Hunters and Gatherers (21 page)

Martha noticed that Sonoma had thrown away her drumstick and was pounding her drum with her fists. Her eyes were shut, her mouth open; a thin trail of drool slicked her chin. As she gripped the tom-tom between her plump spread knees, unattractive pink wedges of thigh pouched out around the rim.

Sonoma was such a difficult girl, selfish, stubborn, spoiled, permitted complaints and cruelties no adult could get away with. But Martha was an adult and was shocked at her own harshness, her lack of feeling for this sad child briefly escaping the prison she shared with a mother whose parameters ranged from boasting about her career to nagging Sonoma about her weight. The shameful part was that Martha secretly suspected that her dislike for Sonoma was really about Isis, who, ever since the incident with the statue at the mission, had fixed on the girl with the absorption she’d once reserved for Martha.

The women were drumming so feverishly that Rita had to go around and grab each one by the shoulders, like clock pendulums she had to stop by hand. The women looked sleepy but rested, and Martha crankily observed the blurry gazes of postcoital gratitude they bestowed on Rita.

Then Rita announced that it was time for spirit dancing. “Our dance is a way of thanking the Earth, our Mother, whom we dance on with our feet to call our spirit helper. That is one thing I hope you will all do this week—find your spirit helper, or let your spirit helper find you. It may be a sacred animal or symbol, a power that keeps you from danger—”

“Some of us already have that,” Freya interrupted competitively. “We call her Goddess.”

Rita said, “Your spirit guide can be a creepy crawler, a creature from any part of the world. One of mine is an African and another a slant-eyed Chinese who likes to stand on his head.”

Joy edged closer to Martha and said, “That’s the grossest, most racist thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” But Joy snapped to attention when Rita said, “When you have a spirit guide, you don’t need a radar detector. You can do ninety, and your spirit helper will tell you when a cop’s hiding behind the billboard.”

“Far-out,” said Joy. “That’s my kind of spirit guide.”

Rita slipped another tape into the boom box and turned up the volume. Dervish drumming and shrill Middle Eastern flutes Dopplered off the mountains—most likely some New Age men’s group, reinterpreting Native American chants to express their resentments toward their absent fathers.

“Close your eyes,” Rita ordered. “Dance your connection to Mother Earth, touch her veins and her roots, reach for healing—”

Though Martha should have known better by now, she was still amazed that these women she’d known for months—women who drove and cooked and held important jobs and were writers and therapists with money, fame, and success—were capable of throwing back their heads, lifting their arms, and spinning like born-again evangelicals or locked-ward schizophrenics. She felt at once mildly contemptuous—and horribly alone. It was bad enough shaking rattles when everyone else was beating drums; not dancing along with the others was something else altogether.

Suddenly Martha heard a scream.

Isis sank to the ground.

Rita shut off the music. The women clustered round Isis.

Starling said, “Goddamn it! Of all the goddamn places in the world to have a medical emergency.”

“Don’t move her,” someone said.

But Bernie was already cradling Isis’s head in her lap, and within seconds Isis opened her eyes and smiled and wriggled her shoulders. She looked around, disoriented, then burst into sobs.

Through her tears, Isis said, “First it prowled around me—this…giant friendly jaguar. I was scared. It started to pounce. But then it reached out its paw, and I knew it wanted to help me. A sinking sensation came over me—that’s when I screamed and blacked out.”

“Your spirit helper,” Rita pronounced. “You have found your spirit helper.”

How like Isis to meet her spirit helper before anyone else! Martha wondered if the others minded. Isis had already
had
her vision of the moon goddess. Or maybe that was how it worked, as with multiple childbirths: each vision made it easier to have the next and the next.

“You were a member of the jaguar clan. Perhaps in some other lifetime.” Rita sounded extremely relieved: Isis’s vision had done wonders for her credibility. Rita must have been nervous about a week with these high-powered New York women who didn’t appreciate getting stuck with her instead of Maria. For the first time Martha felt real sympathy for Rita—a feeling that should have come earlier, say, the first time she saw Scotty.

