Genuine Aboriginal Democracy

Genuine Aboriginal Democracy

Lorraine Ray

Copyright 2012 Lorraine Ray

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Table of Contents

Uncertain Trysts

His Faithful Companion

Big Paper Skeleton

Fantasy Artifact

Genuine Aboriginal Democracy

Mother’s Woman-Marine Bra

Work Out Your Own Salvation

Consciousness-Raising

Metamorphosis of Me

Snake Dance Disaster

On the Rio Mayo

Uncertain Trysts

Desertion claimed the edge of the place.

In a flood of cold morning sunlight, she scurried around the chain link fence and scooted away to where nobody else would be, to where nobody else could see the boss’ daughter coming around the goodies, the guys, the sheet metal workers.

A foil gum wrapper glinted in the chain link, its silver teeth bared at the broken bits of filthy bottles beneath it in the Bermuda grass that nobody mowed. She skulked past the wrapper and the broken bottles and dove between Al Apadaco’s service truck with its greasy red door and Phil Pascal's forklift with its hand painted self-caricature of an Indian in a black bowler and a cholla cactus G-string. Past the acid baths, past the broken compressors with their heavy stink of slug oil, she slipped unseen wearing that crazy alpaca poncho, that drab Peruvian thing with its lines of pack-laden llamas and snow-capped mountains and the fringe that always tickled her wrists. Underneath the poncho strode the woman with no name—though she did have one. It was Laura. Laura Stewart. Short and thin. Big brown eyes and long blonde hair. Laura.

Marugh. Marugh.

The shop yard cat trotted out from behind a tin shed. Black. An Arizona cat. A modest dreamer of scrawny lizards and acrid beetles and deep, deep ever darkening shade. He rubbed himself against her shin. What game is this, Miss? May I trip you up?

Out behind and up against looming rusty metal. Over mud pits and piles of poles, Laura Stewart scrambled, feeling the overwhelming dither of the brain and the shiver of the soul when in pursuit of a loved one. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, after Miss Estee St. Germain dismissed her French class with an energetic au revoir, Laura left the university and drove down Parkview Avenue past the sleazy hotels, past the confusion of used car dealerships, to the desert and the collection of ramshackle sheds and Quonset huts called Pueblo Refrigeration and Heating, her family's business on Orphanage Road. Looking north of the shop, you could see a fine litter of broken glass and shredded tires and coyote-ravaged diapers all the way to the railroad yards. Looking south, the Santa Cruz River wound its way up from Mexico, and when it flowed a few days each summer it carved out the pink and chocolate striated earth and brought up a lot of toxic heavy metals. Once you could also say that the river had brought up some of Laura's relatives (they followed its course in an ox cart), and ninety years later her half-Scottish, half-Mexican grandfather had gone into business with a half-Irish, half-Apache named Clarke and formed Pueblo Refrigeration. Laura was writing a novel in the back of the biggest Quonset hut and her father had given her a desk to work at.

Recently she had found another reason for coming there. On her way through the yard she spied on the sheet metal workers: those at work on the layout tables where the sheets were bent into ducts according to blueprints, others loading trucks with the finished ducts and equipment ready for installation. She never spoke to them; she was shy, and she thought them unobtainable, too good-looking, and sometimes (when she felt honestly snobby) too working class.

Off on her spying mission that morning, Laura climbed a small hill between two buildings and lo and behold, there they stood in a circle in a certain sun-bright, hard-packed clearing. The goodies, the guys, the sheet metal workers took a morning break together, standing in the overalls cramming doughnuts into their skulls.

That was a bad rhyme. Laura was subject to bad rhymes and bad thoughts about the overalls of the sheet metal workers, or rather what was inside their overalls: their bulging forearms, their massive shoulders, their mighty other members (gloriously unmentionable and delicious other members). Any young woman would be susceptible to so much male beefcake, not to mention their clever eyes and the way they sat in a circle on their haunches drinking beer at the end of the day. Intelligence didn’t enter into it, but being eighteen and not having lost your cherry did. That was such a pleasant expression—losing your cherry—much nicer than saying she had never made the beast with two backs or gotten a bit of the goose’s neck, and heaven knows if you lost your cherry you might find it atop your beefcake. Cherries and beefcake, overalls and skulls. Laura grinned at her own bad punning jokes.

