Hunters and Gatherers (17 page)

“What graveyard?” demanded Bernie. “I hate to think we left the mission too early!”

“The graveyard,” said Sonoma. “It was right below that little hill where that asshole priest and those weird old ladies were singing.”

“Sonoma!” said Freya. “Your language!”

“Oh, the observational powers of the young,” Isis said. “How much we lose as we age! I myself didn’t see the graveyard, though I must have been staring right at it. But you, Sonoma, with your unclouded eyes, picked up on it right away, just as you noticed the trouble I was having with that beastly statue—”

“
I
saw the cemetery,” Hegwitha announced.

“Of course you did, Hegwitha,” said Isis. It was obvious why Hegwitha might register graveyards, though none of them—except Martha—suspected the new urgency it signified now.

Hegwitha had been quiet through much of the trip. She’d hardly spoken during lunch and their frustrating drives around Tucson. When she did talk, she whispered to Diana, to whom she’d attached herself with the gluey persistence with which she’d once stuck to Martha. Martha missed Hegwitha’s company, though she’d never exactly liked it. The loss of Hegwitha’s constant presence, irritating as it was, left Martha feeling strangely bereft, insecure, and friendless.

She twisted around to see Hegwitha, who didn’t look at all well. Her eyes had a mucid, syrupy glaze, and she sat at a funny angle, as if at any instant she might slide off onto the floor.

“Hegwitha,” Martha said softly, “are you okay?” She knew it wasn’t a good time to ask, but she couldn’t help it.

Scowling, Hegwitha didn’t reply.

“What
isn’t
okay,” Joy said, “is this fucked-up vehicle. I cannot believe that creep couldn’t get us another one. We should have known from the beginning—we should have been smarter than to agree to even get
in
a vehicle called a Ram.”

Then they all fell silent, recalling the scene this morning with Pete, the travel agent, who had driven the van away last night, presumably out of their lives forever, and reappeared this morning in the exact same defective van. Pete claimed that his mechanic had checked the engine and replaced several vital parts. No one pretended to listen to his list of auto hardware.

One by one, like tag-team wrestlers, the women waded into the fray. First Starling, then Joy, then Titania, then Freya, then Isis took up arguing with Pete, who just turned his big palms up and smiled a silly grin—his friendly male amusement deflecting their viragoish female hysteria.

Finally Titania said, “I guess that’s it, girls. Once again, female disempowerment in the face of male entitlement, embodied here in this glorified cowboy schmo.” Befogged with soupy dread and defeat, they’d filed back into the van.

“If we break down in this heat on this road,” said Joy, “we’re vulture delicatessen.”

But Joy’s concern seemed alarmist—they were still on the highway amid a stream of traffic and drivers quite ready to assist a vanload of stranded Goddess worshippers. Or maybe Joy was simply expressing the disquiet all of them felt: the sense that bad luck had its own momentum, and once small things began to go wrong…

“Delphi!” exclaimed Isis. “What a superb name for a town!”

“Delphi,” echoed Bernie. “Why couldn’t we be stopping
here
?”

“Because there’s no
here
here,” Titania said. “Where is the town, exactly? This convenience store?”

“Oh, relax,” said Starling. “From what I’ve heard, Maria’s place makes Delphi look like Times Square.”

Isis said, “Maria told me that where she lives, there is nothing around but desert, and the loudest sound you hear at night is the howling of the coyotes.”

“Happy day!” said Diana.

“Coyotes?” Martha said.

“Delphi?” Freya was saying, first dreamily, then louder. “Delphi, Arizona? Christ! I can’t believe it!”

“I can’t either,” Diana said. “What amazing synchronicity! That the place we’re going is named for the temple where the Oracle spoke with women’s intuitive power to see the future—”

“Maria isn’t
in
Delphi, exactly,” said Starling. “Her place is somewhere near it.”

“Synchronicity?” shrieked Freya. “I’d say synchronicity. Delphi, Arizona, is where my ex-husband, Sonoma’s father, has bought a ranch with a whole bunch of other middle-aged failed artists living out their cowboy fantasies with a slew of twenty-year-old middle-aged-failed-artist groupies.”

