Effigy Head Part 2

THE EFFIGY HEAD (II)

Part Two

                                                                       

1.

            In the Hungry Moon, Walks-as-Ghost-Woman died.  It is  hard  to count the number of her winters.  Some said that she was the grandmother or great-grandmother of all those alive in our village. 

            Two of her daughters washed her corpse and wrapped it in bark tied tightly together with deer sinew.  Her daughters were old themselves and feeble.  Sickness exempted them from cutting off any joints from their fingers.  Instead, they tore their hair.

            After her death, Walks-as-Ghost-Woman lived for several months in the Dead Woman’s hut at the edge of the village where the thin, hungry dogs prowl the garbage dump and where hides are tanned.  Night-Sky-Girl, who had died in child-birth, occupied the Dead Woman’s hut with Walks-as-Ghost as well as a little girl, captured from Those-Who-Hiss.  The slave girl’s job was to keep the fire burning in the hearth so that it would be warm and hasten the decay of the dead women.  The little girl was afraid to sleep with the dead women and cried when she offered them water and milk and ground corn each morning for breakfast and so she ran away and hid in the forest.  Some men hunting in the woods found her trembling under a berry bush and brought her back to the village.  Walks-as-Ghost’s daughters burned the little girl’s wrists and forearms with embers until she promised to remain with the corpses and tend to their needs. 

            Mid-summer, the sun came close to earth and put its lips on the Long Day post standing in the center of the village.  By that time, Walks-as-Ghost-Woman was ready to be put under the earth.  Her flesh was gone and the men carrying the bark bundle on poles all wrapped in fox and marten fur heard her bones rattling inside.  The slave girl captured from Those-Who-Hiss wore a shawl of feathers and carried Walks-as-Ghost’s medicine vessel.  The Sun Lord came from his his tall thatched house atop the big mound of tamped black earth.  He wore turkey and eagle feathers in a plume above his head and a beaten copper disk covered most of his chest. His women danced around him and warriors carried him across the Chungky playing field on his throne made of white wood embedded with river pearl and cut sea shells.  Invitations to the feast had been sent by runner to all friends and kinfolk along the river, as far to the north as the Great Water Mountain where the river bends like the leg of a dog and where there are more people than stars in the sky.  Many families had come and they reclined on benches or on the grassy prairie bent down and crushed by the Grass Dancers under wicker bowers woven with river weeds to make shelters on green shadow near the burial place.  Drums sounded and the clans sang the songs which they owned and elk and bison were roasted over great pit fires while river turtles  big as boulders with vermillion snapping jaws stood tethered to poles waiting their turn to be butchered.   

            The day before boys had opened the earth with hoes that no woman had touched.  They made a hole that was as deep as they were tall.  After the pit was made, it was the navel of the earth, the center of all things.  Girls found ferns in the woods and laid them in the pit.  The sides of the cut made in the earth were shored with cedar logs and the bark had been shaved from that wood and some of it burned so that the pit had a sweet smell.  A thunder-bird shawl of many bright feathers was set on the ferns to receive the body.  Then, the stained, lopsided bundle containing Walks-as-Ghost-Woman was laid at the head of the pit, set gently atop the open shaw.  Most of Walks-as-Ghost had melted away and the little shrunken bundle of bark looked very small in the grave, as if a child were being buried. 

            Wood heaped in shallow fire-pits around the grave was kindled.  Men smoked tobacco in pipes shaped to represent each warrior’s vision-animal.  Corn cakes were roasted and the warriors and their women ate them. 

            The Evening Star looked in upon the world.  The drums beat and much smoke rose into the sky.  Then, Blue Boy, his face and chest smeared with clays of that color, came across the field, singing and chanting.  Blue Boy had come from the north and his hands had also been indigo by berries gathered from the woods.  He sat upon the north side of the pit with his blue toes, also berry-stained, dangling down over the corpse.  A woman brought him parched corn to eat and roast fish and, after he ate, he smoked and drank a cup of milk.  And, at the same time, White Girl was brought forth, all painted in lime and with mica in her hair.  She sat upon the south side of the grave pit with her pale feet dangling over the ferns and a woman brought her parched corn and roast mouse-deer and, after she ate, one of the old men blew sage smoke into her eyes and mouth.  Then came Red Boy with the blood of animals smeared across his brow and cheeks and with ocher the color of the bones of the earth from which the sacred pipes are made caked on his feet and hands.  Red Boy took his place, sitting upon the east side of the grave pit and he was brought parched corn and the roast flesh of a turkey cock and, after he ate, he smoked and drank from a cup of milk.  And, across from him, Black Girl sat, also dangling her little charcoal-painted feet into the grave.  White clay surrounded her eyes and her lips were painted with white teeth, but the rest of her was black as night, ash rubbed into her skin, for she was Death, the Old-Woman-Who-is-Unable-to Die-Herself and she frightened the evil spirits away from the west side of the grave pit.  Two old women brought her parched corn, but she spit upon it, and the sage lit near her spiraled away from Death’s poisonous breath and when the cup of milk was handed to her, she said something contemptuous and emptied out the white fluid on the earth. 

            The Sun Lord was carried to the pit and sat upon his throne all inlaid with river pearl, looking away from the hole toward where the Evening Star was making the sky beautiful.  Singers chanted and called the sky-kingdom down so that it touched the earth.  Drummers drummed and the waters under the world rose and bubbled through the soil which was moist because what was below had come upward to touch what was above.  Then, Tongue, who speaks for the Sun Lord, and for all the people, drew blood from his lip and cheeks and spilled the blood in the grave and, so doing, spoke:

            – This is our Grandmother, Walks-as-Ghost-Woman.  The number of her winters would be hard to count.  This is the story she takes with her when she goes underground to the Old-Woman-Who-is-Unable-to Die-Herself.  Listen carefully so you will tell it to the Old Woman correctly.

            Walks-as-Ghost-Woman was the name we gave to Granny when she was already older than any other living person, and became restless, and departed our village to walk through all the world.  When Those-Who-Hiss killed her son at the Painted Rocks, Granny said she was tired of living and that she would go away to find her death.  And so, we know, that she walked the Blue Road and went so far that she saw the island of copper and met bears that were white as snow.  And she walked the White Road also, and saw the sea that is hot as blood and the strange people that live by its waves.  Then, she walked the Red Road and went as far as the Cold Sea.  And, returning from that trip, she said that it was time to die and so she walked the Black Road and saw the quarry where the bones of the earth are dug to make pipes for men and, went beyond, to the mountains that stand up like porcupine bristles and climbed to the high place where all the world can be seen and she waited for the Old Woman there, but she didn’t come, and so Granny picked up her Death Vessel, which she always carried with her, and took up her cane and walked back, two winters long, to come to our Water Mound and live with us many more years and, at last, die where she had been born.  

            Granny was named Corn Blossom  before she made her tour of the earth.  She was born a long time ago, in the Moon of Green Acorns in the Winter that we remember as Nine-Killed.  In that time, there was war with Those-Who-Hiss.  A great warrior chief from among that people was hunting our people the way wolves hunt buffalo calves in the Hungry Moon.  We called him Talon Face, because he had a tattoo covering his cheek and jaw that was like an eagle’s claw.  And on the left side of his face, he was all marked with blue scars so that his eye looked like the eye of the Bird Man peering out from the outline of his beak and feathers.  Talon Face was twice as big as other men and three times as strong and, when he walked in the woods, under his plume of hawk feathers, his war medicine was so strong that he could neither be seen nor heard.  Long before, Corn Blossom was born Talon Face had been hunting and killing our people and his feats were so well-known that children crying at the dark were told to be quiet or Talon Face would come and take them away.   

            The Winter called Nine-Killed was named because Talon Face came among our gardens

in the Moon of Turning Leaves, when the women were taking the gourds and beans and corn from the fields, and, with his men, cut down six of them.  A little girl hid in the sunflower patch and saw Talon Face and his soldiers raping the women before cutting their throats.  She ran back to the village after the killing had been done and said that she had seen a giant with a hawk’s eye like the Bird Man swoop down and take the women and, then, he had flapped his wings, she said, and rose high over the forest, riding the wind above the trees like an eagle.  Corn-Blossom’s father, Burnt Hand, was a great warrior and he had killed so many of Those-Who-Hiss that his tally-stick was slashed from one end to another.  With his three sons, he went to the Sun Lord and asked permission to chase Talon Face and kill him.  The Sun Lord prayed for a while and said that the expedition would be successful and so he gave his consent.  Then, Burnt Hand went into his wife and enjoyed her, something that is forbidden.  This was the beginning of Corn Blossom.  Burnt Hand with his three sons pursued the war party lead by Talon Face.  They caught up with the enemy at Stinking Swamp and fought with them.  Talon Face killed all of Burnt Hand’s sons – that is why we recall that Winter as Nine-Killed. 

            Burnt Hand was wounded in the ribs, but escaped, and came back to our Water Hill.  Later, Corn Blossom was born.  Burnt Hand was very sad when he saw that the baby was a girl because he had wished for another boy to take revenge on Talon Face.  

            Other children made fun of Corn Blossom and said she was the Girl-who-had-wished-to-be-a-Boy.  Corn Blossom had a temper and, when the other girls taunted her, she wrestled with them and threw them in the lagoon where the fish as big as logs hide.   And she said that since she had caused her brother’s deaths – it being well-known that Burnt Hand had gone into his wife to make the little girl on the eve of the war party – she would be the cause of Talon Face’s death.

2.

            I needed a plan.  Sleepless, in my lonely bed, I imagined crimes.  It’s depressing.  Necessity is the mother of crime and beneath every plot that I invented there was the throb of dire longing.  My world was broken and the only thing that would knit it together was a serious crime and, for that reason, I needed to make a plan sufficient to the sorrow and the jealousy that tormented me.  A plan, at least, was a kind of bulwark, an engine for accomplishing something, a first step that once taken would be irrevocable.        