Thaddah-thump. Behind her, through the open door, came the sound of someone cutting steel for a duct.

Mew. Ghhhatt. The cat cried and leapt away and Laura turned to see Cauhutemoc Grandillas standing less than thirty feet from her in a shed at a layout table. He was facing out, toward the open door, but looking down at his work.

If there was one worker at Pueblo Refrigeration whom she obsessed about the most, it was Cauhutemoc Grandillas. He was a behemoth of a man, a Mexican Hercules. And she loved the sound of his name, the mystery of it. Unfortunately, part of the mystery was exactly how to say it. She would hear his first name pronounced by various Spanish speakers around the shop and, though she thought she knew how to say it, in a few days she’d forgotten. The sound slipped away. She wondered if it was a bad sign to be in love with a man whose name she couldn't pronounce. Oh, but it wasn’t love; it was just a big crush. And he wasn’t married; she knew that now for sure.

But could he read a blueprint? She’d never seen him working there before, at the old breaker you moved by hand, no pneumatics, all manpower manhandling metal. Usually he delivered the sheet metal, counted the sheets or loaded the trucks with equipment. She watched him now; his big arm came back with the steel; his hips swung too, his shoulders twisted as he brought the silvery metal up to bend, to take the shape it should. Barely any strain showed on his body, and his feet were rock solid. Slam, bam. Slam, bam, almost effortlessly bending the steel. Laura drown in the sight of him. She imagined herself kneeling at the staggering man's feet, hugging his knees like a supplicant and asking very sincerely if he might be of a certain kind of embarrassing assistance to a young woman desperately in need of deflowering, and, in this scene of surrender, she imagined Cauhutemoc slamming the metal and banging it back again and again as she pleaded more and more earnestly and frantically for his favors and then, finally, when he pushed back his long hair and all his motion stopped...

But Laura was a little horrified, more than a little horrified, to see the real live Cauhutemoc stop and look up. Laura tried to noiselessly slither away; he hadn’t yet noticed her. She crouched down and waddled, but Cauhutemoc’s glance followed the sound and he saw her.

Horror of all horrors. She felt her brain bursting and her hands sweating and her stomach churning and her back going very, very stiff. It was the worst imaginable thing that she could imagine that she was not imagining—it was actually happening!

Then he grinned at her, his gloved hands hanging down at his side. Rather elegantly then, he took one glove off and carefully smoothed, behind one ear, a few errant locks of his long brown hair. Was he winking at her or squinting in the morning sun? It was hard to tell. Oh hell, hell. He leaned against the bench and crossed his arms on his chest, his big boots at the ankle. Was he giving her a come-hither look? Laura didn’t stay to find out. She stumbled, bumbled back against a metal post and ran.

She fled across an open place with flecks of glinting metal.

Marugh. Marugh. The cat was coming, too. Where are you off to so swiftly, Miss? Miss and nearly trip. Running and stopping. Tail high. Puss, puss. Grhew.

Laura darted behind an abandoned cooling tower. On the far side of the tower there was a weedy dip and then a small hill that led to more sheds and ultimately, the big Quonset hut at the back of the yard. She climbed the hill and was halfway up when she thought she heard someone coming. Her heart squeezed up. Was the hunk behind her? Was Cauhutemoc really following her? It was too horrible. She thought she might vomit. But when she turned around at the top the hill, there was no one behind her, only the sound of the wind in the weeds and a cactus wren chuck-chucking from a nest in some nearby cholla cactus.

Laura scrabbled under a mesquite tree at the back of the first shed and plumped down on a black stump. Such a narrow escape; it had worn her out.

