blood & memory: a relative thing Wednesday, May 7 2008

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent. – C. G. Jung

Carl G. Jung, the great Swiss psychoanalyst who pioneered important theories about the unconscious mind, must have meant to say “the unlived life of the ancestors,” not just “the parent,” for certainly we are compelled to create or live out, however unconsciously, what our ancestors did not; they line up behind us like multiple shadows, they have not really died. We resent the burdens this places upon us, especially if it comes in the form of an unresolved genetically-based issue like depression.
In order to explain such a burden to myself, I have told a story, based on what I recall in memory, and what is in my blood to haunt me forever despite the biochemical reprieve offered by the much-maligned psychoactive substance called Prozac, an invention whose magic lies in its ability to tweak the “serotonin uptake inhibitor.” I don’t really care about the technical details, I only know that it did take something up from within in me, and release it.
Here is how the story unfolds:
We are never to know exactly how my maternal grandmother, Marjorie Smith Hancock Woods died, or why. The physical facts explain a sort of “how”: cuticle scissors stuck into her throat, by her own hand. But such raw details are merely the black and white. In a gray area is perhaps a twist of mind that took over as she stared herself down in the bathroom mirror. Or a sudden uncontrollable old-age medicine-induced tremor that shoved the scissors blades awkwardly into the soft flesh above her collar bone.
But the imagined scenario goes like this: It was an early autumn day in West Texas, bright and bare. The leaves on the elm trees out back had crumpled to brown paper, and the grass looked gray. No one had called all day. The candy red pills she took for her heart problem were large, dusty, and hard to swallow. She wore the cranberry-colored nylon robe over brown nylon pj’s. The top three buttons were loose and her breasts swung against the smooth fabric. Sometimes she wore a bra, but lately it didn’t matter. My grandfather Charles was gone to coffee with his old golfing buddies. They hung out at the Kresge’s lunchcounter drinking stale coffee while she, in her tiny bathroom with its red Sears towels, would look at herself in a medicine cabinet mirror bolted to the wall over a thick white porcelain sink that smelled like denture cream and PineSol, look at herself thinking God knows what. In a brief hiatus only available to memory or imagination, she would become Kali, and the small lance of scissors would flash and strike.
A shadow of blood on the dove-colored shag carpet tells a story. It has been scrubbed and vaporized, but little details stain into the roots of the shag, leaving the tell-tale signs that someone lurched one, two steps out the bathroom door, then collapsed, head resting on a pooling blot of red. The house is already releasing its hidden odors: the dusty fragrance of old books and photograph albums, mold of old clothing, oddly detached perfume from heaps of fabric scraps mixed with metallic sewing machine parts, sweatsoured socks, soapscum in the bathtub, faint tinge of whisky, limburger cheese, redskin peanuts and beer. After the funeral, my grandfather makes a flat-tasting cup of Nescafe the color of stale tobacco and scuffles to his room, slippers dragging over the gray shape of chemically-removed blood. Later in the night he will cry out over and over again in agony, begging to be taken from this earth.
Later I would have a look at her in her hospital room, a sight that so scalded my soul that I drew inward sharply, unable to even touch her hand. She stared up at the ceiling, pissed and vacant-eyed. Her hands were bound because she kept trying to yank out the tubes in her throat, and the fingers grasped hopelessly at the white sheets. She glared like a shriveled, trapped bird, all bones and eyes. This was not meant to be, to still be alive. I couldn’t bear to look at her, such overwhelming disappointment emanating from her like steam off a hot pavement, like a bad smell.
At the time this happened, we talked around it. There were so many things to do after Marjorie died three days later: the paperwork, the funeral, arranging a caretaker for my grandfather while avoiding his grief and refusing to talk with him about it, scared out of our wits by this absurdly violent situation. A month later he died, too. Natural causes, heart attack, the one he had been careening towards since his son died in Korea some 57 years before. Now he could do it, just drop dead, in utter misery. It’s a thought that keeps me up nights, that enters my dreams in the form of raging dogs lunging for me as I lie in a bed that begins to levitate. It’s the darkstranger dream that whispers, “C’mere, I’ve got a secret.”
When someone in a family commits suicide, it tests every fiber of our ability to tell the truth. We never told the truth about Marjorie. She was horribly depressed. I can see it in my own eyes when I stare into the bathroom mirror on a bad day.
