WHAT NEFFIE MEANT BY PLAY WAS MAKING LOVE, having sex. I had not come across this before. It was not the loose “anything goes” element that was play, and it wasn’t the spontaneous “let’s do it now, here.” It was the guiltless, recreational part, the transformation of sex from its mystical, enshrouded platform into everyday living, a normalcy so easy and natural as to be compared to having a meal or taking a walk, or playing.
This contrasted greatly with my notion of it. I had been taught to approach sex with consecration, with the idea sex was only to consummate an emotional union, to possibly procreate, and was to be treated with deep seriousness. It never occurred to me there was an even more advanced and liberating understanding of this powerful impulse.
I was to find out Neffie’s ideas about sex were ideas developed in her as a child, before puberty, and in her training throughout her early years of sexual awakening. She was provided a forum and opportunity to explore her own sexuality and to establish a set of standards and morals to give her the most wonderful and carefree possible sense of herself, and now me.
Because of the narrowness of the canyon, the sun cast the buildings of Welach into shadow early in the afternoon, around three o’clock, and the ground became cool. The day continued full above, the light reflected from the eastern
wall back into the city, the result a long twilight with azure skies. When the sun finally set, the angle of reflection became steeper and steeper, causing the colors of the canyon to shine in unimaginable hues as diamondlike daystars began to twinkle through the deeper colors. I lay on the grass in Neffie’s arms and fell into a peaceful, dreamless sleep.
When I awoke, it was to the stars above and a distant, almost full moon. Along the edge of the mesa I saw a coyote trotting in the prancing gait given only to animals who live in the wilderness. I wished for him to stop as his silhouette invaded the moon’s, to give me the wonderful scene of the coyote sitting on a mesa, head thrown back, howling at the sky while framed by the big yellow circle, but it was not to be. He pranced past the moon into the shadows beyond. Neffie woke up and sat beside me.
“The dance will be starting soon,” she said, as she got up and pulled me to my feet.
I had only the tattered clothes I had worn.
“I can find you something to wear,” she said, and we climbed the stairs back to her apartment.
Inside, I took some time to look around while Neffie rummaged through her closet and trunks looking for clothes for me. The apartment was bigger than it first appeared, because it went deep into the hillside. There were three more rooms in addition to the front sleeping rooms, and a bathroom with running water and a huge sunken tub carved from the rock, which was also the floor. The back rooms were dark, having no windows, but were lit by lamps. Throughout were some of the most beautiful rugs I had seen, with exquisite patterns and designs, all Native American. Two rooms were sitting rooms of a sort but with no chairs,
only pillows and thick rugs, where Neffie and her friends gathered for socializing. The other back room was a kitchen, I think, but I had no way of knowing for sure. It had a small wood-burning stove that might be used for cooking but also may have been for heat. I didn’t see any food, but did see a few dishes stored around. Neffie came into the sitting room with some clothes for me to try.
“Where does the electricity come from?” I asked as I pulled the shirt on over my head.
“There is a generator under the creek.”
“Under the creek?”
“The creek running down the catwalk has a mirror image underneath it, below ground. We put a generator there and a pump for water.”
“Can you drink the water?”
“If you like. It’s held in a natural cistern above the city, where it flows in from the bottom and then out over the top into the overground creek, so it’s always moving. It’s good, clear water. How do those feel?”
I had slipped on the pants she had given me. They fit perfectly, a rough, dark-brown material, heavyweight, almost like canvas but more pliant.
“Great. Whose are these?”
“I don’t know,” she said as she walked away, into the other room. I knew to ask any more would be impudent; just to shut up and say “thanks.”
“They’re just right. Thanks.”
The shirt was a lighter-colored tan, a soft, blanketlike material with designs familiar to the Southwest: zigzags and diamond shapes in broad lines around the shirt. Neffie came back with a belt and some moccasins. She held out the belt.
It was a series of square conches of beautiful silver laced along a leather strap, which I tied around the outside of the shirt, over the pants underneath. The moccasins were white-soled with dark-red leather tops laced together with strands of rawhide.
“You look wonderful,” Neffie said.
I was sure I looked horrible. I had seen many people adopt modern Native American garb and always felt embarrassed for them. Some wounded divorcee, remaking a life with the divorce money, would move to Santa Fe and buy these kinds of garments from the stores around there, usually ribbon-knit God’s eyes and feathers on the back of a blue-jean jacket with rhinestone coyotes on the front.
“I hope no one thinks I’m putting on airs,” I said.
“They won’t if you aren’t.”
I heard the music. It wasn’t what I expected. It was a pounding blues shuffle, and whoever was playing was laying down a groove so deep you couldn’t see out of it. The drummer had a foot like a sledgehammer and time like an atomic clock, no easy feat in a shuffle. The bass player was playing simple one-note thumps against the root, the little syncopated skip right before the thud on the beat hanging in the air long enough so you felt yourself sailing from the anticipation to the landing. I never heard a more infectious blues shuffle.
Then the guitar player from hell. Elmore James had this way of sliding to an open D chord by scraping up the guitar neck into a resolution that made me stand up every time I heard it. This player was doing the same thing except with a drive to make me wonder if he didn’t have a V-8 somewhere
in there, real horsepower, real drag-strip dynamics. This was serious hard-edge blues.
“They’re starting. Let’s get down there.”
As we walked down the outer stairways, we were joined by other people all going the same way. Everyone seemed to know Neffie, she knew everyone, I suppose everyone knew everyone. As we bounced down the stairs and the music grew louder I looked around at the people. Not only was everyone happy—I mean, smiling—they were also beautiful.
I was uncomfortable with this. Happy, smiling, beautiful people on their way to a dance in a magical canyon city beneath the starry moonlit sky of New Mexico, away from the world, in a world of their own. But, there it was. And I was part of it. Of course, I was up to my eyeballs in love, so the glow over everything could have made a root canal seem attractive. The reality is, I don’t know what had come into my life, but I will never forget it. Whatever doubt or cynicism that has tried to overtake these memories has failed, and they live on, undiminished and clear.
We got to the bottom and I found we had come to Delilah’s again, but things were different. The tables and chairs were gone, so the room was completely open. Earlier there had been a partition across the room, hiding the back, but now I could see it was huge, the size of an amphitheater big enough for five thousand people, a great cave carved into the rock by some ancient wind. There were only about two hundred people, so the room swallowed them. In ordinary circumstances this would look as if the party had failed and needed more people to be festive, but the reverse was true.
Instead, it was as if we had gotten Lincoln Center, or the Rose Bowl, or some airport, all to ourselves and some friends. It was wonderful.
Not as wonderful as the band. Before, I had wished for a camera. Now, I wished for a recorder. But it wouldn’t have been any use. It was like a Dead concert. It was of the moment. No recording could have captured it. There were four pieces and a singer-harmonica player.
I have heard horrible, laconic, ugly blues. But when it’s right, it’s right, and tonight it was right.
