The Saints of Death Valley (part one)

The Mojave Desert is the smallest and the driest of the four North American Deserts. It is a place for the marvelous and the oddball. There is the Wee Thump Forest of ancient Joshua trees, limbs outstretched, guiding the traveler Onward. Brown bats with their transparent wings, and the tiny desert night lizard whose babies look like toothpicks. The ghost flower, and bees that sleep, sometimes side by side, inside the petals of the orange globe mallow cactus bloom. There is jasper, chalcedony, and agate. Geodes that hold crystal universes inside plain brown packaging — an adapt metaphor for any desert.  

The name Las Vegas is Spanish for The Meadows. There aren’t any left. Las Vegas is a mirage — there’s no water there. It’s the elusive pot of gold at the end of a neon rainbow. The city grew out of the workforce that built Boulder Dam. Vegas was the dam’s first customer. 

One hundred and fifty miles north-west of Las Vegas, the desert hits its low point. Death Valley looks the lonely place. There’s a reason the word desert is synonymous with abandonment. Most who walk through Death Valley take the name as fair warning. Who would live in the wooly dust, drink from that heavy water? Dare to call the red hematite and green chlorite streaks worth the trek through every shade of brown? Cough to find lungs flurried with chalk-white borax crystals. But some call it beauty. Some prefer to be alone. The Mojave may be boney, but there’s a billion stars ablinkin’. A silk ribbon wind. When the rains come the flowers follow, tissue paper petals in baby doll colors. There are road runners, that joke of a bird, and stones that sail — don’t think it isn’t so. The ocean went away and left the desert. The desert doesn’t care. Better to blow in the wind than hoist a sea.

 

The Saints of Death Valley

 

FRANCINE & GRACE

California 

 

There was a little-noticed annex of the Carmelite Chapel and Monastery of St. Giles of San Francisco located on Russian Hill. A lavender house — not an unusual shade for San Francisco — with a rather large garden hedged by bridal-bouquet hydrangeas and shaded by enormous Chinese yulan magnolia trees. It was there that five nuns cloistered in comfort and toil, led by Sister Francine. The Second Vatican Council ended the mandatory wearing of habits, so most days, the sisters were a casual bunch. They tended an apiary in their backyard, so prolific the whole house sounded like a radio between frequencies. The nun’s small batch bee products — soaps, candles, and honey pots — carried a label with Jesus’s face haloed by bees — which, let’s face it, is a kind of crown of thorns. 

The favorite night of the week at the annex was Dynasty Night, in which the sisters would watch TV and drink tumblers of Chivas. So it was with some irritation that on a March evening in 1985, Francine left the front room because she could swear she heard a baby crying. On the mahogany turnstile, that small delivery space between the outside world and the cloister, was indeed, a baby. Talk about a delivery. 

The child was wrapped in soft white and there was a rose velvet bag holding what would turn out to be holy cards beside the bunting. Francine brought the baby into the house, and to the sisters, the child was a tiny miracle. 

Francine went out into the garden to think. No need to turn on the string lights; the moon obliged. The magnolias were in bloom, full and open, and Francine’s little inside joke was to think of them as Mary on the half-shell; they looked like blessings. A few cherry-headed wild parrots of Telegraph Hill perched in the trees. Sometimes they came a-visiting. Francine tried to let the garden calm her, redid her little ponytail, running her hands through her short blond hair just to subconsciously massage her thoughts. She resolved there was nothing she could do; she would call the Abbess in the morning. 

Inside the house, after a bit more Chivas and some pretty bad name calling, the sisters had decided to call the baby girl Grace Catherine. Of course Grace should have been turned over to the authorities, but Francine let one day turn to two, turn to bubbles and bottles, and oh, the Carmelites just loved that baby. She had red hair! And her cheeks turned to cherries when she cried. Her ears stuck out just an adorable little bit. Freckles were her destiny, it was written all over her brown-eyed face. They couldn’t let her go. Even Francine, or perhaps especially Francine couldn’t let her go. 

Grace was, well, a graceful child. She lacked for nothing because she knew only of her quiet life. She had Bible lessons on a felt board, Noah’s Ark, and a pillar of salt. Salt! She had chores, and there were errands to run, parks to play in. She had a school desk, she could count to 100. She had three dolls, but what she liked most was her rose velvet bag of holy cards. She especially loved the cards with the gold accents edging the clouds, highlighting the wounds. Grace did not have words or concepts to understand the cards, but she could perceive that there was grace in suffering. She thought of them as friends. 

The sisters managed to keep Grace Catherine for five years. 

When Father Ward made a surprise visit to sample some of their autumn honey beer, the nuns were busted. He shouted that they would be excommunicated and defrocked, which made them feel something like plucked chickens. Father Ward took Grace home with him until he could figure out what to do with her. The annex was not technically his responsibility, but he was the one who collected the bee products and had the most interaction with the house. Therefore, the one who should have seen Grace.   

The only thing Grace had left of her Carmelites was her rose velvet bag filled with holy cards, pushed into her hand by Francine when she kissed all the nuns goodbye. She thought she was going to the dentist (she had been before) and had no sense of foreboding following Father Ward into his little Honda, although he didn’t smell quite right. 

Soon-to-be ex-Sister Francine was nothing if not determined. The next day Francine paid Father Ward a visit. Grace was not present in the room. “Roger,” Francine began, rudely calling Father Ward by his first name, “how do you think it’s going to go when I give an exclusive to the Chronicle about Grace — what took the Church five years to find the poor child? Just who is the mother. Better yet, who’s the father! And I might suggest they do a little investigating into your use of the honey funds….” She went full Dynasty on him. 

Roger gave a world-weary sigh. Women! Monks were so much easier. “Francine, what is it you want?”

“Grace. Now.”

Roger sighed again, but got up out of his seat. Francine knew she had him. 

“And child support for two years so I can go back to school and get a nursing certificate.”

Roger knew the Church was getting off easy. And it was no doubt a good choice for the child. Better than foster care. Better than a scandal. 

When Grace joined them, she ran to Francine. Francine with her short dandelion hair and dark eyebrows that could talk for themselves. Grace knew those hazel eyes, that face, those arms that enclosed her, and the smell of lavender honey creamed into her skin. 

A For Sale sign violated the front lawn of the lavender house. It sold to a gay couple who planned to turn the ground floor into a yoga studio and juice bar called The Downward Dog. The apiary had already been moved, but you better believe there were stings involved, and that honey never tasted as good again, never tasted of Chinese magnolias.

 

GEORGE AND PAULA

Death Valley 

 

George and Paula Carroll were not natives to Death Valley, and it could be said they had no business being there. George grew up in the Salinas Valley on a walnut farm. It was a hand-carved childhood. Church on Sunday, white shirt and a black tie. A stern belief in God. But George certainly didn’t listen when his father tried to tell his son that life need be no more than family, land to tend, and a clear view ahead. George heard that in the glitter gulch of Las Vegas girls danced on tables in the casinos — in bikinis and cowboy boots! For George, it was the University of Las Vegas or Bust. 