I wonder if my grandmother was ever happy and I think she was not. As a child she had a strangely mature face, and as a young woman, black and white photographs could not obscure a kind of feral, but restrained, vitality. She was petite, and “stacked” as they said in her day, with curvy chorus girl legs that she was proud to show off into her 70’s. She wore gleaming deep Chinese red nail polish and matching lipstick, and one of her favorite remarks was, “Good Lord, Charles,” drawn out long, drawling, and superior, but never mean-spirited. She affected a sophisticated pose with her cigarette, and pretended to hate to cook the delicious things she whipped up in her small kitchen on Waverly Drive: pot roast, beef stew, baked yams, mince pies. Her backyard was full of birds and “damn cats” that she shoo’d away, and two huge elms that shaded the patio nicely for the informal beer “cocktail hours” during summer months. She often laughed, made her pointed critiques, and rolled her eyes at my grandfather’s antics. But she was never happy, and even as a child I knew it, and finally I can say it now, because the truth is told in memoirs.
Maybe the unhappiness was a direct transfusion from Marjorie’s mother, Florence. Florence was “dark, beautiful, and haunted.” I saw her photograph, taken in a city park somewhere (Kansas? Oklahoma? Missouri?)–lush with flowering bushes and mature oak and mimosa trees, accessorized with wrought iron fencing and a large central fountain that reminded me of a single huge birthday candle in the middle of this birthday cake of a park.
Florence as I remember her was a fragile woman, like one of those dried willow twigs adrift on a West Texas lawn, frail and elegant, bent quaintly as a Japanese bonsai. In some strange way it seemed she did not belong in the environment of dust and endless horizons; and certainly she was not of it, it seemed to me as a child, squeezing my toes into the white shag that carpeted every inch of her tiny stucco home in Midland, except for the green speckled linoleum in the kitchen. Her home was quiet, shadowy, and refined, decorated with a minimum of curving furniture, Japanese artwork and artifacts collected on her trip to see her son Joe, the major, in Japan during the very early 50’s. In her backyard, as she guided me through an exquisite patch of tiny watermelons, she would tell me about the jealous jaybirds and how they robbed the nests of other birds. Her hands were bony, cool, white and soft. Every known thought I had of her was that she was old–beyond old even, ancient. So when I came across her photograph in my grandmother’s cedar dresser after she died, I was astonished at the vibrant, sensuous, dark-haired beauty with her head tilted under a stylish broad-brimmed hat, seated so stiffly in the anonymous park, her children Marjorie and Uncle Joe and Seward (whose plane was bombed down during World War II) gathered round the full, ruffled skirts of her shiny dark dress. That same discovery was followed by a “portrait”–a small headshot, dominated by large, luminous sad eyes, gazing to the side a bit poignantly. She was indeed a beauty, as my grandmother was not, and as I am not. All the same, Marjorie and I inherited something piercing and lonely from Florence, a similar inner restlessness, a reclusive and secretive nature, a tendency to simply “disappear” to back rooms of the house, and an odd snobbery about the most peculiar things, as if girls brought up in flat open places had anything to be haughty about. But it was in Florence’s blood. And so it traveled to ours.
There are other matriarchs on both sides of the family tree whose sepia-tinged faces in old photographs are haunted and grim, captured in the midst of unspoken unhappiness and pain. If memory serves me correctly, I’ve heard it said that despair starts early in the blood, sometimes centuries early. Perhaps these women–Mary Jennings brooding in her dark silences, Martha Annie taking to her bed for days at a time–perhaps they were not pressured by the world around them to “smile,” or “don’t worry, be happy.” Perhaps with no media images pelting them relentlessly with just how happy they should be, they never learned how. But I suspect that it was the Deep Darkness, the one that runs forever in the veins, and in their innocence they did not know how to hide it, or that they “should,” and so they did not.
These are all women who did not like “pills,” who shunned even the easy aspirin. Mary and Martha Annie were respected herbalists in their small communities, treating other people’s ills with potions of sassafras and mint. Florence had to be strapped to her bed in the nursing home for medications to be forcibly administered. Marjorie shuddered at the idea of the ugly red pills prescribed for her heart.
They were strong women and stubborn. Escape from personal misery was not an option at the time, you toughed it out. There was no talking about it, there were no excuses. No Prozac, Zoloft, or other flavors of SSRIs. Straightjackets and asylums were alien and too dreadful to even contemplate. Better to stay in bed, avoid the daylight, slit your throat. The collective weight of psychic darkness had to bend one of us, sooner or later. And so it did.
c 2008

