Blue Woman Burning--, page 20
“How bizarre. Why extraterrestrials?”
“Presumably because they thought the Anasazi too primitive to figure it out on their own.”
“Wow. To be so blind that you have to come up with an insane explanation for the obvious.”
“What they don’t understand, because they themselves are so divorced from the land, is that when you live a life so close to the land, you notice these things. That spiral represents decades of observation and mapping.” Kaela down-shifted as she rattled over a rocky section of the road.
“It’s mind-boggling how much culture colors perception,” Fallon said. “As Will put it, reality is a pretty broad situation.”
Kaela laughed. “That’s a good one. He’s so right.”
Fallon wanted to tell Kaela about Eustacia’s combustion, but she had a traffic jam of thoughts and blurted out a different question instead. “What do you make of the fact that my brother was talking about a blue woman before he died, and that my car broke down in the exact place where I was bound to run into Teal?”
Kaela drove in silence for a minute. “I don’t know what to make of it. A shaman or a psychic would tell you that the universe is sending you a message.”
“But do you believe that?”
“I only know that I do not know. It could be as simple as this: Jacob and you are drawn to the same kinds of people, and that’s why he stopped for you and you accepted his help. The world may just be a lot smaller and a lot more ordered than we think.”
“Why do you think Teal paints herself blue?”
“I think she just likes the feel of the clay on her skin. But it’s interesting. Of course, there’s the association of blue with sadness. It could be self-expression. In my culture, Kali, the goddess of time, is blue. Many people call her the goddess of death, but only in the sense that time takes all people. She is supposed to free the soul from the ego.”
“The Celtic Picts painted themselves blue with woad before going into battle to make themselves frightening,” Fallon offered.
“Yes, maybe Teal is protecting herself,” Kaela said.
“Maybe Ovid was, too, by conjuring her,” Fallon said.
Kaela glanced over at Fallon but said nothing and looked back at the road. She slowed the truck and turned east onto a dirt road ridged like a washboard. It rattled their eyeballs in their sockets and made it too loud to talk.
Against the backdrop of the Taos Pueblo, the story of Eustacia’s combustion no longer sounded so crazy. In this part of America, where the saints left parts of themselves for people to keep in fetish boxes, where the land and ancient history was so alive, and where Native Americans still practiced their rituals and lived in staircases that mounted the sky, anything was possible.
This thought prompted another. She didn’t need to fear the mismatch she’d felt with Will over the phone. It was a simple matter to call him and tell him what she needed from him, which is exactly what she did when they got back to Buffalo Hill.
“I need you to stop trying to fix things for me when I talk to you.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Will said.
“Well, the last time we talked, you kept interrupting me to give me advice.”
“I thought you liked my advice.”
“I do, I just wish you would wait until I ask for it. I need to make my own discoveries.”
“Makes sense.”
Like a person in a game of tug-o-war when the opponent lets go, Fallon was surprised. She thought in silence for a moment. “You’re not mad?”
“Why would I be mad?”
She paused again. “I don’t know.” She had never experienced an interchange like this before, where she set a boundary and the other person simply respected it without a fight or recrimination.
After they got off the phone, her back was straighter, her bones stronger, and her eyesight clearer. When she breathed, her lungs filled easily with air, and for the first time, she trusted herself.
22
SPIDER WEB
As the days passed, Fallon grew accustomed to and even comforted by Teal’s attentions. The more time Teal spent with her, the more Fallon floated, as if all she had to do was lift her feet from the ground and she could glide above it like water bugs skate on the skin of a pond. Teal’s eyes were large and amber, with the coldness and fidelity of a wolf’s gaze. Teal never spoke, but her gestures were eloquent and more than adequate substitutes for words.
One day, Teal came to Fallon with a pot of brown paste she had made by mashing a root. She knelt by the side of Fallon’s bed and carefully took Fallon’s long white feet into her narrow, tanned hands. Fallon pulled her foot back quickly, but Teal held on, fixing her with her fierce eyes. Fallon relented, and Teal rubbed the paste onto the soles of Fallon’s feet.
