Janice Gould

1 Desert heat, high clouds, and sky the color of lapis. On this journey, anything seems possible, so we stop by an ancient cottonwood to kiss. The beauty trembles, doesn't say a word, just watches me, so open. Small birds fly by, flock in the shady tree above us. What settles in her heart? What congeals? Hope? Despair? Far off, the river churns in its sandy banks, swallows veer, turn in fiery air. Will these kisses seal her to me? I her lover, she my wife? Is all of this a dream, my whole life? 2 She is just this side of wonderful, and suddenly the glamorous world fills itself with shining and we laugh at highway monuments that explain how hard the trek had been for Franciscans in the Indian wilderness, poor fellows— conversion is the devil's own work! Then the stones of her dream turn up under her feet, the back of a huge land turtle. I know we must be circling Paradise because the ants enter the fleshy petals of the roadside flowers with evident joy and purpose (oh, my dark, pretty one). 3 Music, my adored. When is there never music? My accordion puffs up with drinkable melodies. I spill her tunes into your listening ear, one after the other: the squeeze-box enters the dance of the plaintive gypsy with its hard rhythms, lilts the back- breaking labor song the worker croons to earth, warbles romantic notes of dissolving borders. You melt like a woman beneath her lover's touch. Music is happy and pitiless when it sets fire to combustible souls. Even the raspy bandoneon's voice is lyric. 4 Sacred. Sacred. Sacred. Sacred. (Speak in a whisper.) We slip into this space half cognizant. The land is very large indeed: bones of the earth worn down, though she is a living thing. See how she exposes her grace? Antelopes graze on the far plain—their high, white tails—the red soil throbs its slow heartbeat, and the blue sky clears so smartly, perfectly, like radiance. Are the ancestors near? What can we know? We decide to wander around this prairie, mistaken for Utes, buy commodities in little towns. 5 Late afternoon we head west along the willow-banked Malheur after the long curve of the Snake River plain. (Above the falls where the Shoshone went to pray we soaked our feet in cold water, and I observed the arch of her brown foot.) Rabbitbrush and sage along the highway, juniper on far hills and bluffs. Sundown, and dusk falls over the wide basin of land. In Burns we eat eggs in a cafe, take a room in the Motel 6. In the dark, I can see her black hair, black against the pillows. Its clean scent makes me think of corn. At dawn, I hold her and there are kisses. Then more kisses. Then more. The day is cold; a north wind blew last night. But the land is open. Rain falls in showers of light. 6 Her hand on my thigh, my shoulder, in my hair. She leans over to kiss my cheek. We look at each other, smile. For miles we travel this way, nearly silent, point with eyes or chins at the circling hawk, the king- fisher on the snag above the swollen creek. One night I weep in her arms as she cries,"Oh, oh, oh!" because I have touched her scars lightly: throat, belly, breasts. In that communion of lovers, thick sobs break from me as I think of my love back home, all that I have done and cannot say. This is the first time I have left her so completely, so alone.

Now begins the festival and rivalry of late fall, the weird debauch and daring debacle of frat-boy parties as students parade foggy streets in mock processions, bearing on shoulders scrawny effigies of dead, defeated Indians cut from trees, where, in the twilight, they had earlier been hung. "Just dummies," laughs our dad, "Red Indians hung or burned—it's only in jest." Every fall brings the Big Game against Stanford, where young scholars let off steam before the debacle they may face of failed exams. "You're dead wrong," he says to Mom. "They don't mock real, live Indians." Around UC campus, mock lynchings go on. Beneath porches we see hung the scarecrow Natives with fake long braids, dead from the merrymaking. On Bancroft Way, one has fallen indecorously to a lawn, a symbol of the debacle that happened three generations ago in California's hills, where Native peoples were strung up. (A way of having fun? Where did they go, those Indian ghosts?) "Their kids perform mock war dances, whooping, re-enacting scenes of a debacle white folks let loose," chides Mom. "Meanwhile we hang portraits of presidents on school walls and never let fall the old red, white, and blue. My dear brother is dead because he fought in a White man's war. How many dead Indians do they need to feel okay? This whole thing wears on my soul." In the dark car we go silent, and the fall night gets chillier. In yards, blazing bonfires mock the stars that glow palely somewhere above. A thin moon hangs over the tule fogs. I've never heard the word "debacle” before and wonder what it means. "What's a debacle, Mom? " I ask. "Oh, honey, it's a terrible and deadly collapse. Complete ruin." I've noticed how the hung Indians have their heads slumped forward. They wear old clothes, headbands with feathers, face paint, moc- casins instead of boots. Little do we know, this fall, living Indians at Feather Falls leave tobacco to mark that, indeed, we're still here, lungs full of indigenous air.

