'Well, not exactly hopeless, but...'
'It's just the opposite,' Max said. 'The desert brings home how precious life is and how much we should appreciate it while we have it. That life can still flourish under such severe conditions is a miracle. It's an inspiration to me.'
'You're amazing, you know that?'
'Not really. We all know we're going to die someday, but we like to pretend we won't. Given the hand I've been dealt, I don't have the luxury of that pretense. I have to live with the reality of my mortality every day of my life. Now I could just give up— and I won't pretend to you that I don't have my bad days. But when I tested positive, I made myself a promise that I was going to dedicate whatever time I have left to two things: to fight the stigmas attached to this disease, and to squeeze everything I can out of life.'
The waitress came by with their orders then and for a while they were kept busy with their meals.
'You look a little gloomy,' Max said later, when they were waiting for their coffees. 'I hope I didn't bring you down.'
'No, it's not that.'
'So tell Uncle Max what's bothering you.'
'My problems seem so petty compared to what you have to put up with.'
'Doesn't make them any less real for you, though. So 'fess up. Are you having man trouble again? We can be such bitches, can't we?'
'I suppose,' Sophie said with a smile, then her features grew serious. 'I just get tired of arguing. Everything starts out fine, but it always ends up with me having to adjust my life to theirs and I'm just not ready to do that anymore. I mean, I know there's going to be compromise in a relationship, but why does it always have to be on my side?'
'Compromise is necessary,' Max agreed, 'so long as you never give up who you are. That isn't compromise; that's spiritual death. You have to remain true to yourself.'
'That's what I keep telling myself, but it doesn't make it any easier.'
'Somewhere there is someone who'll love you for who are, not what they think you should be.'
'And if there isn't' Sophie said. 'If l never connect with that person?'
'Then you'll be alone.'
'Alone.'
Sophie sighed. She was too familiar with what it meant to be alone.
'It's hard to be alone, isn't it?' Max said.
Sophie nodded.
'But better to be alone than to settle for less than what you need... less than what you deserve.'
'I suppose.'
'Here,' Max said. He reached down under his chair for the package he'd carried into the restaurant when he'd arrived. 'Maybe this'll cheer you up.'
He put the package on the table between them. Sophie looked at him. 'What is it?' she asked.
'Open it up and find out.'
Inside was one of Max's sculptures— a new one. Sophie recognized herself in one small figurine that made up the tableau, only she was decked out in a leather cap from which sprang a deer's antlers giving her a very mythic air. She stood in front of a saguaro on which was perched a tiny owl with a woman's face. Lounging on a rock beside her was a familiar figure in jeans, shirt and vest, cayote features under the cowboy hat. On the ground between them lay a medicine flute.
'It's beautiful,' she said, looking up at Max.
'It's for you.'
'I just—'
'Don't you even dare say you can't accept it.'
'I just love it,' Sophie said.
'Like I said,' Max told her. 'I've been thinking a lot about the desert lately.'
'Me, too.'
18
Sometimes when I'm in Mabon, walking its streets while my body's sleeping a world away, I'll get a whiff of smoke that smells like pinon and then somewhere in the crowd I'll spot a lean man who I swear has coyote ears poking up out of his hair, but he's always gone before I can get close enough to be sure.
Coyote was right about one thing: The journeys we take inside our heads never end.
I never thought I'd say this but I miss him.
Dream Harder, Dream True
Man is a genius when he dreams. Dream what you're capable of. The harder you dream it, the sooner it will come true.
1
The best artists know what to leave out. They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren't necessary. They suggest, and let the viewer fill in whatever else is needed to make the communication complete. They aren't afraid to work with a smaller palette, to delete excess verbiage or place rests on the musical staff, for they know that almost every creative endeavor can be improved with a certain measure of understatement. For isn't it the silence between the notes that often gives music its resonance? What lies between the lines of the poem or story, the dialogue the actor doesn't speak, the pauses between the dancer's steps? The spaces can be just as important as what's distinctly portrayed.
So it's not important where the angel came from, or how she broke her wing. Only that she was there for Jean to find.
2
I'm not saying the city was perfect back then, but it was safer. There were still jobs to be had, and every neighborhood had its own sense of community. The streets and alleyways were swept clean on a regular basis, and it actually made a difference. There was crime, but its reporting was met with shock rather than a shrug. The state sanatoriums had yet to release the majority of their inmates and put them out onto the street— a seeding of homelessness that spread in the streets the way weeds will in an untended garden. Some might say it was a different world entirely through which Jean Etoile made his way home that autumn day.
Jean was a nondescript individual, neither short nor tall, neither ugly nor handsome; the sort of man you might pass on the street even now and never give a second glance: plain grey suit, white shirt and dark tie, briefcase in hand. Brown hair and eyes, with a pleasant smile, though he showed it rarely. When he passed the time of day with his neighbors, he spoke of the weather, of baseball scores and, yes, wasn't it a pity about old Mrs. Rather down the street, may she rest in peace. Not at all the sort of person one would imagine might bring home a prostitute to live with him in his apartment.
To be fair, Jean didn't know for certain that Candida was a prostitute. It was merely the assumption he'd made when he went to put out his garbage the night before and found her hiding by the back steps of his apartment building in Lower Foxville.
Jean had a secret addiction to mystery and pulp novels— stories by Mickey Spillane, Richard S. Prather, Lionel White and the like; stories about tough criminals and tougher cops, hard-boiled PIs and big-hearted hookers— so he felt he knew more than most about the dark side of the city, the side ruled by the night, with its wet streets and neon lights, deals going down in alleyways and pimps running their women, broad-shouldered men with guns under their sportsjackets. And in their hearts, the need to see justice served. When he saw such a beautiful woman in her tight, short dress and stiletto heels, eyelids dark with shadow, rouged cheeks and cherry-