“I don’t know if I like this, Teal.”
Just the corner of a smile tightened Teal’s mouth. She bent her head so that Fallon couldn’t make eye contact with her. The paste turned to a red-orange stain when it was warmed by her skin. Teal took Fallon’s palms and rubbed them orange, too, and then pulled her by the hand into the kitchen.
“So, Teal will be blue, and you will be red,” said Kaela, looking up from the recipe book she was reading. “What is that? Dock root?”
“I don’t know,” Fallon said, shrugging her shoulders and laughing uneasily.
“Must be,” Kaela said. “What are you up to, Teal?”
Teal ignored Kaela and yanked on Fallon’s hand.
“The Navajos use dock root to heal sores,” said Kaela. “Maybe she thinks you need healing. But she’s painted your hands and feet in the manner of a Hindu bride before a wedding. Is that what you are up to? Have you been looking at some of my books, Teal?”
Teal handed Fallon a small, white pot with a black hole at the center, only big enough for a spider. The outside was painted elaborately with black markings, exactly regular. The shape pleased Fallon’s palm.
“Oh!” Kaela said with delight, “this is a pot for Spider Grandmother. In some traditions she is the creator of humans, and in others, she brought fire to the people inside a pot just like this. She put some fire in all things, trees, tinder, and rocks, so that the people could make their own fire. Then she threw a coal up into the sky to make the sun. Of course, she also taught humans how to weave. The Pueblo call her ‘Thought Woman,’ who thinks all things into being.”
Fallon could see how the pot might hold the silence of latent creation in its dark interior, accessible to nothing but a small spider. My mother would have wanted to taste this orb of air, Fallon thought.
It was an unusually warm day for December. Teal took Fallon dancing over the mesa through red sand and the sage’s slow, silver flames. The sunlight was different in Taos: clean, clear, and yellower than the light of the East Coast. Teal began to move in slow configurations of heron extensions, crab crouches, and spider lattice works, as if she were dancing out an alphabet. Her interactions with plants were sentences that spelled out her purpose in the world. She kept trying to pull Fallon into the dance, and at first Fallon resisted. But the soles of her feet burned with a pleasant warmth that lifted her from the ground, and she found herself matching Teal’s gestures. No one could see them where they danced. As she stretched, her fibers filled with oxygen, and she slipped into easeful invisibility, the closest thing to death she had ever experienced. It was a delirious, nameless state she had craved her whole life, a liquid liminality to which she gave herself with relief and and now shared with another person.
Everywhere, orb spider webs stretched between sage branches. Each time they saw one, they danced their version of it. That was how Fallon found herself dancing the strange beauty of Ovid’s wind sculpture. Its iridescent strands hummed in the wind, a song of kite strings, string theory, and spider webs, all woven together, a weave that didn’t require interpretation or meaning, a weave of life that simply was.
No object is solid.
“It’s beautiful,” she said aloud to no one, but Teal heard her and smiled.
Over dinner the three men told Fallon excitedly that the Dodge Dart was fixed, and Fallon thanked them falteringly. After dinner, she caught Jacob by himself. They sat outside on the doorstep. Od had resumed his perch in the tree, and Teal had vanished. They could hear Kaela and Sammy giggling over a game of mancala in the living room, the sounds of the glass pebbles clattering into the wooden depressions.
“Jacob,” she said, “this afternoon I had a revelation while I was out with Teal.”
“Oh?”
She began to vibrate inside, the way she did when she was speaking a core truth. “I want to stay here. I want to help you and Kaela with Buffalo Hill.”
Jacob turned to look her in the face, and gently took her hand, smiling. “My dear,” he said, sighing.
Frightened of rejection, she plunged forward, “I could find a part-time job. I could help with expenses. Will could come out. He’d love it here.”
“My dear, you are on a journey. You must complete it. What about your brother?”
