Bright Segment (5 page)

“She put up her hands to shuck out of the rag she was wearing and I turned my back. In a second she danced past me, wearing the blue-dotted dress. Her and that quiet, pock-marked, unsmiling little face, glowing like that, spinning like a barn swallow, balancing like a gull. Ever see a bird smile, Chip? A lily laugh? Does a passionflower have to sing? Hell. I mean, hell. Some people don’t have to say anything.

“That was the first day I saw her do what I called her Yucca Dance. She stood on the cap of a rise in the yucca forest and the fresh damp buffalo grass hiding her feet. With her elbows close to her sides, her forearms stretched upward and her hands out, she just barely moved her fingers, and I suddenly got the idea—the still, thick stem, the branching of leaves, the long slender neck and crown of flowers.

“I laughed like a fool and ran to the nearest cactus. I pulled two firm white blossoms and went and put them in her hair, and stepped back, laughing. Both of them fell out, and she made no attempt to pick them up. I caught her eyes then, and I got the general idea that I’d made some sort of mistake. I stumbled back, feeling like a damned idiot, and she went back into her trance, being a yucca awaiting the wind.

“And when the wind came she made the only sound I ever heard from her, but for her footsteps. It was, in miniature, precisely the whispering of the leather leaves touching together. When the wind gusted, her whisper was with it, and she leaned with—with the—other—Chip?”

I said, “Yes, Grantham.”

“You don’t forget it, standing in her white dress with blue spots, rooted and spreading and stretched, whispering in the wind. Chip?”

I answered again.

“You know about the moth, Chip?”

I said, “Pronuba yuccasella.”

He grinned. It was good to see his face relax. “Good entomology, for a botanist.”

“Not especially,” I said. “Pronuba’s a fairly botanical sort of bug.”

“Mmm.” He nodded. “It doesn’t eat anything but yucca nectar, and the yucca blossom can be fertilized by no other insect. Chip, did you know a termite can’t digest cellulose?”

“Out of my line.”

“Well, it can’t,” said Grantham. “But there’s a bacterium lives in his belly that can. And what he excretes, the termite feeds on.”

“Symbiosis,” I said.

“Wonder how you’d get along,” he mused, “with folks who didn’t know as much as you do? Yes, symbiosis. Two living things as dissimilar as a yucca and a moth, and neither can live without the other.”

“Like Republicans and Dem—”

“Ah, stow it, cork it, and shove it,” Grantham said bluntly. He looked at the western hills, and the light put blood on his great lion’s head. “Pretty natural thing, that symbiosis. Lot of it around.”

He began to talk again, rapidly, with, now and again, a quick glance at the darkling west. “Six months, seven, maybe, I collected around here. No trouble with Miguel. He collected a bunch of weeds and sticks, but once in a while he earned his keep, retroactively. The old lady kept her hands off. The kid spent every day with me. I guess I had the area pretty well sieved in four months, but I went out every day anyhow.”

“I remember,” I said.

“Yes, yes, I didn’t send so many specimens. Later, none. I know. I said I was sor—”

For the first time I barked at him. “Go on with your story.”

“Where—oh. The moth. The moth that won’t go near anything but a yucca.”

I thought he had forgotten me. “Hey,” I said.

“She danced,” he said, examining his hands carefully in the dim light, “any time it occurred to her, for a long time or a little. Or at night. At night,” he said clearly, heaving himself upright and not looking at me, “the petals open and the moths fly. They were a cloud around her head.”

I waited. He said, “It’s only the truth. And once in the late sunset, still some light, and me close to her, I saw a moth crawl into her
ear. I got scared, I—put out my hand to do something, pluck it out, shake her, do
something
. She didn’t exactly push me away. She looked up at me and raised her hand, slowly—or it seemed to be slowly, but it was there before my hand was. She just stood, still as a tree, waiting, and the moth came out again.”

I didn’t say anything. Not anything at all. We sat watching the western mountains.

“I went away,” said Grantham, his words stark and clear against the heat inside him. “To get more specimens, you understand.”

“Some more came,” I said.

“I was away for three months. A long time. Too long. Then I had no business back in Kofa but I went back anyway—oh, in case I’d left anything there or something. I was supposed to go back to the Institute, I guess. Mm.