“My dad?” said Sonoma. “You knew we were going to pass by my dad’s house and you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t make the connection,” Freya said. “I have more important things on my mind. And since when, I want to know, since when has this man—this bastard who hasn’t written or sent either of us a penny in years—since when has he become
my dad
?”

Isis leaned forward and rested her hand on Sonoma’s shoulder. Starling put aside the road map and picked up the page of handwritten directions.

Joy slowed at the entrance to a secondary road. The jeep stalled before it turned into the desert.

“Check the numbers on these mile posts,” Starling said. “We’re searching for a road that starts at mile post forty-four.”

“A smaller road than this?” said Sonoma.

In the distance, mountains rose in hostile, abrasive crags. Predatory beings disguised as harmless cacti waved their arms to distract them from counting the markers along the road.

“One,” said the women in unison and, a long time later, “two.”

Isis said, “This could be a marvelous centering exercise, counting slowly together. Feel the concentration…”

“Yes, it is,” Martha murmured, but Isis didn’t respond.

At last they counted forty-four. The jeep rolled to a stop.

“This is a joke,” said Titania. “This is not serious. This is a dirt road.”

“That’s what it says,” said Sterling, and read aloud, “‘Mile post forty-four. Left turn onto dirt road.’”

Joy swung the wheel around and left the pavement. From underneath the chassis came ominous bumps and scrapes. They pitched against one another as Joy crept forward. A boulder struck the undercarriage.

“How many miles of this?” asked Freya.

“I can’t tell,” Starling said.

“Five? Ten? Twenty?” asked Titania.

“Medicine women don’t live in the suburbs,” said Starling. “Or in convenient urban centers. Shamans don’t hang out at luxe fat farms, at least the real ones don’t. The whole point of medicine-women lore is its connection with nature.”

“Nature!” said Titania. “I’ve had it with nature, and we’re hardly out in it yet. Personally, I’d settle for the fat farm. I’d trade the medicine woman sight unseen for a good masseuse.”

In the silence they heard Sonoma ask Freya, “Do you think we could visit my dad on the way back to Tucson?”

“Absolutely not,” said Freya.

The jeep coughed several times and died.

“This is suicide,” said Titania. “We’re like a bunch of Goddess-worshipping lemmings heading over a cliff.”

Joy switched the ignition off and, centimeter by centimeter, turned the key to the right.

“Oh, dear Goddess,” Joy prayed for them all, “help us get this piece of shit moving.” The motor sputtered encouragingly and after a moment started up.

“We can still turn back,” said Titania. “Instead of heading further into hostile terrain in this gas-guzzling death trap.”

“And do what?” demanded Diana. “Go back to Tucson and soak in the hot tub? Miss our chance to learn from a wise woman who might change our entire lives?”

“Right,” said Hegwitha. “And just because some prick ripped us off on the vehicle?”

“I’m just the driver,” Joy said. “You tell me what to do.”

“Keep going,” Isis ordered, and even the van complied.

Starling pored over the directions as if she might have misread how many miles they had to go, and another reading would reveal a more agreeable number. The road dipped into a canyon. Rubbly hummocks rose on both sides, so that now rocks also pelted down at them instead of just jumping up from beneath.

Joy said, “I’m only asking, but are we in one of those killer arroyos you hear about—the ones that go from bone dry to flash flood in about five seconds?”

“I don’t think so,” said Starling.

“How do you know?” said Diana. “You just made that up. Starling’s been riding shotgun for half a day and already she’s caught a terminal case of male-answer syndrome.”

Only Bernie laughed, and not for long; her tense chuckle stopped when the van collided with a rock.

At intervals, Titania pointed out, “We could walk faster.” But eventually even Titania slipped into a heat-bludgeoned daze and let herself be thrown about by Joy’s swerves around potholes.

Once Isis said, “Isn’t this an extraordinary meditative state we’re in? What’s amazing me about this trip is how the simple work of getting from place to place keeps putting us in previously unexplored states of consciousness.”

It was too hot for anyone to reply. Martha put her feet up. Joy hung one arm out the window, steering with the other.

“Sure,” said Sonoma. “Driving through the desert in a Rent-a-Wreck jeep is the fabulous new high.”