            A first step?  You will say, I suppose, that I was already stealing from the collection, pawning  scraps and shards of pottery on E-bay.  That was true, but those little ragged shreds of the past were meaningless – they didn’t assemble to anything and I forgot them as soon as they were sold, and payment received and the computer entry deleted.  Theft of the effigy-pot and its sale was a whole different matter, a distinct threshold that once crossed could not be forgotten or forgiven.  I wasn’t a criminal yet, but, once this deed was done, it would be different – the crime would be on my conscience and there was only one thing that would ease those pangs of remorse that I already felt.  If Lupe were to come back to me, if I were to have her in my life...but, who knew if that was possible?  I’m not a fool.  I was hemorrhaging money to Mexico with no evidence that she would ever return.  Reason told me that I should abandon all hope.  She was playing me for a fool.  She wasn’t coming back.  What special grace or attribute did I possess that would lure her across deserts and border lines to me?  I am nobody special.  You wouldn’t notice me a in a crowd.  You and I have brushed elbows a dozen times and you didn’t even see me. 

            But these kinds of thoughts seemed faithless to me.  And, if I were to be worthy of Lupe – that is, worthy of the only thing in my life that did make me special – then, I would have to hope even without hope that she would be restored to me.  To earn her, I would have to be faithful and to be truly faithful, I would have to understand, and hold in my mind at all times, the fact that she was probably lost to me, gone forever, and, yet, know also that she would most certainly be restored, that if I did everything possible to save her, that if I neglected no force nor resource within my power, she would surely be restored to me.  My faith would merit her return.  It made no sense, but that was what I believed, and, on that basis, I had to steal the effigy pot and make it yield money so that Lupe could be brought out of the deserts in Mexico and restored to my side.

            So this was my plan: after five-o-clock, when the museum closed, I would drive my car a mile away to a certain gravel road where hunters and sportsman sometimes parked when they walked out toward the levee and the bend in the river and the shaggy low bluffs beyond.  The car would not inspire any interest parked in that place.  I had often seen pickups and other vehicles pulled onto the shoulder where a trail was beaten over a barbed wire fence and along a low ridge running through a rice field.  But I wouldn’t go that way.  Instead, I would hike back to the museum, enter under the cover of darkness, and, after taking the effigy pot, light several fires, one for each cardinal direction, in the double-wide.  The formaldehyde paneling and the insulation hidden in the walls would explode into flame and I would flee back, through the fields to my car.  I could imagine driving along Highway 61, minding my own business, as the fire-trucks careened by me, unspooling red veins of light in all directions.

            But, I wasn’t sure how to manufacture the fire.  And, it occurred to me that I would need to get a number of the remaining shards in the collection, pulverize them, and set them in the case where the effigy head was located.  Of course, I would disable the alarm that I set each evening when I departed.  But...what if the flames didn’t manage to consume the area where the case containing the artifact was located, or, worse, what if someone was injured or burnt in the fire? 

            So better: arrange for my own robbery.  After five-o-clock, smash the case and take the pot.  But first, I would drive up to St. Louis and buy a junker car, a bright green sedan, something as conspicuous as possible.  I would drive the car around town after dark for a couple of nights and, even, park it for an hour or so by the lot.  The car would be registered to someone in St. Louis; I would buy the car for cash from some place not too scrupulous.  Then, on the night of the crime, I would park the car in the lot at 4:30, take the pot at 5:15, or as soon as the coast was clear, then, speed away a mile or two miles to a bayou in tall trees near the levee.  I would sink the car in the bayou, hike back to the museum, and, then, beat myself in the face until my nose was broken and my eyes black and blue.  I’d call for the police and say that someone came in a green car, that I had seen the green car around town for awhile, and that a man came from the car, possibly a colored fellow, and hit me with a sap so that I was unconscious and, now, that I was awake again, the case was smashed and the pot taken.  People would remember the car around town, but it would not be found, and I would have hidden the pot in the field, just beyond the low range of the Indian mounds, and, after a day or so, under the dark of the moon, I would unearth it.

            I wasn’t sure if I had the courage to beat myself sufficiently severely to make it seem that I had been unconscious.  And, perhaps, the car from St. Louis could be traced.  If it were sufficiently conspicuous, probably someone would peer through the windshield even though I would only drive it at night and see someone who looked like me – there people at the gin, across the highway, always smoking outside, and, who knows?  Perhaps, one of them would see me getting in or out of the car.  And, sometimes, weather was dry and droughty and what if the water level in that old, murky lagoon of the bayou diminished to the point that the green car was no longer submerged.  It was too complicated.  And, buying the car for the fake getaway, would reduce the profitability of the crime. 

            Kids smoked dope among the mounds.  Sometimes, I had to shoo them away after school.  So let’s say, I went to the garbage can, selected some beer bottles, maybe a wine jug, and a whiskey bottle also.  Then, after five p.m., I hide the effigy pot in my car, go back into the museum and trash the place, break beer bottles on the floor, piss on the carpet, set the whiskey and wine jugs on my desk, and, for a good measure – killing two birds with one stone – smash the computer to pieces.  So I’m to blame myself, at least, partly – I forgot to turn on the alarm when I left, maybe, I was carrying out the trash myself and got distracted – after all, shit happens!  Some kids took advantage of my mistake, broke into the double-wide trailer, had a party for the half the night and, then, trashed everything.  The effigy head is missing.  And, I suppose, the explanation is that the kids busted it up, freaked-out, and cleaned up the mess and now no one’s admitting to anything.  This was a good plan, but it would create a victim or victims, some kids would get rousted by the cops, probably black kids who couldn’t afford a lawyer, and who were vulnerable to arrest and someone would probably be punished for my crime.  I thought about that for awhile and, it seemed, unacceptable to me.

            I fell asleep.  In my dream, I was behind the wheel of a green sedan purchased in East St. Louis.  I had paid cash for the car.  The place sold vehicles on the cheap to Mexican immigrants without good id.  The car had holes in the floorboard and I could see the road rushing by under my feet.  I had the effigy pot next to me, set like a pumpkin on the front seat.  Sirens were wailing.  They were coming to get me.   I skidded off the freeway at the New Madrid exit – I knew the place and the alleyways and could hide from the police in my hometown.  I hit the drainage ditches at the intersections hard, bottoming the old sedan out on the asphalt and filling the inside of the car with sparks.  The town was the way that it looked before the trees had all died and been cut down.  But amputated tree stumps shone in my headlights along the dusty boulevards like tombstones and, somehow, interspersed among those stumps were the trunks of huge, flowering trees that formed an arch overhead.  The cicadas made their buzz-saw sound and the cops pursuing me came around the corner.  But my plan was brilliant – two blocks ahead of me, Lupe was waiting in an identical green sedan, exactly the same except for one digit difference in the license plate.  She would wait for me to pass the place where she was lurking, pulled against the wall by the air compressor and the hose for inflating tires at Kwik-Trip.  As I passed, she would gun her car, bounce out over the curb onto the highway, and, then, at the first intersection, speed away to the right, drawing the pursuit after her along a side road and through the poor neighborhoods to the edge of town.  I would speed downtown, find the steep alley that climbed up onto the top of the levee where I knew there was a double-lane running for a half-mile above the huge, dark, placid bend of the river.  On an island, Huck Finn had made a fire and I could see some orange flame and a little limpid curly-cue of smoke and a barge far downstream winked at me and, then, I drove fast, and faster, and at the boat ramp, slid the car sideways, blasting down the asphalt incline and straight into the water, which fountained in luminous, symmetrical fans up from both sides of the car.  I felt the tires float loose of the river bottom and the water poured up through the holes in the floorboard like a artesian springs smelling of diesel oil and catfish and algae and, surprisingly, the sedan didn’t sink but floated for a long time like a raft under the huge moon and the twinkling stars.  Then, at last, we went underwater.  I opened the car door and took the effigy pot under my arm and swam like a dolphin, fast and very strong, each stroke bringing the big, looming bank of the levee closer and closer.  My father had parked his semi-truck and trailer atop the levee and the shadow of his vehicle blocked the light from the town, although I could see a red and blue vortex spinning in the air where the glare of the cop cars had encircled Lupe’s sedan, six or seven blocks away.  My father came down the boat ramp, a little stiff from the long midnight drive he had made from Knoxville or Atlanta or Des Moines.  “What do you have there, son?” he asked.  I showed him the effigy pot which was running clear water like snot from its nose and eyes.  “Where did you get that?” he asked me.  He was young and had dashing sideburns and hair like Elvis Presley, the way that he had looked when I was a little boy and my parents were still together.  I was ashamed to tell him where I had found the pot.  We walked up to the road built on the top of the levee.  At the hitch between the semi-tractor and trailer I could look down on the shingled roofs of the town and see a ring of cop cars surrounding Lupe’s vehicle which was off the road and nudged against a telephone pole.  The cops had Lupe in handcuffs.  My eyesight was a crane that swooped down to bring her close to me.  Her driver’s license was a forgery.  Her name wasn’t even Lupe, it was something else.  “She doesn’t belong here,” my father said.  He took the effigy pot from my hands and dropped it on the asphalt.  The police said that Lupe had violated immigration laws and they lead her away  from the crashed car.  She turned her face to look at me, but knew that I would be implicated in her crime if she spoke or acknowledged my presence.  Tears came from her eyes and she bit her lips and the police put her in the squad car and drove away.  She had said her real name to the police and I had heard it, but I couldn’t recall what it was.   

            The next day, at five p.m., I put the pot in a garbage sack and carried it to my car.  I disabled the alarm by unscrewing the metal case and removing the batteries.  I pitched the batteries in the weeds by the parking lot.  Then, I waited until it was a little darker.  With my booted heel, I kicked in the door.  It wasn’t too hard.  The place as a trailer-house after all and not very well built. 

            Then, I drove home and hid the pot under my bed.

            The next morning, I called the police and reported the theft.  I spoke with someone in Fayetteville as well.

            I wasn’t even a suspect.

3.

            It was the part of the night when the Wind is Tired and Sleeps.  Tongue rested his voice while two girls made a fire near the cedar-lined pit.  They brought Tongue an ember and he lit his pipe and smoked.  The pot made to show Talon Face’s head was set near the little heap of burning wood.  The red clay of the pot caught the firelight and glowed like a coal. 

            Red Boy, who sat at the pit facing the pot, began to whimper.  He covered his eyes and cried.  An old woman was sent to boil some of the herbs that hide pain.  She brought the soup to the boy and ladled it into his mouth with a spoon carved from deer bone.  Red Boy stopped crying but looked very tired and the old woman sat beside him to keep him from nodding off and falling into the pit too soon. 

            People were feasting still beside the roasting pit s and the Sun Lord had made a great bonfire blaze atop the mound where his house was built.  The bonfire threw handfuls of hot sparks into the sky. 

