Ivory and the Horn (40 page)

9

“I’ve got to figure out a way to sleep without dreaming,” Sophie told Jilly.

They were taking a break from helping out at a bazaar for St. Vincent’s Home for the Aged, drinking tea and sharing a bag of potato chips on the back steps of the old stone building. The sun was shining brightly, and it made Sophie’s eyes ache. She hadn’t slept at all last night in protest of how she felt Coyote was wasting her time.

“Still visiting the desert every night?” Jilly asked around a mouthful of chips.

Sophie gave her a mournful nod. “Pretty much. Unless I don’t go to sleep.”

“But I thought you liked the desert,” Jilly said. “You came back from that vacation in New Mexico just raving about how great it was, how you were going to move down there, how we were all crazy not to think of doing the same.”

“This is different. All I want to do is give it up.”

Jilly shook her head. “I’m so envious of the way you get to go places when you dream. I would
never
want to give it up.”

“You haven’t met Coyote.”

“Coyote was your favorite subject when you got back.”

Sophie sighed. It was true. She’d become enamored with the Trickster figure on her vacation and had even named her last studio after a painting she’d bought in Santa Fe: Five Coyotes Singing.

“This Coyote’s not the same,” she said. “He’s not all noble and mystical and, oh I don’t know, mischievous, I suppose, in a sweet sort of a way. He’s more like the souvenirs in the airport gift shop—fun if you’re in the right mood, but sort of tacky at the same time. And definitely not very helpful. The only agenda he pursues with any real enthusiasm is trying to convince me to have sex with him.”

Jilly raised her eyebrows. “Isn’t that getting kind of kinky? I mean, how would you even do it?”

“Oh please. He’s not a coyote all of the time. Mostly he’s a man.” Sophie frowned. “Mind you, even then he’ll have the odd bit of coyote about him: ears, mostly. Sometimes a muzzle. Sometimes a tail.”

Jilly reached for the chip bag, but it was empty. She shook out the last few crumbs and licked them from her palm, then crumpled the bag and stuck it in the pocket of her jacket.

“What am I going to
do
?” Sophie said.

“Beats me,” Jilly said. “We should go back inside. Geordie’s going to think we deserted him.”

“You’re not being any help at all.”

“If it were up to me,” Jilly said, “I’d join you in a minute. But it isn’t. Or at least, we’ve yet to find a way to make it possible.”

“He’s going to drive me mad.”

“Maybe you should give him a taste of his own medicine,” Jilly said. “You know, act just as loony.”

Sophie laughed. “Only you would think of that. And only you could pull it off. I wish there
was
some way to bring you over. Then I could just watch the two of you drive each other mad.”

“You could always just sleep with him.”

“I’ve been tempted—and not simply because I think it’d drive him away. He’s really quite attractive, and he can be very… persuasive.”

“But,” Jilly said.

“But, I feel as though it’d be like eating the fruit in fairyland—if I give in to him, then I’ll never be able to get away.”

10

So every night when I dream, I come to the desert and Coyote and I go looking for my way out. And every night’s a trial. My night-nerves are shot. I’m always on edge because I never know what’s going to happen next, what he’s going to want to discuss, when or if he’s going to put a move on me. We never do find Kokopelli, but that’s not the worst of it. The worst thing is that I’m actually getting used to this: to Coyote and his mad carrying-on. Not only used to it, but enjoying it. No matter how much Coyote exasperates me, I can’t stay mad at him.

And my desert time’s not all bad by any means. When Coyote’s being good company, you couldn’t ask for a better friend. The desert spirits aren’t shy around him, either. The aunts and uncles, which are what he calls the saguaro, tell us stories, or sing songs, or sometimes just gossip. All those strange madonna-faced spirits drop by to visit us, in ones and twos and threes. Women with fox-ears or antlers. Bobcat and coati spirits. Cottontails, jack rabbits and prong-horns. Vultures and grouse and hawks. Snakes and scorpions and lizards. Smoke-tree ghosts and tiny fairy-duster sprites. Twisty cholla spirits, starburst yucca bogles and mesquite dryads draped in cloaks made of a thousand perfectly shaped miniature leaves.

