Graduate creative writing program.
That reading will take place on Wednesday,
February 28 at 8:00 PM here in Modern Languages.
Also, I would like to announce that fiction writers,
Robert Boswell and Antonya Nelson will read from their work
next Wednesday at 8:00 PM in Modern Languages.
And on Thursday, February 22 writers
of the American West William Kittredge and Annick Smith
will read from their work at the Duval auditorium
at the University Medical Center.
Both of those readings are free and open to the public
and are sponsored by the creative writing program
at the U of A. And for more information,
you can call the creative writing
program or the University of Arizona Poetry Center.
Copies of Alison Moore's books are
for sale in the lobby compliments of ASUA bookstore
and Alison would be happy to sign copies after the reading.
Alison Moore is the author of the novel Synonym for Love,
published in 1995 by Mercury House,
a volume of short stories entitled
Small Spaces Between Emergencies and an earlier volume of poetry.
She is the recipient of a 1993 creative writing fellowship
from the National Endowment for the Arts,
the Martindale literary prize in Arizona
and was recently chosen as the staff favorite fiction writer
by the staff of the Tucson Weekly.
Her short fiction has appeared in Ms., Story,
Southwest Stories, and the North American Review.
She's a member of the creative writing
faculty at the University of Arizona
and the publications director for Arts Reach,
a non-profit organization dedicated
to providing writing resources to Native American communities.
If it were any other day than Valentine's Day,
I might have begun Alison's introduction differently,
but because of its amorous implications,
I thought I would start with her conception.
In an interview with Alison Moore I read recently,
she said how she had been conceived while her parents were
staying in the caretaker's cottage
at the Harriet Beecher Stowe estate, which
of course is a noble beginning for any writer.
But this also seems an apt starting point
for a writer who would create memorable characters who
are themselves caretakers and observers reacting
to circumstances that are often out of their control,
the action happening as they assert themselves and find
whatever control is available to them.
Whether that be an elderly woman refusing
to hold a baby when infants are brought to her nursing home
as part of therapy, or the young protagonist in Moore's novel
running away from home, or finding
herself shunned in small southern communities
because of her stance on race relations.
Moore's characters are pitted against the odds
in a world large and daunting enough to require subversion.
The landscapes she portrays suit the emotional tone
of her fiction with stories set in
the contemplative and biblical desert, the human claustrophobia
of the rural South, or the impersonal geography
of the American roadway.
In counterpoint-- and perhaps most memorable in her work--
are its stunning portraits of states of grace.
As readers of this remarkable writer,
we are reminded of our own random and willful negotiations
with luck, our own desire for escape or the need
to find solace or to heal.
I am pleased to introduce Alison Moore.
We'll get you to write my next book jacket blurb fiction.
Actually I'm going to start reading
a poem as a nod to the Poetry Center
and I seem to have had snakes on the brain lately.
I don't know what this is about, but these-- this short story
that I'm going to read tonight and this poem
seem to want to go together.
Are these flowers upstaging me?
All right.
OK.
This poem-- only one person in this audience has heard it,
that was Karen Falkenstrom and we
went down to the Bisbee borderlands poetry fest theater
and read in an open mic there.
It's been a long time since I've read a poem.
So I thought I'd read it tonight.
It's called The Extras at the Gates of Eden.
They were hired for the crowd scene.
The one near the end where Eve resists temptation.
A cheering section of sorts for the humans,
but they were never called nor sent home with severance pay.
So they wait patiently, then not so
patiently, as humans are wont to do.
The Styrofoam cups and newspapers
which at first were put neatly into trash cans
now blow freely, sticking between the bars of the gleaming
gates of Eden.
It seemed like a good gig at the time,
but they've just run out of cream.
The catering truck departs and rumors arrive.
They got it in one take.
Eve was a pushover.
The snake handler didn't even get overtime let alone scale.
In anger, he left the snake behind.
It's coiled now in the tree listening
to lane outside the gate.
All but one finally go home.
A boy peers through the bars at the tree still heavy
with uneaten fruit, at the serpent disconsolate
now in the bowels.
Want one?
asks the serpent, half heartedly trying to look interested again.
But the boy, having read the script says,
no way, look what happened to her.
And the serpent contemplates the clever little face then
watches the strong back of Eve disappearing
into the world weighed down now by what she knows.
She is subject to climate and natural disaster now
and the myriad dilemmas of the wandering mind: rent to pay,
loves to begin and end for all the right or wrong reasons.