It didn’t take all that long for George to come to agree with his dad. He ended his first semester on academic probation, generally hungover and broke, having spent his money one dollar at a time pushing bills against the skin of women who held themselves a millimeter and a hundred miles away. 

George cashed in his chips and went back to the pay dirt of his soul. He earned a degree in Urban Horticulture & Water Conservation, class of 1986, and fell in love with palm trees — those garden-variety showgirls. He spent his days in the contrived groves and gardens of city that shouldn’t even exist. 

 

George’s one-day-to-be wife Paula was rocked in a different cradle.

Paula grew up in Salt Lake City under the gaze of the all-seeing granite eye of God carved into the architecture of the Mormon Temple. When she was little, Paula thought one of God’s forms was cyclops. Symbolism is often lost on children. At the loftiest point of the temple, the gold-leafed angel Moroni blows his trumpet, Paula came to understand, for all the white people. When Paula learned that her best friend Jada couldn’t get into the highest level of heaven no matter how many times she knelt to pray, clean white socks gleaming against her skinny, dark legs, Paula felt the beginnings of the slow burn of repression. A kind of indigestion of the soul. On top of that, in 1978 she understood the apostle LeGrand Richards to say the promise of white skin in death through righteousness in life only applied to Native Americans, and not to Black people, not to Jada. Outrageous! 

At only twelve years old, Paula told her mother that since Jada couldn’t be with her in heaven, she didn’t want to be a Mormon. Paula’s mother, who was making banana bread at the time, beat her head with the wooden spoon, batter flying as if it was the spittle of God. She did not wish to discuss theology with her daughter. 

As soon as Paula graduated high school, her mission was escape. It took a year of coffee shop tips before she could leave the goodbye note with excellent penmanship on the kitchen table. In 1986 Paula made her exodus from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas. City of Saints to Sin City. She wanted a boomtown that practically renounced religion. Plus the bus fare was cheap. 

Paula took in the showgirls with their feather headpieces and slabby makeup. Every billboard either an enticement to excess, or a clean-up-the-mess attorney. The paper bag 6:00 a.m. drunks and the night marauders. Liberace. The truth is Salt Lake (or any city) really is no more moral than Las Vegas — Vegas just likes to talk. Hey girl, guess what I did last night?! Paula might have been the only person ever to find Las Vegas uniquely honest. It’s a town that sells its indulgences right on the street corners. 

Paula trained as an EMT and that’s how she met her husband. George fell out of a palm tree, broke his wrist and suffered a concussion. He thought Paula was a nurse, of course he did. He’d never even heard of an Emergency Medical Technician and all doctors were imagined as men, the way all dogs were male and all cats were female when he was seven. Plus, he was in considerable pain, and not just in his wrist. It was a long fall, and the concussion caused his skittered thinking. The way the dark haired nurse held his good hand on the ride to Sunrise Hospital seemed personal. He began to think she was leaning over him, exposing the edge of her white lace bra, just visible in her V-neck uniform, purposely. Best to pass out now, because there was a part of him that was fully aware that his thoughts were running to the gauche. He closed his eyes, but Paula needed her concussed patient to stay awake. She put her palm on his chest and his heart responded.  

When George left the hospital, his arm in a cast, he was right-minded, albeit a little high on painkillers. He never expected to see the ambulance nurse again. But there she was! By the emergency room exit, exhaling from a cigarette; god she looked good in smoke! He liked her little body, her short dark hair, curls akimbo. He went over to thank her. But mostly to get her number. 

Paula looked him up and down. He was handsome in a hi-ho-silver outdoorsy way; he would never look comfortable on a couch. She had noticed the lines of him while he was laid out on the gurney, his water-blue eyes, sun-shot brown hair. Wide shoulders. 

“What were you doing up in a palm tree?” she asked. Because really, she had to assume he was crazy.

“It’s my job. I’m a freelance arborist. I take care of about half the palms in Vegas.” 

Paula held out her hand, wrist up. “What do you think of mine…?”

 

Paula and George were married in the Chapel of the Flowers on the Strip. Paula wore a vintage mini dress made entirely of crocheted she-loves-me daisies, and glossy patent leather Mary Janes  Creamy stockings. George wore a rented suit of midnight blue stamped with gold fleur-de-lis. They went to see the old school crooner Sonny King at the Bootlegger, and ate salt-crusted oysters that looked like miniature tide pools, drank champagne. The newlyweds were just so beautiful that night. 

George had reserved a room at the Mirage and there was no need for candles; the strobe of the Strip pulsed right through the windows — the Nevada aurora borealis. Paula went into the bathroom and emerged only in her Mary Janes with their prim two-inch stacked heels. She was not a stiletto type of girl. Her hair a backlit dark halo of curls. George thought her breasts looked the fruit of the Phoenix dactylifera — sweet little fleshy Halawi palm dates. Lucky for him he kept his fantasy image to himself. But Paula was a Phoenix, he was right about that. She did burn that bed to ash and rise up and do it again, all with her Mary Janes still on, those shoes reflecting the neon lights of the city as if they were expressing little passions of their own.

Not long after they got married Paula decided she was tired of old people and addicts — the most common ambulance pickups. Really, they both just broke her heart. She needed something a little sweeter so she enrolled at the Dreaming of Pastry culinary school to learn about things with French names and cream. Opera cake and madeleines. She didn’t graduate first in her class — Everybody knows that c-word Megan is giving Chef Maurice buttercream hand jobs in the walk-in pantry — but Paula did win la competition pour petit fours because no one could dare deny the glory of her marzipan. 

As a graduation present, George and Paula piled into their used Country Squire and pointed the avocado green wagon north, keeping the destination a surprise for the graduate. 

Paula closed her eyes. She assumed that when she woke up they still would be crossing the desolate wild. Her body felt the wagon roll to a stop, heard the tiny pings of the cooling engine. She opened her eyes to the surprise of an oasis. An oasis! For a moment she thought they were still in Las Vegas at one of the casino gardens, but there was no adjoining neon city. She looked up at a hotel — the Inn at Furnace Creek — cool stone, windows set in sage-colored frames. A red tile roof. The inn was at the top of a hill, and below it spilled the oasis. 

They got out of the car and walked through the maze of palm. “Deglet Noor,” George said, “Mexican Fan, there’s a pomegranate tree!” But Paula didn’t need names — she knew beauty was a feeling. But she didn’t know the history:

The Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad was built through the Badwater Basin, laying tracks in 1907 through the lowest elevation in North America to deliver red-and-white boxes of borax to a grocery store near you. Then came the luxury hotel built on Timbisha Shoshone grounds to augment the train business with tourism. Always there will be those who attempt the alchemy of dust to gold. Try to turn the desert green. It wasn’t particularly good for the Timbisha, although they could sell their baskets in the gift shop.

Travertine Springs poured endless, earth-warmed water first into the swimming pool at the inn, then through the oasis garden. Happy-go-lucky rills silvered over falls, careened the fat palm trunks, slid into green ponds. Then the stream slipped on out to the mundane chore of watering the golf course. Fairy-paths crisscrossed the oasis, up steps, over narrow granite bridges. Benches announced the best views, suggested no action at all. George and Paula turned their eyes to the serrated Panamint Range — yes they were purple, yes they were majestic — bordering the far horizon. 