The mind boggles at their variety and number. They come in every shape and size, but they all have that madonna resemblance, even the males. They’re all that strange mix of human with beast or plant. And they all have their own stories and songs and dances to share.

So it’s not all bad. But Kokopelli’s flute-playing is always there, sometimes only audible when I’m very still, a Pied Piper covenant that I don’t remember agreeing to, but it keeps me here. And it’s that loss of choice that won’t let me ever completely relax. The knowledge that I’m here, not because I want to be, but because I have to be.

One night Coyote and I are lying on a hilltop looking up at the stars. The aunts and uncles are murmuring all around us, a kind of wordless chant like a lullaby. A black-crested phainopepla is perched on my knee, strange little Botticelli features studying mine in between groomings. Coyote is smoking a cigarette, but it doesn’t smell like tobacco—more like piñon. A dryad was sitting on an outcrop nearby, her skin the gorgeous green of her palo verde tree, but she’s drifted away now.

“Grandmother Toad told me that this is a place where people come to find totem,” I say after a while. I feel Coyote turn to look at me, but I keep my own gaze on the light show overhead. So many stars, so much sky. “Or they come to consult spirits, to learn from them.”

“Nokomis is the wisest of us all. She would know.”

“So how come we never see anybody else?”

“I’m nobody?” the little phainopepla warbles from my knee.

“You know what I mean. No people.”

“It’s a big desert,” Coyote says.

“The first spirits I met here told me it was somebody else’s dreaming place—the way Mabon is mine. But they wouldn’t tell me whose.”

“Spirits can be like that,” Coyote says.

The phainopepla frowns at the both of us, then flies away.

“Is it your dreaming place?” I ask him.

“If it was my dreaming place,” he says, “when I did this—” He reaches a hand over and cups my breast. I sit up and move out of his reach. “—you’d fall into my arms and we’d have glorious sex the whole night long.”

“I see,” I say dryly.

Coyote sits up and grins. “Well, you asked.”

“Not for a demonstration.”

“What is that frightens you about having sex with me?”

“It’s not a matter of being frightened,” I tell him. “It’s the consequences that might result from our doing it.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a condom. I can’t
believe
this guy.

“That’s not quite what I had in mind,” I say.

“Ah. You’re afraid of the psychic ramifications.”

“Say what?”

“You’re afraid that having sex with me will trap you here forever.”

Am I that open a book?

“The thought has crossed my mind,” I tell him.

“But maybe it’ll free you instead.”

I wait, but he doesn’t say anything more. “Only you’re not telling, right?” I ask.

“Only I don’t know,” he says. He rolls himself another cigarette and lights up. Blowing out a wreath of smoke, he shoots me a sudden grin. “I don’t know, and you don’t know, and the way things are going, I guess we never will, hey?”

I can’t help but react to that lopsided grin of his. Frustrated as I’m feeling, I still have to laugh. He’s got more charm than any one person deserves, and when he turns it on like this, I don’t know whether to give him a hug or a bang on the ear.

11

A week after her show closed at The Green Man Gallery, Sophie appeared on Max Hannon’s doorstep with
Hearts Like Fire, Burning
under her arm, wrapped in brown paper.

“You didn’t pick it up,” she said when he answered the bell, “so I thought I’d deliver it.”

Max regarded her with surprise. “I really didn’t think you were serious.”

“But you will take it?” Sophie asked. She handed the package over as though there could be no question to Max’s response.

“I’ll treasure it forever,” he said, smiling. Stepping to one side so that she could go by him, he added, “Would you like to come in?”

It was roomier inside Max’s house than it looked to be from the outside. Renovations had obviously been done, since the whole of the downstairs was laid out in an open layout broken only by the necessary support beams. The kitchen was off in one corner, separated from the rest of the room by an island counter. Another corner held a desk and some bookcases. The remainder of the room consisted of a comfortable living space of sprawling sofas and armchairs, low tables, Navajo carpets and display cabinets.