“But that doesn’t matter anymore.” Her words tumbled over each other. “I don’t know why I was going to L.A. anyway. I don’t really know Terry. I don’t know if I’ll find him. He doesn’t even call himself Terry anymore. He’s Cosmo Kazan. This feels like home, here. I’ve never known what to do with my life. But here, I don’t need to know. I can just live.”
“Didn’t you say you used to want to be a doctor?” Jacob asked.
“Yeah, but I’m just not smart enough for that. Besides, maybe there’s another healing art I could learn, like massage, or herbs or something.”
Jacob scraped at the dirt with a stick. “I’ve been meaning to tell you the story of the Moon Palace,” Jacob said. “Mind if I do?” The setting sun painted the hills above the ranch pale gold that stood out against the sky, surreal and impatient. Beyond them, the blue-black Sangre de Cristo Mountains jabbed the sky in jagged pencil points.
Fallon shook her head, trying to quell her impatience.
“There was a young woman who refused all suitors,” Jacob said. “None of them were good enough. One day, she fell in love with the head of a man she found in a field, just a head, nothing else. They got on famously. This was the man she wanted to marry. But her father was furious, and when his daughter was away, he stabbed the head in the eye with an ice pick. The head rolled away to the bottom of the ocean, back to his family of heads. When the daughter discovered this, she wanted to kill herself, but instead she was sent to the Moon Palace. This is a place that people go to when they don’t want to feel anything anymore, where the light is diffuse, and where the world looks very small and far away.
“She looked down on all the activity in the village, the hunting, gathering, loving and arguing, and thought, ‘Why bother?’ But one day, she saw three men putting their canoes out to sea. They were standing in the waves laughing. As they talked, they splashed water at each other. The droplets fell all around them, showers of sunlight. Suddenly, the girl wanted to go home.
“There was an old woman in the palace. She told her that all she had to do to go home was close her eyes and climb down a rope, and when she was two feet from the earth, she should let go and jump. She climbed down the rope, just as she had been instructed, but you see, she thought the earth was very far away, and before she knew it, before she opened her eyes, she hit the earth blind, and,” he clapped his hands, “turned into a spider.”
Fallon just looked at him in silence. “I don’t understand,” she said. The setting sun turned the mountains to the color of dried blood.
“Because her head wasn’t connected to her feet, she didn’t know how close she already was to the earth, so she missed it.”
The curtain of night fell, and the mountains were now just shelves of darkness against a ridge of dark blue light in which the first stars appeared.
Fallon tried to wipe a tear out of her eye without Jacob seeing.
“This is not a rejection,” he said as he patted her knee. “Once you’ve found your brother and finished this journey, if you decide to come back, you are welcome. Any time. I mean that.”
23
RECKONING
Knowing a thing and being ready to do it were two different things, so Fallon stayed put at Buffalo Hill for a few more weeks. One day, Teal wordlessly conveyed Fallon toward the Dodge Dart. Fallon floated along behind her, unresisting. As she approached the car, shocked body memories poked up their heads like frozen bits of earth, but she pushed them down. She slid into the driver’s seat, and Teal into the passenger side, and Teal seemed to restore to the car its old magic. Eustacia charm. The car started up with a deliciously smooth purr, and they drove out of the Buffalo Hill yard. The road rose to the top of the mesa and grew increasingly rocky and pitted in a manner reminiscent of the road leading up to the Altiplano. It dropped precipitously into the deep gorge of the Rio Grande. A 400-foot curtain of wine-red rock folded and unfolded before them. The river, though narrow, roared loudly as they wound their way down into the gorge. At the bottom, they crossed a metal bridge and drove up the other side.
