Moonlight Water (6 page)

On that night he'd pointed the bumper of the van along Interstate 80 toward the deserts of Nevada and—he felt a trill of fear—maybe deserts of the spirit.
But I'm going to explore.…

All past now. Red was one entire month old and had spent those weeks on the road soaking up experiences. He'd visited national parks (without getting laid). He'd burrowed into diners with heavy white china cups and waitresses who called him Hon. He'd stopped by Carhenge—a tribute not to the old Celtic gods but the modern American ones—and it dazzled him. He also made a point of visiting Cadillac Ranch, a line of old luxury sedans buried nose down in the flat Texas prairie outside Amarillo and angled like the Great Pyramid of Giza. Aside from the originality of what could be done with rusted auto hulls, Red's mind was pinwheeled by the way visitors had spray-painted the cars into a graffiti co-op, leaving spray cans around for the next people who made the pilgrimage.

Occasional days were as flat and featureless as the bed of a dry lake. He deliberately refused to spice them up by writing music, playing music, or even listening to music on the radio or CD player. He gabbed with truckers at truck stops on interstates and heard, sometimes, the inner emotions of their lives. He sat in barbershops and pretended to read magazines while listening to the chat of ordinary folk and sketching profiles, holding his pad inside a
Field & Stream
magazine. He lounged on park benches in small towns and talked to anyone who stopped. Gradually, he picked up bits and pieces of something else, a sense of people that didn't yet add up to anything but felt good. He expected the yearning to write music to rush into his blood and muscles and start dancing. That didn't happen, not yet.

In the van, alone, it was harder. He was quiet, or he carried on long conversations with Georgia or his grandfather. He and Grandpa just talked, and if Grandpa had any wisdom about what Red should do with his life, he never passed it along. The conversations made Red think of one of Grandpa's favorite songs, “Tain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It).” At night sometimes, sitting at a park picnic table, Red blew tunes on his harmonica and remembered how Grandpa's raspy voice brought a full feeling to it. When Red was a kid, he'd asked Grandpa what it meant, “the way that you do it.” Grandpa just said, “The way that feels right to you.” He was a grandpa, not an oracle.

While he watched the miles and towns and cars crammed with families roll by, Red's mind ran along the tracks and sometimes clear off the tracks. Uneasy, afraid, itchy as an ingrown hair, crazy as a bedbug, forlorn, and wildly exuberant—he'd felt it all. He'd spent days fighting off tears, because he had—quote-unquote—lost everything. (
Buck up,
he told himself.
You haven't lost it. You left it. By bold choice.
Except the marriage.
That helped him some.) He'd surrendered to tears because the world was graceful, beautiful, and sublime. Some days Red was so grumpy that waitresses skirted around him to avoid pouring a second cup of coffee. On bad days he was haunted by Georgia, and their inner talks didn't go so well. She and her lover and the guys in the band would all appear until he shouted at them, “Beat it!”

Lighthearted and giddy, my ass.
Most of the time he was scared and pretending not to be.

Was Georgia right that he'd lost his connection to himself? He said out loud, “Red, know thyself.”
How can I know someone fresh-born?

Seeking wisdom, he made the first of two signs that he taped to his dashboard:

AN ADVENTURE

IS A CATASTROPHE

RIGHTLY CONSTRUED

Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas, rolling headlong through the Bible Belt, billboards preached at him. A couple of those signs he liked:

“DON'T MAKE ME COME DOWN THERE!”

—SIGNED GOD

And fifty miles farther on:

“THAT PART ABOUT LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOR?

I MEANT IT.”

—again the divine signature.

Then he saw a bumper sticker that summed up his response to the Bible Belt:

“LORD, PROTECT ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS.”

That became his second hand-printed dashboard sign.

In Nacogdoches, Texas, he read this enticement on a marquee:

MUD-WRESTLING

GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

ALL NUDE ALL THE TIME

NONE UNDER TWO HUNDRED POUNDS

He felt a twinge of temptation, gave in to a big grin, and drove on.