The drummer was a thousand-pounder in fringe, with long, straight brown hair below his waist, bright, copperred skin, and a beak of a nose above an open-mouthed transcendent smile. Every time he hit the drums he sent a shock of air through the cave, blowing through the front door like a shotgun blast. When he played he looked up, not at the drums, holding each stick like a baseball bat.
The bassist was a woman who reminded me of Neffie, tall with long, sandy hair, dressed the same way I had seen Neffie the night she left me with Harouk. But I could pay little attention to her looks, so startling was her bass playing. It was as if in some way she had gotten locked into the foot pedal of the drummer, so every time he hit, she hit. She was playing through a huge stack of amplifiers in back of her, all of it augmented by an enormous stadium-level sound system towering over the band and the stage on each side. They were still playing the shuffle I had heard from Neffie’s, and if it was possible, had somehow settled deeper into the pocket.
A part of the vocabulary of drummers is a flam, and it basically means two beats played almost on top of each other but a tiny bit out of synch, a kind of b’dup. It’s usually one
of the things wrong when you hear a bad rock band. If one intends to play a flam, fine; it adds interesting color to music, but if you’re playing flams because you can’t quite play in time with the other players—big trouble. Instead of everyone landing at the same time in the same place … bam, everyone sort of lands at their own time and in a little different place … kErblytiblAm. As you might expect, ironing out the flams is hard. That’s why the good guys get the big bucks.
Tonight, the closest flam was at Disneyland, a thousand miles away. Every note, every beat was played so perfectly together there was no question the band was of one mind. The guitarist, also a woman, was not as tall as the bassist, her sandy hair in a buzz cut. She was playing slide guitar through another huge set of stacked amps and was also pumping out through the house system.
The keyboard guy was sitting in a circle of some of the greatest instruments ever to play the blues, starting with a black, upright piano he had stashed over to the side of the setup. At the moment he was playing a B3, the big Hammond organ from the sixties, hooked up through a stack of rotating speakers called Leslies. I counted four, two stacks of two, but there may have been more behind him where I couldn’t see. He turned on the Leslies in the middle of a riff, and they began to twirl. The sound wailed across the room like thousands of Arabian women calling out across the desert to their returning warrior husbands, billions of wild birds. He hunched over the keys under a black hat with turquoise and beads woven into a hatband. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his dark glasses, but his hair was long and sandy, the color of Neffie’s.
When the singer came up to the mike the shrill cry of his harmonica sent the energy up another order of magnitude. I don’t know what it is about a mouth harp, but the electrified metal reeds reach down inside me and pull up some primitive soul, some basic life force, and shoots sparks off the ends of my fingers. He looked like a banker, a businessman, a clerk. Any of the ordinary people you pass on the street and interact with in an ordinary day. There was no attitude in his short brown hair, or in his jeans and T-shirt. He was wearing round wire glasses and looked like everybody who looks like him. But when he blew the harp you knew this was no average joe, not a typical anybody.
As we all came in and moved around the stage, settling into positions, he let the song loose. He was singing “Get out‘the world” a Neftoon Zamora blues tune. I tried as best I could to remember the words. They were something like, “Don’t get out’the world ‘cause you don’t care, just get out’the world cause it’s not there.”
The life of all Americans comes with a potential arc from Tupelo, Mississippi to Las Vegas, Nevada. We start off cool, then get stranger and stranger. Elvis, of course, is the model for this. He lived this out. Most of the people I know are in some variation of the process of changing from the trim, sexy, leather-wearing Elvis into the fat, beaded, dyed, comb-over Elvis. We may not take the exact path he took but it amounts to the same thing. When we are born into this country we are born with this potential, this Tupelo to Vegas thing, this America gene.
Busting free of such a tendency had always seemed impossible to me, until this night. Something in the air, in the eyes of the people. When they started dancing I knew I had
the opportunity to avoid my own personal Las Vegas because somehow each of them had avoided theirs. The dance I had imagined I would see, circular, perhaps around a bonfire with sparks rising into the evening sky, a slow shuffling amid low, droning sounds, was not this dance at all.
This was a dance in front of a band laying down hard blues and soul-motivating shuffles with yet another, more exhilarating difference. This dance was not a mating ritual. There was none of the grinding body parts and sultry looks, no addled, take-me, shake-me, bake-me, your-place-or-the-freeway imperative. This was a dance with people moving to the music because the music took form in the movement, and the people doing the moving were along for the ride, to stand up in the roller-coaster seat and smile and scream, with the music in control.
And could they move. I felt myself getting more and more caught up in this dance, but I was not free enough, didn’t understand enough to know what this dance was about. I waved my arms a little but felt silly, embarrassed. It was certain no one was dancing with each other, but everyone was dancing with everyone else. There were no couples. To dance here was to dance more unrestrained and with greater freedom than I ever imagined possible. The more I tried to find the place the dancers around me were sharing, the more self-conscious I became, and the more self-conscious I became, the less conscious I was—of the music, of the time, of the real magic that was no magic, of the heroic pounding of life through hidden veins. At last I gave up and stood there, stupid.
Then I was surrounded, swept up. Neffie beside me and beside her others and all of us together. I think I started
doing the mambo. Some Latin thing or other I saw in a movie. Maybe it was the rhumba, but whatever, I was propelled by the power of the music and the joy of those people, catapulted into an orbit so every inhibition, all fear, all self-consciousness left me like gravity leaves a spacecraft as I danced around the room in magnificent abandon and delight.
When the song finally stopped a cheer rose up from us all, including the band. I caught my breath and looked at Neffie.
“I didn’t think I could do it.”
There was only a second of respite and the music started again, another Zamora tune I recognized from Doc’s tape. This time I unhesitatingly threw myself into the fray and careened around the hall on the rails of the music. A fighter pilot pulls less Gs than I did.
Outside all was not calm, and the merriment inside Delilah’s was fast being overtaken by a storm. The skies had boiled up and were sweating with rain and New Mexico was about to show some fangs. So much for the placid starlit sky and its sparkling moon. The sky occluded and lowered. Somewhere a monster took aim at the happy band of dancers and their revelry.
When the first snap of lightning flashed it made clear how powerful high-powered blues are, which is to say, not at all. Because right behind the wriggling blue light from the lightning flickering around the dance floor came a clap of thunder so loud it shouted down the hardest hit of the drummer’s foot and loudest squeal of the slide guitar.
“You wanna dance?” said nature. “Then dance this.”
Another crack of thunder as the rain poured from the sky, a thousand banshees, and the little band of merrymakers
slowed, looked outside, and thought about the weather. It sure put a stop to my cavorting.
The little window of the storm I could see out the front door was enough to make me stare. The rain was a solid wall of silver, waving back and forth, obliterating the view.
As the band wound to the end of the tune many of the members of the party walked to the entrance of Delilah’s and looked out, debating whether to leave and tuck in for the night.