“The first face I saw in Kofa that I knew was Miguel’s. I fell over him. He was standing like a brown statue on the duckboards near the saloon and I tripped and knocked his hat off. I pulled him to his feet and asked him
Com’ esta?

“
Malo, muy malo
and a flood of north-Mex is all I could get. I guess I looked a little foolish. Why is it when you talk to someone who doesn’t know your language, you holler at him? Finally I got impatient and ran him into the bar. I asked Big Horn what Miguel was trying to tell me.

“The general idea was that the little ones had died. I never did find out how many, two or three. Miguel shrugged at this, took off his hat, raised his eyes and his eyebrows, in that order, at the ceiling. I gather he felt no responsibility over this; such matters were out of his hands, but one could always make more. What bothered Miguel, Big Horn told me, was the loss of his wife, who had broken her leg, gotten a bone infection, and died
muy rapido
. She had been, it seemed, a very hard worker.

“The girl? He didn’t know. He didn’t know any more after I got excited and tried to shake it out of him. Big Horn was over the bar with his bung-starter before I could pull myself together. He never minded anybody getting rough at his bar providing both parties were enjoying it. He pointed out to me that Miguel had come in here
peaceably even if I hadn’t. Then he sat Miguel down and questioned him quietly while I fumed, and then he told Miguel to go, which he did much faster than usual.

“ ‘He says,’ Big Horn told me, ‘that the girl just wandered away. He says she always spent more nights out in the yucca forest than home anyhow. She went away and she just didn’t come back. He says he went looking for her, too, after the old lady died. I guess he wanted his tortillas pounded. He looked real hard.’

“I told him thanks, and came out here. I wish you had the makings, Chip.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“I came out here and wandered for a while. A man can eat out here, sleep out here, right time of year. You could, Chip, knowing it just from books. I guess I felt real bad. Funny thing,” he mused. “I wanted to call her, but I had never found out what her name was.”

He was quiet. The evening breeze sprang and died, stopped and pressed and sprang again. The yuccas whispered and whispered.

“Hear?”

“I hear,” I said.

“I heard it one night, sleeping here, and came up standing. There was no wind. She was here, right here, Chip. Dancing like a yucca, whispering.”

“See her?”

“No, I didn’t see her.” I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was smiling, and I wondered what in time he was smiling about.

“You, Professor, you want something more than you want anything else there is, more than money or your name in books or a woman. You want that Pudley Chair in Botany. I bet you’d kill anyone who tried to get it away from you.”

“Anyone but you.”

His fringed shirt rustled as he twisted toward me. “You mean that. You do mean that. That’s fine, Chip. That’s nice.” He rested his chin on his knees and paid attention to the evening star. “Everybody wants some one single thing that bad. Some get it, some don’t. Some know what it is, some never find out. You found out. I found out.”

“Want to tell me?”

“Sure I do. Sure. Chip, no offense, but you and I are different kinds of botanist.”

“I know that. But—well, go on.”

“You want botany out of books. Some window boxes, some lab, sure. You learned it right; there’s not a thing wrong in being that way, you see? Very valuable. You learned botany so’s you could be a botanist, the best damn botanist in the world, if you could make it. You might make it, too.”

“And you?”

“I got to be a botanist so I could be—close to something. Something like that symbiosis you were talking about. I’m a man, but man and cloverleaf, man and Chaya, man and piñon juniper—is that so much crazier than moth and cactus?”

I said nothing. I try to form my spoken opinions from some sort of precedent.

“Heard a story once about a man went away to a river island to carve statues. He carved statues for fourteen years and stashed ’em all in a big barn, dozens of ’em. When he figured his time was up, he dynamited the barn. Was he crazy?”

“Out of my field,” I said briefly.

“I think I know why he did it. Other sculptors wanted to get close to people—moneywise, socialwise, what have you—and used sculpture to do it. This fellow, he just wanted to get close to sculpturing. Maybe people mattered to him, but sculpture mattered more. Now do you see?”

“You’re trying to tell me that you want to go on with botany by yourself—no texts, no classes, no references.”

He waved a hand; I saw it pass against the dark skyline. “Texts and references all here, Chip. Just not strained through a book first, that’s all.”

I said, “Then no reports, no books written, no articles in the
Journal
.”