“So, this is a little piece of paradise,” said Paula, exhaling the grit of Las Vegas, feeling like they hit the jackpot. They sat on a bench and Paula watched the way the desert sun singled out the gold in George’s brown hair. She understood for the first time why some people choose the desert. A cactus wren flew by. If they had waited long enough, they would have seen desert cottontail, kit fox, the stealthy coyote come the night. 

They couldn’t afford to stay at the Inn at Furnace Creek; they had reservations at the far less ambitious Ranch. But they could afford lunch in the fancy restaurant overlooking the grounds. Dessert was New York cheesecake and it tasted like it walked all the way from Lindy’s on its own two feet. “Sweet Jesus,” said George putting down his fork. “You could do better than this.” 

“I think I will,” said Paula, who got up from her seat and asked for the chef. Maybe because she was short and non-threatening, or because she had a sort of sugar-glaze about her, she made it back into the kitchen. But that wasn’t the reason why. It was simply that Paula’s timing was good. The last pastry chef had recently left in a cloud of suspicion over a missing order of saffron — the stuff costs more per ounce than gold. Meanwhile, all the deserts were arriving twice a week and a day old from a bakery in Las Vegas. 

While Paula disappeared into the kitchen, George wandered the oasis, mentally naming plants and looking for bugs and rot, turning over new leaves in a literal way. When he made it back to the restaurant he found his wife in a white apron licking a spoonful of pink fondant while the kitchen manager spelled out PAULA, HEAD PASTRY CHEF with her Bakelite labeling gun. 

“We’re moving,” Paula said, and George turned his eyes from his lucky-charm wife to the manager. 

“May I speak to the Head of Grounds?” 

 

FRANCINE & GRACE

 

Francine adopted Grace (that took a bit of paperwork) now that she was no longer a nun, which she knew she never should have been in the first place. She rented a craftsman bungalow in Berkeley and registered Grace at Sacred Heart Catholic school. As Grace got older, it became a sort of joke between mother and daughter for Grace to introduce her friends to “my mom, Sister Francine.” 

At Sacred Heart, Grace went to Mass five days a week before class started, plus of course on Sundays. By the time she was ten, Grace and her best friend Marie walked to Sacred Heart together. On foggy autumn mornings, the girls pretended the cloudy shroud was the Holy Ghost. Winter was rain under a shared dour umbrella. In spring, the blooming ornamental plum trees reminded Grace of the plastic flowered swim caps sold at Newburry’s Five & Dime. Summer was hydrangeas, put a rusty nail in the dirt, the blooms will turn from pink to blue like a sleight of hand. 

Graced loved going to church, had an esteem for the taste of Communion. It didn’t taste like the body of Christ, which she imagined to be salted by His sweat and the spray of Galilee. To Grace, it tasted like His clothes, a circle of cloth. She pictured nuns in white wimples weaving the cloth on a loom while singing Dominique, nique, nique. Grace held the host in the top of her mouth for as long as possible to feel it melt like the rice paper around Chinese candy. One Sunday Grace touched it with her finger and Marie made her walk home with her hand in front of her until Grace washed her hands. Twice. Grace wondered, but did not ask, why can’t I touch the body of Christ?

  Grace believed that Francine, always awake by dawn — old habits die hard — attended early mass on Sundays, allowing Grace to sleep in and go later with Marie. But what Francine was doing was communing with pinwheels of French crullers and black coffee while reading the San Francisco Chronicle at Dunkin’ Doughnuts. For Grace, the rules were clear — go to church or chance Hell. Francine didn’t want her daughter to worry about her mother’s flaming soul. But Francine was done, or at least on hiatus with the Catholic Church. So she lied. Dunked another doughnut and ate the fib sweet. 

Grace adored her mother. Francine tucked her into bed with stories about Francine’s father who owned a bar. He served the good stuff up front and kept a bootlegging business running out the back door, selling cheap moonshine to the Blacks and hardcore drunks. Grace thought bootlegger was kin to swashbuckler, and she pictured her grandfather in buccaneer boots. Grace didn’t have the literary knowledge to name it, but she imagined the bar as a sort of Canterbury Tales, a revolving cast of characters who brought the stories of the world right to you. 

Grace knew that her grandmother died young and that Francine spent her academic years at a Catholic boarding school, then lost her father to pneumonia just before she turned 18. Grace assumed it was boarding school that led Francine to the Carmelites. The truth was that Francine was grieving and untethered, and like many of her generation she followed the Pied Piper of the ‘60s over the Golden bridge straight to the heart of the Haight. She traded her frankincense for patchouli, her opiate of the masses for opium. It was a mistake. The flower-child life was too tough, too much for sheltered Francine. 

The Carmelite Chapel and Monastery of St. Giles is located within tripping distance of Haight Ashbury. During the Summer of Love Francine, strung out and tie-dyed, reached back to the comfort of her childhood and took sanctuary with the Carmelites. In later years, if anyone asked Sister Francine how she came to the Carmelites, she said, “I just wanted to stop sleeping on sidewalks and dicks — although honestly the Carmelite beds are almost as hard.” But that was with her inside voice, her private little joke. Her outside voice said, “I was called by God.” The truth was, the 1960s almost killed her, and through she was grateful to stay within the shelter of the Church, she felt she had gone to two extremes, never living a normal life. Well, she had it now, and Grace didn’t need to know every little detail of how she got there. 

Grace loved to hear about Francine’s past, but it made her worry too. It did not seem to Grace that she would ever have any stories of her own to tell her future children. She was too young to realize that being raised by a defrocked apiarist nun was a pretty remarkable childhood. She worried that her life would be uneventful. When she grew up, of course Grace came to know that no life is uneventful. It was a wasted worry. The only question would be, would she want to tell it?

 

GEORGE AND PAULA

 

Perhaps there were never two people more fit to live in the quiet of Death Valley. George’s father was right all along about the value of small places, and the couple found it easy to leave Las Vegas where the brightest stars are on billboards. They were assigned a small company home to rent, one of the Boulder houses, named not for stone, but for history. The houses were originally used to shelter laborers for the titanic raising of Boulder Dam in the 1930’s, and later transported over 100 miles to Death Valley. When Paula learned this, she pictured a ramshackle line of shanties shimmering up the highway — a ghost town on the move in the glooming. But things will always come and go in the desert. When the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad failed in 1940, the tracks were sent to Egypt.  

When the wind blew, George and Paula could open their windows and smell the freshly cut grass from the golf course. After a rain the air smelled of limestone and ozone. They had all of the valley to explore, the little blue pupfish in the water cavern of Devil’s Hole, the super blooms of spring. Joshua trees and twisted old bristlecone pines, sentinels in a slot canyon. Sex is a great filler of lazy hours — an endless game of Twister. When the babies came — Addie in 1990, then Remi in ‘92, Blue three years after that — life could have become quite complicated. But Paula had her pastry and George his palms. Eventually George became the Head of Grounds. Practically as soon as each kid was old enough to take the training wheels off their bikes, they were left to be raised mostly by the desert. Just be home by the time the sun sets or you might die out there and we won’t even know where to look for ya bones. 