The heartbreaking desires of her children
for all the flimsy material things
the world is already hard at making.
The shadow of her own death throwing itself
all over everything and dogging her to the grave,
traffic jammed connections, chain letters
and real estate scams.
Shoddy workmanship and dead end jobs and always, always
men who will try to trick her.
And all this for knowledge of the fine line
between good and evil.
What a trade off?
The serpent thinks, but not unkindly.
He knows what was lost on the fundamentalist screenwriter.
What slipped through the script was
the metaphor of bitten fruit.
Skin broken open and the risk of marred perfection
for the awkward oozing ecstasy of music, sex and art.
If this is sin, he thinks, let's have at it.
The serpent stares at the fox faced little boy,
flicks his forked tongue once for special effect.
Chicken, he hisses.
Eve, he says, had nerve.
I've got this to say about love, there's no synonym.
You either have it or you don't.
And I wanted to begin in this story with an epigraph
by singer songwriter Greg Brown.
Who says loving a hug and loving a kiss.
Love is every day doing this, that, this.
So this is a story about people doing a weird kind of this that
and this and I wanted to thank Deidre Elliot for the triggering
town, so to speak.
This is it called Snake Woman.
Lila's just got written up: Snake Woman of the West
the Seattle Times called her.
Now what does that make me?
In the photograph of us along with the article
Lila looms in the foreground, all six foot of her,
holding on to a five foot Western Diamondback by the tail.
Her Stetson shades her face so that it
looks like a phase of the moon.
Her eyes are in the dark of it, her mouth in full sun.
Her jaw set as if she's trying hard to keep her teeth together.
Mean, but looking good.
And there I am like a hard luck case in my wheelchair
squinting like a Mongoloid which I am not.
It's just the sun because the asshole photographer didn't
like the way my hat looked.
The derby doesn't make it, he said.
It doesn't look Western enough, which
was the point, which was lost on him.
I put it on just to piss him off.
He drove in here in a rented minivan.
Looked like he'd stopped at Dallas Fort Worth airport just
long enough to hit the gift shops
and get a $500 pair of Lucchese handmade boots.
He pointed one of those--
Point the toes at Lila for approval.
That's lizard, she said.
Not snakeskin.
You've been had.
The picture's in a frame in the kitchen
now where Lila can get a good look
at herself every [AUDIO OUT].
She's proud of being called the Snake Woman.
Says it suits her more than her own name
and she places a lot of importance on names.
She's proud of her birthplace: Poetry, Texas, just
for the sound of it even if it is only a shit ass little town
nobody's ever heard of.
My given name is Alexander which Lila
says will take a lot of living up to.
I told her that's why I changed it to Chance which
could mean just about anything.
Personally I have a lot of respect for snakes
and sometimes lately I think Lila has gone too far.
The first one she just shot in the backyard after an argument
probably when she first got a good whiff of hundred proof
on me.
The truth is, I'm a drunk.
I was, am, and I will be, and she's just not
ready to admit it.
She slammed out the kitchen door and then turned right around
and came back in.
I thought she'd come back to apologize,
but she grabbed her shotgun and went out again.
I heard only one shot and then there she
was bringing the bastard right in the kitchen still
twitching and writhing and then it stopped and hung down stupid
as a rope.
I'm going to skin this thing and then make a necktie out of it.
It'll suit you perfectly.
She thrust it at me.
Here's looking at you, Chance, go ahead, drink up.
She had a look on her face I've never seen before, but seen
many times since, satisfied and inflamed with righteousness
as only a person who's gotten the last word can be.
Lila wheeled me out of the VA hospital in Dallas one
day after two months of visiting her daddy,
which turned out to be a total waste of time.
He shared a room with me-- cirrhosis of the liver--
and he'd talk half the night about his glory days singing
with a band on the Roadhouse circuit
basically all the towns all 520 between Odessa and Abilene.
Lloyd Stanley, the singing cowboy, he was having himself
a time he said until Lila slammed him into rehab.
He said he would start drinking again the minute
he got out just to spite her and that he'd never forgive her
as long as he lived, which didn't turn out
to be a very long time.
You'd think it was his wife he went about, not his daughter.
It was like he'd taken a vow to thwart her
and he was true right to the end.
When she came in to visit he wouldn't say a word to her just
stared at her through the whole visiting hour until she left
and she'd stare right back I've never
seen such a stubborn woman.
