December 1 - December 24, 1998

CHAPTER VI

COMPLETELY SANS SERIF

"That should just about do it, I'd think," Julia said slamming the car door as she and Paco got back in the Alfa. Paco put the key in the ignition, turned it. The starter ground, but the engine didn't turn over. "I never want to see him again." She glanced at Paco but he remained silent as he continued to try to start the car.

"I'll have to get this fixed before the trip" he said.

"Is there still going to be a trip? We based a lot of this venture on those connections of Jay's" Julia said.

"There aren't any connections."

Julia wasn't surprised. "Paco, I'm so sorry." It was about nine o'clock in the evening on a night in late January and about ten below with the wind-chill factor. They were parked outside of the apartment building where Jay lived in Manhattan's Chelsea section. "Was anything even packed?"

"His antique toy collection.," Paco said. "He was unpacking that while we talked." Paco tried once more to start the Alfa. No dice. "We need a jump." He opened the car door to get out.

"Let's walk to the corner and call Triple A," Julia said, opening her door.

"Stay where you are. I'm not going to the corner."

"You're not going to ask Jay."

"He's still my friend, Jules." Paco got out of the car. He turned the collar of his coat up as he hurried up the approach to Jay's building, then rang the buzzer.

A few moments later Jay drove out of the parking garage in his Jeep, backed up the wrong way on the one-way street and maneuvered around until the Jeep's hood and the Alfa's faced each other. Paco opened the hood of the Alfa.

Jay and Paco didn't say a word to each other as Jay attached the jumper cables from one vehicle to the other. Julia got out of the Alfa. Jay glanced at her, "I'm not in the mood for any of your lip just now, okay?" he growled.

"I didn't say a thing."

"Just in case you were thinking about it. I feel bad enough."

"I doubt that."

Jay looked at her, then turned and said to Paco. "Okay, try it."

Paco got in behind the wheel of the Alfa. Jay climbed into the Jeep. Even with the jump the Alfa wouldn't start. Paco called Triple A from the corner. The three of them waited for the tow truck in the Jeep with the engine running and the heat blasting.

"Why did you lie about your Los Angeles connections, Jay?" Julia hissed from the back seat after about ten minutes of complete silence.

He turned in the drivers seat and looked at her. "Want to have it out? Want to have it out right now?"

"I think you should pay us back your share of the money we fronted to rent the studio."

"I don't want the money," Paco said.

"What kills me, Jay," Julia said, "is that you knew all along you weren't going. You've known for weeks. I have friends at Redbook. They said you never even turned in your notice. That's why we're here tonight. If you didn't want to do this, why didn't you just let us know? We're leaving in less than a week!"

"I didn't want to disappoint Paco!" Jay spat. "or at least I wanted to put off disappointing him as long as possible, and, I knew how you'd take it!"

"How am I supposed to take it?"

"I have it good at Redbook."

"You and your damn connections on the coast."

"I'm worried about leaving my mother."

"Your mother? Please!"

Julia and Jay were startled when Paco suddenly opened the door and got out. They both thought the tow truck had arrived. It hadn't. Before Paco closed the door he said to them, "Umpping for Pops and Uncle Nicky is one thing, but I hate being caught in the middle between you two. Why it has to be like this, I don't know. Since it is, I'm kind of relieved you're backing out, Jay, because with the two of you constantly squabbling, we'd never get anything done." Paco pulled up the hood of his jacket. "You're each a big part of my life, in my life to stay, and you better make your peace with that. To be honest, right now I've had it with the both of you." Paco slammed the door, turned away and headed up the street. By the time Julia caught up with him, he was climbing into the back of a cab he'd hailed at the corner. He gave her a cheery wave as the cabby drove away.

Turning around, Julia saw Jay backing the Jeep to the corner to pick her up. When he arrived, he leaned across the seat and opened the door for her. She got in. In almost complete silence they waited for the tow truck to come. The driver, when he arrived, looked under the Alfa's hood and decided the problem was a faulty battery cable. He replaced it. Julia drove the car back to Brooklyn Heights. Jay followed to make sure she got home safely.

***

With Moses and Shadrach in their carriers, perched on top of two suitcases of clothes, a crate containing a few pieces of pottery Paco valued and hadn't trusted to the shippers sending the rest of their things, Julia and Paco started for California. Paco insisted on doing most of the driving. He claimed that whenever Julia (or anyone else, for that matter) drove the Alfa it put it, in some indefinable way, out of whack. They traveled the Northern route and ran into a storm front that stranded them in a don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it town is central Colorado. If they'd chosen the Southern route they would've missed the storm, but the southern route required driving through Arizona, and that wasn't something Paco was about risk: The Alfa's steering wheel might turn into a divining rod that would drag them to Paco's mother's front door.

Maybe because without Jay Russo Paco's heart really wasn't into the venture, or maybe because there was either more work than Paco could handle, or such a dearth of it sometimes he and Julia barely met their expenses, their advertising agency failed. If Paco held Jay responsible he never mentioned it to Julia.

After the agency went belly up, Paco took a job as a designer at another small but prospering agency. He showed a flair for concept and design for movie campaigns. Soon, a larger and more prestigious agency wooed him away by offering him the position of head art director. Julia accepted a job in the PR department of one of the major movie studios. Eventually, Jay Russo did leave Redbook and migrate to the coast. But not until Paco took the job at the same Studio where Julia worked, advanced rapidly to the top, and was in a position to offer Jay a job as his second in command.