When had the focus of Sonoma’s scorn shifted to include Isis? Isis said nothing and sighed deeply. A shiver ran through the group.

“A
LL RIGHT!” JOY PUMPED
her fist in the air.

“Yess!” Sonoma hissed.

By now the other women had sunk into tortoiselike states of remove out of which they gradually hauled themselves, blinking their gritty eyelids. They stared unseeingly at a signpost poking out of the desert and a handmade sign, elegantly calligraphed in Gothic script:

“Talk about mixed messages,” said Joy.

“Would you
stop
it?” said Diana.

A feathered arrow pointed toward a driveway that they followed over the sand and around a hill, until it stopped in front of a sort of derelict motel, a circle of pitted adobe cabins, prefab shacks, and campers. In the center was a mammoth cream-colored RV, pinstriped, painted with lightning bolts and kachina figures, and armored with extra bumpers and a shiny chrome ladder to nowhere. Near its door a pack of skinny feral dogs, mottled with patches of pink and silvery blue, arched and convulsed in the dust.

“What the hell?” said Titania.

“Awesome pups,” said Sonoma.

As the van pulled up, the dogs began to bark, then ran out and surrounded it, growling deep in their throats.

“Oh, dear,” said Bernie. “Perhaps we should lock the doors and windows.”

Martha regarded the ugly dogs, sliming the windows with drool as they sprang up, scratching the van.

Joy said, “Hey, fuck this. I’m out of here.”

“Relax,” said Starling. “It’s not our vehicle. Serves the bastards right.”

Just then they heard several loud pops.

“Firecrackers?” said Freya.

“Yeah, right, Mom,” said Sonoma. “Champagne corks.”

“Gunshots, I believe,” said Starling.

“Golly,” Bernie said.

The dogs had heard the shots, too, and crawled back to the trailer.

All this so unnerved the women that only now did they notice the short barrel-shaped person who had emerged from the RV: an Indian woman with long braids, an orange beaded headband, faded jeans, and a black T-shirt that said
Harley-Davidson Club of Tucson
. She was carrying a rifle pointed up in the air.

“Righteous firepower,” said Sonoma.

“Is that Maria?” said Diana.

“Certainly not,” said Isis. “Maria’s thin and gorgeous.”

Joy and Starling jumped from the van, then waited for Isis to take the lead. Trailed closely by the others, Isis approached the woman.

“I’m Isis Moonwagon? We’re looking for Maria Aquilo?”

“Maria’s not here,” the woman said. “She had to go teach at a conference in Santa Fe.”

“What conference?” Isis said.

The woman thought a moment. “Earth Sisters Week.”

“Earth Sisters Week?” said Isis. “They must be holding that early this year. Usually it’s in April, I hadn’t heard…I mean, I’ve
done
Earth Sisters Week for the past four years…I can’t imagine why I wasn’t…”

“Oh
that
one,” said Freya. “Didn’t I do that one in 1988?”

“I wouldn’t know, Mother,” said Sonoma.

The woman said, “Maria left last night. She’ll be in Santa Fe all week. For the conference.”

“I
know
the conference lasts a week,” snapped Isis. “We’ll be gone before she gets back. We’re supposed to be studying with her. I met—I taught with—Maria in Bolinas. I’m Isis Moonwagon.”

“Right,” said the woman. “Maria asked me to fill in for her. I am Rita Ochoa. I am a medicine woman and storyteller. I was expecting you tomorrow. Got my signals wrong, I guess. The Grandfathers used to send messages with clairvoyance and ESP. But the white man jammed our frequencies with his telephones and telegraphs, and now part of the Native peoples’ struggle is to reclaim our old ways of communication.”

“Are you from Maria’s tribe?” Bernie asked.

“We are from different tribes but we are all the same people,” Rita replied.

“Oh, I
know
that,” said Bernie. “But I meant—”

“I am Yaqui,” Rita said. “Maria is half Papago and half Mescalero Apache. But I have studied the lore and legends of all our indigenous peoples, and I travel often, telling our stories and legends. I did the August Powwow in Seneca, New York. I did the Oklahoma State Fair. Just now I did a purification sweat lodge at the Rebirth Center in Boulder, Colorado.”