Paula and George had few disagreements, but baptism of their children was one of them. 

Paula would have been happy to leave religion at the altar, and certainly George was aware of Paula’s reasons. But George had a lingering vision of unbaptized children consigned to Dante’s gray limbo, where souls wandered through a forest of crowded ghosts for trees. When he put it that way, Paula pushed her dark curls behind her ears and said, “A little water never hurt anyone.” 

Beyond that platitude of the soul, following no set religious code, presenting side dishes but never the main course seemed to George and Paula a fine way to raise their children to be independent thinkers. But it is difficult for children to sort and categorize adult concepts. Adults talk so fast. Hands fly and children don’t always know if they should duck or expect a butter biscuit. Intent is hard to discern. What do you mean — When the bough breaks the cradle will fall? Thus it should be no surprise that when their inquisitive middle child Remi first heard the Psalm Yea, though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death she thought it was literally written about Death Valley, and that Psalms were palm trees. She wondered which palm in the oasis at Furnace Creek was number 23. Should she count from the bottom up or the top down? 

Well, the Carroll children’s religious upbringing remained a splintered thing. Paula didn’t care too much what they believed, as long as it wasn’t Joseph Smith. George was not one to talk of God, so much as to show his children the desert, the amethyst hills and the whirling-dervish borax dust bowls of Death Valley. To George, nature was divine. Addie was entranced by the drum beats of the Timbisha Shoshone. Remi by the bible thumps of the roving Baptists whose revival tents rose like mirages in the summer night — 110 degrees at midnight and the preacher calling down the brimstone. Blue went for the tables of fried chicken and lemonade after. To a growing boy, God dare take no other form than food, could have been Blue’s creed. 

It was Remi who was most interested in watching visiting Buddhist monks spend three days building a mandala out of colored sand at Artist Point and then let the wind dissemble it like a naughty toddler. She’d heard the reverberating booms of the singing sands at Eureka Dunes — the terrible language of the mountain gods. She went with her dad to the Date Palm Chapel because sometimes he liked to go to the outdoor service. The kids could go or sleep in. It was up to them. Paula didn’t go. 

George did notice Remi’s interest and he bought her The Illustrated Children’s Bible & Book of Saints and Buddhism for Western Kids. Remi read those books to tatters and smears of peanut butter. But she didn’t know if the stories were fairytales or real.  

Theology to the Carroll family was a Thursday Soup — put all the leftovers in, stir, and hope for the best. “God’s in your sheets, just as much as he’s in any cathedral. You don’t need to leave home to find God,” was Paula’s theory. That statement made Remi bring a flashlight to bed. In the dark, she pitched a tent with her feet and shone the yellow flicker into the tabernacle of her blankets, expecting to find at least the Holy Ghost or a little lamb. But all she saw was her own self in her own pink jammies, brown braids dull as ever, her searchlight projecting a harvest moon on the screen of sheets. It worried her a little. 

Blue didn’t worry about much. He had scabs to pick and popguns to shoot. A bike to ride and miles and miles of dust to moil into the contrails of his youth. He and his buddies would follow the Amargosa River to where it disappeared into the desert, looking for gold but only ever finding rust. Blue was wild as a red-tailed hawk, wild as burros. It is good to be a cowboy.

Remi sometimes called her older sister Haughty Addie. Addie’s talents would pied-piper her right out of Death Valley, Addie was certain of it. She considered the world a music box — wild water over rocks, the chatty lawnmower — every movement had a measure. Addie could listen to radio static and find an underlayer of plainsong. Give the girl a stick, she’ll conduct it.

Remi, as many a middle child, was truly the most overlooked.  “Nobody much notices what goes on in the middle,” was one of her mother’s expressions, “unless you’re an éclair.” George and Paula didn’t realize that Remi would have preferred instruction to choice. 

Remi wanted to know the forces and the rules. Picture her now, two skinny desert-brown braids, teeth so straight she must have done something right. Nevada-blue eyes. Skin on the verge of a breakout; heart too. Thirteen years old in 2005, waiting for Grace to show up with her velvet bag of holy cards shot with gold. In early September of that year, it was Paula who would first spot Grace on the side of the road, thinking the girl was either a mirage, or on the verge of a glimmer-out. 

 

Sometimes George’s old wrist injury from falling out of the palm tree would give a shout out, remind him that the past is never past. It didn’t worry him too much. But looking back, it seemed to him the first time he could recall the feeling of losing his mind, the way he felt when he had the concussion, was when he couldn’t remember his son’s name. Oh sure, he remembered the name Blue. But that was just a nickname, given because the newborn’s eyes demanded it. But what was his little boy’s real name? George went over to the Last Kind Word Saloon — the place where all old cowboys long to die. Well, Annie Oakley rolled over in her grave, because George liked a peaty whiskey and he ordered Talisker’s from the Isle of Skye when there was a perfectly good bottle of Old Overholt ever at the ready. 

George could feel, could almost feel, the campfire whiskey roll through his veins, heart pumping the liquor to his brain, little bursts of electricity lighting him up. “George Finley Carroll Junior,” said George out loud, but quietly. 

“I don’t know why you drink that crap. Tastes like cigarettes,” said his friend Ben from behind the bar, pouring a second. 

“You still driving that piece of shit truck of yours?” countered George, and the buddies were off to the races.

 

GRACE AND FRANCINE

 

Grace wanted to live up to her name. She wanted the nuns at school to love her. She was ecstatic to be chosen to carry the roses up to the statue of Mary in her blue plaster gown, place those blood-red, love-red flowers at Mary’s feet. Standing in front of the class, waiting her turn to set her bouquet, Grace surveyed the other students, expecting to see a kind of adulation bestowed on her. But there was that stupid Anne, in the back of the class with her straight-across bangs, pulling her nose up, making a piggy face. Making Grace giggle. Sister Esther yanked those flowers right out of Grace’s little fingers — You think this is funny?! — and gave them to another girl, a deserving girl.

Grace didn’t cause Anne to fall down on a Girl Scouts trip to Roller King, she didn’t even will Anne to fall. No one thought it was Grace’s fault that she wasn’t able to stop in time, that she skated right over the speedbump of Anne’s skinny arm. Besides, it might have been the fall that caused the break. Grace didn’t know if she should confess how satisfying retribution felt, for Grace was certain that Anne’s broken arm was punishment for laughing the roses out of Grace’s hands. That was how God worked! 

Her catechisms taught Grace that just because she could do something, it didn’t mean she should. She had to choose correct action, and she wanted to. Her indiscretions were small and private. She worried about the black spots on her soul, the weight of that darkness on her white-cloud soul. 

 

There are lucent September days that catch the phoenix of a dying season. On such an seventh-grade morning, Grace purposely threw her red rubber ball over the school yard fence. Sister Esther told her to hurry up. It felt exquisite to open the forbidden gate into the ditch-bramble beyond. On the pretense of retrieving the ball, she picked blackberries from a wild bush and ate them while spying into the boy’s playground. She didn’t get caught. The berries stained her fingers red, and tasted sweeter, more inspiring, than the grape juice blood of Christ. 