Then, to their credit, the band, like a dog rolling over on its back in complete subservience, awaiting its master’s pat on the tummy, responded by starting into a laid-back, slow blues; well under the power of the storm, acquiescent, introspective; reminding me of ZZ Top’s “Rough Boy,” but unrecognizable to me. I assumed it was another Zamora tune. The slow pulse meshed with the storm outside and instead of the abandoned twirls around the floor, all the people slowed their pace to the music, and to my surprise, broke off into couples. I looked for Neffie. She was dancing with Artie, RD-Runs Deep. Her head was laid against his shoulder. Talk about stormy blues.
The torrents of my feelings matched the torrents outside. I was struck motionless, and the first needle pricks of the downside of emotional attachment dug themselves into me. I winced. I didn’t know what to do. Not only was I a stranger, but my new “wife” had just left with someone else. I felt betrayed and ridiculous. I also felt a hand on my shoulder and was turned around forcefully to face another woman. She said nothing but put herself in my arms and began leading me in a slow dance, forcing me to follow her and the music. I became more disconcerted. I was jealous
and feeling foolish. Then to my horror I started to wonder if these people and Neffie were uncommitted and uncommittable. The thought felt like the aftermath of a sucker punch, which hurts more because of the emotion connected with it than the physical pain. I hoped I was wrong but had no way to tell. My unknown partner pulled me close and I felt all of her body against mine.
She was not like Neffie but just as beautiful. All these people had a beautiful concept of themselves. The person dancing with me held me close so I didn’t get a long look at her, but I could feel her, see the luster of her sand-colored hair, feel the presence of this beauty, and I knew she was as lovely as Neffie.
After a moment of dancing I eased her away a bit so I could see her face. She had the same perfect features as Neffie but her eyes were an almost coal-black and her skin was a dark-olive tan, almost like an Asian. She had cut her hair to a shoulder length and it curled naturally about her neck. She looked straight at me, with the same familiarity I had come to know from all the people here. Then to my horror I found myself drifting deep into her eyes and falling in love with her. We had not said a word, but the same romantic, loving state of mind overtook me and I wanted to hold this woman and be with her for the rest of my life. I was either hypnotized or going crazy. Who was she? To my further dismay, I felt Neffie vanishing from my affections as easily as they attached themselves to this new person.
I pushed her away as I held on to the edge of panic. Now I could see her clearly. She was gorgeous, like Neffie, with a perfect figure but much smaller, and eyes burning into my soul. I wanted to grab her and kiss her and make
love to her right there. She seemed to know this as she came back into my embrace, the casual embrace of the dance, and laid her head on my shoulder and snuggled into it.
I looked around for Neffie but she was gone. I thought I saw her once, but there were so many people here who looked like her, so many with the long sandy hair, and so many of the men who looked like RD, I was unable to pick her out of the crowd. Finally the song came to an end. Whoever she was walked away from me and into the crowd of people at the end of the stage. I started shaking and felt the sweat on my brow. I looked out the door again and saw the rain had slowed to a steady pour, more of a gentle shower. As the band started into another song all I wanted to do was get out of there. I hurried to the front door and stood looking to see if there was a way to get back up to Neffie’s under cover. There wasn’t, so I walked out into the pouring rain.
The rain was cooling and I welcomed it as it relieved my anxieties and washed the perspiration from me. I was sweating from the fear of my own emotions as well as the rigors of the dance. What had happened to me was new, leaving me without knowing which of my feelings to trust. A few hours before I had been lying on the grass in the canyon floor with Neffie, convinced I had at last found a life partner and then in one mind-snapping turn had seen her dance away with another man while I was swept into the arms of someone for whom the same depth of feeling began anew, the exact same love, for a stranger. I didn’t like it at all.
I was drenched in only a few steps and got the wonderful feeling of not caring about getting wet in the rain, so I
slowed and let the rain overtake me, washing me down as I turned off the walkway along the side of the city to the canyon floor. I only walked a few feet when I saw LittleHorse.
He was sitting on a fallen tree and had nothing on except a thin leather strap around his waist that held a small, beaded sack on one hip. His body glistened from the water. He was old, but the way he was built was amazing, with muscles defined, not a single element of excess. I was startled to see him, sitting in the rain, deep in thought.
When LittleHorse saw me he nodded a greeting, then looked up into the rain, past it into the sky, on to something unseen and unknowable by me, and he lifted his hands up, palms upward, as if he was feeling the rain, then made a gesture of turning over his hands with a wave and the rain stopped. Not instantly, but quickly. The rain came to a stop at the wave of his hand as surely as if he had turned it off.
My certainty of the impossibility of the event made its occurrence stunning. I was taught all my life nothing is impossible, or more precisely all things are possible, but I never had really allowed the thought the status of fact. My education, what I understood of physics, my own sense, told me only some things can be, so I lived my life within these confines. All that was instantly rearranged.
“Nice night,” LittleHorse said.
Nice night? He was commenting on the weather he had just changed. I nodded and smiled a weak, “heh-heh” smile. Little Horse patted the log, motioned for me to sit down as he slid off of it to sit cross-legged on the wet grass.
“How was the dance?”
When huge motors shut down there is a slow wrwrrrwrrrrrrwrrrrrrruuuuhhh, a sound like an old phonograph record slowing to a stop. Such was the sound I heard now in my own head as most of my belief systems, my bases of navigation and reason, unwound to a halt. I went numb, lost all consciousness of my body and I think I just stared, dumbfounded. Where the hell was I?
There was an expectant look on LittleHorse’s face. He was waiting for my answer.
“I got jealous.”
“Oh.” He nodded. “Then, not so much fun. What happened?”
“Is Neffie your daughter?” I asked.
He nodded. I hesitated. I didn’t want to discuss my emotions with him, to have him dissect my jealousies and errant passions, especially about Neffie.
“It is a nice night,” I said at last.
LittleHorse looked at me peacefully, sitting in the night, cross-legged, straight, long white hair flowing down his back, green eyes glinting in the moonlight. He was the perfect image of a sage; the wisdom of all times was written across his wrinkled, serene face. I wanted to slug him in the stomach. When he spoke after a moment I was sure he knew my innermost thoughts. I was embarrassed for wanting to punch him. Now I wanted to run away, screaming.
“You might like to try this.” He was opening the bag hanging off the leather strap tied around his waist.
Great, I thought. Drugs. Just what I need, some little bit of mushroom or powder so I can see worms crawling in the carpet while I laugh uncontrollably at a knock-knock joke, or drive around a traffic circle for five hours because
I can’t get up the courage to merge. Drugs are good for convincing me my mind is utterly subject to the disposition of my body. I hated this idea as much as I doubted it.
LittleHorse held out a pack of peppermint Life Savers.
“I don’t like them. Too sweet. What do you think?” He peeled the wrapper back.
I suddenly started to like this guy.
“No, thanks. Too sweet for me too. I’m a salt-and-sour man myself.”
