Guises Page 17

I am just a hand. I am fingers that slowly turn the wheel to bring me to the pool’s edge.

  “George!” I scream, agonizing.

  “George?” I whisper, fascinated.

  The water ripples. Dead fish float in it, their round eyes milky in the moonlight. The algae is being buffeted by a current to one side of the pool. The water is moving as if fed from a channel, a conduit to the ocean that just can’t be there.

  I smell it, saltier than the infected stuff in the pool. Stagnant water does not move. It is the undead of waters, producing only plagues and blood-sucking mosquitos.

  An arm emerges from the current. Long, albino as if grown in the absence of light, but at the same time luminous.

  Electric.

  It gestures toward the moonlight, then bends a little at the elbow, a hand uncurling from a white metal fist.

  Then she rises from the broken glass of inrushing sea, kelp in her hair. She’s not the unpretty woman, the mermaid out of water, an alien aspect. She is Venus, born on waves, her hair rich cascade, all of foam and Botticelli beauty. Our eyes lock and I’m weak. Weak in my head, my right arm and fingers. My new loins.

  Scylla and Lorelei rise up on either side of Oanna, the current bearing them like petals. I can hear the gurgle of the ocean, smell their breaths of rainwater and raw meat.

  I put out my hand as far as I can. This isn’t much. But it must be!

  “Help me. Please,” I plead, desperate for them and the touch of the water.

  Oanna takes my hand and gently pulls me. In one graceful plunge my fat body descends from the wheelchair and hits the pool. Where there is no kidney-shaped darkness.

  Only buoyancy.

  Passage.

  Submergence.

  The sisters pull me under and the water explodes in a ferment—a shark delirium. They taste and share me, rip and bear me away in their lips. My ragged shell floats away, unneeded as an armored plate a crab has outgrown. The water is wonderful, is a womb, is creation. I exult and am pacified upon discovering a fluid contentment.

  But theirs is a sisterhood, and no man can be part of them in flesh. I stay with them in the only way I can: the semen of my spirit riding on their tongues through the canals of dreams.

  George is here. There are many male lovers here, present in soul emissions. Our seeds of passion drain into the sweet water and are held forever in these goddess mouths.

  | — | — |

  DUST

  A dust woman came to Jake for the first time while he was working in the yard. The field crops were a total loss, no soil remaining for the roots to cling to. Perhaps the garden might produce some food for them. There would be nothing to sell surely, but maybe there would at least be enough for their personal use.

  He looked up from the tomato plants—the red fruit shriveled and juiceless—to see the edges of her skirt swirling colorless gravel.

  At first Jake thought that he was seeing a really dirty person, a refugee coming over his fence to beg a handout, to ask for work, or to actually do him some harm. But there was no real substance there. Only a suggestion of curves, a powdery rotation of limbs, and gray-spore hair that the breeze lifted—supported aloft for him to see the blur of her face before a gust scattered this illusion.

  “Damned sun, damned heat,” Jake muttered, mopping his brow with the back of a gloved hand. “Damned drought.”

  He stalked into the house and found Martha sitting in the kitchen. The window was open, the screen clogged with grit. There was even grit visible in the coffee on the table in front of her.

  “You all right?” he asked her. She didn’t look away from that cup of clotty coffee. “Hey, Martha! You okay?”

  She slowly turned with sleepy eyes. As if she’d just crawled out of bed. She was obviously overheated, weak from the long spell of suffocating dryness. She barely focused on him as if it was just too much energy for her to spare. Jake had known for a long time that the weather was taking a toll on her. But she’d never looked this bad before.

  He grasped the handle of the pump and vigorously worked it to get even a little stream of water from it. It came out dirty but he cupped it in his hands and drank. Anything to cool his throat.

  He knew it might not be long before the well ran dry, too.

  “It’s gotta rain sometime soon, honey,” he told her gently.

  “No, it don’t,” she replied, barely shaking her head.

  She had an old handkerchief in her hand, a wedding present from her mother some fifteen years ago. She pressed it to her mouth and coughed. He could see the spots of blood on the faded finery. Well, who wasn’t coughing up blood these days with all this dust?