            When Tongue had finished with his pipe, he spoke again.

            – Burnt Hand chose men and boys to take to war with him against Talon Face.  The war party bathed in the river and, then, put white clay on their faces and hands to show that they were like men already dead.  Ghostly white, they marched to the steep black hill of pounded earth where the Sun Lord lived, above them closer to his abode in the sky.  They cried for him to come forth and look over them.  When the Sun Lord appeared, the men took their polished Chungky stones and said that they would wager with one another.  The Sun Lord beckoned to them, but said nothing.

            Burnt Hand had chosen six warriors to make up his party.  Each pair of men went in turn to the center of the plaza where the soil is flat and covered with raked river-sand.  Saying, “I bet my very own head upon this roll,” – it is what we call the “Head Roll” today – one warrior sent the stone spinning across the plaza while the other raced behind, stopped, and hurled his long stick.  The first “Head Roll” was a good one.  The lance hit the stone in its center and sent it sprawling in the direction where the evening star rose – that was good war magic.  The second “Head Roll” was also good.  The long stick glanced against the back side of the rolling stone and seemed to make it speed all the more swiftly across the white raked sand.  The mark that the long stick made in the sand was like a serpent poised to strike.  On the third roll, the lance missed the stone and the Chungky sped forward a long way before losing momentum and, finally, wobbling over onto its side.  This meant that some of the men in war party would be killed.  The women watching the contest began to weep and some of them beat their breasts.  Burnt Hand asked: “Which of you will roll the stone for my cast?”  Before anyone could step forward, Corn Blossom ran forward and took her father’s hand and said that she would throw the Chungky for him.  The men consulted with one another and were uncertain.  Then, the Sun Lord said that since it was by her conception that so many had died, she should be allowed to throw the stone if she could.  Burnt Hand’s Chungky stone was the color of the moon in autumn, smoky white, and it was as smooth as the ice that sheets the river in the Moon when the Bear Sleeps.  It was heavy and weighed down Corn Blossom’s hand, but she was not afraid.  Her father said: “I bet my very own head upon this roll.”  And, then, she stooped and bowled the stone so that fled fast away from her hand, rolling smoothly over the sand.  Burnt Hand darted to the side and threw his lance.  The long stick skimmed low over the sand and, then, stopped, skidding so that the Chungky stone pushed against it, was obstructed, and so stopped upright, still standing on edge. 

            No one had ever seen such a cast.  “This is very strong war medicine,” the Sun Lord said.  “I will go with the men to help kill Talon Face,” Corn Blossom said.  “That can’t be allowed,” Burnt Hand said.  But, then, the Sun Lord pointed skyward and warriors saw three hawks with red tails spinning around the sun, wheeling there as if to make the golden orb spin like Chungky stone across the blue plaza of the sky.  “Take the little girl,” the Sun Lord said.

            They made a fire at the war marker where heads and hands and other trophies were hung, atop the brown clay pyramid facing across the plaza to the Sun Lord’s temple.  The men washed the white clay from their faces and hands with water brought to them in pots shaped like the heads of illustrious enemies that our warriors had killed.  Then, they feasted on dog so that their weapons would bite, ate the lungs of a deer so that they could run without panting, and, at last, filled their bellies with tongue and hump of a buffalo for courage and strength.  Each warrior took three handfuls of parched corn and put it in his pouch, swearing that he would eat nothing but that corn until Talon Face had been killed.  Corn Blossom was given a wicker basket lined with clay to carry water for the warriors so that they would not be thirsty when they fought.  When it was dark, and moon had risen to give them light, the war party set forth from the village.

            Burnt Hand’s troop went through our garden land and, then, the forests that we claim for our hunting.  Beyond our forests, there is a journey of One Sleep across territory that we claim and that Those-that-Hiss claim, but which no one owns.  In that territory, Burnt Hand and his soldiers did not follow the trails, and, even, avoided the paths made by the game, instead hiking in the sticky marshes full of gnats and mosquitos along the twists and turns of the river.  They waded to a small, sandy island a lance-throw across the flowing water and slept there without making a fire. 

            The next morning, Burnt Hand and his troop crossed into the hunting grounds of Those-That-Hiss.  They stayed away from all trails and made their way slowly through the thickets.  When the sun was high, the war party came upon a woman with her baby hoeing in a squash garden.  The men surrounded the woman.  They threw her baby on the ground to kill it and, then, cut off the woman’s nose and ears.  They told her to send Talon Face to fight with them.  Burnt Hand and his men withdrew then to a grove of trees scattered over a low hill.  The men could hide behind the trees and ambush Talon Face as he came to make war upon them.  This was where the fight would occur.  Corn Blossom was sent down to the river, an hour’s walk and told to bring them the water basket so that it would be ready when the fighting happened.  In the woods, Corn Blossom met the ghost of the baby that they had killed.  The baby tugged upon her ankles and hissed that it wanted to be held.  Corn Blossom told the baby no.  It cried some more, but she left it in shadows, found the river and filled her basket with water, and walking very slowly, for the water was heavy, returned to the grove of trees. 

            Night fell and, from the little hill, Corn Blossom could see the fires in the village of Those-That-Hiss and they heard the drums pounding and the people singing war songs.  The men pretended not to see the orange blaze sending shadows that leaped and hopped through the woods.  They drank water, each of them a different amount, so that the urge to urinate would wake them at different times during the night and make them watchful. 

            Now is the time to say who the men with Burnt Hand were: Biting Fish was there, and Round Wind, also the father of Always Afraid whose name is forgotten, and the grandfather of Runs-with-Arrow-Wound whose name I don’t remember either, although you know his grandson. Hole-in-the-Sky was present and, also, Storm-that-is-Green-then-Black. 

            In the twilight before Dawn, Talon Face came from his village with two warriors.  One of them wore a roach of porcupine feathers above his forehead which was painted with red thunderbirds.  The other warrior carried the hand of a humped bear dangling from his chest.  Talon Face’s chest was protected with images of He-Who-Wears-Human-Heads-as-Ear-Rings, each a white plate cut from shells gathered at the great salt water, although at first only Corn Blossom could see this. 

            Corn Blossom saw the men coming.  They paused beneath the hill where there was a little ooze of water, squatting to read the footprints in the soft soil. 

            “Two of them,” Hole-in-the-Sky said.  He pointed.

            The warriors could not see Talon Face because he was invisible to them.  But his war medicine did not affect Corn Blossom and she saw him clearly, moving to the side of the two men and coming quickly up the hill. 

            “Talon Face is coming from the side,” Corn Blossom said.  She pointed to where he was swiftly darting from bush to bush a stone’s throw from where the other two men were slowly creeping up the slope. 

            “Where do you see him?” Burnt Hand asked his daughter.

            She pointed.  “I can’t see him,” Burnt Hand whispered.

            “He is coming quickly,” she said.

            Burnt Hand turned in the direction that she pointed.  He took a throwing axe from his war bundle. 

            “Are you sure he is coming?”

            “Listen, you will hear his feet breaking the acorns under foot,” Corn Blossom said.

            The other soldiers watched the two enemy coming forward up the hill.  They marched toward our warriors very bravely, singing and chanting their Death Songs.  They attracted attention to themselves so that our men would not sense that Talon Face was about to attack them from the side. 

            Burnt Hand cocked his ear to listen carefully.  He heard Talon Face’s moccasins crushing the acorns and followed Corn Blossom’s hand, pointing toward a shadow that suddenly sprang from the brush.  Burnt Hand hurled his axe and it grazed Talon Face’s cheek, tearing off a part of his earlobe.  He roared and charged at them.  Because he was bleeding, Talon Face had become visible.  The men saw his great head and the tattoos on it and the effigies of the War God rattling over his chest that was as broad as the back of a bison. 

            Storm-that-is-Green-then-Black shot an arrow but his aim was spoiled by Talon Face’s roar.  Biting Fish shot an arrow also and it struck the warrior with the bear claws at his breast in the shoulder.  The arrow bit deep and the hurt man staggered as he ran forward, losing his balance.  The Father of Always Afraid leaped forward and bashed in the Bear Paw warrior’s head.  He struck so hard that his war axe was caught among the dead man’s brains and, before he could remove it to swing again, the soldier with the porcupine roach cut his throat with his flint knife.  Biting Fish tried to notch another arrow, but the porcupine warrior charged him.  Biting Fish raised his bow as a club, but the porcupine man’s knife split the shaft and cut him through the mouth.  Biting Fish fell down and the enemy pulled his knife upward splitting his head apart at the upper jaw.

            Burnt Hand and Talon Face wrestled together for a moment.  Then, they slipped on the acorns under foot and rolled apart down the hill.  Round Wind tried to stab the porcupine fighter with his bone lance, but the enemy danced to the side the blow missed.  Before Round Wind could recover from his thrust, Porcupine-Fighter cut his right hand with his stone sword.  Round Wind dropped the lance and Porcupine-Fighter cut open his side so that his entrails spilled out.  Then, Porcupine Fighter picked up Round Wind’s lance and threw it at the grandfather of Runs-with-Arrow-Wound.  The lance went into our warrior’s chest and came out his back and so Runs-with-Arrow-Wound’s grandfather fell down dead.  Porcupine-Fighter shouted something and ran at Hole-in-the-Sky.  Hole-in-the-Sky swung his war-axe with both hands and broke open Porcupine-Fighter’s breast bone.  So that was how the enemy, Porcupine-Fighter, who was very brave died.

            Talon Face scrambled to his feet.  He saw that three enemy soldiers were coming to kill him.  He jumped backward, plunging through a mass of briars and dead fall from the trees, slipping so that he lay on his spine, turned upward like a turtle.  Storm-that-is-Green-Then-Black came around the thicket and dead fall.  Talon Face swung his war-club skimming above the fallen leaves and broke Storm-That-Is-Green-Then-Black’s ankle so that his foot was knocked to the side.  As he fell, Talon Face cut him under the ribs and into the heart with his knife.  Hole-in-the-Sky caught his ankle in Storm-That-is-Green-Then-Black’s legs which were flailing against the ground.  He stumbled and, when he was off-balance, Talon Face lunged at him and broke his neck with his war-club.  Hole-in-the-Sky fell heavily and, although he did not die immediately, he was unable to move. 