“Don’t care about food much, taste and stuff. Once I start eating, I can’t stop. Appetite runs around, nowhere to go, eat more. RD brought these for me to try but I’m going to give them back.” He rolled the Life Savers up and put them back in the bag. I heard a jingle.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
He untied the bag and poured the contents out on the ground.
“Car keys, Life Savers, mad money.” He pointed to each item he described. The mad money was three quarters.
“You can’t get too mad with that,” I said.
“I can make a phone call.”
LittleHorse looked at me with a huge grin. I didn’t know what it meant but it was an innocent, playful smile and I could not help but return it. I did like this guy. I liked him a lot.
“So, who would you call?”
“Nobody. I’m just kidding. Who have I got to get mad at, anyway?”
The moon was framing LittleHorse, creating a rim of blue light around him, the wet grass glistening. Behind him, on a far mesa, I saw another coyote, framed by the moon as well, throw its head back and give the legendary yip yip
yipeeooo. The guys at Disney sure knew what they were doing, all right. I shivered from the cold.
“I suppose I should go in,” I said. “These wet clothes are starting to make me cold.”
“Take them off. That’s what I do. The evaporation of the water is what’s making you cold. Take them off and when you dry you’ll be warm.”
I stood up and took off everything, then sat on the grass next to LittleHorse. He was right. The clothes were what was cold, so the minute my body dried the warm night air was comforting and felt good. Then, I felt my nakedness.
“Here, put this on and you won’t feel so naked.” LittleHorse took off the leather strap around his waist and handed it to me.
“Now you’ll need this.” He held out the empty beaded sack. I took it and nodded my head in thanks. He reached down and dug a pebble out of the dirt beneath the grass and handed it to me. “Put this in there. Magic stone.” I laughed.
“No, really.” he said. “Throw this magic stone at a magic window and the window will magically break.”
I took the stone from him and ceremoniously dropped it into the bag.
“Or secretly put it into the shoe of an enemy and he will magically limp.”
I laid back on the grass and looked up at the sky. It was so clear I could see the Milky Way. I’m not much good with constellations but I made out the Little Dipper and the Big Dipper. I have, over the years, made up some constellations of my own, apropos my own self-made astrological chart. Tonight I could see the constellation “Joe, the Terribly Confused.” I forgot about Neffie, my jealousy, and the
dance. I was happy sitting with LittleHorse. I liked his sense of humor.
“So, LittleHorse, did you stop the rain?”
He nodded.
“How?”
“Practice.”
“You know, LittleHorse,” I said, “any minute a little dog is going to pull the curtain aside and you’re going to say …”
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” We both said it together.
“If you like, I will tell you the story of Welach and of our people. I will tell you of Neftoon Zamora and of Chuchen. I will explain my magical powers, but you must promise never to tell another soul.”
“I promise,” I said.
“Oh, nonsense. Sure you will. I’m just kidding. It’s all here for the telling. No, you need keep nothing secret for me. At times, you may want to keep it secret for yourself, but that’s a choice you’ll have to make on your own. There are times to tell, times to keep quiet. Do you have a camera?”
I shook my head. “No, I wish I did.”
“Ah. Should have got one of those little throwaway ones.
“You’re right,” I said. “But, how did you stop the rain?”
“No, that will come last. You can stop the rain yourself once you have understood what I will tell you. Then I won’t need to explain it.
“You must first learn what you can about Welach and
Chuchen. These are cities without time and without history. They are only states of mind, so the history of them and the evolution of them is only ever made up, only ever in the fancies and fantasies of the times. We live in a time of science with a capital S and evolution with a capital E. So the history of Welach conforms to those notions, much as your own biological history does. And in this scale of time Welach is thousands of years old. We are the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. Chuchen is our neighbor, but it is nearly impossible to reach for reasons you will discover. It is much like Welach, but with better art and a professional soccer team.”
I sat up.
“Just making sure you were paying attention. A few of us have some of the art from Chuchen. The artisans there have a high understanding of beauty and some here think their art is better than ours. But these art wars are stupid and unimportant. What is important to understand is Chuchen is entirely successful. Here we are still working our way to the place where they have got. Yet, to know more of our world I want you to think a little about your world, the outer world.
“As I am speaking to you everyone in your world is breaking the rules. I mean in the U.S.A., in Europe, all over the world, at some time or another, everyone is in violation of the civil codes. One may not know it, in fact probably does not. But one is either parked in the wrong place, their house isn’t up to code, they’re behind on their taxes, something. At no time is everyone in full compliance. Right?”
He was. I nodded.
“So the result is you live in a world where everyone is,
in some degree, an outlaw. The reason politicians sound so stupid is because they first try to convince you the rules are right and the people wrong, then they try to convince you more rules will repair the problem. Stupid upon stupid. Especially since the problem is, the rules have become impossible to obey.
“Why is this? How can rules be bad when they have brought so much good? Two reasons. One, there is a confusion of rule and law. You are not living under the law, you are living by rules. And two, unlike law, rules reproduce, evolve, react, and curve back on themselves, becoming like vines allowed to grow over a house. As they get bigger and more entangled, the house itself must finally fall under the weight, and the only thing left is the vine, perhaps dense enough now to provide a little shelter but not like the original house. So what can be done?”
He looked at me, waiting for an answer.
“I don’t know. Cut down the vine? Revolution?” I shrugged.
“Exactly wrong. The vines are the house now. They cannot be cut down. If you pull apart the vines, you work only to the destruction of what little society there is. The only thing to do is to move, to build another house. But people do not do this. They continue to work on the vines, to try to cut them back, retrain them, prune them, graft more vines to them.
“Fortunately you do live in the age of science with a capital S. Even though some science has its own vines growing over the shelter, it is nonetheless a good way to begin. The reason science can help is because it grows in the right way, that is to say, by revelation and insight.
“Look at the moon. It looks as if it revolves around the earth, moving across the sky. In fact, it does. Now look at the sun. It also appears to revolve around the earth as it crosses the sky. How can we tell the sun does not revolve around the earth the way the moon does? Certainly not by looking. They both look the same. Only by revelation and insight can we tell. If you look at the growth of science in the human race you will see most of the great advances have been made by revelation and insight, overturning conventional wisdom, constrained as it is by the physical senses.
“When someone comes along like Newton he moves things along a bit. What happens when Einstein comes along? Does he throw out what Newton has done? No. He presents a larger, more encompassing system of ideas and leaves Newtonian physics where he found it, good for the good it does, but slowly left behind as the larger and better system provides better answers.
“Welach is a city built away from the ordinary world, aware of it, but using it in the ways of Welach, not in the ways of the world.
“We have a document that forms the basis of our social order, like your commandments—quite similar, in fact—but it does not set forth rules of behavior. It states the law, what is so and what is not.”
I had to interrupt. “This is a document?”