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ch. 5 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Wednesday, May 7 2008

Chapter 5

Zoe scoots over real close to Reggie on the concrete fence that incarcerates Prairie Dog Town in Tula Town Park. And she whispers:
There are angels in the desert on the way to the Texas border. Sometimes they wait wing to wing across Highway 84 at Fort Sumner or Clovis, a glittering row of dimestore wedding rings, a false pool of water, a lull in the road to the past. I can name them all. Our grandmother, Mildred, and her sisters Inell, Opal, Rene, La Vada. The names are the plain and simple facets over red candy hearts glued with gold foil and tinsel.
Mildred says her father had a ranch with 20 head of cattle in Southern New Mexico. And her mother, Ozona Bailey, had a pet crow named Star. Things were never the same after six cowboy astronauts circled the house like it was an abandoned spaceship. They parked their horses and made that house their own. Mildred remembers being gathered with her sparkling sisters into the flimsy safety of her mother’s arms. Later the cows would die of poisoned oats, flat out on the field all at once, like they were zapped by the smoke of a falling star, or the glance of the moon on a bad night. Then Kern burned up in the heat of fever, and Daddy died of a broken heart, the grandmother told me. Star smudged house, land and sky with her wings.
They say some things are not for us to know in this lifetime, but I know them anyway. I know the life past the sad, flat moon over Abilene. I’ve seen a crowd of souls hovering on the outskirts of border towns in South Texas. I’ve disappeared into bluebonnet madness and armadillo amnesia in the fragrant rolling hills near Llano and I’ve known the dark spirit of ancient black water that no one can see, thousands of feet under this bare thumb of land. I’ve heard the Baptist preacher say we must drown for our sins. I’ve submerged myself in the liquid suffocation of false hope, come back, and sinned some more.
So I can tell you, I know the ravens fed Elijah in the wilderness. Spread wings around the dimness of his soul and pulled in a moon of light. Fed him full of falling stars and wishes, captured the meteor of his heart as it flew towards home. Elijah became my great-grandfather boiling sassafras tea on the back of the stove. He pulled his daughters to the window on a clear night to see spaceships traveling through the secret of the western sky. This vision was passed on to me, though the old ones have forgotten the power of the fragrant medicinal herb, its heart rooted in the dust. They have forgotten how to be invisible when fear rides up on a horse. Elijah whispers in their dreams, Tell her!
Tell her, he says, how to follow the shooting star trail, how to witness a spaceship spiraling forever into a dense space of no memory. Tell her about the shapechanger hiding in the fold of a raven’s wing. Tell her where her soul hides in the wide white landscape of possibility.
At the edge of all this the angel sisters are waiting. On a lonely stretch of road they tug on my heart This ain’t all there is, girl, they say. A woman in these parts can lift her wings and go just about anywhere.
They take me to the smooth launching space between Wink and Muleshoe, where quartets of cows wait head to head, to transmit the signal for flight. A kiss from Aunt Opal’s redhot flavored lips melts my soul from its body, and I’m off.
I will go to that territory the angel sisters say they have forgotten. Sassafras tea will warm my memory. I must remember not to stop for fear, a hitchiker who shimmers its ghost on a thin vein of highway; to travel deep into the time warp between El Paso and Juarez; to bypass the gleaming smiles of coyotes and head north, into glistening black feathers past the farthest star I can see.
. . . . .to be continued

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ch. 4 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Wednesday, May 7 2008