She'd go ahead and ask him questions anyway
and he wouldn't even grunt and answer.
Finally, one day I couldn't stand it any longer
and when she asked him, can I do anything for you?
I found myself answering, you can come over here,
you can waste your breath on someone who'd appreciate it.
And to my total surprise, she got right up
and came over to my bed.
She sat down on the edge of it.
Her eyes were disturbing shade of green
and she turned them full on me.
I swear she didn't blink for a full five minutes.
She didn't say anything, .
But I could feel her thinking it.
Well, she seemed to say, well.
Viridian, I blurted it out.
She said, what?
And I had my throat and say it all over again.
It's what color your eyes are, I said.
It was a wild guess something I saw in a paint tube
in the art therapy room and it sounded elegant enough
to be right.
Is that an actual color?
She asked skeptically.
I nodded and she went right on to the next question.
How did you lose your leg in the war?
In a manner of speaking, it was my own war and I lost it.
I'm only here because I did a tour in Nam
and it wasn't even wounded.
Of course, I didn't tell her the whole truth and she didn't ask.
Maybe she took one look at me and knew
I was a long way from coming to believe.
We talked every day for two weeks.
I couldn't tell if she was doing it to spite her daddy
or if she genuinely liked to talk to me.
She told me about the time in high school
she was a rodeo queen in Midland and I made up
a story about my mama being a fortune teller.
In truth the only future she foresaw was mine.
You're going to hell in a handbasket, she'd say.
And if you're self straightened up right now.
Little did she know I'd end up so literally lopsided.
In any event, Lila's daddy slipped into a coma
and it didn't matter one way or the other what
he thought anymore.
But he warned me that first night
after Lila let me look at her, that I shouldn't trust her
as far as I could piss.
What a thing to say about your daughter.
To measure how much faith you've got left in your only child.
She got me out of there as soon as I
was fitted with a prosthetic.
I don't recall a discussion about it.
She just said she was taking me home.
Took me to her ranch which was the real deal.
I mean a dog, a few cattle, well fed, a horse, and a windmill.
The minute I got there, I took off the leg
and I put it under the bed.
It was about as pink as a shrimp and twice as ugly.
And I didn't like lurching around with it.
In the chair I felt more human.
I didn't know how to act or what she wanted of me.
I tried to do little things around the house for her.
I've always been good with my hands and one day
when I was sanding a chair that I had street finished,
she stood over me watching me work.
The back of my neck was burning as she watched me
with those viridian eyes of hers and the next thing I know,
she's kneeling down on the floor, taking my hand
and closing her eyes as she took my fingers in her mouth one
at a time.
Closing her eyes and sucking on them
as if they were honey sweet rather than the varnish
they must have tasted of.
And she conjured up a likewise hunger in me
and I found myself doing something I'd never even thought
of before.
I licked her entire body with the tip of my tongue;
there was no place on her I didn't go.
And then oh how we rolled around all afternoon
on that blue shag rug, a little square of heaven
and come down to Earth in West Texas hell.
I didn't take all that long to lose the fire.
She got pissed at me for refusing to wear the leg
and in that way I guess I was as stubborn as her father.
It was like the old man's pathetic spirit
sneaked into me before he died.
So I could haunt Lila for him.
The bastard was just not going to let her rip.
And before I knew it I started drinking again.
I could say the devil made me do it,
but I swear it was Lloyd Stanley.
And the first night I got knee walking
drunk, which is hard to do with one leg
and then I knew it was only a matter of time
before she would throw me out.
And that's when the snake thing started to become
like a religion for Lila.
After she nailed all the snakes in the yard
she started hunting on the rest of her 40 acres.
At first, it was kind of amusing.
I mean off she'd go with a rifle and heavy boots
at sundown and a knapsack to tote them back in.
She began to do it every night like she couldn't rest until she
cleaned out the county.
She never got bit, she bragged about that.
And I began laying bets that she eventually would and I
tried to get her to take an anti-venom kit with her just
in case.
But she preferred to think she had a charm that kept her safe.
A tinny looking wagon wheel the size of an old silver dollar.
It had the letters of her name stamped on it.
Her father had given it to her at 12 years old--
got it from an amusement park in Biloxi
he was passing through after he left her mom.
She said the reason it was lucky was that he'd
spelled her name wrong: Lilla.
The extra L, she said, stood for luck.
And how like her to turn something hurtful
into a sign of grace, but to me it
was just another sign of a father
not having any idea who his daughter was.