Shadows lengthened while we sat stuck in traffic just beyond San Rafael. Headlights had begun to flare in the cool dusk. The hum of the car's engine lulled me, and I put my forehead against the glass, looking out over a darkening landscape. We were headed to the Bishop's Ranch, a weekend retreat for Episcopal Young Churchmen in hilly country that would someday produce superlative wines with garnet hues that stain the inside of a glass. I was queasy from the lurching of the car, the stops and starts, the smell of exhaust. Though trembling with cold, I was too shy to ask the lady, the mother of one of the other girls, to turn on the heater. I imagined pale pink blossoms on the Japanese plum, apple trees laden with white flowers, and north of Sebastapol the vibrant yellow of daffodils on slender, pleated stems. That night I slept in a single bunk made up with thin sheets and blankets. A warm sun the next day restored me, but in the evening, seated by the fire that crackled in the fireplace of the big lodge, I felt flushed. Our recently ordained curate (we were not to know he was gay till some years later) had asked me to bring my guitar, and now he wanted me to sing about the girl who decides to sleep next to her mother her whole life long instead of falling for an unfaithful suitor. I sang; we all sang together. Young Father W. had a wonderful tenor voice. His smile reassured me, but now I was tired and, earlier than the others, I decided to return to the dorm. In that clear March night, the sky gleamed like black ink and stars blazed, bright and alive. Walking downhill, guitar in hand, I suddenly stumbled with dizziness, and the slope swam before me. “Hold on, hold on,” I told myself as I nearly fell onto the dew-slick lawn. For a moment I could sense myself floating away from my body. Back in the dorm, I crawled into bed and lay shuddering with cold, bones aching. The room seemed to spin. I wanted to be home, but the thought of facing my mother filled me with terrible dismay. I knew the blue failure notice mailed by the school would have arrived. Sure enough, it lay open on the dining table when I got home the following afternoon. A Sunday fog, hardly a mist, had blown in from the bay and was gathering in the eucalyptus across the ravine. The house was steamy. A basket of clean laundry occupied a chair atop a stack of San Francisco Chronicles. Mom sat at the table sewing, but I knew she was scowling. I thought it wise to look industrious, so I began to fold towels and pillowcases. “What I want to know,” began my mother, “is whether you have any ambition? Obviously, you will never get to college. What do you expect to do with your life?” She paused, and I shrugged. “Go ahead and shrug. Do you think your girlfriend is going to take care of you? That won’t last long. And why is it you only fall in love with girls? Well, I suppose you want to be a boy.” What an unutterable failure I am. I retreated, burned by her ferocious, upright anger. “Oh, yes, I’m sure you’re sick! But you will go to school tomorrow!” That night, wracked again with cold, unable to stop my trembling, I sought my parents’ bed, stood moaning till Mom woke and let me under the covers, where she tried to warm me with her body. Weeks later we learned that one of my classmates, a robust girl who shot baskets as well as any boy, had succumbed to the illness and died. That night, my mother placed her hand on my forehead–her smooth palm, her touch, gentle–and said to my barely awake dad, “Our daughter has a raging fever.” Like a miracle, I was still her child. Comforted, I slept.

We could hear her knocking down strands of cobweb from ceilings—sticky filaments, sacs of eggs—as we woke most mornings to a worm of discontent. It lodged beneath the heart, rubbed our frayed nerves, gnawed at the gut, spleen, ovaries. Filth was Mom's first enemy, so each day began with ritual cleaning: the stab and sweep of the broom down the dark hall, over the stained and scratched oak floors. For weeks, she held her dust mop one-handed, and with the other cupped a hernia, while she swore at us kids in that hard voice—a litany of our sins and failures: sloth, stupidity, secrecy. We watched her smash the spiders that ran, herky-jerky, along the baseboards, while we ran, too. Glaring at each other, we gathered up the scattered laundry, our father’s shoes, his newspapers and tools, our books, drawings, music, sweatshirts, and jackets, whatever we’d left lying around. We were guilty, but good at evasion. We cultivated shrewish or obsessive behaviors of our own: my tough older sister sneered and stalked out of the house to meet her boyfriend; my sweet younger sister trembled and cried, comforted by one of our many dogs. I slammed doors, pounded them with my fists, screamed, “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” She couldn’t leave us alone. She loved us too much. Though we were quick, she was quicker. Her words stung. We must have deserved it.