Such were Grace’s youthful transgressions. 

 

There is a small, poorly tended, retired graveyard well behind Sacred Heart Church. A grove of eucalyptus sheds bark in strips of paper, and the leaves smell of the best kind of clean. Of course Grace always knew the graveyard was there, but it was sometime in her freshman year of high school that she first stepped inside the scrolled and arched iron gate. It had rained that morning, and Grace picked up and broke some leaves, rubbed the exposed veins against the veins of her wrist. There was something in the quiet nature of the place that drew her to return to the woods, always alone. The graves were secondary to her; she read the mossy headstones, experiencing the cemetery as if she would never belong to such a place. 

But then Grace found the stone of Alice Farrell (1930-1944), Alice just the same age as Grace. Of course Grace knew that children died, but seeing it carved in green-black granite — it was so much more permanent than a newspaper story, tossed at the end of the day. Grace visited Alice, brought urban wild flowers. In a way that Grace could not articulate, she almost envied this girl who died, surely, in innocence. Puberty was confusing Grace. She wondered, when was the exact day that it became not about how she swam at the Strawberry Canyon community pool, but how she looked coming out of the water? 

One of the nuns saw Grace resting on Alice’s grave — not laying down! — just resting her back against the stone. Grace’s mother was called in for a conference — It was that poor girl Alice Farrell, killed by some vagrant who left bite marks on her body! Unseemly, disrespectful. 

Francine didn’t see it that way. Graveyards inspire contemplation. If only Grace hadn’t actually been sitting on the grave. “Honey, you probably shouldn’t go back there,” was all her mom said. 

How could Grace defend herself? How could she explain that she was 14 years old and didn’t know what to do with her straight red hair, her new breasts, her bloody underpants, that she still wanted to be a little girl, ride a rusty bike. How could she explain that sitting in the graveyard with Alice and the warm stones and the menthol woods, felt closer to God than the dead-tree pews at Sacred Heart? That the holy water font was smudgy from all the fingers dipped into the basin, while the rain in the grove was cold and clear. How could she explain that she was trying to craft her future in the shade-dulled sun of a quiet place? How could she possibly both live up to her name, and become an adult? The older she got, the closer she felt to becoming a citizen of sin. She didn’t know the words to express her feelings. 

And why, oh why, was Bart Cooper so cute! 

Grace felt doomed by her body and her floppy heart. Well, we all are. It was just that Grace’s upbringing made her feel liable for it. Francine had come to question if she should have put Grace in Catholic school at all. But Father Ward’s childcare payments had extended beyond the two years that Francine had asked for, as long as Francine kept Grace in Catholic school. Well, it was too late now. God knows that girl insisted on dressing up as a nun every All Saints Day, although by high school it was a more slutty nun. She worried that Grace took her religion too literally, too much focus on the rules and not enough on the wonder. 

“Listen, Grace,” she told her daughter. “You gotta take the church with a grain of salt.” Grace couldn’t help it, she pictured the pillar of salt. “Unless you’re in a convent, the place is run by men. They have control over you. Ugh!” By then, Francine had become a feminist, but Grace had just become more confused. 

Bart Cooper did ask Grace out to a movie, in their Junior year. He said they were going to see The Last Samurai, and Grace thought they were, but when they met up at the theater, Bart wanted to just go walk around. Oh, how exciting your own city streets if you are seventeen and the street lights — Stop, Slow, GO — are your only chaperone. It was December and people were out shopping, music spilling from the shops. Grace felt as if they were breaking all the rules just to be part of that night. Bart reached for her hand. She took her mittens off. When they headed back to the theater, it started to rain. At the back of the building there were collapsed boxes and Grace sat on the cardboard. Bart made a sort of homeless shelter around them, then sat down too. Leg touching leg. Bart kissed her. Grace felt awkward, but it was hard to think over the thrumming of her body, and then his hand was on her breast. 

It wasn’t the full-sized portrait of Jesus with his flowing hair in the hallway of Sacred Heart that made Grace stop Bart’s hand, break the kiss — although that image did come to her. It was more every school kid’s innate knowledge of their place in the social caste. Bart was a jock, dirty blond hair with a wave like the California coastline, billboard smile. He was popular. Grace was in the Ecology Club. She was pretty too, she had those eyes, hair like burning wood, although she didn’t yet believe it. There was a part of Grace who still saw herself as one of the kids that used to have to pull their retainers out for lunch. She couldn’t buy that Bart wanted her for anything but her new boobs. She might have been right. But, gosh, what a kiss! What a thing — a body. 

Grace went home that night (How was the movie? — Oh, pretty good. You know, Tom Cruise) and pulled out her bag of holy cards. She barely remembered her first five years at the Carmelite Victorian annex. Mostly she remembered the bees and a feeling of safety. Sometimes she played the cards like tarot — laid them out to get a glimpse at her future. But that’s really not a good idea when most of the saints are martyrs and died in some horrific way. Out of the rose velvet bag came Saint Eulalia of Barcelona. Eulalia’s fate was to be placed in a barrel with shards of glass and rolled down a street that would be named Saint Eulalia’s Descent. Grace sighed. Put her head down on her pillow and pretended it was the expanse of Bart’s chest. 

 

Four years later, Grace dreamed she had a baby girl. Even though she was just born, the baby asked Grace to name her Twentieth Century. When Grace woke up she went straight to the store for a pregnancy test. It was positive. But from the moment Grace found out she was pregnant, she knew Twentieth Century was in trouble. She didn’t go to Francine for help, not to Marie or anyone. She didn’t want help because she needed to make up her own mind. She believed people only ask for advice when they want to hear themselves talk. Yap, yap, yap. Also, if she asked her mother for help, then her mother would know.

Grace grew up with Valentine’s Day cards, decent cuts of occasional steak, new dresses for Easter and the first day of school. Herbal Essences shampoo. She was not the kind of girl who doesn’t know the father of her baby. But then again, she was. 

Grace believed that repentance was possible through ashes on her forehead, that water could be holy. But she was also brought up in Berkeley where rebellion brewed in the coffee houses and the college students were never interested in surf boarding or how many kids could be stuffed in a Bug. They wanted to change the world. There was always a war to fight. 

Telegraph Avenue is the main street in Berkeley, running downhill from the university toward the San Francisco Bay. When Grace turned seventeen she got a job at Carta Fiorentina, a stationary store on Telegraph that specialized in marbled Florentine paper made by hand in a back studio. The shop smelled of good paper and paint, and the gold accents on the finished work reminded Grace of her holy cards. While she was still in high school, the owners encouraged Grace to keep her school uniform on when she worked; it fit the general theme. 

On work days, Grace took the bus and then walked down Telegraph, her Stewart Black a flag, her knee socks at half-mast. A Catholic girl is easy to spot. She watched the old hippies on day trips, the college students, lax or animated, filling the tables at outdoor cafes. She watched the students pass out flyers. The bells of the university campanile heralded the hour. But Grace didn’t feel she belonged to the vibrant street. She belonged behind her silver cross. The Gulf War was on TV, the protest was four blocks away, but she only walked three.