Chapter 4
From a past life the church bells ring, echoing her name, beckoning her from the garden behind the stone monastery. Her body turns slowly, like a cow moving on instinct . She steps over rows of wild strawberries, she follows the path toward the sound. The heavens open and something lifts her from the scene, pushes her through lifetimes, through layers of consciousness that unpeel the darkness until her head is filled with light, and she emerges to the other side and comprehends
a disembodied voice at the end of a huge flesh-colored conch shell: “Good morning!”
Reggie gazes stupidly at her hand on the receiver as she hangs up the phone. It is pink as a starfish and slides off the hard plastic, picks up a dark blue matchbook, brings it to focus. Hilton. She considers the heavy curtains bordered by a neon blaze of sun. She looks at the clock. High noon. She understands that yesterday she had $3.75 in her checking account and her Mastercard was over limit. She does not understand what she is doing here, or why the smell is so unfamiliar. The covers are messy and warm on the other side of the bed. The smell! Is it man or beast? What planet is this?
On the deep red carpet, the Milky Way sparkles on a soft mound of dark cloth with its froth of lace and net. A black shoe with a four-inch heel sits on the bureau.
Later, trailing a line at the Southwest Airlines counter at Albuquerque International Airport, Reggie scans the departure schedule for flights to Lubbock, Austin, Dallas, Houston. In her purse is the $250 she got off her heavy silver and turquoise jewelry at City Pawn Shop. The last time she stood in this line, it was with Antonio, and they were on their way to Las Vegas.
It was Antonio who told Reggie you should always leave Las Vegas on a full house, but he never took his own advice and came back flat broke each time. They used her VISA card to buy bus tickets back to Santa Fe. Antonio remembered he had two dollars stuffed in his Tony Lamas, and they had bitter coffee and cheese crackers out of the bus station vending machines for supper. Once on the bus, Antonio pushed his hat over his face and slunk into his seat, and Reggie doodled on anything she could find. She wrote “Las Vegas Sucks” on the back of the seat in front of her. My contribution to art in public places, she whispered. Later she would do a paint-by-number landscape in a dream. The ground kept coming out blue, the sky green, no matter what color she dipped her brush in. Clearly the blue was blue, until she put it on canvas. Then it was wrong, and then wrong again. She stabbed the canvas with a knife, a pocketknife, her father’s old Swiss army knife. Ravens fly up from the rip in the cloth, screeching and scolding and the room is full of them. Daylight becomes darkness in a full sweep of black wings. Back in Santa Fe, Reggie would take her sketchbook to the Plaza. Ravens were motionless in the trees, until the moment she tried to capture their dark intensity, the brooding beaks. Then they would lift their wings and disappear, mocking her.
Reggie’s grandmother told her that her own mother, Ozona Bailey, part Cherokee, had a raven as a pet, when the family lived on an isolated ranch in southern New Mexico. Things were looking up till something bad happened. I can’t tell you no more, the grandmother said. But later Zoe told her the whole story. Zoe said she’d been out that way, and she saw something that made her remember. Remember what? asked Reggie. Everything, you fool, said Zoe, downing half a bottle of coke in a swig. And don’t you ever forget what I’m about to tell you.

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ch. 3 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Wednesday, May 7 2008