“I’ll give you a copy. The important thing to know is the effect this has on the political economy of Welach. By basing our society on law, the individual is empowered, not restricted. We say, ‘you may.’ We do not say, ‘you may not.’ Does that sound like a good idea?”
I nodded.
“Would that be a good way to run your world?”
I nodded again.
“Exactly wrong again. Such a notion would create havoc. Your rules of order, which are based on what you may not do, are proper to your times. For one thing it’s simpler. ‘You can do anything you want … except this,’ say the rules. That was genius, really inspired, and it worked. Settled everybody right down. Let’s say the rule was ‘you may only honor one god.’ Good rule. Clearly only a rule and not a law, since it certainly seems one may honor as many gods as they want to. Now, what would the ‘law’ be for something like that? The only thing it could be is ‘There is only one god.’ That’s either true or it isn’t. If it’s true, then it is a law. If it’s a law, it can’t be broken. But look at the problem of telling that to most people.”
I looked at LittleHorse long and hard. He gave me a slight smile of recognition.
“The wonderful thing about Welach, and the reason you like it here so much, is we are not conforming our behavior to the rules. We recognize the law that governs us, certain it can be no other way. Law by this definition, is truth. With a capital T. We live blessedly outside the influences of many of your thinkers. From Rousseau to Freud. From Locke to I Love Lucy. We did have a close brush with some Catholics. When we first heard of this teaching, in the 1700s …”
“Are you that old?” I asked.
“Of course not.”
“How old are you?”
“I don’t know. Over a hundred, but I feel great.” He did a little hula with his hands. “You want to hear this story or not?”
“Sorry.”
“It was when the Spaniards came. They had this story about the head of their religion being a simple, poor man with great powers to heal and control the earth and so forth. We were already doing this a little, so we thought we had found another people like us. When the priest got here, though, it was clear they couldn’t heal, couldn’t control their world, didn’t know who or what did, and they were scaring everybody with this eternal hell thing. Hell you would conveniently fall into if you didn’t do what they said.
“When the first really sick and unhappy people asked for help they got a lot of gobbledygook about sinning and being guilty and God being mad at them. So, we knew they were full of rotten lettuce and we came back to Welach and ignored them. It was close, though.”
“Do you believe in God?” I asked.
“You tell me what you mean by God and I’ll tell you.”
“I mean an all …”
“No, no. Don’t really tell me. That was rhetorical. What I mean is, listen to me, and then you can decide for yourself whether God fits into this or not. It doesn’t make any difference whether I believe in God. It only makes a difference whether you do. Let me finish.”
“Okay, okay.”
“So, the economy of Welach … as I say, we had learned how to heal ourselves and to feed ourselves and to live together and work together and play together in harmony. But there was a tension, a desire to grow, to expand, get bigger and bigger. I’m not sure where it came from, but it has only been recently we have found this out and have begun to correct it.”
“Correct what? This desire to be a bigger city?”
“No. To propagate in order to maintain the species.”
“You think that’s wrong?”
“Unlawful.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Something in my internal clock had stopped ticking. I didn’t like what I was hearing. “You mean die out and not …”
“Nez, you are jumping to conclusions and you aren’t listening carefully. The idea life is going on because you are having sex, so having children, thereby populating the earth, thereby sustaining life, is just silly. Especially if you understand the universe and our place in it. Learn the history of this city and of the decisions that were made as we went along. Once you have all the facts, you can reconcile this with your upbringing as is best.
“This is a fact. Since we have come to the understanding of certain ideas, Welach has shed itself of its tensions. I can tell because of how good the music is sounding these days. As each day goes by there is a better and better feeling here. When was the last time you sat naked on the ground with an old man and looked at the stars and had pictures come to life? Only Welach provides that.”
I sat up and plucked a few pieces of grass from the ground and rolled the leaves into little balls with my fingers. “What kind of work does one have to do to stay here?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” he said. “If you really mean to stay here, very little. If you mean to understand our ways, then you will have to answer your own question with this: If you’re walking up a mountain carrying many bags, how much work is it to put down the bags? Understanding
the ways of Welach requires patience and listening and watching. You found something of Welach in the songs of Neftoon Zamora. They touched something in you, awakened you to it. This would not have been possible if you had not been listening, would not have been possible with your hands and mind full …” He stopped as he looked up behind me.
I felt a touch on my shoulder and turned, looking up to see Neffie, her long hair blowing around her face, her eyes flashing in the moonlight, focused like a hawk’s, lips drawn tight, arms akimbo. She was serious. I stood up quickly and faced her. Something was wrong.
“They found Harouk,” she said.
A drop of rain snapped against the end of my nose and rolled off. I looked to the sky, a tufted expanse of darkening gray.
“Where?”
“He was somewhere near the diner. They’ve gone to get him.”
“Is he … ?”
“He’s alive. They didn’t say anything else. I’m going up there. I thought you might want to come.”
I did. The little time I had spent with Harouk, I liked him.
“I have to get dressed,” I said as I picked up my lump of wet clothes. “Is there something else I can wear?” I offered the clothes as explanation, holding them up for Neffie to see the water oozing from them, dripping between each finger.
“You can check the apartment,” she said.
Then LittleHorse looked at me with the same curious
twinkle that had been flashing through his eyes as we talked earlier, but there was a new focus to them.
“The little bag,” he said, pointing to the bag he had given me, “is a symbol of male fertility.” Another drop of rain landed on my shoulder and ran down my back, right down my spine, giving me a chill, causing me to shudder. “And fertility,” he continued, “is best left to the land.” He paused. I supposed he was waiting for the remark to register its importance. I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.
“You better get going.” He looked up. “It’s starting to rain.”
I remember having the usual stack of dreams about being naked in a public place, mixed in with the dreams of being unprepared, dreams of having to take a test or perform some piece of music, recite some poetry, and having no idea how to do it. Standing there with LittleHorse and Neffie I felt profoundly naked and unprepared. My moment in the enchanted land of mystical houses was turning into a childhood nightmare. I wanted to cover up. The raindrops were coming more frequently and running along my legs and torso.
I looked toward Delilah’s and saw the crowd coming from the door. The dance was over. I held my bundle of wet clothes in front of me, low, covering, and looked to the top of the staircased apartments at Neffie’s. It might as well have been the moon. To walk those stairs, with all those people, was an impossibility for me at that moment.
“I’ll go get you some clothes,” said Neffie. “You can stay here and hide behind this log.”
She walked away toward her apartment. LittleHorse uncrossed his legs and stood up without touching the ground
with his hands. He smiled at me like a waiter saying “I’ll be with you in a moment,” and walked away, across the valley floor. He was, of course, completely naked, since I now had his little bag and the leather thong that held it around my waist.
I was alone. I felt humiliated and foolish. I looked at the ball of wet clothes in my hand and began to unfold them. The rain came now in a gentle shower and I put on the sopping pants and shirt as I looked at the log Neffie said I could hide behind.
