Blue Woman Burning--, page 19
There was a comfortable silence at dinner, and for the first time Fallon didn’t feel that she had to make conversation. She knew that she didn’t need to explain herself or entertain these people. Od praised the food sincerely, Sammy smiled and babbled occasionally, and Jacob and Kaela exchanged the minor details of managing daily life. All were enveloped in the warm, spicy scents that rose from the food. Teal had not yet returned, but no one seemed perturbed. The sun slipped down without event, and darkness bloomed fragrant and resonant over the land.
Fallon hadn’t eaten since dawn, and the food sent her into an ecstatic trance where nothing else existed except the rice and spiced vegetables that went from her plate to her mouth, all the cells of her body crying, yes, as if they were instantly absorbing and transforming the food into energy and endorphins. So she was totally unprepared when she looked up by chance into the black space framed by the window and a blue-faced woman appeared and locked eyes with her. The food turned to a cold lump in her mouth, and a sickly, feverish chill ran from her temples down her spine.
Fallon’s fork clattered to the plate, and she jumped out of her chair in animal horror. Kaela followed her gaze.
“Oh, that’s just Teal,” Kaela said, mildly irritated. Teal vanished.
Fallon’s mind skittered this way and that, wondering how it could be possible.
“Her favorite thing in the world is to strip naked and rub her body with anything she can find, preferably something blue, hence the name Teal,” continued Kaela. “Blue as Kali herself. I don’t know why she does it.”
Fallon’s head spun. She stopped breathing, the ground shifted, and she found herself in that terrible silence after the storm, the pit of nothingness after Ovid flung himself into oblivion.
“Looks like she found herself some blue clay. Now I wonder where she dug that up,” Kaela said, looking at Jacob.
“Must have stolen it from a neighbor, or from town, God forbid,” said Jacob.
“Od, will you catch her and see if you can get her to shower off? Use the outside stall. I don’t want that all over the house,” Kaela said.
Od rose silently and slipped outside. Jacob followed.
Noticing that Fallon had not calmed down, Kaela said, “Are you okay, dear?”
Fallon looked at Kaela mutely, her eyes wide and dilated almost to black.
“Od is devoted to her,” Kaela said, as if she could calm Fallon with chatter and explanations. “He’s the only one who can handle her. She gets pretty angry when I ask her to wash up. But she does make such a mess sometimes. I’m not the neatest person in the world, but Teal knows nothing of boundaries—My dear, what is it? Sit, sit.” She patted the table when Fallon didn’t move.
“It’s just,” Fallon’s voice faltered, “My brother—before he died—he was talking about seeing a blue woman.”
Kaela absorbed this in silence. “What do you mean? When?”
“It feels like a very long time ago. But it was, I don’t know, end of October?”
“Only about a month and a half. Where did you say your brother lived?”
“Upstate New York.”
Kaela rose from the table and wrapped her arm lightly around Fallon’s stiff shoulders.
“Oh, you poor thing! You’re shaking! Come, let’s go to the living room.” She guided Fallon gently to the cool darkness. She lit an oil lamp, which cast a yellow glow around the room. “That’s a remarkable coincidence, but that’s all it could be, of course. She couldn’t have gotten to New York and back without us noticing her absence. Two young women who like to parade around painted blue. That truly is something,” Kaela said as she steered Fallon to a comfortable couch, pushed her down, and sat beside her. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“I—can’t,” Fallon said.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to talk. Just take a deep breath.”
Fallon tried to breathe, but the familiar steel bands were back, preventing her lungs from expanding. The air scraped the back of her throat as she tried to inhale.
“He was in one of his depressions again,” Fallon choked out, inexplicably compelled to speak. “I always tried to help him, you know?”
“Forgive me, is it your brother you are talking about?”