She petted the cat. The desperate thing made a shivery arch and wiped his whiskers on her jeans. A spider wed, caught on his face, dangled comically at the end of his whiskers. The cat flicked his paw up and shook his head, making maniacal eyes. Messy thing, said Laura, teasing the web off. Messy old mussed-up monster. His tail, bent at the tip, tickled her face. I’m at a precipice, puss.

A precipice. What precipice? It was this. Stay where she was and she would become—what? A mad old nun, a virgin lunatic? Jump, and she would be doing the scariest thing she’d ever done. Well, if thoughts of mad virgins weren't enough to drive her to it, there was Cauhutemoc’s astonishing body. There was a smooth bulge of muscles in his upper arms and a triangular shape to his back that Laura had seen the past summer when he stripped down to his waist and walked into the big Quonset hut complaining of a bug bite. She still remembered the way his brown back twisted and his big hand felt for the bit mark. The top of his orange overalls had slipped down slightly below his waist to reveal the wide elastic band of his underwear. It had been difficult for her to watch all that.

Only a gimpy middle-aged man with a lisp, an astigmatism, and a receding hairline would have the unmitigated gall to stand up in front of a class of horny eighteen-year-old women and proclaim that the characters of Ulysses and Hercules were outdated and irrelevant in the twentieth century. Laura’s English teacher at the university had said that and everyone seated around her, the ass-kissing robots, had copied it into their notes and oo-ed and aw-ed and how profound that statement was. Laura hadn’t agreed with them at all, but she said nothing. What her professor said had made her angry. She’d sat at the back of the classroom, rolling her eyes, glaring at her professor’s white hands and his long clean fingers draped over the lecturn. Such pristine fingers. She bet he kept them squeaky-clean by stopping at every washroom between New York City and Arizona on his drive out each autumn. This would be his ironic, twentieth century idea of a Herculean task. Well, she was one female who responded to a healthy male body. And when some girl in the class with the improbable name of Miss Marlowe Wolvington read aloud that Marvell poem about the coy mistress and kept gasping and tossing her hair back off her face, Laura was hard pressed not to raise her hand and ask, Hey, was this guy kind of effeminate or skinny or yucky or something and that explains why he had to work overtime getting laid? Laura knew if the man in Marvell’s poem had looked anything remotely like the sheet metal workers at her father's shop, his mistress without a doubt would have climbed atop him eagerly. Once she realized this, Laura wanted to lose her virginity to a sheet metal worker more than anything in the world. The idea appealed to her, but she wondered if she would be using the sheet metal worker. Well, she wasn't so bad looking, maybe the right man wouldn’t mind?

Quite possibly she was unfit for college. She was too rebellious for the place. A person in college shouldn't have the kind of thoughts she had day-in, day-out. They should be like the rest of the undergraduates: ass-kissing robots. That was what the whole college scene was about. If you wanted to be a real rebel, you had to get out of that place and go out with men and machines, or run away to Mexico or something. You had to strike out at the system if you wanted to be creative.

She should quit and get a job someplace really interesting like a tortilla factory downtown or the tallow factory or that mysterious livestock yard near the freeway that she’d blundered into while aimlessly driving around town after class. There was something inside her that drove her toward honest work and that found intellectual tricks repellant. She liked the way people worked with machines. She liked it when men and women transformed simple things like sheets of metal into useful objects like air conditioning ducts or a plenum below a furnace.

Laura studied the ground around her feet, the yellow litter of dried mesquite pods, diminutive mesquite leaves, and pinwheel weeds. This was the soil where she’d spent her childhood. As a party of warriors with Geronimo, she’d raided from this hill, running down the innocents, skewering them as they arrived for work. She’d ground mesquite seeds on the old metates. Laura looked over at them, sitting side by side against the shed. She hadn't noticed them in years, the pinkish oval metate and the black metate with its four stout legs, which always looked like some swarthy beast about to scuttle away. In the future, when she was a very famous writer, she would have to remember to mention metates as her childhood inspiration for her writing. That would shock many people who would not know what metates were. But after she thought this, Laura began wondering what she meant when she said metates inspired her. Did a