  “Sure it does,” Jake assured her, not being able to help frowning at the amount of fine grit that had infiltrated the screen, the roof, the spare cracks in the boards to settle in her coffee. It wasn’t black anymore, and Martha always took her coffee black. It looked as if she’d added some store-bought powdered milk to it and then hadn’t stirred it in right.

  She smiled dreamily. “No. It don’t, and it really ain’t so bad as you think.”

  She coughed again and then hummed, stopping in between musical notes to sputter more red flecks into her hankie.

  For months all Martha could do was complain about the temperature—the baking, thermal, waterless gag. She tried without success to clean the farmhouse, sweeping and mopping and polishing all the time. Reading in the paper or hearing on the radio shows how this entire part of the country seemed not to have a drop left in it and how whole states seemed to just blow away. She never could stand a dirty house.

  While she cleaned, she grew paler, coughing blood, spitting it into the dust that waited for it—absorbing it. Growing weak and white with her grumbling becoming a murmur, she’d sing softly with a sort-of-resignation.

  Jake couldn’t understand the change in her. It worried him sick, particularly now when she lifted the cup and drained the grainy coffee, her eyes sparkling refreshed as if it were champagne.

  He made a face. “Marty, how can you drink that? Ugh! Sweetie?”

  She didn’t answer. She put her head down on the table and went to sleep, flecks of grit on her lips, pursed as if in the act of a kiss.

  She didn’t wake up again.

  ««—»»

  The dust was everywhere on Martha’s body when Jake undressed her to prepare her for burial. It was across her breasts in drifts, hands of it around her naked waist. It was even on her thighs, meshed into her pubic hair, chapped into that place that supposedly only Jake had ever adored. She’d been intimate with dust, seduced by its dust men of broad-shouldered, sandy-haired sand, dark-eyed as all storms and remnants of storm.

  He washed her in what water he could woo from the faltering well and then wrapped her in a sheet he found in a trunk. It was the cleanest thing he could find. Then he went out with a shovel.

  “Lord, Marty. Lord.” Jake sighed as he came back into the house many hours later. “There ain’t no place to dig. The ground just moves away when I stick a shovel in it. If I manage to get a shovelful out, it blows all around and the hole fills up again before I can try over. It’s like it ain’t there at all. It’s just the spirit of the ground.”

  He patted the edges of the sheet that held Martha.

  “Sweetheart, where’m I gonna put you?” He closed his eyes to will back the tears. They would only make the dust in his eyes burn worse for the salt. “It’s like trying to dig a grave in rabbit whiskers and cotton candy.”

  He lifted her and carried her down to the root cellar. Jake knew it was likely that in this almost-zero humidity she’d mummify down there. At least she wouldn’t rot. She’d dry up and blow away a long time before she’d decay.

  ««—»»

  A dust woman came again while Jake was surveying a dead horse, a mile or so up from the road from the turnoff onto his farm. The ribcage looked like a trap for quail. Most of its flesh had sunbaked, crisped, then fallen off like flaked Bible pages. The saddle was more or
less intact since it had been properly tanned to begin with. There was no sign of a rider. Had to be in the same state as the horse, more than likely. Must have gotten caught in the dust wall and wandered off blindly to suffocate.

  There was a whirl of sand. Almost without odor in its airlessness. It was stronger than what Jake had seen in the garden a few days ago. Yet it was the same pattern of circular motion, fuller of bolts of dingy gauze. Breasts and stomach. Bleached out and wan, except for the eyes. They were maroon, like dust across the sunset.

  “Mirage,” he whispered to himself although he couldn’t look away. The steadier he gazed into it, the more she seemed to be there, and the more it made him dizzy.

  “Hallucination,” Jake revised, a little louder than before.

  His fists were clenched, digging the remnants of his close-bitten nails into the palms to convince himself that reality was solid and painful. If grief was making him see things, then this made him angry.

  Nothing in the dust smelled like sandalwood. And feet didn’t dance in the branny winds common these days to the depressed plains. She smiled, with her riverbed stone eyes and her hands the same as a mixture of earth and sky. Then she-as-a-cloud blew across him.