“Ovid, yes.” She remembered the storm-tossed, muddy green of his eyes, his hands clenching upward. “He was so beautiful, you know?” She saw his deep-set eyes, the clean lines of his jaw and neck tendons descending to his jugular knot. “I couldn’t pull him out of his depression. But he was so vital. He was always inventing things, new bicycles, small hydroelectric plants that wouldn’t require those huge dams that destroy the land.” She saw his room with its narrow bed, his clothes in a heap on the floor, the walls covered with topographical maps of the backwoods country in Upstate New York. “He harvested honey, built a greenhouse full of orchids, and baked bread that smelled like heaven. He actually knew that AC stands for alternating current,” she laughed shakily.
“He was in the hospital because of the bees, but something went wrong, the bee venom or the pills— I couldn’t reach him, so I went home. But something woke me up. I knew instantly something was terribly wrong. When I got to the hospital, he was on the roof, dancing on a ledge or…or…running, or something. It seemed like someone was up there with him. I couldn’t see. The sun was shining right into my eyes. He was flickering through the light. I screamed for him. I screamed and screamed, but then—” Staring into the dark center of the house, Fallon whispered, “He threw himself at the ground and disappeared.”
With a harsh, metallic crack, the door from here flashed wide to there, and she saw it all over again—but in a new way.
“Ovid,” she had screamed. He had paused briefly and looked her way. The early morning air was cool. She could see her breath. Then he jumped—no—dove, as if leaping from a diving board. She saw it. His beloved body unmoored in space above her. She ran to him as if to catch him. She remembered only a dark shadow passing over her head in complete silence, a silence that went on unnaturally long. Then she heard a sickening sound, like a pumpkin squashing, a pumpkin of flesh and bones, crunching wetly, with finality, behind her. It was over. And she couldn’t look, for her brother, her father, her lover, her twin, and herself lay burst and broken on the ground behind her.
“He killed himself,” Fallon whispered. Kaela’s eyes were huge and dark. Fallon’s hands lay on her lap like dead birds, flopped open, belly up.
Teal slipped into the room, laughing low under her breath, and pulling Od by the hand after her. Her face was pink, her hair was black with water, and combed straight back from her brow, curling and dripping around her shoulders. She stopped short as the silence of the room hit her like a blunt instrument. Od’s clothes were completely soaked.
Fallon drew a long breath and looked down at her own slumped body. She saw a piece of rice sticking to her skirt, looking like a maggot. Sickened, she moved to flick it off. But it stuck to her. She grabbed it between her thumb and forefinger with a fierce pecking motion. It was lint. She saw another white dot, and another. They were all over. She pinched at one, then another, gathering momentum, up and down her thighs, violent rooster pecks, vicious twists. Her hands picked up speed as if she were trying to pinch the skin off her legs.
Kaela’s eyes widened and she reached for Fallon’s hands, but Fallon hit her hands away and began to laugh. Fallon’s hands moved faster. They became a blur of bone and feather, whirring through the air, and her laughing grew harsh, dissolving into ugly coughing sounds. Tears spilled over her cheeks. Embarrassed, she laughed at her tears and cried at her laughter, imagining how grotesquely ugly and red her face must look. Then she was running again. Dimly, she was aware of Kaela’s shadow rising, calling for Jacob, but she didn’t care. Her legs pumped pleasurably, elbows slicing the air. She arched her back to pull her torso up out of her hips. Her hands became fins chopping at the tissues of this world, and she was running through space, ripping through the silver screen of sky into the cool, clean life of spirit. Hands grasped at her, trying to draw her to the ground, back into her body, but she slipped out of their grasp with a toss of her shoulder. She wrenched free of them, cursed them. Hands grabbed at her legs, though she was pumping them like the trestle of a manual sewing machine. Hands slowed her down, weighed her legs with lead. She coiled herself into a ball and jack-knifed her body, sending people flying in all directions. Winds howled from the other side of reality. Her strength compounded, doubled, tripled, and she flung people from her as if they were flies. The rip in the screen of reality gaped at her and she hurled herself at the hole. She was almost through, but arms had closed in on her, wrapped tightly around her from behind, pinned her own arms to her body so that she couldn’t move, not one inch.
It was over as suddenly as it had begun, with a thunderclap of silence. Her ears popped with the atmospheric change, and the veins in her forehead bulged upward into the stillness as if her blood were slapping against the barrier of her skull.