A few years later Grace went to UC Berkeley on a Carmelite scholarship (who knew?!). She at last became one of the college students she had so envied. She upgraded her fashion from tartan to Madonna (the singer, not the mother of God) in a bid at irony. After all, Madonna loved her some crosses. 

But Berkeley made Grace feel awkward — its purposeful counterculture was a demanding idol. She would have fit in better at Holy Name. She studied History because she thought hers was dull. All that was left of the ‘60s was a lingering in the air brought over from the after-burn of the weed still smoking in the Haight. But there were plenty of new bandwagons. Osama Bin Laden saw the Twin Towers as Sodom and Gomorrah and President Bush as a pillar of saltpeter. The Janjaweed were scorching the earth of Darfur. Matthew Shepard was reaching a type of sainthood for the gay community, and Grace made a holy card of him at Carta Fiorentina, Matthew depicted as a wheat-gold scarecrow broken on a split-rail fence. The card was beautiful, with fleur-di-les of barbed wire, and a tiny bicyclist sporting gold-leaf wings in the upper corner representing the man who found Matthew — at first mistaking Matthew for a scarecrow. 

Grace used the card as a bookmark. It was a just a project for her art class to her. She joined no cause. She covered her Catholic past in vintage Blond Ambition outfits, wrote her papers at Three Worlds Café, and expected nothing to happen.

On the last day of innocence, Grace was reading Camus. Christos Alexander sat down next to her and shredded any remaining stitch of plaid skirt right off the face of her thighs. Her hand shook as she put down her coffee cup. His stare was blue caffeine. 

“Anybody sitting here?” he asked, scraping a hand through his Greek hair. The place was practically empty. He wore a White Stripes tee shirt, his jeans authentic hobo or left-over Nirvana curated grunge. He vibed musician or artist, or welder. Something non-student and grown up. 

Grace didn’t say anything. 

Christos, sitting down, shrugged towards Grace’s open notebook. “What are you writing?” he asked — ignoring Camus — his focus on the personal.

Grace would rather die than tell this man that she had to write a paper comparing and contrasting Arron Burr and Andrew Jackson. She knew she was blushing, probably looked like a burning bush. “You from around here?” was her answer. 

Grace was looking for the real world, and he was looking right at her. 

 

Christos was older than Grace, and he had been in the Gulf War. He was intense, he had scars. He was direct and addicted and had a burned-out soul from accidentally killing a little kid and the kid’s mother on the Highway of Death outside of Kuwait City. Or maybe he did it on purpose. Sometimes the story changed. Christos did not know that Grace was a virgin, didn’t know that she was more interested in feeling the pressure of his trigger finger on her skin than any other part of him. 

In for a penny, in for a pound. 

Grace told her mother that Marie was subletting a furnished apartment in San Francisco and that Grace was joining her, would be working at the Carta Fiorentina on Maiden Lane for the summer. 

“I thought Marie was in Los Gatos?” her mother asked, her eyebrows knitting together.

“Yeah, for school, this is just for summer. We’ll have you over for dinner.” Grace wondered where she had learned to lie so smoothly. “We have a bay window!”

Of course Francine believed her, even thought it was a good idea for Grace try something new. San Francisco was practically their backyard; she wasn’t going far. 

But Grace’s move was only to Point Richmond, into Christos’s studio that smelled of old bong water. Christos showed Grace his illegally constructed driftwood sculptures of prurient themes out on the mudflats of Emeryville, between Berkeley and San Francisco. They were just drifter’s shit. He wrote violent poems on her skin and they were shit too, but now Grace was softly high, and the words sounded like the pealing bells of the campanile. She made Christos tell her war stories and she imagined Nighthawks over the desert, infrared goggles, camels on the highway, spittin’ mad. She confused the smell of his sweat for the scent of date palms by the Euphrates River. Grace thought Christos knew something real, while all she knew was the poetry of prayers. 

 

It happened so fast. Christos took Grace to the Glory Hole and the Hit Club on the dirty side of Oakland. Grace got high and danced by herself. Other men moved into her sphere, and Christos watched from the bar. Grace lost her job at Carta Fiorentina because she didn’t show up. Christos sold coke, and sheets of LSD that looked like Cracker Jack tattoos. Red-threaded pot. Whatever came his way. But a lot of it never hit the resale market, and they were broke. Dinner was Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco Treat. 

Their apartment bedroom window was shattered, the fog from the bay came inside, made itself right at home. Grace woke up under a ghost blanket. In the mornings she could smell the cold ocean air in the length of her red braid, could lick the salt off her arms like a cat. She was hungry. So she did. She looked out over a sci-fi skyline provided by the smoking stacks of the Standard Oil refinery, felt the shadow of WWII in the deserted burly Kaiser shipyards — yards that once produced three ships a day bound for troubled waters. Grace fell back to sleep to the long-distance loneliness of freight trains.

Christos had this idea. “The girls always smelled good, and they were, I don’t know, plump,” he put his hands out as if he was touching flesh, “and they wore those belly-dancer clothes, silky. There was candy.” He was reaching for images, trying to sell her something. 

Grace had a good imagination. She saw rosemary-scented oil baths, Persian silk, fat green pistachios and rose-flavored Turkish Delight. For a moment Grace was the Little Match Girl lighting her last match, looking in on the feast. Then he said, “Only one man a night. I’ll set it all up….”

The cross Grace still wore around her neck, the one Christos liked to tease her about, might as well have glowed with the Holy Ghost. Grace girded herself with all of her past and all of her strength, all the power of the redheads, told Christos to fuck off. Oh, what a satisfying word!

One week later she was crashing with Marie in the Los Gatos hills and starting a new waitress job at the Good Earth. She was eating nothing but whole grains and fruit. Jake Jamerson was the cook, and he was a hipster, but all shinned up. Nature boy, and he could make a mean grilled cheese with Havarti. He only did drugs he could grow; organic pot in a pot. Jake said, Move in, I have room! It was easy to slip into his clean sheets, his earth eyes, and there Grace was, pregnant, and she may as well have flipped a coin to guess the father. While she was taking all those drugs with Christos she forgot to take the one she really needed.

 

Grace went alone to Big Sur, wandered the tide pools, little wombs of nebulous and darting life. She thought of all the drugs she had taken. Coke took her up, pot brought her down, LSD took her over the rainbow. 

Grace imagined telling Jake she was pregnant. Somehow she pictured it happening in the kitchen at the Good Earth while he was pulling a sheet of granola cookies from the oven. His face would light up and he would ask her to marry him! They would marry, not in the Catholic Church, but in the Muir Redwoods just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Very early in the morning and Grace would wear a veil of fog held in place by a single gardenia. 

What a pipe dream. Straight out of a bong. 

And how was it she was pregnant anyway? How could she be pregnant when the sex was so bad? Wouldn’t conceiving a whole new life require the ingredient of pleasure? Shouldn’t it be the orgasm that sparked life? Well, Christos and Jake certainly had theirs. Ugh. 