The thing to remind her every day of her life
that everything about her down to her name was wrong.
Fathers are expert at that.
You can't shut them up for anything even when
they're in the ground.
The first time my old man took me deer hunting
and I missed what he considered an easy shot,
he called me a useless piece of shit.
Useless.
I heard that word so many times it
was what I begun to answer to.
And I thought if I came home from Nam with a medal that
might vindicate me.
I didn't get a medal, but I came home one legged which I hoped
would shut him up for good.
And all it did was turn the volume down.
Anyway, Lila wasted no part of this.
She fed the meat to the dog and even sneaked some in his stew
for us once, but I bit down hard on one of those tiny vertebrae
and knew it was nothing that came from a chicken.
I took it out of my mouth and set it on her bread plate
and it sounded thin as a dropped dime.
She picked it up.
I thought she'd say she was sorry.
I might have choked on the thing.
Earrings, is what she said, studying it.
Already planning on how to get the hooks attached.
She made everything out of snakeskin, skateboards and belts
and hat bands, and there was a logic in these items.
People paid big money for such things.
She showed them to me once in Esquire magazine.
A big square jawed bastard with wet hair in a suit
on with no shirt underneath, his hands
on his hips part of the jacket just enough
to show off the belt. And the caption beneath him said,
accessory to die for: rattlesnake belt, $300.
You couldn't pay me $300 to wear one of those.
Personally I don't much care.
It's only from a distance that snakes
look slick touch the skin.
And it's bristly, it's scaly, it's dry.
Pretty soon Lila was buying kits to make clocks,
cutting out little circles of skin
to paste where the hours were.
Then it was pieces glued on lighters and tape
measures and nail files and any goddamn thing
that had a surface that would take glue.
What are we going to do with all this shit?
I asked, wild-eyed, when she brought in a Sony Walkman--
mine-- with a snakeskin slipcover.
You can run the gift shop, she said.
You're wasting away out here, Chance,
you've got to get a life.
And since you won't I'm going to get you one.
Then she slammed the screen door behind her
as she set out for the evening kill.
Fuck yes I was pissed, just because she
was feeding me and loving me every once in a while which
took less and less time lately, didn't
mean she got to assign chores like I
was some kind of hired hand.
I brought in some money.
My disability checks covered the bills.
And now here's my Lila, my beauty [AUDIO OUT]
haired Lila, armed to the teeth, an Amazon
with a lot of hard miles on her.
A woman with a mission which is not just snakes anymore, but me.
A gift shop.
20 miles of bad washboard flash flooded open range road.
Who does she think will find us?
I'll take an ad out in Fort Worth, I said.
Don't you dare, she said.
Whoever finds us will feel they've
discovered us all on their own.
We'll be a well-kept secret.
Like you discovered me?
I asked.
And then wondered if I was her secret and how well-kept I was.
I didn't discover you, I found you.
There's a difference.
She left me sitting there, her spoken words
like a wind stirring around found
like something shiny picked up from the floor
examined, deemed worthless, thrown down again.
The days get purposeful and tiresome
and I grow to hate the sound of the singer.
It's the sound of my feet being hemmed up.
I can't stand the thought of Lila's fingers on that skin,
feeding it so patiently beneath the foot, the way
the silver needle when she makes it go slow looks like it's
bucking between her fingers.
I start driving, it's come to this.
I put the leg on so I can work the clutch,
but I take it off as soon as I get in the door at home.
On my first trip out, I drive all day
and I wind up at the dump outside of Amarillo.
Some of my best memories are the ones
with my grandfather at the dump in St. George on Saturday
mornings picking through all the stuff
other people had no use for.
My grandfather cleaned it all up and sold it
at weekly yard sales.
I made change for him and I felt proud to be trusted with money,
be counted on to get it right.
The first thing I find today is a bronze baby shoe, the left.
One-- who would throw such a thing away?
I put it in my pocket and no time I fill up both.
A grenade of all things, harmless, unpinned, and an egg
beater I saw blade marks.
I have no idea what I'm going to do with it
all, but I found these things and somehow I
feel responsible to them.
When I get home, I dump it all out on the ground.
I stare at it for a while then I'm picking up the baby shoe.
It weighs a lot for such a little thing and then I think
when I put it on display...
Screw the gift shop.
I'm going to make a museum.
And so I tie a string to it-- there's
a ball of twine I found-- and the next thing
you know I'm tying it to an old hitching post.