The walkways were emptying as everyone in the town of Welach went to their apartments. No one looked at me or LittleHorse, no one strayed from the walkways. Soon the town looked asleep.
I was soaked. As the new rain began to pour there were currents of water along my body. I sat on the log and tried to put on the moccasins, but they were soggy and wouldn’t slide over my foot. I gave up after a few tries and decided to go to Delilah’s, the nearest shelter. As I walked I looked toward Neffie’s apartment. There was no sign of her.
Inside Delilah’s it was warm and dry and empty except for a sole figure near the stage who was packing up the last of the band gear. He turned as I came in, looked at me for an instant, then resumed his work. A single white light bulb from the top of a portable stand was the only source of light. It rang out into the huge cavern in a sphere of diminishing visibility, carving hard shadows behind all it touched.
I sat in one of the chairs and tried to get the moccasins on again but still had the same trouble. I let them drop to the stone floor and watched the man finish packing the last
bit of equipment, close up the box he had opened, and leave by a side entrance.
Once again I was alone. This time it was eerie; the light in the cave from the little bulb was not enough for me to see anything immediately around me, and outside the rain began to escalate in volume, in water and sound. The entrance to Delilah’s closed over again with the silver sheet I had seen at the dance.
I walked to the doorway and looked out at the city, a dim outline through the torrents. I could not have seen Neffie if she had been coming. Then something happened to me I cannot explain.
It was another wave of emotion but it was not the presence of a feeling. It was the absence of all feeling. No sensibility of any kind. I stood looking at the rain for a few seconds, then, in a lifeless shuffle, walked back to the chair I had been sitting on and carefully lowered myself down. All thoughts were leaving me, all thoughts about thoughts were leaving me.
I did not care about anything. The feeling was neither good nor bad, it was no feeling, a type of emotional numbness, the disappearance of my mind. Not of my consciousness, but of all the ideas that usually rolled around in my thinking. This was accompanied by a state of desirelessness, of having no goal, nowhere to be, wanting nothing, nothing to investigate or discover.
From a distance I heard music. I didn’t know if it was from inside my head or outside. It seemed like the music I heard when I was with Neffie in her apartment, when the band had first started to play, but it was not as clear and it was not the blues. It was an unknown type of sound, musical,
but without any of the usual musical clues. It filled my thinking completely, rushing up like water filling a bowl, shutting out all else.
There are case studies of people whose thinking was arrested in some trauma, who never aged, who never moved beyond the moment of their arrest. These people all displayed remarkable physical properties. A seventy-year-old woman had the body of a nineteen-year-old, the age she was when her lover was killed. Of course, she was mad, because she did not have the mind of a nineteen-year-old and she did not have the mind of a seventy-year-old. She was caught in a loop, circling back upon itself, never leaving the instant of her emotional trauma, never really living the life that passed in front of her for the next fifty-one years.
This music in my head had that same horrible quality of agelessness without growth, of a static perfection defying time. It increased in volume until it became as a mighty and rushing river, all the sounds melting together in a roar. The sonic spectrum surpassed everything I had ever heard with my ears, low tones deeper than the center of the earth, high tones like the cracking of teeth and bones. All the ages were in this sound, and there was no essence of music anymore, only a complete and overpowering constant hum, a power hum, like a stuck electric motor.
Outside the rain had stopped but I did not notice. Neffie was in the doorway, a gray silhouette, holding some dry clothes.
As she walked to me I saw in her eyes a flicker of recognition. She knew what I was going through. I stared at her blankly. I did not feel the warmth of love rise in me as
I had before. I felt no connection to her at all. I did not feel jealous of RD or competitive.
Neffie was simply another figure on a strange landscape of some type of dementia. As she came close to me, face-to-face, the noise in my head began to subside, the sounds diminishing in a way that was not like the volume decreasing, but like the dissipation of a mass, the dispersal throughout my being of particles of sound.
Neffie stroked my brow and smoothed my hair back. She wiped the water from my face and began to pull the sodden shirt off my shoulders. She took every piece of clothing from me and wiped the water off me with her hands. The clothes she had brought with her were my old clothes, the ones I had been wearing when I had come here, but they were clean, freshly washed, and the tears from the fall were sewn and repaired.
I began to dress myself with her help. I took the leather pouch from around my waist and pushed it into the pocket of my blue jeans. When I was fully dressed Neffie embraced me, holding me in her arms tightly for a long while.
“Now, listen to me.” She grabbed me by my shoulders and forced her gaze into mine. “In the transition you call death you will see the same thing again you are seeing now. The music will turn into light and the light will turn into you. But, there is nothing in this. Nothing to be made of it. No one dies. We have to get Harouk. That is the next stage of the story here. So come with me. Here. LittleHorse said you wanted this.”
She held out a coin. It was the size of a U.S. silver dollar. I looked at it and saw it was covered with markings; not a
writing I recognized as foreign, but marks I could not decipher. I held it in my hand. It was light, something like aluminum, not quite round, and flimsy. I held it for a second before closing my fingers around it.
I pushed it into the watch pocket of my jeans. I felt my mind restarting, an onset of grossness as I contemplated the tasks at hand, a feeling of sinking back to earth after having floated weightless.
Neffie took my hand and led me from Delilah’s. The clouds still blocked the sky but the rain had stopped. Outside we turned away from Welach, down a stone-paved path leading along the side of the canyon. I followed Neffie along the walk and knew I would never see this city again. I looked back to take a picture in my mind and saw the magnificent dwellings stacked one on the other carved from the side of the hill, a great monument, at once a part of the land and yet built as only the might of intelligence can build. An intelligence beyond the intelligence of mortals. The city glistened from the fresh rain and then slid into the fog that had settled along the canyon floor.
The path led into a tunnel carved from the hillside. Inside the tunnel were shallow steps leading down for a long distance. We walked in the tunnel for perhaps fifteen minutes until we emerged into a clearing much lower than where we started. Here I could see the stars.
The clearing was big, stretching across a wide valley, surrounded on all sides by low hills and mesas. We walked along a footpath for almost a mile until we came to a break in the surrounding hills, a little canyon. Then through this we were at a grove of ponderosa, surrounding an open, flat space where Neffie’s motorcycle and three cars were parked:
mine, a Honda Prelude, and a perfect 1972 El Camino SS. It was bright yellow.
RD was standing by the car with two other men, both as big as he. As Neffie and I walked to the car I felt a twinge of the old jealousy, but it quickly passed. That was the last time I felt it. Then from the bed of the El Camino came a low moan as Harouk raised himself up into a sitting position.
“Are you all right?” Neffie asked.
“No, I’m not all right,” Harouk said. “I think I broke every bone in my body.”
“Did you get shot?”
Harouk raised up further in the back of the bed and pulled himself to the side. He uncoiled, crawled over the bedsides and stood up outside the little truck, then stretched like he was waking up from a long sleep.