Chapter 3
Zoe told the man the story before she left:
I met a man in Vuelta. He said he was the local brujo. His eyes were hard and bright as junebugs, and when he lifted his hands in the firelight, they made crow shadows against the wall.
There are so many ways to cure the ills of the soul, he said, on a late October afternoon, and took me to the door of his little shop, once a dusty museum of movie memories. Now, years later, a boarded-up building, for the brujo has left town. I keep looking for him, I know, it will never stop.
But on this day with the smell of burning trash in the air, and the sun sitting pumpkin yellow on the edge of the Ortiz Mountains, we stand at the door, looking out.
All of this here, the old church, the little white dogs, the short brown women in red, the rich Anglos who lock their doors at night. All of this here, the handmade tamales in the crockpot at Anaya’s store, the pink geranium on the woman’s porch, the way the road goes through here without a glance, just stirs the air. All of this, right here.
He waved his arm, it shadowed an angel wing on the hard brown ground. All of this here, the little golden-haired children on blue bicycles, the cat with no tail, the coyote who will eat the cat with no tail, the snow at the doorstep in deep January. Yes, all of this here.
He gave me his book, The Herbs of Vuelta and Their Power, then vanished around the corner, and a little white dog followed. The streets were empty, but the air stirred from some passerby, or someone leaving. The energy is the same.
And now, journeys later, I consult the book for cures and potions. The names of the herbs coat the roof of the mouth like mesquite honey, are hard for a thick- tongued West Texas girl to slide out graciously. So I travel carefully over words like Mordilla…
Mordilla, Verbana, herb of purple beauty favored by Antonio, the brujo. As a poultice tea it has a calming effect. I will apply it to my heart. It will heal it. It will stop it from racing.
Escoba de la Vibora, Snakeweed, “Broom of the Snake,” cures snakebite and rheumatism. I will apply it to my sharp tongue. I will oil my joints, elbow and knees, so I can move away faster.
Prodigiosa, many ladies in Vuelta swear by it to aid diabetes. I will take it to alleviate excessive sweetness, and finally achieve a balance of blood and soul.
Yerba de San Pedro, local to Vuelta, but rare, induces sweating. I ask the women of Vuelta to wrap my body in dry leaves and stems of Yerba de San Pedro, to draw out the toxins. The old ladies, one with no teeth, and one who has the cat with no tail, place a pinch of Chicora, Dandelion, in my palm to purify the blood, and a crown of Bellota de Sabina, Mistletoe, on my head to assure me of love.
I sip Zazaparilla, Wildhops, for hypnotic effect. The old lady with the cat with no tail leans over. All of this here, yes… she whispers, a rustle of dry juniper needles against a window which has been shut all winter. All of this here, the ghosts of the Spaniards and monks, the shards of pottery faded by sun next to the bleached skulls of ground squirrels and cows, the candle in the window of a house at the top of the hill, the man who cries and wears no shoes, the lightning which strikes the house with the candle at the top of the hill. All of this here.
I have had far too much Zazaparilla, and the old ladies rush to bring the medicine woman. She observes the soil. She stoops to one knee, takes a handful of earth, runs it through long fingers brown as roots. The soil is hard, reddened far as the crow flies. She takes a knife from the leather sash wrapped against her waist, the handle studded with amethyst and turquoise. She plunges the knife into the soil with both hands. I feel the impact in my back. I buckle over. She indents the earth with tiny arroyos, empty roads in all directions.
All of this here, she says, All of this here, the crows that fly North, South, East and West; Kokopelli’s flute song in the wind, the sound before thunder, the fear that sits in your heart like a thief; the bloom of lavendar, sweet clover and sunflower; the joy in the heart that opens to itself. All of this here.
Late September, near the full moon, a woman with long braids and a feather necklace superimposes my reflection in the bathroom mirror. She says, Plant Alvacar, Sweet Basil, to grow in late sun for good luck. She says, Stay up late every night until you finish what needs to be done. Eat good bread with sweet butter, and drink tequila on the New Moon. Take Chile for heart trouble and Comfrey when you cannot breathe. And always, when you do not know the way, come here and look me eye to eye….All of this here I can show you, from the little white dog to a strange shift in clouds, from pink geraniums to a portent of ozone in the air. All of this here is right here. All of this here.

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ch. 2 – journeys to places out of bounds: a novella Wednesday, May 7 2008

Chapter 2

She was a very strange woman, but he didn’t appreciate that until after she had left him. Then he lay dry-eyed in the dark remembering her angry, angelic face. It was a juxtaposition that kept him awake all night. “A very strange woman,” he muttered, jerking the covers over his shoulder. “ A very, very strange…” and he tossed the cover off, stuck a foot out to feel the light breeze caressing the room from the open window. She slept with the window open even in winter, despite his stuffy-nosed pleas that bronchitis would be the death of him, a tarot card reader had told him, and he was suspicious of oracles. Too much air is bad for you, the woman had whispered. Then her face became HER face. The man knew she had left him because he wouldn’t succumb to the infusion of air from the open window. She gave up.
It all started the summer they did not put down roots. Or, perhaps, they put down many roots, tender emotions, pressed into soft soil then jerked rudely from their home. It was the summer they had no home so they made their home where they found it, whether they liked it or not. One night they were lying awake in the dark at the Warren Inn Motel on Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe, and Zoe told him she was beginning to feel like she was many women, or the essence of many women. Some of them felt as familiar to her as a West Texas back of the hand landscape, a space of nothing, an all inclusive territory of dirt and sky and not much else. They were as familiar to her as the endless stories of her half-wild cousins, or the memory of her first love, the one who wore his soul thin in the oilfields, then burnt it out completely reading and re-reading Revelation, filling his heart with galloping horses the milky color foam at the corner of a rabid dog’s mouth, filling his spirit with a prophecy of doom.
Zoe said at first she thought some of the women were talking in tongues, crowding her mind with consonants, vowels and shrieks. But I began to listen carefully, she whispered, and darned if one isn’t speaking Spanish! Just to think of it, a headful of cosmic conversation and I can only understand the simplest things like Senorita, and Gracias. Why, I was awake all night last night just straining to hear those two words. But I do know her name. She says she is Consuela Osage.
Then Zoe said she had a story to tell him. It was the last story he would hear before she left. Next morning her battered brown Samsonite was gone, and her candles, and the big bag of peanut M&M’s, and her ratty old toothbrush. It’s a true story, she said before he drifted under the spell of her voice. It may take a whole chapter.