Kaela’s face came into focus over her. Fallon realized she was still inside the house. Od and Jacob were there, too, pressing her shoulders to the earth. A few strands of Jacob’s hair poked up over his bald pate, and Od’s eyes were the expressionless spirals of the Milky Way galaxy, widened now with adrenalin. They were all breathing hard and sweating.
“Shh, shh,” Kaela panted, her hand cool on Fallon’s hot brow. Kaela smoothed the wet hair out of Fallon’s eyes, and the strands seemed to pull a twisted, hot mask off Fallon’s face, revealing a new, cool face beneath. Fallon’s eyes wandered. Someone was sobbing and hiccupping. That woman was standing in the shadows, pressed against one of the log posts, barely recognizable as the blue woman now, with her hair wet, brushed clean, and an old flower-print dress hanging waif-like off her slender shoulder. Teal looked at Fallon quietly, with a mixture of weariness and fascination. Or was it recognition? Fallon’s eyes traveled the room and found Sammy, crouched on the clay perimeter bench, hugging his knees to himself and rocking. He was the source of the crying. A string of clear snot extended from his nose to his wet kneecap.
“It’s okay,” Kaela said. “You’re here now. You’re safe.”
Fallon struggled to find her voice and mentally scanned her sore vocal cords. She didn’t remember shouting, but her hot breath abraded her throat as she tried to clear the webs of phlegm that bound her voice.
21
WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM
Whenever Fallon awoke, Teal was standing in the doorway. Her indigo energy swirled the air, crackled like static electricity, and smelled of ozone, like an old electric mixer. Or so it seemed to Fallon, from her high, lumpy bed in the hobbit-hole of a room where she hovered between waking and sleeping over the next few days. Fatigue lay atop Fallon like a corpse, sealing her eyes closed. Each time she surfaced into near-consciousness, she remembered having the breakdown, and the shame of it pressed her back down to sleep. Other times she remembered her revelation that Ovid had not dispersed into the ground but had broken himself on it. And that sound. That beautiful body and that sound. The thought was too much. When she got out of bed one morning, Teal was nowhere to be seen. Fallon looked out a small round window and shivered. The tile floor was cold to her bare feet.
The huge, kiva-style living room was warmed by a wood stove that emitted the caramel smell of piñon pine. When she stumbled into the sunny kitchen, Kaela and Jacob would accept no apology for the scene she had caused.
“That’s nothing compared to what we’re used to around here,” Jacob said, patting her shoulder as he rose from the breakfast table. “Come on, boys, time to get to work.”
Od looked at Fallon kindly as he rose. “Teal has taken a liking to you. That’s rare. You must be a good person.” He spoke with a level of sincerity and simplicity that embarrassed Fallon. He stroked his gray-streaked beard reflectively.
“I try,” Fallon said. After the men left, she asked Kaela for a phone and called Will.
“Hey, lovely lady,” Will said, “how’s it going? I called a few times, but they said you were out.”
“More like unconscious.”
“You okay?”
As Fallon filled Will in on what had happened from the time the radiator sprang a leak to her breakdown, Will tried to interject, giving her comforting interpretations of what had occurred and advice on how to handle it all. But the more he tried, the more irritated she got. She finally came up with an excuse to get off the phone. She felt uneasy. It wasn’t a fight, but only because she hadn’t said what she was really feeling, which was, “Back off. Let me tell my story—yes I already figured that out for myself.”
“Why don’t you go out and get some fresh air,” Kaela suggested, noticing Fallon’s despondent posture after she hung up. Kaela handed her a blanket from a basket beside the door. “Better bundle up, though. December weather has finally arrived.”
Fallon squinted in the sunlight when she went outside. The sight of the green Dodge Dart across the sleeping gardens was not a welcome one. Od, Sammy, and Jacob were leaning under the hood, elbows on the rim, talking.
What if this whole relationship with Will was just another illusion, another misperception, another miscalculation.