“No. That guy couldn’t hit anything with a gun. I’m okay, really, just banged up. You obviously got away.”
Neffie nodded yes. “I slipped out the side door and came in the back way to Welach. Nez was in Glenwood and followed me in.”
This impressed Harouk.
“The back way?” he said, pointing the remark, but it was lost on me.
Harouk walked around, stretching his arms some more. Neffie walked to RD, gave him a hug and waved thanks as he and the other two men climbed into the Prelude and drove off, leaving the three of us alone.
Harouk let the tailgate down on the bed of the truck and hopped up to sit on it. Neffie sat beside him.
“What happened?” Neffie asked.
“I ran across the road when Gus started shooting and
laid down in the acequia. When he backed out, to chase you, he ran over my foot. The acequia was muddy, so it pushed my foot down into the muck. Didn’t hurt, but it stuck me there. Then, when every emergency vehicle in the world started to show up at the diner, one of the ambulances backed into the ditch and ran over me.”
“You got run over by the ambulance?” I said, incredulous and trying not to laugh.
Harouk did laugh. “An ambulance. Four came.”
“I’m glad it strikes you funny too,” I said.
“It didn’t at the time. It could have been terrible. But because the bottom of the acequia was so mushy I kept getting pushed further and further into the clay. I didn’t want to scream because I didn’t want to be involved in the whole scene. I think Li called the cops or whatever.”
“Did he get hit?” Neffie asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. He went down behind the counter so I couldn’t see. I just wanted to get out of there. There were cops and paramedics for days. Since it was after-hours everybody around there with an ambulance responded, looking for the overtime. I counted four ambulances and twelve cop cars.”
“Twelve?” Neffie said.
“Yep. Of course there wasn’t one fire truck and when the diner caught fire …”
“You’re kidding,” she said.
“No, really. Caught fire, from Li maybe, on purpose or not, but up she went. There were twenty uniforms standing around watching the place turn to toast. No fire truck for thirty minutes … came just in time to hose down the ashes.”
“And you were in the ditch all this time?” I asked.
“Yeah, the ambulance that rolled over me, rolled right off so I laid there. I wasn’t hurt and I could breathe … .”
“But didn’t you say you broke every bone in your body?”
“Not literally. I was talking about the ride up here, Nez. I was in the back of this truck. The last five miles over this rocky road was a nightmare.”
“So the diner’s gone?” Neffie said.
“All gone,” said Harouk. “I wish you could have been there, though. The best part was … I’m stuck in the clay, the diner burns down, all the officials are standing around … some of them had little car—fire extinguishers and tried to use them, which was as silly as it looked … and then, when the place is finally a pile of cinders, the fire truck comes … pumps enough water to make a plume of smoke the size of the Rose Bowl … decide to try to pull myself out of there and split. I worked for a few minutes, got loose, and … stood up. Man, you shoulda seen it. In all this white smoke and red-and-blue flashing lights, this guy stands up from the ditch totally covered with gray and red clay … . I mean, the place went nuts. They started yelling, all sure they were seeing, like, the ‘fire ghost’ or some monster. If I had had my wits about me I could have scared them out of some money or something. I mean, they were petrified with fear. Instead I got the hell out of there. It was a pretty good time, though.”
“And Li?” Neffie asked.
“Never saw him. Not for sure. I guess he must have been talking to the cops, but I never saw him. I went to the
hunting cabin back up by our place and hid out there. I guess RD sent his guys out—they’re the ones that found me.”
“I told him to look for you,” said Neffie. “I was worried. I didn’t know whether you had been hit or not.”
“Thanks. No, not a scratch. I’m fine. Did you ever find Kweethu?”
“What do you mean?” Neffie said, concerned.
“You know she was in the car with me and Gus?”
“No.”
“Yeah. Absolutely. Gus picked her up in Quemado. Made her come with him to the diner. She was in the backseat. Didn’t you see her?”
“No,” she said again. This time her concern was up a notch, but it seemed to me an odd concern, not just about Kweethu’s safety, but more as if Neffie had been given a call to action she had missed.
“When Gus took off out of there, after you, she was with him. Have you checked to see where she is?”
Now Neffie was clearly focused. She sensed something of extreme importance to her. I thought it might be the shock of Kweethu being kidnapped mixed with some sense of a greater danger. Those emotions were present, I think, but there was more to it than that, much more, hidden to me.
“It never occurred to me. I thought you were alone in the car. We better go up to Quemado and check. You feel up to a drive?”
This last remark was to me.
“Sure.”
We all climbed into the front seat of the El Camino and
drove down the bumpy road to the highway and, I think, turned toward Quemado. I say “I think” because there were no road signs at the junction. I watched everything as closely as I could with one objective: to find my way back to Welach. But I couldn’t pinpoint any landmarks or signs. There was no moon now and my private constellations were useless. Knowing “Clementine the Rude” is a good way to amuse myself, but no way to navigate.
When we pulled onto the paved road it was a relief from the grinding bumps of the previous four and three-tenths miles. I did have the good sense to look at the odometer.
Neffie was driving and I was sitting between her and Harouk. My legs were up underneath me, on the transmission hump. The light from the dash lit Neffie’s face; the road unwound before us into the New Mexico countryside. We were silent, nothing to say or do but watch the road unfurl. My thoughts drifted over the events of the last days and I flexed my wrists and fingers, still amazed at the quick recovery.
As we drove through the night, and the road began to twist around the hills, I felt Welach drift away. Perhaps I would come and look for the city again. But, perhaps not. The road before me overtook my attention gradually, until it was all I was thinking about.
Over the distant mesas the sun began to cast its first light. I had stayed up all night again. My biological clock had been confused since I left Doc’s.
I MET Doc when I was in high school. He came to the school to give one of those talks on hygiene and there was something about him that drew me to him. After his lecture
I approached him and we started a conversation about hot rods. I was a car nut in high school and was thrilled to find a semi-adult—he was in his twenties—who knew anything about cars or was willing to talk about them.
He seemed knowledgeable about some of the more arcane aspects of car building and customizing, but he was most familiar with the elements of the car, with the concept of a car, as a system of ideas. He was the first to point out to me nothing man-made existed that didn’t first exist as an idea. This was the first glimpse I had into the power of ideas.
He also was the first to point out to me a fundamental flaw in the structure of American society, namely that the hierarchy of our society was based on needless skills, creating a society whose value system was at odds with its own historical realities and the realities of the world.
Doc’s notion was the greatest men and women of history have a clear order of importance relative to their effect on our lives.
At the top of that order are the spiritual leaders who can and do alter our perception of reality. Behind them, a close second, are the thinkers, philosophers and poets, writers and artists and scientists.
Beneath them by a significant degree are state leaders and governors of some type: kings, presidents, emperors, and lawmakers.
Next are the adventurers, including businesspeople of great wealth and philanthropy, and inventors, the appliers of science and technology.