For twelve hours Grace stayed by the ocean, the waves pixilating, she was inside the Magic Eye. It was the last Cracker Jack tattoo that would ever dissolve on her tongue. Grace laid down on the gold-standard sand. She tried not to picture Twentieth Century, sparking drug dripping through her thimble-brain, DNA contorting. Forever, she knew, she would feel the guilt of purposely drugging her unborn baby. But that was the point. To keep the baby unborn, Grace needed to wreck the fetus, otherwise how could she let Twentieth Century go?  

 

Grace pawned her high school graduation diamond earrings and showed up for her appointment at the Bay Area Women’s clinic. In the waiting room the nurse gave her Valium to relax and she sat around pretending to read magazines with the other woman. She looked at them all. There was a blond girl with her blond boyfriend. She was crying and he was supportive. Grace wondered if crying made her feel less guilty. For the love of God, if you want to keep your baby get up and walk out. On this day Grace felt an intolerance for indecision — she couldn’t afford it. There was an older woman who looked like she lived in a shoe. Had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. The tall Black woman, she looked strong enough to use the hanger.

Grace liked the Valium. They called her into a dim room with a single bed, a big overhead light, and those metal stirrups. She put her heels in the stirrups and the nurse pushed her legs apart. The nurse’s fingers in thin membrane gloves came sliding, sliding into her. “You’re about ten weeks,” she said.  

Grace wanted the nurse never to have said that to her. It made the baby so much more real. Soft blankets and milk, little fingers and bassinets. The doctor came in. Onesies, powder, diaper pins. He turned on the dilation & curettage engine with its efficient vacuum aspiration. Bubbles and nursery rhymes. He put a tube inside Grace, deeper than anything had ever been before. Rocking chairs and lavender. The slender tube scraped and scooped and it really didn’t feel like much at all. Grace tried not to think about what it felt like to Twentieth Century. 

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. 

Hail Mary, full of grace. 

And then it was done. Grace was transferred to the recovery room where she sat again with the other women. Staff gave the women orange juice and cookies like nursery school. Everyone actually seemed to feel a little better now that it was over. Grace could see that the blond girl had transformed herself back into a cheerleader. The older lady didn’t look so old. 

But Grace was wrecked. She went home to her mother, Sister Francine. To the arms of an angel.

 

Well, let’s face it. An angel who thinks Jesus walks on water, but has conflictions about institutional religion. As Grace told her mother her story — romance novel, horror — it was hard to keep up with the genre. But in a way, Grace was reciting Francine’s diary. Oh maybe the cover had changed from pink pleather to tooled leather with hand-torn paper, but the tin key remained the same: Child who loves the pageantry and the rules when she is little, comes up against the sticky rapture of desire. Raised on bible verses and Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No, Grace held herself in innocence as long as she could. A little bug in amber. And then all hell broke loose. Francine had tried to save Grace from the drugs and the dicks, but all she had done was allow history to repeat itself. Francine just listened and ate her child’s sins. 

The hardest thing for Grace to tell was about Twentieth Century. Especially the day at Big Sur and what she did to make sure she would go through with the abortion. In the end, she couldn’t tell the Big Sur part. It was just too awful. Some actions stay with us forever, and Grace knew this would be her albatross. Carcass around her neck.

 “Here’s what we are going to do,” Francine at last said, telling Grace her plan. 

Together they went to Britex, the fabric mecca in San Francisco. They sewed a jumper of woodland animals — fox and badger — and a pixie-hooded jacket. They bought readymade rose socks and a rose angora blanket, soft as bunny ears. And a little stuffed bunny. All of this Grace and Francine settled into a fair-sized, thick cardboard stationary box from Carta Fiorentina, the paper covering as beautiful as any holy card. 

On a cloudy night, the momentary mother and grandmother went to the way-back graveyard of Sacred Heart. Grace nodded to Alice Farrell. Farewell. They used a garden trowel to dig a shallow — well, it must be said — grave, under the eucalyptus and the trumpet vines. Settled the box within. Then they scattered earth and paperbark, and rattles of eucalyptus pods back over the disturbed ground. No marker, but they would always know the spot. Walked away hand-in-hand. 

“Do you feel like you want to go to confession?” Francine had grown to believe that forgiveness is granted through personal contrition, that one did not necessarily need the intermediary of a priest in a confessional box. In fact, confession now felt a little voyeuristic to Francine. A sort of Days of Our Lives for priests denied personal fleshy messes. But she felt her Catholic daughter might benefit from going.

“I looked it up. I’d have to go to a bishop.” Big sin. 

Of course Francine knew a bishop — Roger’s boss. Francine almost laughed. Roger would livid with her, raising a daughter who had an abortion. Still, she could take on St. Sanctimonious for her daughter’s sake.

“But I don’t want to go anyway,” Grace said. 

Francine was nobody’s fool. She knew her daughter. “Is that because you don’t believe you can be absolved?”

Bingo. “And because given the same circumstances, I’d do it again.” Hard admission. Maybe not the Big Sur part. 

They walked through the angel-light of streetlamps, through the scents of summer-after-dark. Well, some things just need to sit awhile. 

 

School would start in a few weeks, Grace’s junior year at UC Berkeley. But she no longer wanted to major in History. She had one now. What she needed was a future. Francine, perhaps over-compensating for Grace’s grief or guilt, bought her a 15-year-old Pontiac Grand Safari with exactly 722 miles left to live (surprisingly close to the purchase price) and suggested Grace might want to go on a road trip for, maybe a month? You know, get away from it all? Come back and we’ll figure it out. Things will be better then. 

 Grace had this vision of the two of them scrubbing the house, themselves, their souls with Pine Sol. Hanging their souls out on the line like carpets and beating the dust out with a broom. Get some of those black spots out. They would be better then. 

She went to look at the car. “Really, a Grand Safari!? I’m going to look like a creeper!” The car clearly had suffered all kinds of domestic abuse. But really Grace loved it. It was the greatest shade of red and it would hold all her stuff.

Francine had tried to get money out of Roger to send Grace to a retreat at Esalen in Big Sur, but given the fact that Francine could not tell Roger of Grace’s transgressions (She’s depressed, Roger!!), and given Esalen’s New Age, Eastern philosophies, Roger wasn’t going for it. Maybe Francine should have just come up with the money herself, because instead of the controlled grounds of Esalen, Grace bought herself a golden ticket to the party on the Black Rock Desert, as far away from the California coast as a landscape can possibly imagine. 

Grace was going to Burning Man. 

 

Grace left the warren of the Bay Area, headed east. It always surprised her how quickly the city-maze unwound into barely developed, grassy hills. You have to call these hills rolling. In spring, the grass is the shade of parakeets, freckled with orange poppies. Lupins, and yellow-brick-roads of mustard flowers. Now the grass was August-dry, dairy cows crowded under the wide branches of stoic oaks. It evoked old California to Grace. She passed the Pinole oil refinery with its Necco candy-painted holding tanks. Soon came the delta and Sacramento, the city built on gold nuggets and road-side produce stands, and then over the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Those mountains mean business. 

Grace wanted to make Reno by nightfall. Driving down the twisty Mt. Rose Highway,  the put-it-on-a-calendar beauty of California just gradually trailed off. Grace hadn’t even really noticed until poof, it was gone. Welcome to Nevada. 

