On the way home, a shop window caught his eye. Someone had arranged a desert diorama, with sand and cacti and, incongruously, quartz crystals and other mineral specimens. But what got his attention was a group of stone carvings of animals, fetishes similar to the turquoise rabbit. There were no rabbits, but there were several bears (unlikely in a desert, you would think) along with some dogs and other creatures he couldn’t identify.
He entered the shop, and found a glass case with a great many more fetishes, some an inch long that could have been stamped out with a cookie cutter, others very elaborately and realistically crafted, including an eagle whose every feather was defined and a snarling bobcat or lynx that looked positively fierce.
The shop attendant, a black girl with her hair fixed in blond cornrows and rings on six of her fingers, explained what the fetishes were. The bear was a powerful figure in the Native American cosmology, he learned, and thus was the most common subject for carvers, even in areas where actual bears could not be found. And what he’d taken for dogs were in fact coyotes, and the coyote was the great trickster of Indian folk myths.
“Wile E. Coyote,” he said.
“Except he’s the one who gets tricked all the time. This one’s probably a badger, and of course you get owls and birds. Here’s a rabbit, an owl, a frog. A buffalo, you see plenty of them.”
And would he like to take one of them home and feed it? He said he didn’t think so, that a friend had given him a fetish and he just wanted to get some sense of what it was and what to do with it. Did you pray to them?
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you sort of honor their spirits, you know? And absorb their energy. And of course you have to feed them.” And she’d explained about the cornmeal, and showed him a selection of small shallow dishes suitable for the purpose. The nicest one was a piece of lustrous black pottery, and he was astonished to learn they wanted forty-five dollars for it.
“It’s Santa Clara,” she said, “or San Ildefonso, I can’t always tell the difference. See, this bowl here is Santa Clara, and this one’s San Ildefonso, but on a small piece like this one, it’s harder to tell. Oh, wait, it’s signed, Maria Sojo. Well, she’s a well-known potter, and she’s Santa Clara, so now we know it’s a Santa Clara piece, and that’s why it costs that much. Some of these others don’t cost half that much and” — she grinned — “I don’t think the little animals can tell the difference.”
But he liked the black one, and said he’d take it. While she was wrapping it he said he bet there was a lot she could tell him about the fetishes and pottery, and that he’d really like to take her to dinner and learn more.
She smiled, her whole face lighting up, and touched one of the rings on her left hand. “Now this gets sort of lost in the shuffle here,” she said, “but it’s a wedding band.” He started to apologize, but she told him not to, that she was flattered. “You ever see me without the ring,” she said, “ask me again, okay?”
A few days ago he’d moved some books to create a niche for the rabbit. Now he spooned cornmeal into the black dish and placed it in front of the little animal.
He checked his messages, returned a call from Roz. She was holding off on foreign sales until she had Darker Than Water in hand, but reported that his French publishers wanted to renew contracts on his earlier titles, and to acquire one book they’d passed on first time around.
Nothing succeeded like success.
There were two other messages, but not ones he wanted to respond to. He erased them and sat down at the keyboard, and the book drew him in almost instantly, and the next thing he knew it was dark outside and he was hungry. He saved his work, ran spell-check, and printed out the day’s pages. While they were printing he picked up the phone and ordered Chinese food.
He could have gone out, but he hardly ever did, except for interviews. The phone rang more frequently these days, with old friends who’d avoided him after the arrest now eager to pick up where they’d left off. He was cordial enough, but found himself turning down dates, pleading the pressures of work. He gave the same excuse to a couple of new friends, if that’s what they were — people he’d met that magical night at Stelli’s, who hadn’t dropped him earlier because they hadn’t even known him then. He didn’t bear resentments toward the old friends — at least he didn’t think he did — and he didn’t want to reject the overtures of the new friends. But he really didn’t feel very social.
He wondered how much the rabbit had to do with this.
Not its mystical energy, nothing like that. Just the enormous fact of its presence, because until he’d come upon it in his sock drawer he’d been looking forward to an expansion of his social activities, to nights at the Kettle and the Corner Bistro, to field trips uptown to Stelli’s. Dinners at fine restaurants, and night games at Shea, and the company of women.
He looked at the rabbit, serene enough in front of its dish of cornmeal. He heard Bogart’s voice in his head, speaking in haiku:
Of all the sock drawers
In all the towns in the world
You hopped into mine...
Hitting on the girl who’d sold him the little black dish had been spontaneous, and more of a surprise to him than to her. It was probably just as well she’d had a husband, or invented one. Jesus, she was half his age, and what would they talk about when they ran out of Zuni fetishes and Pueblo pottery?
And suppose she’d come back to his apartment, and wanted to see his fetish? Suppose she recognized it, suppose she’d sold it to Marilyn Fairchild? That wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded; Tenth Street was just a block from Charles Street, and the woman could very easily have shopped there.
He went over and took another look at the rabbit. Was he supposed to name it? That was something he could have asked the girl. He wasn’t inclined to think of a name for it. He had to name characters, every little walk-on in Harry Brubaker’s life needed a name and a history, and that made him think of the biblical folk tale of Adam in the garden, required to assign names to all the animals. It felt presumptuous, like playing God, when he arbitrarily assigned names and back stories to characters, but maybe it was more a matter of playing Adam.
The first day or two, he’d figured he had to get rid of the rabbit. It was dangerous to have it in his possession, and he was just lucky beyond belief that the cops hadn’t found it when they’d come looking for it. How likely would they be to overlook it a second time?
He thought of ways to dispose of the rabbit, simple things like dropping it into a sewer, more elaborate strategies like walking a few blocks west and tossing it off a pier into the Hudson. You wouldn’t have to weight it down, like a body. It would, appropriately enough, sink like a stone.
But for some reason he wanted it.
He liked the thing, and wasn’t that nutty? Although, if you thought about it, it wasn’t all that surprising. If he’d liked it enough to swipe it in the first place, why shouldn’t he go on liking it?
Had he somehow killed her for it? Had she caught him taking it, and called him on it, and had that triggered the fight that left her dead? He could see how that might have happened, but that was the trouble, he could imagine anything and everything.
He’d keep it, he decided. At least until it was time to buy more cornmeal.
Her card was still in his sock drawer.
Susan Pomerance, who sold folk and outsider art, and what was a turquoise rabbit if not folk art? Probably not the sort of thing she dealt in, but she very likely knew something about the art of the southwestern tribes.