The Days of Anna Madrigal (18 page)

“Oh, lamb.” She reached over and squeezed his hand. “You won't even know when it happens. And it won't mean nothin', you know that. This boy's a lost soul, and . . . I got so much mothering in me. Just like I got for you. You understand?”

He understood all too well. Sex had never been Margaret's only gift to the world. She had a vast, promiscuous kindness that had made him jealous, in small ways, even as a child. There had never been anything like this, though, nothing that had torn through his heart from the inside. She had let Lasko into the nest, and she wanted Andy to know it. He yanked his hand away from her, sprang to his feet.

“Andy, lamb, listen to me—”

But he was already out the door, heading for the house and ready for revenge.

I
n the parlor Mama was banging out a tune for the customers. It was easy enough to slip unnoticed into Mama's office, where he grabbed one of her envelopes and a sheet of her fancy stationery—the one with a howling pink tomcat in a top hat. He took them up to his room, latched the door, and began, furiously, to write.

Dear Mr. Madrigal,

I am sorry to have to write such a letter, but I feel I must explain your son's injury. He came by my establishment last night and made an indecent advance toward my son. My son is all man, and gave him what for. I will speak of this matter publicly if your son ever returns to the Blue Moon. He is not welcome here.

Sincerely,

M
ONA
R
AMSEY

P.S. I mean the sheriff!!

Letter in hand, Andy crept out of the house and into the truck. It took him twenty minutes to reach the Madrigals' house. He knew there was a strong chance that Lasko had taken Hegazti directly home, so he waited in the shadows beneath the big lighted
LOTHING
sign and watched Lasko's garage room for signs of activity. It was completely dark, so he crossed the backyard and went to the porch, where a mailbox and a door buzzer were all he needed to carry out his plan.

Only one had been strictly necessary, of course. Delivery would have been enough. They would have found the letter in the morning, and the message would have been conveyed. But Andy, in his pain and jealousy, wanted the satisfaction of being a
witness
. He wanted proof that he had stood his ground and fought back like a man, that this story had not ended with Lasko's heartless “Abyssinia.”

He opened the mailbox, slipped in the letter, rang the buzzer, and ran like crazy.

Breathless, he took refuge in the truck, which was hidden behind a stand of cottonwoods. It wouldn't matter anyway, if someone saw the truck, since it belonged to Mama, and that would only confirm the authenticity of the letter. Andy was banking on his belief that no one would contact Mama. There would be too much shame and dishonor involved. This would be a family matter conducted in private.

Someone opened the door and stepped onto the porch. Even from this distance Andy could hear the momentous squeak of the mailbox.

The first voice he heard was Hegazti's. “Papi,” she was calling, “Papi!”

The porch creaked under the heavy tread of the man of the house. Hegazti was speaking to him in Spanish, presumably translating the letter.

It serves you right, thought Andy. You had your way with my family. I'll have my way with yours.

Mr. Madrigal's growl grew into a bellow. “B
ELASKO!
B
ELASKO
!”

Lasko answered feebly from somewhere inside the house.

That'll keep you away, thought Andy. That'll keep you away for good.

How right he had been.

Chapter
20

THE TEMPLE OF JUNO

A
blue
moon—the second full moon of the month—was rising over Black Rock City when
Shawna set off on her own to look for Otto. She knew already he was part of the
temple crew, so she made that her first destination, so she could praise him on
his communal effort when she came to look for him at Seltzerville, the camp he
shared with a dozen other street clowns. There was no way to do this but to do
it. No phones, no tweets, nothing. Just this roulette of random souls, cycling
through the watercolor twilight on their way from somewhere to somewhere
else.

Once in a blue moon.
As
in rarely, but sometimes.

It was what she adored about Burning Man: the way
one thing could lead you to another like an undertow. You threw yourself into
it, and it took you from there, swirling you into moments so rich and rare that
you could almost forget you had ever written LOL or OMG on someone's Twitter
feed. Burning Man wasn't a link to life; it was life itself, immediate and
astonishing. All those weeks of planning and ticket scrounging had led to this
sweet release into the wild and woolly Now.