But straight on the heels of this new compassion came great swells of irritation. Because now they were really in Rita’s power, and Isis had put them there. It no longer seemed likely that they would leave early and spend the extra days around the pool in Tucson. They were in for the desert walk, the sweat lodge, the fasting, and the vision quest.

“Tomorrow,” Rita said, “we will greet Dawn Spirit Rising with drumming. We will meet here at five-thirty and drum Father Sun up over the horizon.”

M
ARTHA REACHED BENEATH THE
covers and, languorous and ecstatic, scratched the lumpy flea bites encircling her legs like anklets. The bright air streaming in through the screen brought with it the fresh turkey-stuffing scent of sage. For a few blissful seconds she imagined she might be happy, until a less benign breeze blew in a ragged flurry of drumbeats.

Martha couldn’t imagine joining the other women. Instead, she picked the bites on her ankles till they erupted in bright dots of blood, and wallowed in a deep trough of isolation and sorrow, which she deepened, experimentally, with painful thoughts of Dennis: the muscles rippling in his back as he got out of bed in the morning. Once more Martha was alone, a shivering spectator at a rink crowded with happy skaters: normal people falling in love, getting married, having children, gathering to drum in the dawn and worship a kindly beneficent Goddess.

The other bedsprings squealed, and Martha stiffened with anxiety until she heard Titania say, “Mother of God. What’s the racket?”

“They’re drumming the dawn in,” Martha said.

“Horseshit,” said Titania.

So Martha wasn’t the only one not taking part in the drumming! The fact of Titania’s presence—or really, that Martha wasn’t alone—filled Martha with an irrational glow of optimism and well-being.

By the time Martha and Titania went outside, the drumming session had ended. They found the women in the ramada, settling in for another of Rita’s lectures.

“Today on our medicine walk,” Rita said, “we will learn desert ways.”

“Excuse me? Did we miss breakfast?” Titania asked.

Joy said, “No. Get this. We’re fasting. In preparation for the vision quest tomorrow. I could personally go for two eggs over and hash browns and take a miss on the visit from Little Sister Bunny Rabbit.”

“Maybe it’s better this way,” said Bernie. “I don’t know how many more roadkill meals I could handle.”

“Two more, I think,” said Diana. “We get lunch today and then nothing, fasting till tomorrow evening. Then a feast so we can stuff ourselves before we go into the desert, to make sure we have enough protein and don’t faint and sue them, even though for the Native people the solo vision quest was
about
fasting—”

“Would you quit it, Diana?” said Joy. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? You’d love to turn every one of us into a world-class anorexic.”

“Not eating should be a choice,” Bernie said. “We should honor Diana’s decision but be free to make our own—”

“Are you ladies finished?” asked Rita.

“Sorry,” Diana mumbled.

Joy said, “Can you believe this?”

Rita said, “Going into the desert is like going to see our family. Because we are related to everything—the prairie dogs, the rattlesnakes, the little creepy crawlers.”

“My,” said Titania, “she’s pathologically obsessed with little creepy crawlers.”

Isis sat near Rita, gazing at her adoringly. Well, there was no telling how hallucinating a giant friendly jaguar might alter one’s point of view. Wasn’t Isis’s life a testament to the transformative power of vision?

Starling, Bernie, Freya, and Hegwitha still hoped to meet their jaguars and so were willing to give Rita the benefit of the doubt. They sat up front with Isis and mirrored her worshipful look. Joy, Diana, Titania, Sonoma, and Martha sat slightly farther back. But when Rita said, “Don’t be strangers, sisters,” the holdouts moved forward and the acolytes made room.

“This morning,” Rita continued, “we go for a two-hour walk in our church. Ours is not the white man’s church: a building with a roof and a cross. The Earth our Mother is our church, and every time you walk the earth you enter our temple. Our Asian brothers and sisters remove their shoes to go into their temples, but when we enter our desert church, Native people put on heavy boots—if they know what’s good for them.” Rita lifted one columnar blue-jeaned leg to display a cracked, dusty work boot. “Everybody got strong shoes?”

“Yes,” said Bernie, and the women raised their booted feet.

