Chapter 9
Consuela Osage explains, This is also a landscape full of shadow. You come in by way of the black arroyo. You could drive it in a day. In this landscape you wait for dawn. A woman could go crazy out here, but she doesn’t.
Antonio the Brujo once told Zoe some people stand in one place and wait for lightning to strike. They will wait forever, he says, They will not see the little sparrow stuffing itself with seeds in a kiva of Pueblo Bonito at Chaco. They will miss the flight of the bird after it has eaten its fill. They will not see the feathers on its head shift upright. These people, they will wait forever for a sign. Si, it will get them when they are not looking! The relampago, it is tricky, it waits for the right time. Then the flesh on the bones melts away, then it is over. Just like that. He says he does not like the word estupido, but about some things, he says, it is true.
Now that Zoe is a medicine woman, she knows about lightning. She made a serious study of lightning when she passed through West Texas. While thunderheads gathered, she stood in a greasy brown oilfield east of town, lifted her hand, pointed straight to the sky, poised for the strike to travel down her arm, into the hot gold center of her solar plexus. It came on command. She was not a woman used to waiting.
Antonio was something that came without warning, a dust devil blown in from the north, a portent of storm. Once he was there, it was no surprise, the appointment made years ago, the date set in memory. He had an owl feather tied
into his tangled black curls. His eyes were fire agate and his face was brown.
What took you so long? she asked, drinking tequila at the end of a sunset.
I have come a long way. He was weary, and his hat hid his face.
She remembers him when she gets into her blue Chevy pickup and drives hard, for miles, to the source of lightning. She heads west for the Caprock, past empty cottonfields flat forever, through little towns–Post, Wink, NoTrees, Slaton, Earth–towns that exist because she passes through. She stops at Sue’s Cafe for coffee. She pays Sue, who lives multiple lives as postmaster, mayor, landscape beautification director. Sue plants orange marigolds in imported Mexican pots decorated with bluebirds, red flowers and senoritas.
He was here, says Sue, filing her nails. You just missed him. He had apple pie and a cup of hot water he put strange things in, like herbs and drops of black stuff.
He’s from the north, explained Zoe. That’s how it is there.
Sue raised her black painted-on eyebrows and pursed her red lips. She ducked under the counter and lifted up a bottle of amber liquid. Mescal, she said and handed over the bottle. For your journey. A rubber worm floated near the bottom. From Juarez, said Sue. Anejo. Very authentic.
I believe everything, answered Zoe. Everything is true at some level. Even a worm turned to plastic. Even him, whose laughter I hear in the call of the crow. She remembers Antonio said laughter is the truest thing of all. She remembers he lifted his black wings and soared out of Penasco Blanco at Chaco, calling her name.
Uranus and Saturn pass each other in October of this year without smiling. When Saturn is not looking, Uranus shoves it over the edge of the galaxy and spins madly into space. At that exact moment the brujo and the medicine woman sit eye to eye in the Great Kiva.
He says, Your heart is pure, I know, but I want to see it.
She cuts it out with her turquoise and amethyst-studded knife. It is transparent as quartz crystal, and begins to melt in the sun. What more can I do for you? she asks.
Show me your dark side, he whispers, But not what I already know–the secret misfortune in your chakras, why you sob like a wolf at full moon, why you play with your shadow at Pueblo Bonito but run away if it follows. I know these things already. He covers his heart with his palm. Show me instead real darkness, the way winter sucks through your soul howling and moaning, the way you lock your legs tight around me as you are drowning, the way you meet your face in the mirror and see your lives pass, dancing, in your own eyes.
She considers this. She considers how true it feels in her heart. She considers the triangle in her third eye, where the road winds into a landscape she has not traveled. I am good at this kind of thing, she tells him, and raises her hand. His spirit lifts from his body to a shock of lightning. It shoots to the half-formed moon over Fajada Butte. It travels forever with no concept of time.
I am good at this, she repeats and her hair lifts wild and red around her face. Don’t play with this. Ever, she warns.
Afterwards at Hungo Pavi, Antonio was weary and rested in her arms. Tell me your secrets, Zoe, he murmured. And she saw the sun on his face, and knew he was, at heart, a man, and would stumble through lifetimes with dust on his hands. Would try, each lifetime, to know something he had not known before.
Do not confuse me with the others, she said quietly. Do not confuse me with those whose lives you have passed through as a magician, invoking them into constellations, stars in fantastic shapes for the galaxy of your invention. She looked down at him. He appeared to be sleeping.
I am not to be kept, except in memory. I will be the memory you consider most often as you take the long journey back north. I survive in memory, in myth, in the space beside you when you look to see who goes with you.
Before they part ways at Chetro Ketl she tells him, Here is the fork in the path. To one side lies the landscape with no moon, through a passage of rock, up a steep pink cliff to Pueblo Alto. To the other side is a winding trail to Una Vida, a lonely village full of wind and dust, petroglyphs of unidentified birds frozen in stone. It is the way the crow flies. It is the only way out. You can come if you wish. If we go the same path, our differences will always be great, but lightning will strike between us.
I need a landscape with moon, he says . Even if it is full of wind and dust.
And I need lightning, she tells him. And a road that winds in and out with mystery.
I need to fly, he replies, scratching his chin where the hairs grow thick and peppery, to disappear in the fire of Casa Rinconada, to play my flute alone.
And I need to travel alone, she answers. With my feet on the road. I need to travel alone, she answers, to tell my secrets to Mother Earth, to weave spells, to search for lightning.
Then there is no way out of this, he tells her, and she agrees.
I”ll put feathers in my hair and paint my face, she warns him, We could go up in smoke.
So what? He is already backing off, growing wings, swirling off of the ground. I’ll take off in a whirlwind, I’ll become the dust devil, and then the devil itself.