Over the next few days, Od, Sammy, and Jacob held conferences over the car. Occasionally all three of them would lean together under the hood. But most often Od could be found pontificating about corporate, fascist America and the crepuscular light of TV materialism. “Consume and submit!” he’d yell. Jacob would chuckle, but Sammy would sometimes be reduced to tears, crying “It’s not a conspiracy!” Then the three would go back to their conference under the hood.
“It takes us a long time to figure out which way to go,” Jacob explained one afternoon, “but you’re not in a hurry, are you? As a general rule, I try to let these guys reach their own conclusions in their own time. It’s a long-cut to any practical accomplishment, but a short-cut to redemption.”
As the days passed and she waited for the new head gasket to arrive, Fallon was haunted by Teal, who appeared and disappeared at odd moments. At first it unsettled her. Sometimes Teal would appear behind Fallon as if from nowhere and pick up a stray lock of hair from Fallon’s shoulder, then leave. Once she lightly touched Fallon’s forearm and raised her finger to her lips, as if to taste Fallon’s skin. Other times, Fallon would sense Teal’s dark presence on the furthest periphery of her vision, only to turn and find she wasn’t there at all.
“I’ve never seen her attend to anyone like that,” Kaela commented one day when Teal was off on one of her expeditions. “She avoids everyone except Od, usually. And even with Od, he’s the one who approaches her, not the other way around.”
Fallon accompanied Kaela on errands in their battered red truck and helped her pick wild sage to make sage sticks that she sold in town. She’d asked for permission of the local tribal council, and because they trusted Kaela, they had allowed her to.
As they worked together, Kaela told her what she knew about Teal. She believed that Teal had been sexually molested during her childhood. She bore the signs. When Od found her, she was homeless and trading sex for food and shelter. Kaela wasn’t sure how or why Od attached himself to Teal. Od himself was open about the fact that he had been sexually molested and beaten by his mentally ill parents. He was brilliant. And it was clear he had appointed himself Teal’s caretaker and sometime lover. Teal had acquiesced, but Kaela didn’t know if Teal experienced anything like love. She surmised that Teal had some kind of attachment disorder.
On one of their errands, Kaela pointed out the entrance to the Taos Pueblo, an adobe brick village continuously inhabited for a thousand years by the Tiwa-speaking people, descended from the Anasazi who had lived as much as ten thousand years ago in Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. The village looked like mud building blocks stacked on top of each other three tiers high, echoing in human form the Sangre de Cristo mountains, and accessed by wood ladders rather than stairs. Kaela explained that around 1540, the Spanish had moved in, and at first the Indians had accepted them. But the growing white population warned of problems to come, so the village elders finally asked the Spanish to move a league away. That was how Taos was built. By 1680, disease, intermarriage, and the encroachment of Catholicism finally spurred the Taos Indians to declare war on the Spanish in order to expel them. They did not succeed. Fallon knew the dismal end of the story.
“American archeologists like to say that the Anasazi mysteriously disappeared,” Kaela explained, “but the Taos people will tell you their ancestors had merely migrated to this area when the climate changed. In the late 1900s, after years of economic and social collapse, the Pueblo Indians turned their town into a tourist attraction. Now tourists could go from house to house and shop for hand-crafted items. Would you like to visit?”
“Oh, I don’t think I could. I would be too ashamed.”
“Ashamed?”
“Because some of my ancestors fought the Native Americans in the east.”
Kaela was silent.
“And the irony,” Fallon continued, “Is that they were running away from oppressors themselves. You’d think they wouldn’t turn around and oppress others, wouldn’t you?”
“Even today, if you look up the Anasazi petroglyph the Sun Dagger, it will tell you that a white person ‘discovered’ it.”
Fallon snorted with disgust.
“I know. Right?” Kaela told her that the Sun Dagger is a spiral solstice marker and lunar calendar of sorts at Chaco Canyon unlike anything else on the continent. Each arm of the spiral corresponds with the 18.6-year cycle of the moon’s orbit position relative to the earth. “It shows how advanced their astronomy was. But one video at the visitor center posited that extraterrestrials might have carved the spiral.”