Where on this list, he asked me, are the great athletes? How far back does our memory go of people with extraordinary physical skills? A hundred years? Barely. Do you
remember the sport of archery diving? Jumping off a diving board into a swimming pool while shooting a bow and arrow at a target? Of course not.
But look at the structure of high school society, that little model of American society, and you see a pecking order that is the complete reverse of the historical order of importance. Athletes are the most popular, the most valuable (because of the income they generate), the most socially important. The best male athletes get the prettiest girls and the best female athletes get whatever they want.
Next are the wealthy, the locally powerful, especially if they are physically beautiful. And way down on the list, derided and abused, lowest on the high school popularity index, are the poets, philosophers, artists, scientists, and, very last, the spiritual thinkers, usually considered crackpots. When we leave high school it takes ages to shake off this social order. Some never do, dying drunk on beer in front of the latest sporting event, looking for a hero, a role model, where none exists.
I liked the way his thinking developed along these lines. I also knew the ideas were dangerous, the kind likely to get you killed a few centuries ago and get you mutilated today or at least ostracized. Try going into a sports bar on Super Bowl Sunday, turning off the TV and reciting a poem, and you’ll see what I mean.
I looked in the rearview mirror of the El Camino and could see my scraped-up face, behind me the road wandering into the early-morning horizon. On the horizon stood Rousseau. I remembered his dismal admonitions to avoid artists and menstruating women, since one was useless and the other was, well, useless too. His figure loomed
smaller and smaller until the sunrise, in one exploding ray over the purple mesa, turned him into a silhouette wavering like a flame, then extinguished.
We turned off the paved highway and drove along a smooth dirt road for a mile or so until we came to an enclave of five or six small adobes arranged in a great circle.
Breakfast was under way, tiny wisps of smoke from the chimneys on the little houses wafted into the pink morning sky, carrying the smell of tortillas and fried beans. A black dog walked up to the car as we came to a stop outside the circle and looked in as Harouk and I got out of the passenger side. When the dog saw Neffie he became excited and ran to her, spinning in circles and jumping with glee, rising on his hind legs to lick her face.
Neffie ruffled his fur and caressed him. Two young children playing in front of the houses saw Neffie and had nearly the same reaction as the dog, running to her in abandoned delight, jumping into her arms and smothering her with kisses.
Neffie picked the youngest one up and walked toward the biggest adobe. The excitement of the children stirred the people in the houses and more and more of them came outside.
Soon Neffie was surrounded by fifteen or so people, all Native American, from small children to adults, thrilled to see her. One of the smaller children crawled into her other arm so now she had a child on each one. Neffie made her way to a bench carved from a solid piece of wood and sat down.
Everyone wanted to touch her. The children climbed on her seated figure until she was virtually covered, a child on each leg, one standing on each side of her, four at her
feet and adults standing about her, waiting. I had never seen such love expressed for someone as these people expressed for Neffie.
I looked at Harouk, but he did not return my gaze. Instead, he was looking at the scene before us, smiling, familiar with such a response for Neffie, knowing it would happen and happy to see it had.
From a small adobe came an old woman who I thought was Kweethu. But as she came closer I could see she was not the same person I had met in the parking lot in Quemado. I was to learn this was her sister. Neffie beckoned to her and the woman came to Neffie. The children parted enough to give her room, respectfully, but not enough to let go of Neffie completely, holding to her like treasure.
“Have you seen Kweethu?” Neffie asked.
The woman shook her head but did not speak.
One of the children said, “She’s playing bingo.”
The child next to him elbowed him in the ribs and said, “No, she isn’t. You’re stupid.”
“I saw her in town,” a little one said.
To all of these sightings, the old woman shook her head to Neffie’s questioning glances.
“How long?’ Neffie asked the old woman.
The woman said something in a language I didn’t understand. I looked again at Harouk, but he still looked only at Neffie. She stared at him for a second and he nodded some understanding. Neffie shuffled in her seat and the children closed in on her again. Kweethu’s sister sat on the bench next to her.
“Do you have a story to tell us?” one of the older girls asked.
This sent the other children into cries of ecstasy, pleading with Neffie to tell a story.
Neffie looked on these people gathered about her with more love than I am able to describe. Something went out from her eyes and her heart to them, something tangible and alive, something like compassion, but more a mixture of care and camaraderie, at once their equal as children, then as their teacher.
“Okay,” she said. “A short one.” She looked at me and Harouk.
“That man over there is Nez.” She pointed to me with her eyes. Everyone turned and looked at me. I wanted to faint, run, hide. I looked behind me for someplace to go. It was that moment when the magician picks you from the audience to come up to the stage to help him with a trick and you know he is going to pour water on you or tear up your clothes or smash your watch. I gulped and produced this idiotic good-natured smile. Then I sort of shook my head. To this day I have no idea what I was saying “no” to.
“Nez is a wise man and knows a lot about frogs.”
Frogs?
“There is a story the people of Chuchen tell of the frog man. A frog was out plowing a field one day and an angel appeared and said, ‘you have been chosen to build a great temple for the king. Will you come with me in my golden chariot?’ Well, the frog was tired from working in the field all day and said no. The angel left and never came back. When the frog got home that night he told his wife, the loon, what had happened and she became crazy with jealousy. ‘You let an angel from the king get away?’ she
screamed. ‘Why, that would have been food for a month.’ This legend has kept the people of Chuchen entertained for years, even though there is not a shred of truth to it. Until today. Now that Nez has come looking for Kweethu with me that story of the frog and the field and the loon for a wife has even less meaning, just the crazy ramblings of a lost culture. So, now, Nez. Tell us what you love,” Neffie said.
What did I love? Well, let me think.
“I love you, Neffie.”
Everyone nodded approval at this. I was not alone in this notion, it was obvious. However, this was not the answer.
“And I love warm winds.”
This caused a ripple in the crowd, a damn of faint praise. The children knew it was a weak answer; too New Agey.
“I love to laugh.” I rose the inflection on the end of the statement, but left out any question.
That was the hot button, the magic trick. I got a round of applause as the children stood up, their faces alive with delight, and cheered. Neffie stood at the same time. She walked to me and embraced me and laughed. She put one arm around my waist. “Welcome,” she said as she swept her other hand across the scene, presenting me, “to Chuchen.”
At that instant I fell into a quiet, indescribable peace. I was through the looking glass, with the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter and Alice. I was elated and confused, happy and perplexed.
I turned to look at the El Camino, shining yellow in
the morning, a golden chariot if there ever was one. I was swept up in the arms of these people, absurdly, without a narrative, living in a moment of eternal happiness. From here I could see forever, the road trip ahead of me, the people I would meet, the dangers that would come and go, and through it all, the children wrapped around the feet and arms of Neftoon Zamora, laughing as the fish ate my furniture. I have never had much tolerance for ‘gee whiz’ in my life, but now, standing at this miraculous spot, waiting for the next part of the story to unfold, it was the only thing that came to mind.