            Corn Blossom followed her father, Burnt Hand, as he plunged through the thicket and jumped across the dead fall toward Talon Face.  The enemy war-chief turned and swung his bloody war-club at Burnt Hand.  Burnt Hand dodged the blow and sunk his flint knife into Talon Face’s groin.  Blood spurted from Talon Face to the height of the smaller trees in the forest.  Some of the blood struck Burnt Hand in the eyes and he was blinded for a moment.  Swinging  his war-club, Burnt Face staggered past Talon Face, missing his blow.  Talon Face hit Burnt Hand in the side of his head with his war axe so hard that his eyes were flung from their sockets and landed on the ground.  Talon Face had his back turned to Corn Blossom and she picked up a lance laying on the ground and ran as fast as she could toward the enemy warrior.  She stabbed the lance into Talon Face’s kidney and the point came out his belly and, when he fell forward, embedded itself in the ground.  So that was the death of Talon Face, the great warrior.

            Then, they were all dead but Corn Blossom and Hole-in-the-Sky.  Corn Blossom brought Hole-in-the-Sky some water from her basket and he tasted it, chanted his death song, and, then, died.  Corn Blossom picked up her father’s flint knife and cut off Talon Face’s head.  While she was cutting through his backbone, Talon Face’s eyes opened and his tongue came out of his mouth and wiggled like a worm.  When his head was cut off, Corn Blossom spilled out the rest of the water in her basket and put Talon Face there.         

            Corn Blossom carried Talon Face away from the battlefield.  She expected other warriors from the village to come soon and so she hurried away from the grove of trees, plunging through reeds and thickets.  She hoped to find the river with its many channels and islands.  Following the river would bring her home.

            After walking for an hour, Corn Blossom was very tired.  Several times deer or opossums startled her.  The head had become very heavy and its weight seemed to drag her down in the mud and shallow water through which she waded.  After a time, she came to sandy hill cut open by streams and showing tangles of roots washed by water.  She scrambled up the hill and sat for a time looking over the marshland that she had crossed.  The ghost of the baby was also riding in the basket with Talon Face.  The baby’s ghost told her to lie down and rest.  “It will be better for you to travel by night,” the baby’s ghost whispered.  Corn Blossom was leaning against a tree and, suddenly, the tree’s trunk seemed soft to her as a bed of moss.  She fell asleep.

            Corn Blossom woke to hear men shouting.  She opened her eyes and saw that enemy warriors were splashing through the creek under the sandy hill where she was resting.  She could see the men clearly and count the number of feathers in their roaches.  One of the men carried a skin shield showing the sun darting out fire like arrows.  Since she could see the men very close to her, she supposed that they were looking at her as well and coming to kill her.  Cotton Blossom was so terrified that she could not move.  But the men did not come straight toward her but, instead, ascended the sand ridge where a tree had fallen into the water, using the trunk and branches as a ladder.  This was so near that she could hear their heavy breathing as they hauled themselves upward through the fallen tree and onto the hill.  Then, the war party forged ahead, turning away from Cotton Blossom and running along the edge of the hill.  After a few minutes, she heard them splashing in the water of the lagoon on the other side of the island.  Now, they were ahead of her. She waited for the time it takes a big cloud to cross over the sun.  Then, slowly, she lifted the wicker basket, carrying Talon Face as if he were a precious thing.  She followed the track that the warriors made, looking carefully for their moccasin prints in the wet places and following the pathway of broken branches and reeds. 

            Night came and she crawled into the lower branches of a tree to sleep.  A bear ambled by, pausing to sniff at her and she smelt the rotten meat entangled in its fur.  Perhaps, the bear smelled Talon Face.  Later, she saw a badger.

            After two sleeps, she came to our village.  She told the Sun Lord what had happened and Talon Face’s head was taken to the War Pole where it was suspended by his hair woven tightly to make a black rope.  The widows came and cut themselves and some of them sliced off their little fingers in grief.  But most of the people were happy that Talon Face, the invincible enemy warrior had been killed, and his head brought back as strong war medicine to protect our village.

            A potter woman captured from the Fisheater People sat at the foot of the War Pole, atop the cone-shaped hill of packed earth, working for a week to make the likeness of Talon Face in a medicine jug.  When the pot was fired and finished, the Sun Lord handed it to Corn Blossom and told her that it would be her power and protection.  That pot I now place on the breast of Corn Blossom who is now called Walks-as-Ghost-Woman.  She will carry it underground to the Old Woman Who Cannot Die and it will be her power and protection in that place as well as it was here, beneath these skies. 

            Now you know why there is a winter in the Long Count many winters before this one that our people named Little-Girl-Comes-Back-Alone.  That winter was named in her honor so that her adventure will always be remembered.

            These are the stories that make our people great.  We are the only human beings in the world who have such stories and it is important that you know them for they are what preserves us and set us aside from Those-that-Hiss and the many other beasts and monsters in the world. 

             

4.

            I went to the lawyer’s office without making an appointment.  The guy didn’t have a secretary and the message box on his answering machine was full.  I got lucky.  He was still in the office a little after five.  I came inside and sat beside that funeral parlor lamp waiting for him to get off the phone.  An ashtray full of butts gave the lobby’s sour smell an odor of fire.  The people who sat here were already half-roasted by the flames of hell.  I could hear the lawyer yapping in his office in that self-important way that lawyers have, everything just a little too loud and little too emphatic and the pauses too profound, as if the penny-ante deal that he was putting together required deep and laborious deliberation.  Across the boulevard, Marines were moving into an abandoned gas station that shared the dismal, sagging parking lot with the Chinese buffet.  I saw their flags, posters, a trim, grey-haired chap in an elegant uniform who looked like he was jittery and badly hungover.  The trim soldier paced back and forth.  He was watching some workers wash the windows of his brand-new recruiting station and, sometimes, casting furtive glances over this shoulder at the buffet and its reeking dumpsters and the undertaker crows perched there.  The Mexican kids could fuel up on potstickers and lo mein before trudging over to the Marine Recruiting Office.  Getting your leg blown off, or your face burned down to the bone in Iraq or Afghanistan – that was a way to stay in the good old USA.  At least, after completing your tour of duty.  It’s a heartless world, I tell you, cold and sad and cruel.

            I fake-coughed so he would know I was waiting.  He got interested to see who was in his lobby, brought the phone jabber to an end, and came out from his den.  His shaving was haphazard and his shirt buttoned wrong and, to be frank, it looked as if he had just been jerking-off.  I thought, Jesus Christ, what have I done – This is my attorney at law?  The feeling was mutual.  He glared at me with barely concealed contempt.  His handshake was firm, but clammy.  I could smell his sweat – that was the sour odor in the place.

            “So something went wrong?” he asked.  “You couldn’t get the item.  You don’t look like you got the retainer.”

            He fished in his shirt pocket and found a cigarette which he lit with a trembling hand.

            “I got the artifact, no problem at all,” I said.

            “So why did you come?”  The lawyer said.  “We can do this business by phone.  It’s best.”

            “You don’t reliably answer your phone,” I said.

            “Look, I got serious court cases pending.  My receptionist is off having a baby.  Of course, your case is...important to me.  But I got serious business.  And I don’t think we need a lot of face-time given the risks involved.”

            “What would those risks be?”

            “We don’t need to be explicit,” he said.  “You get me the money and I will have to deal with some problematic people.  These are folks that I can’t haul into conciliation court if something goes south.”

            “Look,” I said.  “I need a bill of sale and some kind of transfer deed or what have you?”

            “You want to document the deal for Christ’s sake?”

            “The buyer wants something in writing, a warranty that I have good title to the thing,” I said.  “He sent me an e-mail.  And he wants you involved so that the deal is done up nice and legal.”

            “Are you gonna swear to me that the artifact came into your possession legally, through no foul means?”  He asked.

            “How can I swear to that?”

            “We put it in writing.  The object is an old family heirloom, your daddy bought it an auction in St. Louis, you found it in a manure pile, I don’t give a shit, but I’m not going to draw anything for you without your atttesting to the provenance of the artifact,” the lawyer said.  “I’ll write something up.  Look, I got my license on the line.”

            We went into his office.  It was the same mess, a chaos of documents and damp-looking letters.  The carpet smelled of mildew.  He had a dehumidifier in the corner, but it wasn’t plugged-in.  I supposed that the tray of water in the belly of the machine was a month old and growing scum. 

            The lawyer typed a little certificate that my father had purchased the artifact some time before I was born at an auction in East St. Louis.  He made me sign the sheet and, then, punched the paper with his notary stamp.

            “You state and depose on your oath, the pot is something your daddy bought in East St. Louis before you were born and that you took it from his home after he died.  Right?”

            “Sure,” I said.

            I handed him a small sheet of paper with the phone number for my contact.

            “You call him,” I said.

            “Me?  Why me?”

            “So he can tell you what he wants as a bill of sale and certificate of authenticity.  And he wants to tell you where I’m supposed to go to meet his courier.  He’s sending a courier with the money and wants me to arrange all th details through you.”

            “Why?”

            “It’s a bona fide transaction if you’ve got a lawyer involved,” I said.  “That’s what he emailed me.”

            The lawyer’s shoulders slumped.  It was one more burden on him.

            “I’ll call him now,” the lawyer said. 

            He dialed.  The number must have been a cell-phone because someone answered, gave him another number which the lawyer jotted on the back of an envelope, and, then, after some gloomy chat with me, dialed. 

            They talked for awhile.  The lawyer said that he wasn’t an archaeologist and couldn’t verify the provenance of the artifact.  All he knew was that I was “a straight guy” and that I had come by the object honestly. 

            “My client is willing to provide you with a Bill of Sale and a certificate of how he got the piece,” the lawyer said.

            There was some more legal banter.

            “Native Graves and Repatriation?” the lawyer said.  “I never heard of that.  All I can have him certify is how he got the thing.  For all I know, his daddy bought the thing from someone who looted it out of the Smithsonian.  See what I mean.  But this... this is a good faith purchaser for value, I’m sue of that.

            The lawyer said he would write the Bill of Sale.  He stated a purchase price a thousand dollars higher than my agreement with the buyer.

            I waved my hands at him.  “Wrong price,” I whispered. 

            “It’s for my attorney’s fees,” the lawyer said.  “You can’t expect the seller to pay transactional costs in a deal like this.  I have to dip my beak too – just a little.”