That's why it made sense to stop at the Hug Deli on
her way to the Temple of Juno. Because it was
there
,
this hand-painted sidewalk stand in the middle of nowhere, fake as can be yet
completely archetypal, like something Wile E. Coyote would erect as a ruse for
the Roadrunner. The menu at the Hug Deli included, among other items, the Warm
and Fuzzy Hug, the Beverly Hills Air Kiss Hug, and the Gangsta Hug, with side
orders of Pinch, Tickle, and Back Scratch. She ordered the Long Uncomfortable
Hug, because she thought that was funny, thereby prompting a nut-brown Venice
Beach–looking dude to hold on to her, earnestly pokerfaced, for a seeming
eternity.

“Are you uncomfortable yet?”

“Fairly, yes.”

“Excellent. My work here is done.”

She laughed and mounted her bike, pedaling away
from the zany mirage as her gratuitous hugger shouted “Namaste” in her
direction.

Insemination should be so easy, she thought.

T
he
spire of the Temple of Juno appeared in the dust as fragments of filigree,
looming so high in the sky it could have been someone's last hallucination. It
felt Asian, but not entirely, with a courtyard that made it sprawl like a
kingdom. It took ten minutes to reach, pedaling hard, so she needed a long swig
on her canteen once she had chained her bike out front. There were dozens of
others joining her, freed from their wheels and continuing their pilgrim's
progress toward the structure.

It was plywood, this temple, blond and raw up close
but intricate as lace, a computer-hewn patchwork assembled by Otto and a
multitude of others, people who had built something magnificent to be burned in
a week on the premise that simple creation was its own joy, and everything,
everything
, must be released.

The more she thought about Otto, the more he seemed
like the perfect guy to ask for sperm. He was strong and sober and kind. He'd
been nice to her the night they ran into each other at Martuni's. He had even
joked about the two exes who had come later. She had let him down gently, after
all, when he started getting serious, and that had been four whole years ago. He
seemed to have let her go as thoroughly as he had let go of Sammy, his monkey
puppet—minus the ritual cremation.

But the real bonus was the fact that he was moving
to Ottawa in a month. (He liked the sound of Otto from Ottawa, he said, and it
was easy to find eco work in Canada.) The sheer geographical distance would
lessen the chance of him forming an emotional attachment to the child. And maybe
he'd be totally cool with the idea, expecting nothing in return for his
contribution. Seltzerville was an easy bike ride to Dusty Dames, where the
insemination would be staged. Or held. Or whatever.

She hated all the language of this, the mechanics.
She wanted to focus on the end result, so that one day she would be able to tell
the apple of her eye that she had loved her/him long before he/she had even been
a seed. That she had dreamed of him/her in a place so profoundly infertile that
life itself was imported for one magic week, and that love and art were the only
intentions. Once pregnant, she would not (she swore) be one of those women who
natter away about the future to their growing bellies, but she wouldn't mind
having a word with the kid right now. She would tell her/him that the coast was
clear, that it was beautiful here.

She flowed with the others into the temple, where
beams of light slashed through the lacy walls like swords through a magician's
cabinet. A great wooden pendulum—an inverted pyramid—swung almost imperceptibly
above a mandala of humans arrayed beneath its point. Dust was the constant here,
making everything velvety and sumptuous. The walls were covered with felt-tip
scribbling that would have seemed defamatory without the knowledge that this was
the soul of the space: poignant and pithy (or not so pithy) farewells to dead
friends and old lovers, lost pets and bad vibes, anything that needed
remembering and releasing through fire.

The people beneath the pendulum were in their own
orbits of bliss or grief, which Shawna did not want to invade. Instead she made
her way upstairs, reading the inscriptions that caught her eye, moved by the
sheer accumulation of loss.

Grief-fiti. That's what it was.

She stopped on the landing and found a clear space
on the wall, claiming it benignly with her presence, as she would a good spot on
a beach. She was digging in her knapsack for a felt-tip marker when someone
approached her with his own, presenting it to her with a courtly flourish. He
was her age or thereabouts, and so coated in dust that the fabric-store fur of
his Pan legs was indistinguishable from his own smooth flesh. His horns, in much
the same way, merged with his head.

“Thanks,” she said, “but I may be here for a
while.”

“Please,” he said. “Keep it.”

And with that he was gone—somewhat theatrically,
but thrillingly just the same. She wondered if he had blessed her on the spur of
the moment or if felt-tip markers were part of his official gifting. But even if
he had a whole sack of those suckers stashed somewhere, it was a cool thing to
do. It was good to give people things they needed. To be there for them in the
moment. It showed you noticed.