Teal motioned for Fallon to park the car in a dirt area just off the shoulder of a hairpin turn. She scrambled out of the car and jogged down a narrow trail where prickly pear cacti were tucked into the crevices. Fallon hurried to catch up, but Teal was already out of sight. When Fallon found her, Teal had strewn her clothes willy-nilly over the rocks and was immersed in one of the three pools ridged with lava rocks at the side of the river. She gestured for Fallon to do likewise. Although the sun was hot, the air was cold and a slight breeze blew, making Fallon loath to take off her clothes. But she dipped a foot in the water and found it hot. She turned her back to Teal as she unfastened her clothes. Exposed, goose flesh prickling, she stepped carefully into the pool, not looking at Teal, as if avoiding her gaze would hide her nakedness. Hot water jetted from the greenish black mud at the bottom of the shallow pool. Fallon lowered herself into the warm water. Teal scooped up a handful of mud, picked up Fallon’s foot, and carefully smeared the mud along her ankle, where it glittered like asteroid dust. As the warmth softened Fallon’s muscles and the steam rose, she lay back, looked at the high, blue sky, and submitted herself completely to Teal’s care.
If only I could skip all the work and confusion of life and climb the skies, thought Fallon as the heat gathered and spread throughout her body. If only my body could be released from its human chains and float like this vapor into beauty, into blue sky.
I am a child of the great mother, an ant, crawling between the hairs of her scalp, warmed by her red blood pulsing under her skin. I am nothing. Her muscles loosened from her bones, her brow ran with drops of sweat, her heart pounded under the labor of the heat.
Teal climbed out of the pool and gestured for Fallon to follow. Fallon noticed how curiously childlike Teal’s hips were. She was not saddled with the womanly hips and thighs that Fallon had. Teal’s belly protruded like a baby’s belly, accentuated by her swayed back. Her fuzzy hair turned dusty silver in the sunlight. Teal led her up over the rocks to a small lake not visible from the road. Though it was winter, the water was at least 70 degrees. It felt pleasantly cool after the heat of the spring, but it was still obviously warmed by the same source. Fallon imagined a fissure at the bottom of the pool that reached all the way down to the earth’s molten layer. She climbed in and sat where the pool was still shallow.
Teal giggled, low and breathy, and pulled Fallon off the ledge into the bottomless center where it was hotter, and she lightly dropped her hands around Fallon’s neck. Fallon felt uneasy and awkward being so close to Teal, their naked bodies brushing lightly against each other as they treaded water. Teal’s arms grew heavier as she pulled her mouth to Fallon’s ear.
When Fallon first heard the words, they sounded like another language. She struggled to tread water under the weight of Teal’s arms. The vowel sounds were long and spidery, short and silken, hot-breathed and blurry. Fallon finally sorted the sounds out into words, “Stay with me. I want to die with you.” It was almost a complaint, a plaintive sigh, sinister in its innocence.
Prongs of fear stabbed her. Teal wrapped her legs around Fallon’s waist and transferred her entire weight onto her. Fallon felt the shock of Teal’s pubic hair pressed against her hip bone. Her head went under for a second, their bodies melding into each other so that, for a moment, she couldn’t tell where hers ended and Teal’s began. Fallon spluttered for air as she bobbed up again, her arms pinned to her side by Teal’s arms, making ineffectual fin movements. Panic mounted. She tried to maneuver her forearms between their bodies to push Teal away, but Teal’s arms were surprisingly strong, wired with madness. Fallon’s will to live roared like fire, but the harder she fought to stay above water, the lower she sank. Then something clicked. In one violent, instinctive movement, she sank deep into the water and slipped out of Teal’s embrace. In the murky light of the water, she saw Teal’s hands grasp for her, but with one powerful scissor kick, she shot shark-like away, her foot accidentally making contact with Teal’s body. As she flailed for the rocky ledge and heaved herself out of the water, she was dimly aware of Od, standing over them.
“Teal,” he called sharply, his blue eyes burning. Without disrobing he dove into the pool.
“No,” Teal screamed. When he emerged next to her, she kicked and hit him, pushing him away.
His voice softened. “I’m not angry. Don’t be afraid. Just get out of the water.”
Fallon staggered to her feet into the cold air and almost fell to the ground as her blood pressure dropped precipitously.
“No,” Teal screamed, flailing her arms, her head whipping back as he grabbed her around the waist.
“Calm down,” he gasped, out of breath. “What’s gotten into you?”
“I want her. I want to die with her,” she screamed, a whirl of fight.