Looking at the word
Lord
day after day on his dashboard started to wear on him. When he was a kid, they'd gone to Mass every Sunday, but by the time he was sixteen, he'd found the whole thing hard to swallow. He decided from now on to give Him or Her a new name. Red changed his dashboard sign to:

ANONYMOUS SOURCE, PROTECT ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS.

That felt good, even though he wasn't a praying man unless he was feeling very desperate.

But today would feel good. Very. Moonlight Water. Gianni. An adventure!

Ahead Red could see the desert country, red and buff-colored, rippled into ridges, mesas, buttes, spires, and towers. Gianni had described this place as the epicenter of nowhere, maybe what Red needed. And with Gianni it would be full.

 

9

MOONLIGHT WATER, A FEATHERED SPY, AND THE LAW

Don't throw rocks at a whirlwind. It will chase you.

—Navajo saying

 

There it was down below, a single man-creature.

“Something's going to happen.” That's what Winsonfred told Ed, and he'd asked Ed to watch for the something, maybe for trouble. It was the something, all right, but Ed couldn't tell if it was trouble. Not yet.

Ed wheeled out of the thermal, adjusting his wingtips, and made a wide circle clockwise. He took in the dried-blood color of the sun on the huge, red-rock monoliths of Mythic Valley to the southwest. That red was his favorite color, low-pitched and primal, the fundamental color of this country. He looked at the river that oozed like a glorious green snake across the desert floor. Then he felt the cool air rising from the water and used it to lose a little altitude. He eyed and sniffed Moonlight Water Canyon, the ancients' highway to the Azure Mountains in the north. Ed's eyes and nose were primo.

He angled easily downward toward the strip of concrete through the slender green canyon that sloped into the village. Ed kept everything in his life easy. It wasn't smart to work hard in the heat of the desert, and besides, ease was his style. He feathered his wingtips just right and cruised toward the man-creature.

He was standing in the graveled area alongside one of the automobiles that human beings traveled in, taking a piss and looking at the cliff drawings. That was okay with Ed. He understood pissing just fine, along with all other means of getting rid of unwanted baggage—he didn't carry any extra weight himself. Ed didn't care for the contraptions people traveled in. Why not get rid of them and walk, so you can see and smell and touch the
whole
country? Now, cliff drawings, Ed had never figured out what people wanted with them. The creatures in those weren't merely dead, which would suit Ed's appetite, they were way, way dead.

The creature lifted a soda pop can, and Ed feared he would give it a heave. But the creature drank and held on.
Good.
Of all the humans' bad habits, Ed had the least tolerance for littering. He often passed judgment on litterers from above with a glob of guano. His aim was excellent.

Ed passed over the creature and banked into a turn for another gander and a good whiff. In Ed's previous life he'd been a human being, more or less like the creature down there, and a lover of the Canyonlands of the Four Corners region. This had given him a good beak for trouble. Ed was the self-appointed guardian angel of this piece of the gods' good earth.

He swooped over the creature's head. The creature walked toward the drawings, and in a flash Ed knew. This was a lost soul tinged with a hint of desperation and a wild spirit. Well, he'd be right at home in Moonlight Water. The place was full of souls searching for something. Some of them felt the call of the Four Corners and stayed. After a few months they got their rhythm back—the country had something good for them.

The creature tilted the soda pop and drank deep. Ed himself had loved such cans, his were full of beer, but now he preferred the taste of water and judged that no drink was worth the trouble of bottles and cans.

Ed watched. Scores of man-creatures and woman-creatures turned their mechanical contraptions into this spot every day and got out, and Ed felt zilch about most of them. Some, mostly locals, gave him a good feeling. A few troubled him. This one felt like Winsonfred's something, maybe good, maybe trouble. Ed would tell the old man about it tonight.

The stranger was still staring at the wall of cliff drawings.

Ed watched and waited. Of course, he didn't have any word like
love
to describe what he felt for this piece of earth. He didn't need words to have awareness. Not needing words, he would have thought that was funny if he'd remembered that in his human form he'd been a man of many words—books full of them, good books that people still read. The local trader had made more money off
Desert Solitaire
than Ed ever had.