It dangles and spins heavy in the breeze,
then I hang the grenade next to it.
Just because it's the next thing I grab unintentional,
but like most amazing unrelated things
there's a weird kind of sense to the two
being next to one another.
The wind shifts and pushes them together not too hard,
they almost chime.
I can't get the rest of the stuff
up fast enough and in half an hour all
these things are banging around clanking and tinking
in the wind.
Look, I said to Lila who's woken from her nap
and is on her way out for the evening hunt.
She stops, until he stops and even though she's well
on her way she cocks her head.
She looks and then she does something else.
The slow smile slides across her face.
Lila listens.
Lila would be the last to admit that she's afraid of anything.
She's certainly not afraid of snakes,
but that's an unnatural kind of fearlessness
fueled by the fact she's got something to prove.
Her daddy did a lot more than spell her name
wrong on a cheap medallion.
He tried to defeat her every day of her life.
She's got plenty of stories of how
she'd drive him to all those roadhouses,
hang around until he fell off the stage
and then pour him into the car and drive him home again.
She told me he was a genius of a liar, professed
to be sticking to a two drink limit,
but rigged up the washer fluid container in the car.
Filled it with vodka, and ran the line through the dashboard
and straight into a carton of orange juice
he topped off every time they stopped for gas
and he'd send her in to pay.
That bitch, Lila said, was sitting there getting
loaded thinking his higher power for showing him
the alternate route to heaven.
Things went from bad to worse until one day
after not seeing him for two weeks, when
she went to the rodeo in San Antone,
she came home to find him on the couch in his boxer shorts.
His bottles in the ashtray and the bedpan
and the remote for the TV all within easy reach.
That's when she put him in the hospital.
All the way there he insisted he could stop drinking any time.
If you can stop drinking for half an hour
then I'll buy you a hat, she said.
The ultimate Texas challenge.
Well he didn't get a hat and she didn't save his life.
And out of all that she ends up with me: more of the same.
You want to see Lila scared, you want to see Lila cry?
Just turn up the volume on Patsy Cline.
I did just last night before I knew what it did to her.
That it was Lloyd Stanley's favorite music
and he'd play at full volume whenever he'd go on a bender.
Lila screamed at me to shut it off and I waved her away.
Crazy was and is my all time favorite in the world
and I damn well was going to hear it
all the way through at a volume through, which
could be properly appreciated.
But she went out the back door to the breaker box
and just shut the whole house off with a yank of the switch.
And I sat there in the dark mad as hell,
then I heard a strange sound, a moaning like the dog
had been shot.
I crawled through the living room of my hands
not bothering with a chair and out into the yard.
It was the dog moaning, but it wasn't shot
and there was Lila down on the ground punching
the poor bastard and the dog beside itself with two
different needs, cowering from the blows
and trying to lick her face at the same time.
We all ended up in a heap, Lila shaking and sobbing
like her heart was cracking open which it truly was.
An old break I guess like the way
a bone heals when it's never set right.
A weakness in the structure.
And as I held her out there in the dirt of the yard
I knew her heart would never open to me.
It was crowded with a sorrow being cheated out
of that first kind of love.
It has to have to believe that there's more in the world
and that they have a right to it.
It made sense to me then why we were together.
The wounded always find each other sooner or later;
pain surely cleaves to pain.
It was not so far a stretch to go from where we were
to making love right there.
You get inside a woman and you think
you've finally gotten somewhere, but it just
brings you close enough to feel the fence, to know there's
no way to get there from here.
Lila wouldn't even look at me during or after.
It was like I'd already seen too much,
but she was the one who turned away.
I clung to her like a person falling to keep her
there just a little longer.
I fell a space open up beneath us as if the earth
itself was heaving open.
I thought about the fact that we were
stupid to be lying on the ground,
the snakes were out at that time of the evening.
But it wasn't the snakes that were the danger right then,
it was love and what it wanted of you.
The whole huge pressure and the promise of it and the
fear that when it finally comes to you,
it'll be able to find a big enough place in you to breathe.
We laid there in the dirt looking up
at the sky at separate stars.
It seemed only the scattershot ones were overhead right then,
not the ones that added up to something,
but the extras not needed for dippers, bears and kings.
The days are shorter now; water runs cool in the pipes.
These are the things you measure the turn of a season by here.
Never mind the calendar.
Lila has been going out every evening determined
to get as many snakes as she can before they
go to ground for the winter.