August isn’t Reno’s best month. Here’s the seven-day forecast: Hot and dry, and don’t throw your friggin’ cigarette butts out the window. 

And the desert was just getting started.

Grace spent the night at the Peppermill, her first casino. The main casino was a blotch of color and sound, the carpet oddly some sort of space theme, the clanging bells of the slot machines with their whirling faces, the pour of a jackpot, the slap of the cards in a dealer’s hands. Cocktail waitresses dressed mostly in flesh. Buffets of shrimp, curled up in death, lemon-glossed. Grace loved it! The colors reminded her of stained glass windows. If you soften your eyes, you can skip what it’s selling, and just enjoy the kaleidoscope. She ate the shrimp. 

Grace continued into the heart of the desert. She never felt so alone. She had delayed going out to the playa until there were only three days left of the festival, because she suspected Burning Man might not be the best place for a Carmelite wanna-be fallen from grace. What would Jesus do? Well, she kept driving. So that was that. 

Grace stopped in Elroy at the Native American mini-mart just to look for signs of joy in the effervesce of a fountain Coke. Back out in the parking lot, Grace saw a woman approaching on a wide-tire mountain bike, sweating something fierce. Grace walked over and handed the woman her coke. “Thanks, oh my god, thanks!” She finished the thing.

“What happened to you?” Grace asked.

“My fucking car broke down.” 

The woman had a huge backpack on, her sunburnt biceps all spiniched up like Popeye. She looked capable. “You need a ride to the Black Rock?” Grace offered. It was obvious where the woman was headed.

“Would ya?! I’ve been hitchhiking. Not easy with a bike.”

“Where’s your car?”

“Lodi! It’s always fucking Lodi.”

“Oh Lord,” said Grace, opening the back door for the woman to toss her backpack in. 

Fresh Cokes in hand, Grace and her new friend Barbarella headed out. Grace pointed the wagon towards the Black Rock Desert, mountains on both sides funneling them forward. There was no natural color but brown, so the Grand Safari sparked like a ruby slipper. The sun came through the windshield, little dust motes everywhere. They passed a far-off view of Pyramid Lake that could have been a delusion. A band of mustangs that would not look at them. It was a pencil sketch of land. When they finally got to Gerlach and then out onto the playa, Barbarella gave a low whistle. “Looks like there’s a scorched earth policy here.” 

The playa is an alkali basin, dried up and cracked. The only inhabiting animals were humans, and they were transient, population 35,000 in Black Rock City. But in the sagebrush dunes surrounding the playa, the puny kit fox with its big ears, the kangaroo mouse, wondered what new Armageddon is this?, and took cover. Maybe a jackalope loped by — who’s to say what’s real in the desert? It’s true that when the playa floods, the dormant eggs of the fairy shrimp hatch and grow three inches in the ephemeral water. There is ever magic in this world.

Black Rock City is built in a semicircle, a mile and a half across. In the middle stands the Man — an artful effigy infused with combustibles, and like a monk’s mandala, built to blow. Scattered across the playa, fantastical art, most of it big, most of it hands-on, right this way, step right up, most of it built to blow your mind. Mutant vehicles scutter around — golf carts to parade floats all dressed up like Timothy Leary and Marti Gras had a baby. 

Grace and Barbarella set up camp; Grace had plenty to share. She earned her patches — Adventurer, Eco Explorer, Take Action. Barbarella pulled a bottle of tequila from her pack. They drank it straight from the glass neck and bit into limes that were born in Costa Rica. A little drunk, they saddled their bikes, Barbarella tossing the tequila into the incongruous pink wicker basket lodged between her handlebars. The liquid sloshed through the confines of the bottle in little golden waves. 

The women headed out of the campgrounds and into the no-car zone, into the bizarre.

A girl on a beach cruiser bike glided past in a cherry crinoline half-slip and a 1950’s pointy-cup bra. Barbarella almost followed her. A drag queen on stilts. Mad Max passing out Twinkies. A piano on wheels playing jazz. Was that a pirate ship? An octopus, a movie theater, a Victorian bar.

They passed a tent offering to reinstate your virginity and Grace thought of Christo. She had liked the ropy scar across his shoulder. But he was always twisting her arm. She thought of Jake, and in that moment she named him Two-Shakes-Jake, and laughed. Well, what’s to be done about it? 

A fire-breathing fish swam by, singeing the desert air, giving it a taste of its own medicine. The Billion Bunny March started up. All those fuzzy ears. Grace and Barbarella watched the parade, most of the women topless and bouncing. “I feel like Empress Nympho,” Barbarella declared, and started pointing and singing, “Yes, no no no no no no no, yes, no no, yes, no no no no no no, YES!” 

As night fell Black Rock City lit up with neon — official element of the State of Nevada. Laser shows, music, minor fires started to burn. The women went to District and Slut Garden, Barbarella danced in a window box, she was just a silhouette, a marionette to the music that did not stop. Everyone wore glow sticks — hula-hooped round wrists, bandoliered over chests — so they wouldn’t get run down by the mutant vehicles. Everyone was high. Was everyone high? To Grace it was a cacophony, she couldn’t find a balancing cadence, while Barbarella turned herself into a set of drum sticks. Barbarella joined everything. Grace stood back and watched. Wretched voyeur.

Near midnight Grace saw a dark girl, almost a shadow, but that was not uncommon. The only light coming from her was a sort of halo of hummingbirds, neon glints under their rapid wings. Grace tried to get closer, she wanted to see those whirly birds, but the shadow seemed to continually move off, the way a rainbow does. 

In the morning, Grace had to disentangle her legs — which ones are mine? She and Barbarella lost the way to their camp, ended up sleeping in a commune called the Hen House. Grace had all her clothes on. She considered this a win, given the tequila. Grace peered over the piles of sleeping women in various stages of attire. Caramel sunlight filtered through the canvas walls, and Grace did see the painterly beauty of draped limbs. One of the slumberous still had on her bunny ears — one ear up, one down. In that obtuse light Grace momentarily mistook the pink polyester center in a white fur surround for an albino vagina. It only lasted a moment, but Grace knew she was never going to fully recuperate from that image. Easter may always be traumatic for her now, as if a man nailed to a cross wasn’t bad enough. 

Grace quietly went out into the dawn. There was a layer of smoke in the air, the smell of ash and early morning pot and coffee. There was pulsing music already at District. Grace found her bike (amazing!) and threaded her way back to her car. She loaded all of Barbarella’s belongings out of the car and into her backpack, laid a pair of lipstick red panties on top, like a beacon. She never learned Barbarella’s real name. 

The Man had not yet burned, Grace had yet to go to the temple where people left photos and poems, loss and regret. She didn’t care. Burning Man was not for her. There had to be a place between the hard-and-narrow church pew and the borderless green-grass of hedonism. She wanted to rest in the middle space. Grace still had her holy cards with her, she wondered if she brandished them, would half the people on the Black Rock turn to salt, or minor saints?

What a bunch of jackalopes, what a grand safari. She couldn’t really handle it. She headed south. 

(to be continued…)