“That’s right. This is for me.”

“Selfish, isn’t it?”

He said, very gently, “Not after eleven years in the Pudley Chair.”

I understood that, and had nothing to say. Instead I asked him, “How close do you think you can carry this symbiosis of yours? Or was it just a figure of speech?”

“Time to show you, I reckon,” he said. He rose. I followed.

“It’s dark.”

“Sure,” he said. “I know the way. Hook on to the back of my belt.”

I did, and he strode off purposefully into the pitch-black shadows of the yucca. How we turned, climbed, slithered, I couldn’t say. It might have been a long way, and it might have been a circle.

We stopped. He fumbled in his pouch. “It’s her birthday.”

“How do you know?” I whispered. This was a place to whisper.

“Just know. Pick a day, stay with it from then on. Amounts to the same thing. Here.”

He put something into my hand. Cloth, very fine cloth. Layers, lace. Hard knob one end, two sticks other end …

“A doll.”

“Yup,” he said. “Purtiest one I ever saw.” He took it away from me. “Chip, hush now. Wait till the wind dies.”

I waited in the whispering dark. The breeze was fitful, careless. It would drop to almost nothing, until all the other breathings and stirrings could be heard, and then giggle on up to be a breeze again. Suddenly, then, it was gone. From before us, in the pitch blackness, a yucca whispered.

“There she is,” Grantham murmured. He stepped forward, and an unreasoning terror sent cold sweat oozing in my armpits. I stepped after him. He was leaning forward, apparently putting the doll into the lower swords of a young yucca.

Something touched my face and I bit my tongue. Then I realized that Grantham’s heavy hand had tilted the plant toward us. Without conscious motivation I reached up swiftly and closed my hand on a flower. Without conscious reasoning I was exquisitely careful to twist it free without a sound or a detectible motion. I slipped it into my side pocket.

“ ’Bye, baby.” He stood up and nudged me. “Let’s go.”

If anything, the way back was longer. I stumbled along behind
him, wondering if he were sane enough to write that resignation coherently. When we reached the trail a loom of silver was staining the eastern sky. “Easy going now,” was all he said.

We trudged into the rising moon. I was deeply disturbed, but Grantham was calm and apparently deeply content.

The yuccas thinned, and we started up the valley’s throat. Abruptly Grantham grunted and stopped.

“What is it?”

Silently he pointed. Fifty feet up the slope something wavered and flickered in the moonlight. “Bless her heart,” he said. “Come on, Chip.”

He struck off toward whatever it was, and I followed him, walking on the balls of my feet, my eyes too wide, so that they hurt.

When I caught up with him he stopped, turned to me, and drew his knife. “Symbiosis, Chip.”

I don’t think he could see my face. I wouldn’t want to.

He dropped to one knee and I leapt backward, stood spraddled, gasping. I watched him digging carefully in the ground, while over and around him fluttered a silent cloud of small white moths. They were not yucca moths. I know they weren’t because yucca moths never,
never
cluster near the ground. I mean, moths that cluster that way are not yucca moths, they aren’t, they were not, they couldn’t be.

Look it up if you don’t believe it.

Grantham grunted, pulled, and up out of the ground came an object that looked like a large parsnip. “Ever see one of these in the flesh, Chip?”

Gingerly, I took it, squinted at it in the brightening moonlight. It was like a tuber, spineless, and with the upper end rounded and ribbed. I slipped my fingers along the grooves between the ribs and felt the small round protuberances.

“Lophophora,” I said. My voice sounded odd to me. “I don’t know which one.”

“Doesn’t matter.” He trimmed off the grooved part and dropped it into his satchel. “Long as it’s peyotl, who’s quibbling?”

Back on the trail, I swallowed hard and asked, “That’s symbiosis? You leave a doll on a yucca, and moths find peyotl for you?”

He laughed his big laugh. “You can’t see further than your nose,” he said gaily and insultingly, “let alone as far as your front teeth.”

“If you’ll explain,” I said stiffly, “I shall listen.”

“The doll’s a symbol,” he said, suddenly deeply serious. “It represents something as vital as cellulose to a bacterium, or bacterial products to a termite. I didn’t need the doll itself, except it was her birthday. Long as I bring what she needs—and I do.”