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journeys to places out of bounds: a novella – chapter 1 Wednesday, May 7 2008

This is the first Chapter of 20.
The novella is Copyrighted 2008.

Chapter One

She was a fat little girl with freckles and a ponytail that stuck out from her head like a shock of dandelion. She knew everything, and everything was strange. She knew she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but if she was patient she would someday be a grownup and understand the reason for the world’s strangeness. Sometimes, though, the grownups had disturbing things to say, like I just don’t understand what’s going on, Betty Lou, or For the life of me, Thelma, I don’t know why. They said these things in whispers on the phone, or muttered to each other under the roaring heat of the hairdryer at the Chat and Curl Beauty Shop. This could be a true story. All three characters once lived in Tula, Texas, but one remembers it better than the others.
The first character, Lucy, lives at the twilight edge of understanding with its nice pink glow around her dreams. She figures another few years of childhood will explain to her why the grownups pretend they don’t know. Her grandfather plays 18-hole golf on a flat brown field decorated with a scruff of dead trees and mudpuddles to knock the balls over. He rides a cart with Joe Ray and they tee-off near a rattlesnake hole at the south end. He tells her snakes lie in wait under moonlight on country roads and whip themselves around the first set of tires that pass their way. And headlights stun the jackrabbits to veer into the darkness and dance across the weeds. When she asks him why he says, I just don’t know, honey, and she knows he lies.
In high school, Lucy trades off to Reggie-short-for-Regina. Reggie lives life in the fast lane in her heart. She wanted out of Tula bad. Years later she will have an epiphany of realization when she recalls a certain memory circa 1968 at the Caprock Drive-In. She and what’s-his-name, who will break her heart, watch Clint Eastwood strut across the screen in The Good, The Bad & The Ugly. On the back row a line of boys wait at the flung-open door of a black 57 Chevy with a rusted hood. They are waiting a turn with Sue Brown, who has large breasts, hair with dark roots and no eyebrows. Years later people will say they don’t remember Sue, or they will say she died. But Sue will rise in Reggie’s dreams in a vision of Kali. She will rage and spew into the deep caverns of Reggie’s soul. When Reggie awakens, she has left Tula, and her childhood dreams and adolescent yearnings far behind, a little speck of stardust on the prairie, a little burnt UFO landing spot on the back 40 of somebody’s oil-bled land.
The third character, Zoe, who began as a major constellation in a pinwheel of stars and comets in Reggie’s third eye, will live far away. She will live in the desert and still feel strange most of the time. This girl has a yearning for all the things she was in past lives: dance hall girl, Tibetan monk, Civil War soldier like great-great-great grandfather Hironymous Bailey, who survived the hole in his head from a Yankee bullet. He slumped headfirst into a stream and the water washed it away like a mere sin. Zoe knows all about these things and more. But here she is, all by herself and nothing more. It’s as if in this lifetime she will both leave–and live in–Tula, straddling both worlds in her heart. She will be aware of that fact. And nothing more.
In terms of plot summary, this story starts in the solar system and ends up in Santa Fe. Off the planet, the specks of three celestial bodies shift and flex and shine. They revolve into something beyond themselves. They evolve into Lucy, Reggie and Zoe. Where these three strange beings came from originally is unimportant. Fact is (so says Reggie), previous lifetimes don’t amount to much unless you can figure out where they fit in; i.e., “Do I like potatoes because I was in Ireland in 1500? Do I hate the thought of eating meat because although I am a Southern Baptist in this lifetime, I was an unfortunate cow in another? Do I have bad luck with men because karmically I am working through every negative relationship I ever had in my previous 49 lives?” It’s hard to say. In 1952, all three characters were born and in 1988, two died and one became a ghost. The two dead ones haunt Zoe, who has a particular fondness for vampires, though she hates the sight of blood.
