from his life in Seattle began to lift out and into the darkness, as though leaping one by one from his very chest. The band played on in its drone song that morphed into a version of “The Invincible Eagle” and “Hands Across the Sea,” two of Victor’s favorite Sousa marches. The core band shrunk in size as some members dispersed to answer a message calling only them. Victor got up and walked the perimeter of the circle and out into the cactus garden, where he would continue the conversation about life and death with the plants under the woven sounds of the inimitable brass band until morning. Standing at the edge of the world under the moon and its new, visible fingers of light, he let go of some of the fear he’d been gathering like a dung beetle his whole life. He watched as all his anger and fear rolled down the arroyo and disappeared into the darkness, breaking apart into stars. His stomach heaved with the force of such an exodus, but as he had eaten nothing that day, nothing came up.
He peeled off his clothes piece by piece and folded them in a pile on a rock smooth as the very moon. Naked, he raised up his arms and let the world take over his skin. Everything he saw was new, which on some level was intensely frightening, but on another thrilling. He no longer knew what anything was, but allowed the strangeness and the unknowing to enter through his body like a ghost. The tuba sounded, louder than before, and the deep notes rattled his body and the cirque and the world shook a little for a moment, leaving traces of light in the air. He surrendered then and there to the desert, to the earth, and tendered his resignation to the prison of clothing. He would find a way to be new, to be free, and to never bend to the confines of a society that might dictate otherwise. He lay prone on the smooth rock, bathed in the baby blue of the desert moon, and lay for hours in a trance of the alive, until finally, just before morning light, sleep found him.
Victor awoke from his short, naked slumber on the flat of the topmost boulder. Someone had covered him with a thin wool blanket against the desert cool. His clothes were still in a neat pile at his feet. As he stretched his limbs and lay on the smooth rock, he felt as though he had finally found what he had left home looking for. He was free from the ties that bound him. He would find a way to remain naked from then on out. He kept the blanket around him for warmth as he rejoined the group and shared in a meal of corn cakes and stewed vegetables and beans that had been set up on the blanket near the smoldering fire. It was the most delicious meal he had ever eaten in his life, without a doubt. The memory of the hunger he had felt staring into the diner with its vinyl booths and black coffee seemed like a bad memory compared to the pure bliss delivered with each bite of food.
After the meal, he packed up his belongings and came upon the envelope. The envelope! He laughed out loud at how long ago that night eating peppered pasta with the old man felt. He hadn’t noticed before how thick the letter felt. He opened it and inside was a stack of crinkled bills and a letter. He took out the letter and read its wavering handwriting.
Dear Wanderer,
Tomorrow is my last day on this earth, so I wanted you to have what is left of all I own. I trust I will not need it where I’m going. An incredible woman told me once that we could all use some kindness on this journey. I hope you find what you are looking for on the road. When you find something you love, trust me, hold tight to it and just let it be what it will.
Best,
Warren
Inside the envelope were thirteen worn fifty-dollar bills, two twenties, two fives, and four ones. He smoothed his fingers over the bills and the memory of his father’s crisp, full billfold popped into his head. He had never been allowed to touch it as a child, though he longed to feel the mother-of-pearl clasp under his finger. It was the beauty, not the money that he was after. But that wad of dough was the apex of his father’s power—his totem. His father’s money was not alive, he realized, but a carcass of possibility. He wanted to do nothing with it but keep it in a moldering pile. There was no frivolity of spending allowed in his house. This money, Victor decided, as he filtered it through his fingers, would be different. He would dedicate its power to unlocking the secret voices of old things. He would collect all the world’s amusements and curiosities, its antiques and literature, and celebrate each item’s story by sharing it with the rest of the world. He would turn the money into an observance of all people and their curiosities. He would not let it become a symbol of greed. He also decided, looking up at the church members as they filed down the canyon, into the arroyo, and back into town, that he would wander no farther. Needles was his new home. He had finally found a place to be.