            He winked at me.

            “Okay, we have an agreement,” he said.  “Cash money.  I’ll let him know about making the transfer.”

            He cupped his hand over the speaker on his phone.  “Can you do the deal tomorrow morning?”

            I nodded.

            “Yeah, sooner is better than later,” he said.  “We’ll make it happen. 

            He hung up the phone.

            “That’s one cagy dude,” he said.  “You make the transfer tomorrow at 8:30 am.  Be at the Graceland Mansion parking lot, the Presley place.”

            “Graceland?”

            “That’s where he wants you to go,” the lawyer said.  “There’s lots of folks there coming and going that don’t know one another.  It’s a big parking lot.  Very anonymous and easy to get to.”

            “Okay,” I said.

            “He’s sending a colored guy as a courier.  You don’t look for him.  He’ll look for you.  You get out of your car.  Kick both the tires on your driver’s side.  That’s the signal.  Then, take the object, suitably wrapped or boxed, and walk toward the ticket concession.  The courier will come to you and make the trade.”

            “Then what?”  I asked.  “This is a load of cloak and dagger shit.”

            “True,” he said.  He chewed on his lip a little.

            Then, he said:  “You come right here with the money.  You hand it to me.”

            “And then?”

            “I talk to a friend of a friend, a labor recruiter for a local poultry place, and he arranges to bring your girlfriend back home,” he said.

            “As simple as that?” I asked.

            “It may take a couple days or a week, but she’ll be back,” he said.  “These guys don’t fuck up.  All you need to do is take her call when she gets to the bus station and make the pick-up.  Your girlfriend will be in Memphis inside of a week – if everything goes smoothly.”

            “What could go wrong?” I asked.

            The lawyer typed the Bill of Sale and printed two copies on the little, rattling printer beside his hard drive.

            “What could go wrong?” he replied.  “Nothing.  Everything.  Who knows?”

            He handed me the paper.  “Have the courier sign for the object?  You keep one copy.”

            “Do you need a copy?”

            “Nope,” he said.  “And bring me a decent picture of your girlfriend tomorrow with my retainer.”

            “She’s my wife,” I said.

            “Whatever.”

5.

            Graceland is pretty much a bait and switch.  You see signs promising the miraculous all over town, along the freeways, on billboards stuck in forlorn swampland as far north as St. Louis and down to New Orleans.  You get off the belt-line interstate at Elvis Aaron Presley Avenue, which sounds pretty grandiose, and the ticket complex for the mansion tours occupies four or five linear blocks, all of it shopping malls and theaters with Elvis’ jet planes stored in plain sights among the souvenir shops and ice cream sundae places.  But the mansion itself, on the green hill beyond the famous music-note gates, is a cruddy little suburban rambler, the kind of place that a prosperous orthodontist or chiropractor might acquire for his first wife and family.  The suburbs are full of far larger homes now, with great halls and 25 foot vaulted ceilings and walk-in refrigerator/freezers, places that are home to junior accountants and car rental mid-management.  But, in a way, the place is touching because Graceland, I suppose, was grand to Elvis -- at least, compared with the three-room shotgun shack where he was born down in Tupelo.  The place is parable of some kind, but no one knows for sure what that parable means. 

              Everyone in town has been to Graceland.  And everyone knows where it’s located.  Even a hillbilly like me, from West Memphis and New Madrid, Mo. knows how to get there.  It’s unavoidable.  After all, as they say, you just follow the signs.

            And so, that’s what I did, early on a rainy morning.  In the bathroom, hanging on the mirror, there was one of Lupe’s rosaries and a little key-chain with the Virgin clad in corn-stalk gold and standing on the horns of the moon.  I kissed the key-chain.  Lupe used to do that for good luck.  Then, I got on the freeway, crossed the Big Muddy beside the pyramid, and zigzagged through the rush-hour traffic, stopping and starting in the drizzle to the exit for Elvis A. Presley Ave.  On the floor on my truck’s passenger side, I had the effigy pot in a wedding-cake-sized, cream-colored John B. Stetson hat case.  It was something left over from my daddy.  I had his hat with me as well for good luck sitting on the seat. 

            I was early exiting off the freeway.  The avenue is broad and straight and, every eighth mile, there is stop-and-go light.  Two or three lights south and you pass Graceland, the house hidden in the trees on the left and the shopping malls, aquamarine green and sea-blue, stretching along the opposite side of the road, all sorts of arrows and other signs urging you to turn there and park.   But I didn’t turn.  I was early, killing time.  I went farther south, past the Heartbreak Hotel, and Marlowe’s, beyond the tourist neighborhood to the old commercial-industrial district where junkyards alternated with the loading docks of trucking companies and fast-food franchises no one ever heard of stood marooned among the weeping cypresses and weeds of old cemeteries.  I came to the end of the line, where the city stopped at the border of a more liberal suburb with neon there directing me to exotic dancers, their brightly lit silhouettes like upright wasps,  and drive-through liquor stores baring metal-bar teeth.  I turned off the avenue and went for a mile among white clapboard houses scattered between green lagoons and jungle-like hedges, some kind of church at every street corner: Seventh Day Adventist, Pentecostal, Jehovah’s Witnesses, little storefronts with a white cross posted on their balding foreheads and outlandish initials: C.O.C. I.C.J., all Welcome! everything cheerless and miserable-looking in the warm rain, plywood blocking windows, arson sites scattered here and there with frayed yellow police tape dissolving in the drizzle, an immense fat lady walking a dog, black kids kicking at puddles underfoot in a barren lot full of broken glass.

            It was enough.  I turned around.  Police cruisers were gliding along the side-streets.  What did they expect to find so early in the morning, now 8:15 a.m., a train howling sadly like an old, beat-up dog on a siding by the abandoned factory?  This was America, the last best hope of Mankind, the place that Lupe, and a million others like her, wanted to come to – I sneezed; there was pollen in the air. 

            I drove back up the avenue, made the left turn and pulled into the parking lot – twelve dollars to put my car among the RV’s and Cadillacs that the old people had parked ahead of me.  I stepped out of the vehicle, kicked the tires on the right side as I had been told to do, and, then, walked in the drizzle toward a band of cottonwood and hickory trees, all tied-down by great green cords of vine.  It was a little waterway or a drainage ditch separating the parking lot – I was in the Blue Suede Shoes section – from the sidewalks and approaches to the shopping malls.  A steady stream of colored folks, mostly girls and young women, were hustling toward the sidewalk and the little pedestrian bridge passing through the trees and over the waterway.  Most of the girls were wearing uniforms labeled Elvis Presley Enterprises – they were employees, tour guides, or worked in concessions.  A few young black men walked along with them, teasing the girls and the girls teased them back in loud voices that chopped through the sultry drizzle and heavy air.  The workers were hurrying to meet a deadline.  Some tourists, plump and white in their shorts and pale pastel blouses, with visors over their eyes, ambled along toward the pedestrian bridge, not keeping pace with the workers around them.

            It was wet and dripping in the little swath of trees and I could see that the creek-bed full of chipped stones was gushing water that chirped at us as we padded over the footbridge. 

            A black man was waiting on the bridge.  He tapped his heart and looked into my eyes.  He was old, with dull, yellow staring eyes, and the beard on his stubbly muzzle was showing patchy white.  On his head, he was wearing a sort of beret with a pattern like a Scottish kilt. 

            He fell into stride beside me.

            We walked without speaking out of the trees and onto broad, puddled sidewalks toward the big concrete-block ticket pavilion.  Black trumpet-shaped speakers in the trees were playing “Blue Moon”.  The notes echoed off the wet concrete.  The crowd of black workers were ahead of us.  Two old white ladies were wheezing their way over the little arched bridge behind.  Suddenly, the man and I were alone.

            “Do you have the merchandise?” the man asked me.

            He had a tremor in one of his hands and his teeth looked battered.

            “It’s in the car,” I said. 

            “Good,” he replied.

            “Do you have...?”

            I paused.  He was wearing pea-jacket.  It would have been too hot for me, but he looked like he was chilly and shuddering under that cloth.  He pointed to his heart again. 

            “In my pocket,” he said.

            “So what do we do?” I said.

            We continued to walk slowly toward the concrete pavilion and the kiosks where lines of tourists were gathering.  A TV screen flashed a man in a white jumpsuit howling into a microphone.  The fins of two airplanes poked over the top of a wooden fence.  On one of the planes, there was a lightning flash painted and the letters TCB – Taking Care of Business. 

            “You go up and walk around the ticket place and, then, follow me back to the parking lot,” the black man said.

            I did as he said.

            “Blue Moon” had a rhythm like an old horse plodding through supernatural darkness.  A high falsetto wailing came from the speakers.  It was the sound of something from the other side of death.  The drops of water on my face seemed anesthetic – it was as if they were numbing me. 

            I walked back to my car and sat down in the front seat.  The black man appeared in the side-view mirror suddenly.  He tapped on the window. 

            I rolled down.  He flashed cash to me.  Did you count it?  Did you take it on trust?  What was the protocol?

            “Hand me the thing,” he said.

            “It’s fragile,” I told him.

            “No one even tells me what it is,” the man said.

            I handed him the John B. Stetson hat case.   

            “There you have it,” I said.  “It’s very fragile.”

            “Much obliged,” he told me. 

            “The Bill of Sale’s in the box,” I said.

            “No one told me nothin’ about a Bill of Sale,” the man said.

            “Well, I need your receipt,” I told him.

            “You ain’t gettin’ my receipt,” he said.  “This deal is done.  Right now.  It’s done.”

            Then, I looked in my side-view mirror and he was gone.  I looked in my rear-view mirror and he wasn’t there either.  The rain swarmed in the air and I heard faraway thunder.

            I counted the money.  It was the right amount.  My lap was wet from rain that had slipped inside while we doing the transaction.

            Driving through the gate, I saw two squad cars pulled up to the curb.  A couple of beefy cops were hassling a colored guy.  As I made my turn onto the Avenue, I saw that it was my colored guy.  My heart throbbed and my blood turned to ice.  I overcorrected on the steering and almost hit an oncoming car.

            In my rear-view mirror, I could see the black man mouthing words.  The cops had their backs turned to me.  One of them had his blue spinning light on to warn away the procession of cars now turning into the Graceland parking lot.