There was art everywhere—on the walls, as might be expected: posters, reproductions and a few originals, but there was even more three-dimensional work. The sculptures made Sophie’s heartbeat quicken. Wherever she looked there were representations of the desert spirits she’d come to know so well, those strange creatures with their human features and torsos peeping out from their feathers and fur, or their thorny cacti cloaks. Sophie was utterly entranced by them, by how faithful they were to the spirits from her desert dream.

“It’s funny,” Max said, laying the painting she’d given him down on a nearby table. The two ocotillo cacti spirit statues that made up the centerpiece seemed to bend their long-branched forms toward the package, as though curious about what it held. “I was thinking about you just the other day.”

“You were?”

Max nodded. “I remembered why it was that you looked so familiar to me when we met at your opening.”

If her desert dream hadn’t started up after that night, Sophie might have expected him to tell her now that he was one of its spirits and it was from seeing her in that otherworldly realm that he knew her. But it couldn’t be so. She hadn’t followed Kokopelli’s flute until after she’d met Max.

“I would have remembered it if we’d ever met,” she said.

“I didn’t say we’d actually met.”

“Now you’ve got me all curious.”

“Maybe we should leave it a mystery.”

“Don’t you dare,” Sophie said. “You have to tell me now.”

“I’d rather show you than tell you,” Max said. “Just give me a moment.”

He went up a set of stairs over by the kitchen area that Sophie hadn’t noticed earlier. Once he was gone, she wandered about the large downstairs room to give the statues a closer look. The resemblances were uncanny. It wasn’t so much that he’d captured the exact details of her dream’s desert fauna as that his sculptures contained an overall sense of the same spirit; they captured the elemental, inherent truth rather than recognizable renderings. She was crouched beside a table, peering at a statue of a desert woodrat with human hands, when Max returned with a small painting in hand.

“This is where I first saw you,” he said.

Sophie had to smile. She remembered the painting. Jilly had done it years ago: a portrait of Wendy, LaDonna and her, sitting on the back steps of a Yoors Street music club, Wendy and LaDonna scruffy as always, bookending Sophie in a pleated skirt and silk blouse, the three of them caught in the circle of light cast by a nearby streetlight. Jilly had called it
The Three Muses Pause to Reconsider Their Night.

“This was Peter’s,” Max said. “He loved this painting and kept it hanging in his office by his desk. The idea of the Muses having a girl’s night out on the town appealed to the whimsical side of his nature. I’d forgotten all about it until I was up there the other day looking for some papers.”

“I haven’t thought of that painting in years,” Sophie told him. “You know Jilly actually made us sit for it at night on those very steps—at least for her initial sketches, which were far more detailed than they had any need to be. I think she did them that way just to see how long we’d actually put up with sitting there.”

“And how long did you sit?”

“I don’t know. A few hours, I suppose. But it
seemed
like weeks. Is this your work?” she added, pointing to the statues.

Max nodded.

“I just love them,” she said. “You don’t show in Newford, do you? I mean, I would have remembered these if I’d seen them before.”

“I used to ship all my work back to the galleries in Arizona where I first started to sell. But I haven’t done any sculpting for a few years now.”

“Why not? They’re so good.”

Max shrugged. “Different priorities. It’s funny how it works, how we define ourselves. I used to think of myself as a sculptor first—everything else came second. Then when the eighties arrived, I came out and thought of myself as gay first, and only then as a sculptor. Now I define myself as an AIDS activist before anything else. Most of my time these days is taken up in editing a newsletter that deals with alternative therapies for those with HIV.”

Sophie thought of the book she’d seen lying on one of the tables when she was looking at the sculptures.
Staying Healthy With HIV
by David Baker and Richard Copeland.

“Your friend Peter,” she said. “Did he die of AIDS?”

“Actually, you don’t die of AIDS,” Max said. “AIDS destroys your immune system and it’s some other illness that kills you—something your body would have been able to deal with otherwise.” He gave her a sad smile. “But no. Ironically, I was the one who tested positive for HIV. Peter had leukemia. It had been in remission for a couple of years, but just before we went to the desert it came back and we had to go through it all again: the chemo treatments and the sleepless nights, the stomach cramps and awful rashes. I was sure that he’d pulled through once more, but then he died a week after we returned.”