“Whoa,” said the teenager.
The ones like her, Rowan thought, strange things would be going through their heads about now. Outrage about the orphan girls. Unfamiliar urges involving death and sacrifice. At least that was how it had been for her, and that was how she imagined certain kids felt. She would have liked to take this one aside.
“And the Bears,” Rowan said, “to conceal the blood, to fool the other animals and to fool the girls, spread black cornmeal all around. And that’s why the ash is here, and the cinders, all that black world, the mafic fluid. The world around here.” She raised a hand, checking the pulse in her forehead. Her face felt hot and dry. “Well,” she told her public, “that’s all we have time for. I hope you’ve enjoyed your visit to Temple Cavern as much as we’ve enjoyed having you.”
And she had enjoyed having them. In her present frame of mind, she might have gone on for hours.
“Where the heck did you get that sacrifice bit?” Phyllis asked discreetly as the visitors filed out. “I sure never heard it before.”
“It came as a revelation,” Rowan told her. “I was reading Karl Bodmer. I mean spiritually it was pretty fucking sublime.”
“Thanks but no thanks,” said Phyllis. “Well, I guess you’re the expert.”
“Sure,” said Rowan. “I’d do it.”
“Well,” said Phyllis, “you certainly had them eating out of your hand.”
“Thanks. Sorry I kept you late.”
“I guess it’s all right,” Phyllis said. “Good luck on enforcement tomorrow.”
The turnoff for Temple State Monument was in a village called Deerdrum, thirty miles from the college town in which Smart was scheduled to read. Just before arriving in Deerdrum, the highway passed through the Shoshone reservation where Rowan’s friend John Hears the Sun Come Up had spent his childhood. The reservation was scattered over a vast plain of sage and greasewood that stretched toward distant mountains. Here and there over the plain were clusters of beige rectangular buildings and khaki trailers. These were the clinics, schools and meeting halls, some enclosed within chain-link fences. Each cluster was equipped with a few government-issue street lights of the sort found around prisons or military bases. The lights were automated, geared to daylight, so that as the weather changed in the enormous sky overhead they would flash on and off in reaction to passing banks of clouds. Near the road was a square white wooden church, freshly painted, with a little bell tower trimmed in green and a gold-colored cross.
Deerdrum itself had changed since Smart had last seen it. Once its fortunes waxed and waned with molybdenum production and the molybdenite mine outside of town. Now there was still some mining, but tourism was coming in. The hot springs along Antelope Creek had been dammed. Artists and soothsayers had moved out from the expanding university, and one of the town’s restored gingerbread brothels had become a bed-and-breakfast. There was a Days Inn and even a florist.
Smart would have much preferred to stay in town; it was a tight squeeze in the trailer with John and Rowan. On the other hand, she would be insulted and there would probably be drinking and it was a long dark way from the park back to Deerdrum. Just before the turnoff he stopped at a state store and bought two bottles of Rioja. Then he drove on and took the left that led west toward the lava beds.
He felt no excitement or anticipation as he approached the park, and this was a little surprising. On the way, in pursuit of his poem, he had managed to make himself forget the storms that raged about Rowan and the terrible energy between the two of them. Old regrets troubled him as he got farther from town and deeper into the volcanic desert around the Temple. A sense of excitement and dread. You do what you want in the end, he thought, forget what you need to forget. You follow your bliss, as the man said. More than anything he wanted another drink. One of the things he had almost forgotten was the pitiless loneliness of the place.
“Shit,” Rowan said when John met her in the yard of the trailer “he’s not here yet?”
John looked up the highway and shrugged. “Not yet.”
“I was really hoping he would be,” she said and began to pace back and forth in the yard. A faded striped sunshade protected part of the trailer yard, and even though the hot weather was over they had not yet taken it down.
“You were hoping but you were scared, right?” John asked.
“For God’s sake,” she said after she had paced outside for a few minutes, “I need a drink. How much wine did you buy?”
“Two of them big bottles. That’ll make one for each of you,” he said, “because I guess you know I’m not having any.”
“I’m gonna have some now.”
“You know,” John said, “could be hours before he gets here. You start drinking now, you’re like to be passed out by the time he shows up.”
“Ah,” she said, brushing past him toward the aluminum door “that’s where you’re wrong. I’m spinning my wheels. I sort of ate into that crank.”
In the kitchen, she took a bottle of the Georges Deboeuf out of a paper sack and commenced drawing the cork with a Swiss Army knife corkscrew. John watched from outside the open door.
“What did you do that for?”
“What did I do it for? Let’s see. Because Max was on my case because he thought my pants were too tight. Because I had a brace of pilgrims to instruct. Two braces actually.”
When she had opened the wine she took her guitar out of the broom closet, dusted it off with her uniform cuff and sat on a plastic kitchen chair to tune it.
“So you gave your park tours on crank?”
She put the instrument aside and poured some claret into a jaunty breakfast juice glass and sipped it delicately.
“Not for the first time, old sport.”
“I know it,” John said. He stepped up into the trailer went past her to the sofa and sat down wearily. “I suppose you made up a lot of hoodoo about Indian people. The way you do.”
“I don’t make things up,” she said. “I never make things up.”
“I’ve heard you. I wonder your nose don’t get long as Pinocchio’s out there sometimes.” He looked her up and down, lazy-eyed. “And Max is right about your pants.”
“I haven’t heard any complaints from the public. You complaining?”
“Not me. I think you look good.”
” Good? How about beautiful.”
“You’re beautiful regardless,” John said. “Don’t hurt to be more modest. Your face is all red from that shit. And how about removing your weapon? Or are you going to have your supper that way?”
Rowan took a deep drink of wine and grimaced.
“Christ, it feels good though,” she said. She turned to him on the sofa and put his hand on the buckle of her gun belt.
” You gonna give him speed?”
“Are you kidding? He’s an old doper from the great age of dope. He could do half a kilo while other people were doing a gram.”
John looked at the trailer deck for a moment, his fingers interlaced.
“I’m not comfortable,” he said, “when you been drinking and doing drugs. You know that, don’t you? When we’re intimate and you been drinking…”
Rowan picked up the guitar and began to sing: “When we’re intimate, and I’ve been drinking, I get to thinking…”
“Oh shut up,” John said. “Don’t be so smart.”
“Smart’s my name, baby. Smart’s my nature.”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten,” John said, “you’ve got in real trouble on that crank. I’ve seen you crazier than all get-out.”