“Oh, Lordy, Lordy,” Lou Ann said again, drying her eyes. She put a chip in her mouth with a flourish, licking each of her fingers afterward. She was draped out on the sofa in her green terry bathrobe and blue turban like Cleopatra cruising down the Nile, with Snowboots curled at her feet like some insane royal pet. In ancient Egypt, I’d read somewhere, schizophrenics were worshiped as gods.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Lou Ann said. “When something was bugging Angel, he’d never of stayed up half the night with me talking and eating everything that wasn’t nailed down. You’re not still mad, are you?”
I held up two fingers. “Peace, sister,” I said, knowing full well that only a complete hillbilly would say this in the 1980s. Love beads came to Pittman the same year as the dial tone.
“Peace and love, get high and fly with the dove,” she said.
SEVEN
How They Eat in HeavenA red Indian thought he might eat tobacco in church!” Lou Ann had closed her eyes and put herself in a trance to dig this item out of her fourth-grade memory, the way witnesses at a holdup will get themselves hypnotized to recollect the color of the getaway car. “That’s it! Arithmetic!” she cried, bouncing up and down. Then she said, “No offense to anyone present, about the Indian.” No one seemed offended.
“Oh, sure, I remember those,” Mattie said. “There was one for every subject. Geography was: George eats old gray rutabagas and picks his-something. What would it be?”
“Oh, gross,” Lou Ann said. “Gag a maggot.”
I couldn’t think of a solitary thing George might pick that started with Y. “Maybe you haven’t got it quite right,” I told Mattie. “Maybe it’s something else, like ‘pulls his yarn.’ ”
“Plants his yard?” offered Lou Ann.
“Pets his yak,” said the dark, handsome man, who was half of a young couple Mattie had brought along on the picnic. Their names I had not yet gotten straight: Es-something and Es-something. The man had been an English teacher in Guatemala City. This whole conversation had started with a rhyme he used to help students remember how to pronounce English vowels. Then we’d gotten onto spelling.
“What’s a yak?” Lou Ann wanted to know.
“It’s a type of very hairy cow,” he explained. He seemed a little embarrassed. Lou Ann and I had already told him three or four times that he spoke better English than the two of us combined.
We were flattened and sprawled across the rocks like a troop of lizards stoned on the sun, feeling too good to move. Lou Ann’s feet dangled into the water. She insisted that she looked like a Sherman tank in shorts but had ended up wearing them anyway, and a pink elastic tube top which, she’d informed us, Angel called her boob tube. I’d worn jeans and regretted it. February had turned mild again right after the frost, and March was staying mainly on the sweaty end of pleasant. Lou Ann and Mattie kept saying it had to be the warmest winter on record. The old-timers, somewhere down the line, would look back on this as the year we didn’t have a winter, except for that freeze God sent on Valentine’s Day so we’d have green-tomato pie. When the summer wildflowers started blooming before Easter, Mattie said the Lord was clearly telling us to head for the hills and have us a picnic. You never could tell about Matties version of the Lord. Mainly, He was just one damn thing after another.
We’d come to a place you would never expect to find in the desert: a little hideaway by a stream that had run all the way down from the mountains into a canyon, where it jumped off a boulder and broke into deep, clear pools. White rocks sloped up out of the water like giant, friendly hippo butts. A ring of cottonwood trees cooled their heels in the wet ground, and overhead leaned together, then apart, making whispery swishing noises. It made me think of Gossip, the game we played as kids where you whisper a message around a circle. You’d start out with “Randy walks to the hardware store” and end up with “Granny has rocks in her underwear drawer.”
It had been Lou Ann’s idea to come here. It was a place she and Angel used to go when she first came to Tucson with him. I didn’t know if her choice was a good or bad sign, but she didn’t seem unhappy to be here without him. She seemed more concerned that the rest of us would like it.
“So is this place okay? You’re sure?” she asked us, until we begged her to take our word for it, that it was the most wonderful picnic spot on the face of the earth, and she relaxed.
“Me and Angel actually talked about getting married up here,” she said, dipping her toes in and out. There were Jesus bugs here, but not the long-legged, graceful kind we had back home. These were shaped like my car and more or less careened around on top of the water. The whole gang of them together looked like graduation night in Volkswagen land.