            I tried to put on my Stetson hat for good luck but it was too tall for the truck’s cab.

            The rain let-up on the bridge over the Mississippi.  I went to the lawyer’s office.  His beady eyes were watching through the venetian blinds – I saw them, cold, merciless, like stones in ice-water, glaring at me.  He met me at the door.

            “You got the retainer?” he asked.

            I handed him the money.

            “You’ll get Lupe out of Mexico?”

            “I don’t make any guarantees,” the lawyer said.

            ‘You’ll do what you can do?”

            “Of course, I’m your lawyer,” he said.

            I decided not tell him about the cops and the bust.  How could that help?    

   

           

6.

            It was the part of the night called Chill Dew Comes.  The boys and girls protecting Walks-as-Ghost woman’s grave were very tired and they teetered, half asleep, on the edge of the cedar-lined pit.  Tongue was smoking again. 

            A drum circle of old men began to sing.

            They are coming

            They are coming

            They are coming.

            Between the beats of the drum, frogs croaked and you could hear young women and men making love in the moist grass between the squash and bean gardens. 

                                                The old men sang:       They are coming over the river

                                                They are coming over the field

                                                They are coming through the woods.

            Tongue stretched and put aside his pipe.

            The old men sang: The ancestors are coming.

            Tongue circled the grave and gently touched each boy and girl.

            “Stay awake with me a little longer,” he said. “We have almost finished.”

            Then, he told them that Corn Blossom became the first wife of a great warrior, Afraid-of-Fire.  “– He lead many war parties against Those-that-Hiss and brought back many trophies.  Corn Blossom had three sons with Afraid-of-Fire before he was killed in battle.  All of her sons survived and they became great men and their stories are often told at campfire and when we are burying the dead.  Then, Corn Blossom became the second wife of another war chief, Red Hand.  With him, she had two daughters, but only one of them lived.  You have heard of that daughter when we speak of the Girl who was the Bear’s Wife.  Red Hand was killed raiding and his brother, Floats-on-River, made Cotton Blossom his third wife.  She bore Floats-on-River two more daughters, both of whom are living yet.  Cotton Blossom was not happy being third wife to Floats-on-River and so she left his lodge and lived for many years in the women’s lodge.  There, she acquired much wisdom and learned how to heal wounds and sickness.  She assisted in child birth.  Many times we have seen children who were born dead revived by Cotton Blossom.  She did this by lifting the child to her mouth, breathing some of her life into the baby, and, then, whispering to the child his or her secret name.  Once, when I was a little boy, I saw her bring a man who was dead back to life.  She learned the names for all of the stars in heaven and spoke with the birds.  And, it was a bird, a sparrow, that told her to abandon her old name and become

Walks-as-Ghost Woman and that she should follow the flocks of birds as they migrate across the earth and learn all of the pathways in the world.  As you have heard, this is what she did.”

            Tongue told them about adventures that Walks-as-Ghost Woman had.  Then, he named her kin.  At last, he said:   “So we have come to this present winter in the Long Count.  What is this Winter named.”

             Blue Boy said: “We call it Winter-that-the-Man-with-mirrors-on-his-Breast-came-riding-a-Great-Deer.” 

            Tongue circled the cedar-lined pit three times.  It had become very still. The dew was cold on the grass.

            He stood at the foot of the grave, where the pit was deeper and darker. 

            Tongue beckoned to Blue Boy.  “Have you heard her story?”

            “Yes,” he said.

            “Can you repeat it?”

            “Yes,” he said.

            “Then, go now and tell her story to the Old-Woman-Who-Can-Not-Die.”  He raised a stone club over his head.  Blue Boy began to lift his arms, but, quick as could be, Tongue broke open his skull so that he dropped down into the ground at the foot of Walks-as-Ghost Woman’s bundle.

            White Girl began to cry.  Two old women dragged her to where Tongue was standing. 

            “Do you know the story?”

            “Yes,” the girl mumbled.

            “Would you want our Grandmother to go to the Old Woman without anyone to announce her and sing her praise?” 

            The girl shook her head and Tongue broke her skull so that he fell at the foot of bundle wrapped around the corpse.

            Red Boy came grinning to Tongue.

            “So it’s time?” he asked.

            “It’s time,” Tongue said.  “Tell the story well because it is what makes us human.”

            He broke the boy’s head apart and they laid the body in the ground at the foot of the dead woman.

            Black Girl stood up, but fainted and, almost, fell into the pit.  The old women carried her to Tongue.  The cold dew splashed her face and she revived.

            “Do you know the story of Walks-as-Ghost-Woman?”  Tongue asked.

            “I do,” Black Girl said.

            “Will you tell the story truly to those who must know it?”  He asked.

            “Who will tell my story?” she asked.

            “Not all of us are lucky enough to have a story,” Tongue said.

            “But I have a story,” Black Girl said.

            “You are Death and Death is not to be killed,” Tongue said.  “Go into the village, our Water Hill, and tell all those what you have heard here today.”

            He tapped her on the forehead with his club and, then, the old women began to sing and each took her hand and lead her toward the village.

            Then, it was the part of the night called Birds Sing and the bushes and woods were full of music praising the sun rising over the river-side bluffs.

  

7. 

            Dodge was down-and-out.  He was so down-and-out that he didn’t have cab fare to come down from the south side to Graceland.  He had to call the man on his cell-phone and hustle over to a certain street corner for a little loan.

            The man on the street corner said: “Nigger, didn’t I jes’ give you a stack of money ‘bout one inch thick?”

            “That you did,” Dodge said.

            “So you come to me for fuckin’ cab fare?” 

            “I don’t commingle funds,” Dodge said.  “It ain’t a good business practice.  What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is yours.”

            “For a junky, you sure are precise about things,” the man said.

            “If you’re a junky, you got to be precise,” Dodge said.  “It’s a hard life.”

            “That’s why you’re my nigger,” the man said and he handed Dodge two twenties and a five.

            “I’ll bring you what’s left over,” Dodge said.

            “Keep the change,” the man said.

            Next morning, Dodge went on down to Graceland by cab.  It was a luxury.  Normally, he had to ride the bus.

            The taxi-driver was one of those Ahab-the-Arab types.

            “What’s a black man goin’ down to Graceland for?” the cabbie asked him.  “And this early in the morning?”

            “I jes loves the King,” Dodge said, using a minstrel voice.

            “It’s all white folks down there,” the cabbie said.  “I can’t recall ever takin’ a colored to Graceland.”

            “Well, I jes’ loves the King,” Dodge said again.

            “Yeah, and I like James Brown,” the cabbie said.

            To show what he meant he put on some wailing camel-nigger noise, a dude singing through his nose to an untuned fiddle.    

            It was wet and sticky at Graceland.  Dodge found the contact, a big, sweaty white man, and made the exchange.  The thing was in a hat box and the cardboard looked a little damp.  Dodge put his arm under the cardboard so that the pot wouldn’t drop out – it seemed like the drizzle was maybe eating the box. 

            He didn’t look into the box.  He figured it was none of his business.  Dodge like to do things in professional manner.

            As he was walking from the parking lot, Dodge heard someone call his name.

            He turned around and saw two cops.  One of them was black, the other white.

            The black cop was fat with doughnut stains all over his lap and belly. 

            “Nigger, what are you doin’ here?” the black cop asked.

            “Hey, hey,” the white cop said.  “We don’t wanna be talkin’ that way.”

            “Okay, okay,” the black cop said. “Dodge, ain’t you way far away from your home stompin’ grounds?”

            “I guess so, sir,” Dodge said. 

            “What are you doin’ here?” the white cop asked.  He was wearing sunglasses despite the lightless grey rain.

            “I jes’ loves the King,” Dodge said.

            “Yeah, and I’m a big fan of James Brown too,” the white cop replied.

            “And I like hillbilly music and the fuckin’ Nelson Riddle orchestra,” the fat black cop said.

            Dodge put the cardboard box down, between his feet, so that they could search him.

            “No weapons, no dope,” the black cop said.

            “Ain’t that amazing, Dodge?” the white cop said.  “You’re clean.”

            “Let’s have a little look-see in the hat box,” the black cop said.  “Stoop on down and hand it to me.”

            Dodge picked up the box and handed it to the black cop.  He lifted the lid and peered inside.

            “What’s he got?” the white cop asked.

            “Damned if I know,” the black cop said.

            “No, what is it?”

            “A hatbox,” the black cop said.  “It’s just a hat box.”

            “Empty?” the white cop asked.

            “Looks empty to me,” the black cop said.  “You look.”

            The white cop took the box and glanced inside.

            “What are you up to, Dodge?”

            A dozen feet away, a taxi-cab skirted the parked squad cars.  The yellow door popped open and a burly white woman in shorts got out.  She helped another white lady, old and bearded and leaning on a cane, from the cab.

            “That’s my ride, gentlemen,” Dodge said.

            “I guess it ain’t a crime to walk around with an empty hat box,” the white cop said.

            Dodge raised his hand for the cab, but it sped away, spitting a little water out from under its teeth.

            “Guess no one wants to give a nigger-felon a ride,” the black cop said.

            “Speak for yourself,” Dodge said.  “Take off your uniform and see if you can get a ride out of this honky-heaven.”

            “Don’t be givin’ us lip,” the white cop said. 

            After the cops left, Dodge went into the toilet by the information kiosk.  He was sick to his stomach. 

            In one of the stalls, he lifted the lid on the hat box.  He saw the brow of the pot.

            What did they mean that there was nothing in the box?  The pot looked familiar.  He lifted it from the box and looked into the dead eyes and the lips split in a half-grin, half-smirk.

            Ten minutes later, he came out of the stall.  He stopped in front of the mirror and wiped his eyes.  He didn’t want the world to know he had been crying. 

            A cab came along the sidewalk just as neat as could be, let out some white girls, and Dodge could see that the cabbie was a Brother.  He waved to him and they went uptown.

            “What you doin’ here with all these white folks?”

            “I jes’ love the King,” Dodge said.

            “Suit yourself,” the black cabbie said.

             “Are you a religious man?” Dodge asked.

            “Born and bred Baptist,” the cabbie said.  “Saved by the Blood of the Lamb.”

            “Do you believe in miracles?”  Dodge asked.

            “Sure, I do,” the cabbie told him.  “Some say the Age of Miracles is done.  But not me.  For me, every day is a miracle.”