The gift shop is stuffed with useless crap
and the great hordes come, maybe one or two people a week.
And my museum which began as a kind of fence
for the parking lot is spilled across the road
like it has a mind of its own and is heading on out of here
and shown me the way.
Yesterday I found a pair of crutches and I hung those up.
I also found a slew of old knives.
It's an odd accumulation blowing around and hardly
anybody to see or hear at except Lila and me.
She says she likes it that it's wild noise that I've
given a wind the sound.
But days like this when the wind is up
and she's in the house sleeping, I wheel myself up and down
the rows of things.
And it sounds to me like a music coming
from a strange world I should know better than to set foot in.
And I can only think that now the wind to want something
from me.
The day it brought the final thing
to hang in the museum, my leg, it's the perfect place for it
right next to a blade from a circular saw.
And when I finish hanging it I sit back
to admire the juxtaposition.
I got a bottle of single malt scotch
I've been saving hid inside a broke guitar
and I drank quite a bit of it though I came for just a taste.
I had meant to make it last.
I get more reflective than is good for me
and I want more than I can hope in this world to have.
My leg back, my woman sweet on me again,
for my momma to tell my future one more time.
Surely, my life won't completely turn on me.
And watch a puff of dust rising that can only
mean a car coming fast.
Who can this be on a Tuesday afternoon?
If anybody shows up it's usually on the weekend.
An old green and white Buick Roadmaster
slowly comes into view.
It just seems slow actually because when it comes closer,
I can see the thing bucking through the potholes.
A great wall of churned dust behind.
It roars past and skids to a halt.
I hear it clunk into reverse and it backs up fishtailing
until it's even with me.
The motor shuts down, but takes a long time to stop it easily.
A man the size of Orson Welles in his later years
heaves himself out.
He squints at me, but doesn't say anything.
He's got a bolo tie on it with the biggest scorpion in amber
I've ever seen.
He fishes in his pocket for something
and takes out a roll of butterscotch lifesavers.
He peels back the paper enough to get four of them out at once.
And the rind of paper flaps in the wind
like a little white flag.
He pops them in his mouth and then looks around.
What the hell is all these? he finally asks
after a decent interval of trying to figure it out.
Museum, I say.
Is it for sale?
He peels back another mess of lifesavers
and finishes the roll.
For sale.
How much? he asks.
It's not, I say.
He shrugs and studies it some more.
What's it for?
Satisfaction, I say.
Surprised at the word that's come.
Studies me now: you hardly look satisfied.
Not done with it yet, I say, annoyed
that I have to defend it.
He nods toward the gift shop then looks back down
the road wide and empty as a runway.
Busy this time of year isn't it, Christmas and all.
What do you want?
I ask, gripping the wheels of my chair
hard and rearing it up a little which
must look about as ridiculous as a cat puffing up
in front of his Saint Bernard.
I want to see the Snake Woman, he says.
I come to do business with her not you.
Here I lie.
You her trainer, her keeper?
He stares poignantly at my empty pants leg flapping in the wind.
You get bitter or what?
I wish I had Lila's gun, I might be just drunk enough to use it.
I'd bury him in his car and hang his bolo tie in the museum.
I hear the screen door slam and my heart drops.
It's Lila and she's coming right this way.
She's got her rifle ready to hunt.
She might shoot you, I say.
He just laughs.
Could think of worse ways to go, he says.
And she walks over to us and sizes up
the man which takes some time.
She's at least as tall as him and suddenly I
wish I had my legs.
So I wouldn't be down here at knee level like a kid at a
grown up party.
Are you the one that called yesterday?
She asked him.
Roy Dix, yes ma'am the same.
Hang on a minute, I'll be right back.
She ducks inside the gift shop and for one crazy minute,
I'm sure that she's about to sell my soul,
that she's taken [AUDIO OUT] isn't looking in she's got it
in there along with the snake ties and the knickknack trash.
And I feel the old panic hit me.
I can't breathe.
I sweat like a pig.
I hardly know where I am.
It's all I can do to turn my head to look at her
and she's coming out the door, she's
got a bottle in her hand full of milky liquid.
Roy Dix looks at me and laughs an evil laugh
as he takes the bottle from her.
He hands her two $50 bills.
My right mind leaves me all together.
What the hell is that?
I cry.
It's the cure, he says.
You look like you could use one.
He turns to Lila again, so how do you milk them?
It's a little tricky, but not particularly hard.