  Jake shivered, choked and spat out tainted mucus. Next his limbs stiffened, relaxing afterward as if he’d passed through a maze of opium smoke.

  He watched her dance away from him.

  Nearby was another movement, another surge of wasted topsoil and morsels of desecrated farms. In it—another female form? Supple as some Hollywood version of Babylon, voluptuous in silk. He’d seen something like it in some D. W. Griffith movie about twenty years ago, when he was just a kid and trying to decide whether to be a farmer like his daddy or go up to Tulsa to find work in one of the new factories.

  The two merged dusts, and the wind shifted direction to blow them over him again.

  This time he felt their pairs of hands as he tasted the nutmeg of their skins.

  “Ghosts!” Jake shouted. But not in complete fear.

  More in a kind of wonder. It went through him in a shock, tingled in raw voltage that made him jump even as he felt them put their fingers under his clothes and the billows of their long hair into his mouth, nose, and eyes. He gasped for air and then laughed. Then did nothing when their combined forces eddied away, pirouetting for another thirty feet or so. They cracked apart in all directions.

  Jake was numbed, soothed, embarrassed by the sexual arousal it had given him. It was as if he’d been loved and had passed seed in a rush of senses, and was now spent.

  He looked back at the carcass of the horse and then out at the barren landscape. A wasteland now, wasn’t it?

  What had happened to the rider?

  Died in the arms of a dust woman.

  Of that Jake had no doubt.

  Suffocated. Died of thirst. Dehydration or starvation. It might not be possible to dig a grave in it but the dust bowl was where the dead seemed to be these days.

  ««—»»

  Jake crept down to the cellar to say goodbye to Martha. He folded the corners of the sheet away from her face. He touched her cheek.

  “I gotta go, Marty,” he said, apologizing.

  He frowned, rubbed his calloused thumb gently over her bottom lip. He’d bathed her as best as he could, considering how little water there was. Had taken very special care with her beloved face. But there was dust on her mouth again, granular as old brown sugar. As if she’d been kissed by a scarecrow made of topsoil and rainless, desiccated years.

  He covered her face, turned away, saw the darkened red on the floor. In dried spatters as if she’d been awakened, had coughed up blood as dust playfully scoured her lungs out, and then had gone to sleep again.

  ««—»»

  Jake went down the road in the Ford ’29 he’d bought for $57 back in ’33. It was a rustbucket but maybe it would take him where the dawn still held moisture and the nights had food and company in them. He drove past the Websters’ place, not bothering to turn up their road. They were gone one way or another. The bank had foreclosed.

  He did drive up to Pallas Gurney’s. The sight of the faded clapboard house with its door propped open and tumbleweeds rolling across the broad porch brought a lump to Jake’s throat. There were two crosses in the yard and an unmarked mound. The first cross was for Kit, the youngest of the Gurney children who had died in 1931 in the great diptheria epidemic. There was the other cross for Jewel, Gurney’s mother who’d died in the first great wall of dust. The unmarked one was for the cow that died at the same time, so blasted and dirty—and the poor thing was already half-starved—that it wasn’t even fit to eat. So Pallas had just buried it.

  Jake blinked and rubbed his eyes, the Ford idling and making dust. There across the graves he saw a couple doing a slow, stately waltz. She was in a mudpearl ballgown and he was in a hueless, humorless suit of tails. Doing hazy turns, sweeps, Astaire and Rogers synchronized and so in tune with each other that their individual edges blurred. Jake knew they weren’t a real pair of dancers, even if he thought he did hear music from ‘The Gay Divorce’ in the wind that slipped through the rolled-up rustbucket windows.

  Not real. Dust people.

  She: so like the sultry cyclone sirens who had haunted Jake’s dreams lately or had touched him playfully, privately, to leave their smudges on his clothes and their drought-jasmine blanketing his lungs.

  He: like the one who had wooed Martha into accepting the wall, into embracing the grit. Had made her smile at the last as she gave him the blood from her lungs and then every crevice in her body.