Zoe takes several journeys in this book: She goes to Chaco Canyon and sees a giant black raven launch over Casa Rinconada. She transcends in Oaxaco, Mexico, and out of desperation tries trancing to India for a change of scenery. She meets her alter ego, Consuela Osage, during a pilgrimage through the backroads of New Mexico. She pays invisible visits back to Tula, waits in abandoned oilfields for a sign, but all she hears is Consuela’s disgusted snort in the wind.
Along the way she discovers she can’t please everyone, and will, in fact, survive if she doesn’t. This is a hard lesson and makes her a little sad. However, this is what is true and she will move through it like light through shadow, move through it and let go. Her answers will not suit everybody. Though the heart aches to know this, it is still what is true.
When Zoe is old, old enough not to care and old enough to be outrageous, she will wear baggy pedal pushers and a worn-out plaid cowboy shirt with silver snaps and she will walk on the beach every morning at sunrise. It doesn’t matter if she finds any shells because she has lots of them in her glass house. She has thrown away old letters and photographs of pinched-nosed ancestors from Missouri and Oklahoma. She keeps the black and white snapshot of her mom and dad perched on the hood of a two-tone Ford in 1947. She gives away books and clothes. Now there are only shells, bones and skulls of fish and small animals. She could even throw these skeleton memories out and it would be okay–bones and shell to earth, and dust to dust. When all is said and done, Zoe will be way out there again, drifting high over a planet she thought was a pretty peculiar place to begin with.
When something ends, the way a chapter folds inward and concludes a book, its nice to put a little twist to it, something about rebirth, evolving on to the next level. Maybe what appears to be an ending has the musical ambitions of a caesura and is merely a thematic conclusion, a break in the continuity that has nothing to do with finality, and everything to do with possiblity.
The thematic conclusion of this story begins here: The evening is dry and excitement shades the air with hope, or dread. Whether you are 6, 17, or on the cusp of your late 30s, anticipation feels no different. How to describe anticipation? Land in the middle of it. It’s pink and soft and takes your breath away with its hot fragrance. Suddenly, you plummet into it, you can be nowhere else, you can’t find your way out. It is sweet, it’s petals close around you. Anticipation buzzes all c’s, p’s and ssshhh. It hovers near the ear. It whispers and tickles. All of this, whether you are 6, 17, or nearly 39: the ridiculous hope, the fragrant desire of dread.
Yellow flowers on Zoe’s grandmother’s oak table look like fireworks in City Park on Fourth of July. Fireworks in a forest of green petals. Lucy interrupts, she says, I just want to see ‘em up close, I just want to smell ‘em…(and here comes Reggie) to let the fragrance evaporate right through me, to trace some pattern of their memory on my senses. Then Zoe whispers fierce, out loud, to nobody in particular, I can’t keep nothing for myself, even the words evaporate, even the thoughts in my own private head. What ever got us all to thinking we were poets?
All three characters know about poetry, how it creates fireworks, splashes of color and light, and the movement of detail. Let me tell you a detail: today I drove the backcountry road by Cordova, looking for Consuela Osage. The village is small, adobes slump into the softness of earth like chicks gathered close to a scruffy brown hen. Narrow dirt roads splice into shadows, even sunlight so bright I must wear dark glasses in shade. There are hidden places in the village I can’t even begin to describe. Where the penitentes moan at God and punish their flesh for their sins. Where the woman is made mute. Reggie says, Speak your truth, woman! Then Zoe comes around: Consuela! Get your butt out here this minute! (where’d that woman learn such talk?). Lucy trails behind, because, of course, she spotted the three ravens, diamond black and glistening in the dead apple tree, its hard toes rooted in the dirt. The real details within the life of this town are hidden from view, behind windows covered with lace curtains, plastic sheeting or plywood. Then…a very small detail…a woman’s face vanishes. And soon after–could have been in this town, or someplace else that somebody might have had a mind to make up–this story begins.