Rita put her hands on her thighs and pressed herself out of her chair. The others picked up knapsacks, canteens, and walking sticks. Weren’t they somewhat overprepared for a two-hour hike? Maybe this was just their way of dealing with the unknown. Martha had brought a small water jug that had come with the bike she’d had in the city; she’d kept it as a memento after the bike was stolen. The canteen fit in her purse, which she’d taken when she left her cabin. She knew it was an uptight, distrustful New York thing to do, but something about Scotty made her want her cash and credit cards with her.

Bowing her head, Rita asked our Mother the Earth to share her medicine with her New York sisters. Then she set off toward the same trail that Martha had taken yesterday afternoon.

The desert was less lovely with other people blocking the view, but the compensation was that Rita strode confidently past the point at which Martha had panicked and quit. Rita paused for impromptu botany lessons about various cacti and other plants.

Holding up a branch, Rita asked, “What is this, ladies?”

“What
ih-iz
a branch?” Sonoma said.

“Wrong,” Rita said. “When Native people look at this, they see a part of a tree. You know the difference between a branch and part of a tree? We see everything as connected to everything else in creation, and it all teaches us secrets about medicine and health. Native people were the first to extract aspirin from a branch like this one.”

“That one?” asked Hegwitha.

“
Like
this one,” Rita said.

Martha kept catching up and then falling behind and growing more sullen, just as she had on nature walks with her grade school classes. Anyone might think that children would be glad to get out in the air, but Martha recalled feeling put-upon and insulted when teachers bullied them into inspecting the dirt and trees. The only thing the children had cared about was who was walking with whom; the boys and girls were like baby bats, operating on sonar, not looking but acutely aware of where the other sex was. Those nature walks had simmered with repressed sexual tension. If the teacher had known to study that, she might have learned about nature, too.

Rita kept pointing out especially large or oddly shaped giant saguaro cacti. She said, “Native people believe saguaros are magic creatures. Some say they are our ancestors—or visitors from outer space. If you stand between the arms of a saguaro cactus—not the kind that grow straight up, but the ones that put their arms out and circle them around you—you will hear strange noises. And we say that the cactus arms are talking to each other.”

Giggling uneasily, the women took turns standing between the arms of a huge two-pronged cactus and closing their eyes and listening. Some gave it longer than others, their faces contorted with effort, but even the most suggestible women wore silly smiles of bewildered relief as they scurried away and gave the next woman a turn. No one was saying whether or not she’d heard the cactus speak, or what she’d overheard.

Sonoma spent a surprisingly long time between the cactus arms, with her eyes scrunched shut and her cheeks puffed out, as if blowing up a balloon. Finally, she shook her head and sneered in disbelief.

By the time it was Martha’s turn, the others had all moved on, thus saving her the embarrassment of public ritual eavesdropping on cactus conversation.

Now Rita was talking about harvesting plants in accordance with time-honored ritual, and how living green things would save you if you got lost—provided you respected their spirits. She showed them water-bearing stems, plants with edible buds, poisonous plants identical to ones that were nourishing and delicious.

It was dawning on Martha that she might really be expected to spend two days alone in the desert. Yesterday she’d got frightened hiking up not even this far. She would have to find a way to avoid the vision quest without losing face completely.

Rita was talking about how many of her neighbors’ lives were saved by their knowledge of roots and herbs. How strange that so many people should have got lost and had to subsist on prickly pears! If Martha was pressured into going alone, she would stay in sight of the cabins and hide and pretend that she’d gone farther.

The desert shimmered so prettily in the silvery light that it was hard to imagine Brother Rattlesnake sleeping fitfully under a rock. But Rita could hardly get out a sentence without mentioning Brother Scorpion, Sister Black Widow Spider, and other members of their extended creepy-crawler family. Was Rita just a worrier, or was she trying to make her world seem like a minefield that they needed her to guide them through? Rita said that many tribes believed in the spiritual benefits of fear; your journey would go faster if you started it in terror.

The morning was cool, the air fragrant and pleasant. Martha began enjoying the hike. The women goggled admiringly as Rita named the desert plants, some of which cured diseases like dropping sickness and centipede fever, so now they knew what tea to brew if that was their diagnosis. Rita showed them a hive of honeybees living in a rock, guarding the entrance to their cave like a battalion of fuzzy helicopters, and listed twenty different kinds of honey that her people knew how to make.