You get a jar and you clamp them onto it
so their jaws are spread, you press little
on the sides of their heads and they just
shoot it right in there.
Snake spit, God damn, he says shaking his head.
I never thought I'd be saved by one of Lucifer's friends.
Lupus, your days are numbered, he says, pounding on his chest.
He holds up the bottle and shakes it a little at me.
Just take a second look at nature, it's only right.
For a second he looks like some worked up
preacher about to take up serpents himself,
but his eyes when the next glance at me then cut away well,
they are the eyes of a large and fearful man
who has tried everything.
Whose life has come down to one small long shot thing.
His hugeness, which at first looks so menacing,
now seems only the weight of an extra person
inside him wanting out.
He climbs slowly back in his car,
parking himself in behind the steering wheel.
Thanks Lila.
He starts up the car and a great blue cloud
of smoke coughs from the pipe.
He leans out the window.
If you decide to sell you'll let me know.
Folk art, it's all the rage.
Who knows, who the hell knows?
Lila says.
I don't know whether she's referring to folk art
or what's all the rage or the idea of a cure
and what can also kill you.
She looks out over the museum and I
watch her do a slow double take on the leg twirling
there next to the circular saw blade, which
clanks its steel teeth calf.
You got a mean sense of humor, sweetheart, she says.
I'm starting to feel real sorry for you
and that's a deadly final thing to be feeling for a man.
It's a lot worse than being mad.
Last word, Lila turns on her heel
and goes leaving me with my leg twirling
on the line pink and naked and almost red
now in the fading light.
I still can hardly breathe.
And the white rat that lives inside the crawlspace in my head
nibbles on a little more of my nerves.
Any day now there'll be this white rat
in an empty black hole of thought,
while the little memory cells short out.
The full colored pictures, the ghastly green
of Nam, the glory gold of Utah, the blue building
I wanted to buy to open up a junk shop of my own.
And the red blood coming from my own blown apart knee
with a bullet meant for my heart.
One little jerk of the hand at the last second,
I couldn't even do that right.
And finally this, Lila's face when she first
got a close look at the stump, just
after love, the look of a woman [AUDIO OUT]
and trying not to show it.
And then that other final look of heartbreak, resignation.
The look of a beautiful woman once again settling for less.
And somehow in there, there's useless Alexander
who will by God any day now live down his name.
There's a hurry in most of what I do anymore.
The days are shorter than ever, the darkest thing with boots
on walking right this way.
It throws its shadow around like a man you owe money to and can't
ever hope to pay.
And the pills aren't working as good as they used to,
takes half a bottle of single malt to steady my hand.
Lila hunts further and further away,
not coming home until dawn.
The snakes are few and far between.
It's like we take turns with the bed, it's a lonely place
and I take my pleasure whatever way I can,
but it's about as satisfying as milking a cow.
Tonight, the worst part is I actually cry when it's over.
The house is empty and listening in to a man in pain.
And I imagine it's not sympathetic.
I think I hear a sound outside the window,
it can only be Lloyd Stanley peering through the window
and laughing at what has wound up in his daughter's bed.
And right then Lila comes back in the back door.
She's early, cupboards bang and drawers screech and shut.
She must have found the Scotch in the sack of beans.
I hear the glass filling, the squeak
of a chair she settles into it.
Lila never drinks.
I'm about to go in there to see what's
wrong when I see her move like a thing through water.
A dreamy sway slowly filling in the bedroom doorway.
Silence buzzes in the room.
I don't know what she wants.
She hasn't wanted anything in such a long time.
Alexander, she whispers.
I don't know how to answer.
My heart stolen out of my chest and the thought
finally comes clear to me that's been months of arriving.
I am afraid of her now.
Haven't I made myself a slow moving target?
She could turn her snake gun on me and finish the job.
Is there any part of me that might be grateful?
It's the one listening outside the window,
I'm sure of it, which makes her the only person in the world
that's ever heard me cry.
Women think they want a man's tears until they actually
see them.
And then they have to rearrange the face before them.
Take it down from High Plains Drifter
to lonely shriveled child.
Alexander, she says a little louder.
She waits and I don't dare breathe.
She sighs, it's a sad sound, not a mean one.
The stinging scent of burnt gunpowder
drifts off her like a dangerous perfume.
Her boots creak as she turns.
I could stop her with a word, but right now I
can't even say her name.
From the window I see the spike of light from her flashlight
as she makes her way toward the rocky hills.