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john who goes missing with sherman alexie Wednesday, May 7 2008

“How can we imagine a new language. . .when the language of our enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt? How can we imagine a new alphabet when the old one jumps off billboards down into our stomachs?. . . .How do we imagine a life when a pocketful of quarters weights our possibilities down?”
-Noted contemporary Native American author and filmmaker Sherman Alexie, quoted from his essay “Imagining the Reservation”, as discussed in Understanding Sherman Alexie by Daniel Grassian.

John is gone. I mean like GONE. Disappeared from the earth of the college, disappeared from Earth itself maybe. Except no, I call the phone number listed for him and a cousin answers and says John is not there — the man pauses — “John is an alcoholic. We haven’t seen him for days. He’s roaming around the pueblo. Others have seen him, in the woods, behind buildings, walking by the highway.” His tone is resigned and apologetic. He is talking to a teacher after all. John’s teacher.
John, what the hell are you doing to yourself? Everything is finished for your Writing Portfolio except typing the Final Essay. Goddam. I feel really pissed, concerned, codependent, and resigned. I see John trying not to stagger and fall into the abyss, but he’s already there, once again, after pulling himself out, blowing me away with his writing, his deep character, his passion for the ways of the Native American. No compromises about his views. He feels like the eagle he says. Many times he says this and one time he wrote about it.
John is a 49-year-old man on the cusp of his ninth life. This is number nine, I know it. He will prowl like the injured wildcat, his eyes hooding the darkness that envelopes him, his shaking legs pulling him toward a sanctuary of rocks just outside the pueblo, by the mountains. He loves the mountains. There he will lick wounds and return to life or he will die. No one will know.
John was offended by some of the essays in the textbook and he never hesitated to express his contempt and dismay when writing a response. He refused to finish reading Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death, calling it “appalling” and “very upsetting” for a Native American to read. I never understood why he felt that way. That was just John. He also dismissed M. Scott Momaday’s writings as “too white” and felt as if Momaday was giving away something sacred to the Indian culture. “Sacrilege!” he wrote in his response.
However, we liked to joke about our mutual fascination with famous Indian writer Sherman Alexie, author of “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” and “Reservation Blues.” We had both seen the movie version of one of the books, and laughed at the ridiculous Hollywood title, “Smoke Signals” as well as the “convenient” changes to the plot made by those involved in making the movie.
“What was wrong with the way it was?” John asked, exasperated.
“I don’t know, John, I really don’t. What did you think of the ending.”
John frowned. “I just don’t want to talk about it. It was wrong.”
John said he met Alexie once at a reading in a Santa Fe bookstore. Highlight of his life.
“What was he like?”
“Just like his books! Just like them. Man, it was great.”
Later in the semester, when John had taken to arriving to class late, or not at all, I told him I saw Alexie’s newest book at a local bookstore. “Guess what the title is,” I said to him, hoping to bridge the strange new gap, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.” John did not smile. “Okay,” he said quietly, staring at the computer in the room where the class was working on papers.
I am being pursued by those who do not understand I am an Eagle. I have to drink this magic potion so that I can fly. I could tear their eyes out but I will not. They just have to see me, they will never see me. You can’t trust the White Man nor the White Woman, despite her kindness. I will not do it. Take me in, darkness. Take me in. He wanders the historic old plaza area of the pueblo, muttering to himself. His relatives go looking for him, see him stumble around a corner, sigh and go home to their adobe houses and trailers outside the pueblo and hope he will not come home. He is a disgrace. Lester had to talk to his teacher on the phone! How could he lie to a teacher? It is a disgrace.
I am a disgrace. Why has it taken me so long to understand that I cannot shed this skin? I am not a snake. I am an eagle whose feathers are diseased. Look at them shedding, I cannot fly. It was the writing. I could write and when I did I felt the wings, and then the words became stuck in my throat and my wings became weak. It was too much; that language which is not my language, which has to be fixed by the White Woman. Yes, she was trying to help me say it better, but I did not seek better, I only wanted it to be as I said it. She said it was good. Yes, they are good, my words, like my wings once were. But I can no longer fly. I know that Sherman Alexie can fly without fear into the White Zone. But he is a warrior. He tells it like it is. I will never be able to do that, so why bother?
I sit at my desk filled with regret. Language truly provides the wings of the mind. Why would I fuck with that, intuitive as I pride myself on being? This is the diseased core of teaching the “Basic English” class in a college setting. Pedagogy asserts that language must be written a certain way, as a correctly calculated body of words, even though the textbook essays we read in class consistently break all the rules. Why did I feel I could not let John break the rules? Paradoxically, why do I so often feel like all my students should break the useless rules anytime they want to? Language is not passive, though academically the insistence on white bread composition fosters static writing and frustrated minds and hearts. As I realize my complicity in this mythology, my lack of courage stings like a scorpion at the base of my throat.
In his final essay, the one that will not be read, along with other papers that will not be read, John wrote: “I agree with [John] Gatto’s statement that ‘An educated person knows the way of the human heart; he is hard to fool.’” In his efforts not to fool his mind with academic jargon, John fooled his heart. He let the foolish system get to him; he did not follow the language of his heart. For “non-traditional learners like John”, the English classroom is an insane place to learn anything, much less to feel the throbbing heartbeat of a living language.
c 2008

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