All that was gone. He was 100 percent buzzard and crazy about being one. The best views going. Big wings that carried you miles and miles real easy. Never a need to buy gas. You could ride the thermals up high and beat the heat. Eyes so gonzo you could see flies from five thousand feet up. A nose that led you to hidden flesh. Because of that nose, you could get your dinner fresh and your water cool. Plus, you always had friends to cruise with.

Never mind being human—this incarnation was the gift. The universe thought he'd been a good man and had brought him back in a higher form.

*   *   *

The buzzard made Red want to climb into the van. The bird gave him the willies, flying low over him, like it was watching him, waiting for him to croak.

Red spent a last moment with the carvings. They were the damnedest things. He'd read the sign a couple of times and got the facts, how they were made nine hundred to one thousand years ago by the Ancestral Puebloans, whoever they were. But what intrigued Red had nothing to do with facts. What were the carvings trying to say? Some were chipped into the rock, some painted in color. Human handprints, hundreds of them, large and small. Animals, maybe deer or antelope or bighorn sheep. Spirals. A hunched god playing a flute and dancing. And still more shapes that felt like bursts of unconsidered creation from a place far distant.

It was okay with him if people got messages from another world. He'd gotten his music from the sub-conscious world, hadn't he? He'd learned during the last month that new tunes didn't just jump into your body and dance you around when you asked for them. They snuck up on you, as if from a time-warp galaxy.

One set of carvings really grabbed him. In the center was a spiral. On each side of the spiral was a line of people, dancing slowly toward the center. Or were they dancing out from the circle? He looked and looked and wasn't sure. He was damn sorry they were frozen in stone. He'd like to have swayed their thousand-year-old dance inside his bones.

He started to get out his sketch pad but looked up.

That damn buzzard was still there, circling.

Red slid into the van and looked at his watch. For the first time in a month he needed to think about clock time. Half an hour to meet Gianni, buzzard in tow.

The predator followed Red through the canyon. He ignored the bird, concentrating on the world around him. Surreal. The curving canyon was sweet and fine, red bluffs harmonizing with fluttering green leaves on the trees. He rolled down his window, half-expecting to hear the melody of the leaves, but it was drowned out by the whir-wind of the van.

When the canyon opened wide, the world was huge and mind-blowing. He'd seen shots of this desertscape in dozens of TV commercials and movies. The place where Forrest Gump stopped running. The cliffs where Thelma and Louise sailed their convertible into that huge chasm. A land Anglos found awesome and Native people revered.

After another mile, he entered the town of Moonlight Water. He remembered what Gianni had told him. “My friend, it is the edge of the epicenter of nowhere and everywhere. No doctor, no drugstore, no bar—hell, no grocery store. The nearest movie's over a hundred miles away. Hippies,
hosteens,
rez dogs, sagebrush, and sand. The clock ticks Navajo time, which is mañana land only more so. For all that, it's the most solid place in the world—as long as your definition of
solid
includes impossible shapes in stone and a strong creative vibe. Oh, and these people, half of them Navajos and half Anglos, call themselves Moonlighters.”

“What?”

“They call themselves Moonlighters, after the town of the first trading post. Translation from Navajo: Moonlight Reflected on the Water. So pretty Mormons kept the name when they got here.”

What Red saw first was a filling station–convenience store–restaurant named the Squash Blossom. Beyond that was a run-down Laundromat with an army of kids milling around middle-aged women who looked like Navajo grandmas. They were dark-skinned and gray-haired, talking and laughing, keeping the kids together like hens with their chicks. Some wore velveteen blouses, huge turquoise necklaces, and full skirts above pink Walmart sneakers. Way down was a bridge, then supposedly a café called the Locomotive Rock Café and Trading Post, the place he was meeting Gianni.

Red stuck his head out the window and gawked upward. Damn buzzard was still circling overhead. Red muttered, “Probably the state bird.”