  Jake drove away, leaving the neighbors’ place behind, forgetting it as a part of the dry moon it seemed to be.

  ««—»»

  The girl trudging up the road wore shoes twice the size of her feet. Her dull brown dress might have been a pattern once of flowers and peacocks. Now it was as faded as old Victorian wallpaper. She had a scarf wrapped around her head and over the lower half of her face. Wisps of dirty blond hair (without shine and stripped of all the oils that might have given it luster) straggled out from under to flap weakly in the air.

  Jake didn’t know her. She might have been one of Clyde Semple’s daughters. The bag she had over her shoulder with her few possessions stuffed into it was marked Semple Feeds.

  He could already see the edge of another black roller far off in the sky. She wasn’t walking in the direction of the Semple place but determinedly away from it. On foot, she could never reach Cobbieville—provided that’s where she was headed—before night came. Jake braked the Ford ‘29 to a stop which plumed up clouds of pulverized dirt. She shielded her face as he waited for the silt to fall some before he rolled down his window.

  He nodded curtly. “Hullo. You goin’ to town, young lady?”

  She bobbed her head, and he motioned for her to hop in so he could give her a lift.

  “You one of the Semple girls?” He coughed, shuddered, shook it off.

  “Yessir. I’m Ruby,” she replied as she unwound the scarf from her face. She took it off and her hair flopped lankily around her shoulders.

  Jake set his eyesight back to driving. All the Semple daughters were famed for their good looks. Yet this one was so lackluster that it didn’t seem worth the trouble to look. Maybe if there was enough water for a bath, she could be scrubbed back to porcelain and apples in her cheeks. Beneath the layers of grime, he could see the line of a fine jaw, belle cheekbones, and lips that could make men forget hard times. But the dust made everyone a drudge and buried the bloom of any rose.

  “What are you doin’ out here by yerself? I haven’t seen yer family in a coon’s age. Figured ya’ll left to pick Muscat grapes in Fresno.”

  “They all went but me. I was hopin’ they’d be a new picture in town. Last one I saw was six months ago. ‘Born To Dance’. That Eleanor Powell sure can twirl. That’s what I’d like to be. A dancer in the motion pictures.”

  Jake squinted at her. “But how do you live on tha
t place by yerself?”

  In better clothes it might be called slender, even willowy since she was tall enough. But in rags and dirty,, she was merely thin.

  She shrugged. “Well, at least I don’t have t’work all day in the fields, from can see to can’t see. Nothin’ grows so they’s no sense in it.”

  “But what do you eat?” he pressed, concerned, knowing how little there’d been for Martha and him. They had been subsisting off coffee, dried grains, and preserves she’d put up three years back.

  “Not much. When I get down to the last bean in the pot, my backbone and my belly button shake up the dice to see which of ’em will get it.”

  Ruby Semple looked askance at him and then winked. It was so true it hurt, and that pain forced Jake to laugh.

  “Ain’t it so?” he agreed.

  The dark smear on the horizon could be a thunderstorm, he thought, hoping as he glanced out the windshield at it. He sighed bitterly. Wouldn’t that be too much? That after Martha was dead—so many folks dead—it would pick this day for the drought to end?

  Oh, Marty, couldn’t you have held on a little longer, sweetheart? And not let them dust gigolos lure you away from me?

  He missed her so much. Leaving her was harder than leaving the farm his father had willed to him.

  It was tinged with brown, that dark smear was. Yeah, a black roller. More dust in a wall so dense and Ethiopian that people would think the world was coming to an end. That wasn’t rain. It would never rain again. Not long now and the sun would be blotted enough that it would be no more than the moon, and then there wouldn’t even be that.

  “I can sing, too, you know. It helps if you want to dance in the pictures to be able to sing, too. I like Cole Porter’s songs best of absolutely anybody’s,” Ruby said. She began to sing softly from the last movie she’d seen, ‘Born To Dance’. “I’ve tried so not to give in…I said to myself this affair never will go well. But why should I try to resist when, darling, I know so well, I’ve got you under my skin.”