            “I think so too,” Dodge said. 

            The cabbie let him out a half-block from his flop.

            When he was alone in his room, Dodge took the pot out of the hat box.  With his fingers, he traced the fine sutures in the ceramic where the broken shards had been pieced together.  He closed his eyes and stroked the head’s face.  Then, he put the pot on the shelf above his hot-plate where he kept some cans of soup and a box of cereal.  That way he could see the pot from all parts of his room. 

            Dodge paced in circles.  People were shouting on the other side of the wall.  Outside his door, someone was smoking crack cocaine.  He went to the window overlooking the alley and struggled with it for a long time.  He had never opened the window before and it seemed to be painted shut.  Finally, he got it open.  The air in the alleyway smelled of vomit and piss, but it was better than the tight, suffocating swelter in the room. 

            Dodge called his P. O.

            ‘I’m ready,” he said.  “I’m ready.”

            He and the Probation Officer had been talking about a drug rehab program for the last three or four months.  Everyone knew that he was using and using heavily.  But everyone also agreed without say it out loud that he was too old to “violate” and send back to the slammer.  The idea was that he would just OD one day and that way solve everyone’s problems.

             The P.O. asked him if he thought he had the energy and fortitude to stay sober.  “You always said that you thought you was too old to change,” the P.O said.

            “Something’s happened to me,” Dodge said.  “I got a second chance now, and I know it.  I’m not too old.  I promise you that.  I ain’t too old at all.”

            The P.O said he would arrange for in-patient rehab.

            “You’ll show up where I tell you to go?” the Probation Officer said skeptically.

            “Oh, that I will, yes I will,” Dodge said.

            Then, Dodge placed another call.  He said that some cops had hassled him at Graceland and that they had jacked the pot.  “I couldn’t do nothin’,” Dodge said.  “They yanked it off me and just walked away.”

            “Did you get their badge numbers?”

            “Happened too quick,” Dodge said.

            “So the money is gone and you lost the pot?”

            “That’s about it,” Dodge said.

            “Well, you gotta get out here to Tunica and meet with us.”

            “I got no car and I got no cab fare.”

            “Then, we’ll come and see you.  We need to talk about this.”

            Dodge hung up.  He put the pot under his cot.  The room was small and he didn’t own much of anything and there really wasn’t any other place to hide it. 

            Then, he left the flop, locked the door, and walked to the park.  He slept in the park on a bench for a couple days before the P.O. called his cell and told him to report to the Rehab.  It was a long walk, but he had smoked the last of his crack and the birds were singing and the sun was shining and it wasn’t unpleasant to amble along the city streets, pausing, now and then, to peer down an alley or look under some shrubs or bushes where some adventure had befallen him. 

            At Rehab, they put Dodge in a small white room with a Gideon Bible and a tiny window, like a hatch that looked out on a train yard.  The trains bellowed and roared at one another all night long and, at first, he couldn’t sleep although, perhaps, that was caused by the withdrawal symptoms.

            One evening, a couple men that Dodge knew burst into his room.  They asked him about the pot.   He told them that the cops had taken it and that they were pigs and had probably busted it all to pieces. 

            “You gotta give me something better than that,” the big man with the claw hammer said.

            “Brother, it’s all I got,” Dodge said.

            “Listen, I’m gonna regret this a lot, but I’ve gotta do what I’m told,” the big man said.

            “Check my room,” Dodge said.  “You can check my room.”

            “Ain’t this your room?” the skinny man who looked like a monkey said.

            “I mean where I live,” Dodge said.

            “How fuckin’ dumb do you think we are?” the big man said.  He was sweating and kept blinking his eyes nervously.  “We went there and tore it all apart.”

            “And?”

            “You know that the pot ain’t there,” the big man said.

            The skinny monkey-man put a pillow over Dodge’s mouth and the big guy with the claw hammer broke both his shins and, then, smashed apart one of his knee caps.  Dodge made a lot of noise, but the trains in the switching yard were busy and no one heard his screams.

            “Listen, I’m sorry brother,” the big man said.  He put the hammer in his belt like it was a dagger or pistol.  “You just can’t fuck with people like that.”

            Dodge passed out. 

            The night nurse had been bribed.  As soon as the men left, she came to Dodge’s room and saw what they had done to his legs.  She hadn’t reckoned on anything like that – they had told her that they just were going to talk to him – and so she became sick.  When the vomiting passed, she called 911 and an ambulance was there soon.

            Dodge was lucky:  there was a first-rate orthopedic surgeon on call that night and the doctor did an excellent job piecing his smashed legs together.  He put in some pins and plates and Dodge healed so that he could walk pretty well, although always with a little hitch in his step. 

            When Dodge got home, he found that his room had been ransacked and everything torn apart.  The cot had been moved.  But the pot with the dead man’s face on it was still under his bed. 

             

           

8.

            The mining shack stood near a field of broken rocks.  Quartz in the smashed boulders made them look white in the moonlight.  Water spilled through a gravel-bottomed trench in the rocks.  Several big scoops of rusting iron lay on the hillside.  In the ridges above the shack, wind shuddered through pine trees.  A woman stepped out of the cabin.  She lit a cigarette.  When she finished the cigarette, she went back into the cabin.

            There were three of them in the cabin:  Oracio, who drove the Jeep Grand Cherokee, Jesus, whom Oracio nicknamed “Sleepyhead” and Juanita.  The shack creaked in the wind and, when they lit the woodburning stove, a couple bats flapped around in wobbly circles before finding their way out the door.  Oracio told Juanita to always check her shoes after taking them off to make sure that scorpions were not hiding there.  On a rickety table near the stove, there were some magazines that others passing through the mountains had left: Vanidades, Revista H, and Tv y novelas.  The inside walls of the cabin were dense with newsprint from Gringo papers tacked up for insulation. 

            Juanita couldn’t sleep.  She checked her shoes, put them on, and stood outside smoking.  Below the mine-works, the hills funneled down toward a dark, pine-covered slot where she saw snow still drifted under the trees. 

            The day before, they left the highway and drove 100 kilometers on a narrow, bad road.  The road climbed into the Sierra.  It was full of holes and rattled the Grand Cherokee so hard that Juanita thought it would shake the lungs out of her.  Oracio had a walkman jacked into the car speakers and he played Ranchera music by Vincente Fernandez.  Sleepyhead lounged in the back with a small automatic rifle with a tubular folding stock lying across his lap.  He lay back against his seat with his eyes closed.  Oracio said that they sometimes encountered mountain lions and bears in the Nature Reserve and that it was best to be armed.  But Juanita knew that the automatic rifle was for protection against bandits and narco-traffickers.

            They met three trucks on the road.  Each time, the Grand Cherokee yielded, backing to a place wide enough for the oncoming vehicle to pass.  Then, Sleepyhead came awake and flashed the gun, not in a hostile way, but just enough for the men in the other vehicle to see that he was armed.  They flashed weapons also, but only for an instant.  Then, Oracio got out of the jeep shook the hand of the man driving the oncoming truck and they discussed the hazards of the road, exchanging information about the way that they had come.

            Before dawn, Oracio started up the jeep and they climbed aboard.  Juanita was glad that the cold, sleepless night in the shack was over.  Oracio drove slowly down the pitted and tilted dirt road toward the slot-shaped opening in the hillside.  Snow chilled the passage and, rounding a corner, Juanita saw that they were on the rim of great, barren escarpment thousands of feet above the desert. The sun had not yet risen, but it was grey and there was enough light in the sky to see across the wasteland to another cup of high, crooked mountains studded with pine trees at their top ridges like the quills of a porcupine.  Between the escarpment and the distant mountains, there was a river showing slate-grey beneath jagged cliffs and the notch of a great canyon.  No lights of town, nor road, nor vehicle shone anywhere in the wasteland before them.

            It took them two hours to descend the escarpment, cutting back and forth on a narrow track with an irregular, heaped stone curb at the edge of the abyss.  At the bottom of the cliffs, the road zigzagged between low rocky hills.  Ocotillo and wax plants grew along the track and there were clumps of prickly pear. It was very sandy.  Oracio was listening to Pepe Aguilar on his Walkman. 

            They entered a small village.  The town’s generators were still shut down and there was no electrical power brightening the strings of Christmas-tree lights dangling from the arbors around the cantina.  Wrecked vehicles slouched down the hillsides on all sides of the village and there was a heap of brick crumbling into big concrete foundations where an old smelter had once been.  A couple of old women wearing black were sweeping in the dust outside a store.  Weary-looking yellow dogs snarled at the jeep as it passed.  The dogs looked too weak and emaciated to bark. 

            Beyond the village, the road was white powder and the jeep’s wheels spun in the dust. 

            Oracio stopped the jeep above the river and, with Juanita, he walked down toward the shimmering green cane and bamboo crowding around the muddy, brown stream.  A few hundred yards downstream, the river cut through the escarpment and sheer canyon walls rose a thousand feet or more above the shadowy gorge.  The cliff walls were red and brown with stripes of glittering mica. 

            In the glade by the water, a boatman was smoking a cigar.  Oracio went ahead of Juanita and spoke with him awhile.  Then, Oracio signaled and Juanita came down the steep, rocky slope to the willows where the rowboat was tied.  The boatman lifted Juanita so that her shoes would not get wet and put her in the rowboat.  It was damp at her end and puddles of water splashed under the ferry-man’s bare feet.  Juanita shook the man’s hand which was hard as horn.  She waved goodbye to Oracio.  He said adios and ascended the hill.

            The ferry man took Juanita about forty feet out in the chocolate-brown river.  Here and there, current nudged rocks in the river-bed or fallen timber.  The ferry-man told Juanita to give him all of the money in her purse.  She said that this was not part of the deal.  “Since nine-eleven,” the boat-man said, “this job is very dangerous.  Helicopters patrol here.”  Juanita told him that she needed the money in her purse to buy a bus ticket and get to her home near Memphis.  The boat man said that he didn’t care about her problems.  “I have problems of my own,” he told her.  Shaking the boat from side to side, he approached her, took away her purse, and removed all of her money.  “Now, we go to the USA,” he said.  Juanita looked at the water beside the boat.  She wondered if she could have simply waded across the river. 