Paco and Julia loved life in California; loved the pleasant weather, loved the mountains, loved the ocean. The bought a pretty bungalow on Alta Vista Avenue in West Hollywood, and then a motorcycle. They took motorcycle/camping vacations all over the West and Northwest, though they never did get to Arizona. They began to think about having children, but what Paco and Julia continued to do most was enjoy each other's company.

Eventually, Moses and Shadrach died; Moses first, Shadrach a year later, both of old age.

Julia always believed that at birth a person should be issued a standard set of pets. Over the course of a lifetime one would have the option of augmenting the set as often as one wished, but those, along with the original issue, would be around always and for ever. It was a running joke between Paco and Julia that he had married her to get his hands on Moses and Shadrach, and he was delighted the day, shortly after their wedding, when they took the cats to the vet for their annual shots, and Julia changed the name on her vet file from Morton to Berelli. The death of "the boys" so annihilated both Paco and Julia that they remained completely catless for a long time.

While they were catless, a friend offered them an eight-week-old Golden Retriever pup. Julia was against it. She couldn't say exactly why. She simply preferred cats. Paco never had the opportunity to do a compare-and-contrast on the dogs v. cats question, not with the way Sal always felt about animals in the house (his house, anyway). Paco was never intimately acquainted with either species: until he met Julia, that is, along with Moses and Shadrach. The moment Paco met them, he went into orbit. When he landed, his feet were planted firmly on kitty-camp soil. The strange thing was, Julia's family did have dogs--three of them--before she was ten, all of whom she adored. Maybe it was simply that in comparison to the furry feline deities she dared call hers, all canines seem slobbery, oafish, and occasionally. . . dangerous.

***

On a hot and glaring Sunday afternoon in May, Paco and Julia were cruising the pearl gray sash of road winding through Topanga Canyon on Paco's motorcycle, in and out of the shadows made by chiseled rock overhangs abutting the road. They seemed to be gliding. Each time they approached another curve Julia held onto Paco more tightly, relishing the solid geometry of his body, as together they dipped in and out of the languid eternity of that afternoon. Late in the day they stopped at a Topanga roadhouse for an early dinner. The place was a biker heaven. They ate their good greasy cheeseburgers and chili fries at a scarred picnic table near the dry creekbed out back.

Half an hour later, when Paco started their bike, when Julia was just strapping on her helmet and climbing on behind him, a pit bull sprang from the nest of glinting chrome and bright metal-fleck paint and tore after them. He had managed to get a fleeting hold on Julia's right foot.

"He break the skin?" Paco yelled to her over his shoulder.

Julia glanced down at her Nike. "I can't tell!"

She glanced back at the mottled gray dog. His head was down, his teeth were barred, his ears were back. As the dog thundered after them in dust raised by their lightning getaway, she could see the muscles rippling in its chest, see it spewing saliva.

"He's still coming!" she half laughed, half wailed. Paco swung out of the lot and back onto the canyon road doing sixty.

Three miles down the road from the biker haven and the demented pit bull, with the bike parked at a turnout overlooking the canyon, they stopped to assess the damage to Julia's foot. The pit bull had left a bruise on her instep and a gash mark like a denture mold on her sneaker. She finished re-tying her shoe. Both of them silently applauded as the sun, like a tired performer after a matinee performance, bowed and scraped orange and florid pink across the rock-sculpted canyon face down into the Pacific below them.

Paco seemed weary, too. He sat down in the gravelly dirt beside her, leaned partially across her and pressed his forehead against hers. They often did this when they wanted their brains to kiss.

There were to be good days after this one, great days, even, but Julia would always remember that this was the last day she and Paco would share that was unmarred by a force considerably more threatening and beyond their control than the enraged pit bull.

September 10, 1960

Dewey's maternal aunt (Sylvia) has died. It looks like it was a stroke. Within hours of her death, her face and hair were washed with sacred corn meal by her nearest blood relative (Dewey's mom). Feathers were twisted into the front shock of her hair so that they partially covered her forehead. Her face was covered with a white cloth of the thinnest cotton. She was then carried to a burial ground in a rocky area at the eastern portion of the mesa.

Several hours later she was buried in a sitting position, facing east. In four days, her breath-body will enter the great sipapuni and go down to the Underworld.

The family is grieving for Sylvia. She was a fine and beautiful woman, and an excellent basket-maker. She will be a great loss. But they don't view death the same way we do. The line between the two states is thinner and more flexible. The dead continue to pursue the same course they did in life: prayer, sacred ritual, membership in the community for the benefit of the community. The line between the two states is so thin that on occasion, a person accused of murder (murder is rare here but not unheard of) asks for leniency because the victim isn't actually dead (not in our sense of the word). The dead do, however, have supernatural powers. There is a strongly held belief that the dead and the living work hand in hand to help one another, and others.

This is a part I really love: The dead exist on only the odors of food so they can become light enough to eventually ascend from the Underworld and enter the Afterworld as one of the Cloud People. The Cloud People float in the stratosphere above the San Francisco Peaks to the south. Their primary imperative is to bring rain to the mesas, so essential to the success of the corn crops.

The spirits of the dead (the Cloud People) are represented one, by the carved Katcina figurines, and, two, by the villagers who dress up and impersonate them during the dance cycle, in veneration, propitiation, and supplication.

(to be continued)

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