I haul myself into my chair and roll down the porch ramp
she built the day I got here.
I wheel down the rows of the museum
and cut my leg off the line.
It falls with the plastic thud on the ground
and it looks like a doll part, magnified and strange.
I can still see the flashlight.
She's low searching now and I've maybe
got a chance of catching up.
All I know is I have to follow her.
She's at the end of her tether, I can feel the fray from here.
The moon is going down now.
It's dropping fast in the dark crawls across the bajada,
chasing the last edge of moonlight east.
I follow her jerky as a puppet at first
and finally I get the hang of it, but the ground is rough
and it's slow going.
At least she's not stalking straight out and purposeful
like she usually does.
Lila is wandering tonight.
How much can about a woman in less than a year
except to feel the emptiness of any room she lives?
Is it enough time to know that she can keep
a secret if you give her one?
Or that she'd risk her life for yours if there came a time?
Can you say you'd do the same?
Whatever love we'd once put in each other had run out
like water down a drain.
I gave her my need, the only thing about myself
I knew would last forever.
And what had she done about it except set it aside
as if it did nothing would call up her own.
I follow her light up a long hill
and when she disappears between some boulders.
I think as I'm alone there in the dark
that this is a picture of how it will be when she's gone forever.
Me stumbling toward the afterglow of her,
a disappearing trail of light where she's last been.
Lila, I call out.
Needing to hear her voice coming back.
She hiding now, keeping quiet laughing
to see how I'm trying to come to her?
When I finally clear the rise I see her light.
It's not moving, but lying on the ground.
Fanning out through scrub and rock
and the hunched form of Lila crouched upon the ground
like a creature about to leap.
The light catches what's just beyond her.
Green.
A section of coil thick as my arm.
I know by the color it's a Mojave rattler, the worst kind.
As far as venom goes, maybe the best kind as far as Roy Dix
is concerned.
A fierce buzz emanates from its tail while it doesn't move.
She and the snake stare at each other
from a distance of two feet.
[AUDIO OUT] distance for what looks to be at least a five foot
length.
Don't move, I whisper.
She's inching forward on her hands and knees
and the snake only draws its head back
a little as if it's having second thoughts about what
to do.
As if it's curious more than anything or farsighted,
needing just to see her better.
She inches even closer and the snake holds its ground.
They can't be more than a foot apart now.
There it is.
The face she's hunted all along and shot from a distance.
Now as close as a kiss.
She's daring it to strike her.
Or is it playing with her and taunting her closer?
For a moment I actually believe Lila has managed to hypnotize it
and maybe all along she's been working up
to this, to take it up in her bare hands once and for all.
Lila's mouth is moving, I can't hear words,
but I know she's singing.
It's not exactly pretty.
It's more like eerie crying or a high pitched prayer.
There's a spirit moving on her, into her,
and the snake is surely listening.
What is going to happen when she reaches the end of the song?
The snake will be mad when she stops singing.
There's no way this song can end.
I can't stand it any longer.
One step is all it takes.
There's only inches after all between one life and the next.
The snake whips its head around and its entire body
shoots toward me like a loaded spring.
It strikes once, twice and keeps on going at the plastic leg
determined to break through.
I don't feel it, but I imagine that I can.
Two points of heat drilling into me.
The venom like a stream of lava racing
through the blood aimed straight for the heart.
And I imagine Lloyd Stanley scared shitless out
of here, at last leaving me and her to our own fates.
I watch in horror as the thing beats itself
against the stubborn leg, emptying its venom,
wasting its best asset on something
it can't even begin to hope to hurt.
It stops finally and slides into the rocks
as if it has had enough and can hardly
wait to get beneath the ground.
Lila isn't singing now, [INAUDIBLE] anything.
She doesn't even appear to be in her body at all.
Then she starts shuddering, all the adrenaline escaping at once
and running wild now through her veins.
I get down on the ground.
I don't know whether she'll let me touch her or not.
What a time to want a woman, when
she's got a look on her face like I've taken something meant
for her or have given her something
it might cost her plenty to keep.
I just watch her from about the same distance the snake had been
and I see what it saw.
A round, plain face, frightened, her eyes more deathless black
now than any kind of green.
Her mouth still half open, sung out,
waiting a cave where I might crawl into and hear my own self
breathing.
And I hold her look, her nakedness,
a soul coming loose within reach.
I hold out my hand and it shakes.
There's only one or two ways this thing can go.
I could come to harm.
I could come to mystery.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]