            The ferry man leaned hard on his pole and drove the front of the boat onto a black mud bank.  He helped Juanita out of the rowboat.  There were in the mouth of the canyon with sheer walls towering over them.  At the base of the cliffs, green bamboo grew in a dense stand twenty-feet high.  The ferry man lead Juanita by hand into the thicket.  It was wet underfoot, pools of water standing between the pale green, straight lances of bamboo.  Mud sucked and hissed with insects.  A folding chair was set in a tiny clearing in the bamboo.  Small tunnels cut through the bamboo radiated away from the chair.

            “Here, you wait,” the ferry man said to Juanita.  “Wait?” she asked.  “For how long?”  “I don’t know,” the ferry man said.  “Someone will come and get you in a few hours, before dark for sure,” the ferry man said.  “I don’t want to wait,” Juanita said.  “You must,” the ferry man said.  “Why would I trust you?” Juanita asked.  “What choice do you have?” the ferry man said.  He told her adios and vanished in the green thicket. 

            Juanita waited a long time.  She heard rustling in the bamboo and thought someone had come to rescue her.  But it was only a mother javelina with her brood prancing through the little game trails in the thicket.  The javelina sow was big and her black, wiry fur glistened.  The sow’s little eyes didn’t seem afraid of Juanita.  So she decided to give the animal and its half-dozen piglets a wide berth.  She backed away from the folding chair and went deeper into the glade to a place where the rock face of the canyon wall actually curved upward into a kind of stone shelter.  Some slabs of pale limestone were fallen to the sand and Juanita sat on them. 

            Indians had painted their hands and left their marks on the rock face.  Among the hand prints, Juanita saw several warriors painted cochineal red.  The warriors were carrying round objects that Juanita thought were shields and they had horns on their head.  A much smaller warrior figure with an inverted “v” between its legs was carrying a smaller shield, or some kind of round object, next to its body.  It had become very hot and light reflected off the still lagoon-like surface of the river where it curved into the canyon.  In the scalding warmth, the stick figures seemed to dance on the rock.

            The javelinas went someplace to hide from the mid-day heat.  Juanita went back to the folding chair in the thicket and sat in the shade.  It was sweltering.  All the heat in the day seemed to be focused on the opening into the canyon and huge rock walls radiated warmth like an oven.  Juanita was drowsy and very thirsty.  She took out her last bottle of water and drank.  The water was lukewarm.  

            Juanita slept. When she awoke, she felt as if she had been poisoned.  It was even hotter than before.  Nothing stirred.  The glints of river she saw through the thicket flashed like an acetylene torch.  It was almost impossible to breathe.  Juanita thought: “This must be hell and I am in it.”

            The brush crashed around her.  It was twilight, but the cliffs were still burning like rocks that had been cast in a fire.  A Latino woman in national park uniform bent bamboo to make a trail to her.  “Hot down here,” she said.  Juanita’s legs felt numb and she had trouble keeping her balance.  The woman hurried ahead of her, making her way up some switchbacks on a steep, stony bank.  On the terrace, there was another stand of bamboo pierced by a trail made from raked cinders.  Irrelevant to the vast, chiseled masses of rock, the moon sailed through the sky like a pale balloon.

            The trail turned into a nature walk loop with small signs naming different kinds of cactus.  Below the hill, there was a parking lot and Juanita saw a big Suburban with tax-exempt plates waiting for them.  “We’re going up to the basin,” the woman said.  “It’ll take forty-five minutes.  If you have to use the toilet, go now.”  Juanita went into the little brick building holding toilets at the head of the nature trail.  She tried to urinate but couldn’t.

            It was dark when they came to the mountains.  The road went upward.  Two mule-deer crossed ahead of them.  The mountains were rocky and bare, but clusters of oak and pine stood in the ravines where the cliffs protected them from the sun.  The basin was a bowl among big hatchet-edged peaks.  There were a lot of pines and the air was much cooler.  A lodge built like an old two-story walk-up motel stood on a modest height above the two-lane highway.

            The woman wearing the national park uniform used a pass-key to open one of the doors on the motel’s open upper arcade.  “You stay here until morning and, then, we’ll get you on the road,” the woman said.  A woman in her twenties, disheveled and with red, wet eyes, sat on one of the double beds in the room.  She had the TV turned on, but muted.  “The guy with your papers will be here before midnight,” the national park woman said.  “The phone is turned-off,” she told them.  “Don’t do anything to call attention to yourself.”  Then, she left. 

            The young woman who had been crying took Juanita’s hand.  Her grip was limp and moist.  “The man who comes...” she said.  “He is very bad.  If I had known I would have run away.”  Juanita said: “What do you mean bad?”  The girl told her.  “I would have run away,” she said again.  “Where would you have gone?” Juanita said.  “I don’t know,” the girl said.  She lay down on the bed and turned her face to the wall.

            The man came at 11:30.  He was a big, heavy-set Hispanic man wearing a broad-brimmed cowboy hat and reptile-skin boots.  “As I understand, you have no money,” he said.  “I was ripped-off at the river,” Juanita said.  The girl in the other bed pretended to be asleep.  “No money, no papers,” he said.  “It is a dilemma.”  Juanita didn’t say anything.  “Aren’t you anxious to get back home?” the man asked her.  “Who wouldn’t be?” Juanita asked.  “You want to see your children again?”  “I don’t have any children,” Juanita told him.  “Well, do you love your husband?”  “Yes, I do,” Juanita said.  “And you want to see him again – in fact, soon?” he asked.  “I do.” “Well, then...” the man said.  “I talked to the girl,” Juanita said.  “Let’s get this over with.”

            When he was finished, the man went outside to his car.  Juanita watched him through cracked venetian blinds.  He was driving a Brewster County, Texas squad car.  He came back to the room with an envelope.  Inside, Juanita found 250 dollars and several ID cards, as well as social security cards.  Now, she had another, new name. 

            The girl in the national park uniform tapped lightly at the door.  The two women were dressed and waiting for her.  She drove them out of the park to a small town where the bus from El Paso stopped on its way to Midland-Odessa. 

            A hour later, the bus was stopped in a line of cars and trucks.  The desert on both sides of highway looked hot, all color baked out of it so that it was a common brownish-grey.  Someone said that it was immigration checking vehicles for illegals.  Juanita felt like she was going to vomit.  She plugged her mouth with her fist.  The bus inched ahead slowly.  At last, they saw that it was a bad car accident – a pick-up truck had burned and a sedan lay on its side, roof crumbled and glass sprayed out across the concrete.  Several canvas tarps were spread out over bodies lying in a row along the road’s shoulder.  Several of the tarps were small.  Apparently, several children had been killed.  Juanita’s heart leapt with joy when she saw that it was only a car crash. 

            The money ran out by Dallas, but, by that time, Juanita had purchased a ten dollar phone card.  She called her husband.  He said that he could be in Dallas to pick her up in six hours.  “I’m almost afraid I won’t know you,” her husband said.  “You will know me,” she replied. 

9. 

            Here’s the frustrating thing about my profession: a lot of times, you never find out how the deal really went down.  You’d like to follow-up, but its unseemly.  Once you have money in hand and the necessary contacts in place, your job is done.  Most of the time no one even calls to thank you for your efforts.  So you just never know.  And that’s too bad if you’re like me and have a curious, inquiring sort of mind. 

            Here’s an example: I set up a deal in Old Mexico for a client of mine.  It was an immigration transaction.  Of course, I would like to know what happened, but really it’s none of my business.  I never heard from the guy again.  You know, I’m like a doctor, like a surgeon – all I can offer is my best effort; sometimes, the patient dies on the table.  Notwithstanding every precaution, on occasion, you lose the battle.  I suppose that’s what happened with my immigration case.  Bad outcome.  The poor son-of-a-bitch was too trusting, too gullible.  Why he was even willing to trust me!  (That’s a joke, of course!)

            As to Doc X, it went down about as you would expect.  As soon as I had the money, I replenished my trust account.  Then, I called the surgeon and told him that I would be sending his check, reimbursing the funds retained for expert fees.  He was pretty cold, at first, even a little rude.  I said I was just verifying his address.  After all, several weeks had passed.

            Dr. X said that he had sold the house to some sucker.  “I don’t need a place that big any more,” he told me.  He was living in a condominium on a golf course in an upscale suburb.  “Give me the address,” I said, “and I’ll issue the check today.”  “You know, I want to do this transaction in cash,” Dr. X told me.  “Cash?”  I asked.  He said that he had expensed the expert fees on his taxes, on advice of his accountant, taken a deductible loss against income and that he really didn’t want any paper trail with respect to the transaction.  “Didn’t want to show too much in earnings since the bitch was entitled to some of it,” he said.  “So I need to have cash.”

            “I can do that,” I said.

            Real estate was starting to make a come back.  A couple investors had approached me about putting together a development deal for some property in Mississippi, down in Oxford.  It was an excellent site, wooded but with pastures, just across the freeway from Old Miss.  There were deed restriction issues, zoning questions, and some problems with financing.  I needed some higher profile investors.

            “You know I’ve got something interesting,” I told Dr. X, “down in Mississippi.  An open land option on some very, very nice property that could be developed, subdivided – maybe, get fifteen or twenty lots out of it.”

            “Sounds interesting,” Dr. X said.

            “I’m a helluva lot better real estate and conveyancing attorney than I am a trial lawyer,” I said.

            “I hope to hell that’s true,” Dr. X said.

            “See I’m working on putting together a blue-chip consortium of investors,” I said.  “There’s this famous author lives down there, raises horses, I think.  I’m trying to get him involved, put his name on the development.”

            I was just making this up, but it sounded good.

            “You mean...what’s that guy?...Faulkner?” Dr. X asked.

            “No, he’s dead,” I said.  “I mean John Grisham – he writes these legal thriller things.”

            “I heard of him,” Dr. X said.

            “We could put your cash into the deal as seed money,” I said.  “Of course, I’d need a bigger commitment...”

            “What are you talking?”

            I told him. 

            It’s a tremendous investment opportunity.  College kids are living in most of the big old houses in downtown Oxford and the county is very prosperous.  The college is expanding.  I envision nice wooded lots, rolling hills with a bike trail, maybe a water feature with a little fountain implanted to aerate and keep down the algae.  Those tweedy professorial types could live there, less than a mile from Old Miss, and bike to work – that’s the green way of doing things.  This deal has got real potential – it’s got legs and you better get on board now or it’ll run away without you.

            What do you think?