She went to the wall and began to write in bright
green ink:

Dear Connie
Bradshaw,

We've met only once. You
held me in your arms and looked into my eyes. I wish I could remember that.
My friend Michael says you were kind and sort of daffy and liked guys a lot.
I do, too. And gals, by the way.
Something tells me we would get on great. I've heard what you went through
to give me life, and I REALLY FUCKING APPRECIATE IT, CONNIE. I'm living for
us both now.

Your
daughter,

S
HAWNA
H
AWKINS

P.S. Would you like to
be a grandmother? Wouldn't that be fantabulous?

When she was finished, she left the temple and
strolled around the courtyard. Night was falling swiftly. The lights in the
temple made it glow like candlelight through old scrimshaw. She sat on one of
the courtyard benches and wondered, idly, which parts of this otherworldly
palace Otto had helped to build.

Juno, goddess of fertility and
overseer of childbirth, protector of women and preserver of
marriage.

Could there be a better place for her tonight?

She had been there for ten minutes before she
noticed the writing on the wall behind her. It was rendered in the same green
ink she had used for her own.

WANT TO BE A MOTHER? NEED SEED FROM A NICE
GUY? THAT'S WHAT

I'M GIFTING THIS YEAR. NO STRINGS ATTACHED.
SEE NEXT BENCH.

It wasn't like her to blush, but the message felt
so intuitive of her situation. She was like one of those starving wretches on
Survivor
getting a tree-mail message promising
doughnuts and milk. She looked around the courtyard furtively—
guiltily—
to see if she was being watched. There were
several dozen people there in the indigo gloaming, but none of them seemed
especially interested in her.

The nearest bench was unoccupied, so she walked
there and checked it out, using her pocket flashlight to examine the graffiti.
Much of it was written in green ink, so the color was obviously not exclusive to
the faun in the temple. The marker might have been provided by the temple crew
itself. The anonymous benefactor could be anyone at all. Anyone.

His handwriting, however, was instantly
recognizable from the other bench: loopy letters with open
O
's. This time he had written:

HEALTHY EX-MORMON RESPECTS ALL WOMEN. NO
CONTACT DESIRED. TOP TIER OF TEMPLE, PLAYA SIDE. INFO UNDER RAIL. LOOK 4 HEART.
PROMISE NEVER TO SEE YOU AGAIN.

Three minutes later, as she headed back to the
temple, she thought, It's a good thing I'm not fucked up. It's a good thing this
is my first e-less unmollyfied Burn in . . . well . . .
ever. Otherwise, I might invest this moment with something falsely mystical,
something beyond the lark of a treasure hunt in the desert. I might see it as a
viable option, too, a natural progression of the Hug Deli, a great big
why-the-hell-not.

She knew better than that. Especially sober. Otto
would almost certainly end up being her go-to guy, because sperm was not a fast
food proposition.

Except of course, that it
was
. What else was it if not that? It was always a thing of the
moment, best served warm. And anonymity had certain advantages in this
situation. Someday soon she would have a spouse, someone under the same roof who
would love the Kid as deeply as she did. Why burden that person with a third
person—some long-gone retired street clown boyfriend in Canada, for instance? It
muddled things unnecessarily. Ben would never have been a problem in that
regard, since he was already part of the package, already inextricable from her
life.

What the hell was she talking about?
Yes, a very good thing you aren't fucked up tonight,
missy.

Reaching the mezzanine of the temple, she followed
the railing until—yes!—she found a plain green heart without an inscription. It
was almost too easy, this game. She sank to her butt on the spot and used her
flashlight to inspect the underside. She found a smattering of words there.
Green capital letters.
Eureka
.

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

CAMP COINKYDINK

5:30 AND JASMINE

ASK FOR DUSTPUPPY

Here was the thing:

She didn't have to see Otto right away. She didn't
have to see him at all, in fact, since he didn't even know she was coming. You
couldn't break a date that had never been made, could you? She could tell him
tomorrow how much she admired and respected his work on the temple. Tonight
there was curiosity to be satisfied. Maybe—just maybe—there was a fourth option,
beyond Ben and Caleb and Otto.

Camp Coinkydink was out toward the scattered edge
of things. As Shawna pedaled across the gleaming playa under a silver-dollar
moon, she remembered something Mrs. Madrigal used to say:

“Your regrets, my dear, are all about the things
you
didn't
do.”