CHAPTER XIII
WHERE EAGLES SLEEP
"It happens to me all the time," Jay said. His voice was so dense with emotion, Julia barely recognized it. She glanced across the genuine cowhide covering the rough-hewn plank table, past their dinner companions to make sure it was Jay who was speaking. They were dining at the Steak House, a popular restaurant and watering hole in the tiny community of Tusayan, a few miles west of Grand Canyon Village, not far from the airport.
Jay had just shared a story about Paco with Alison (an account rep from a paper company Jay often used for studio business), Paula (a rep from a color separation establishment), and with Barry and Isaac, who worked with Jay at the Studio. Julia had heard the tale before, many times actually, in the months since the incident had happened. She was a little tired of hearing it. She had tried to tune it out so she wouldn't have to hear it again, but it had seeped through anyway.
The story Jay told was about the afternoon in October he went to the Los Angeles Convention Center to attend the annual Antique Toy Fair. It was the first time Jay attended without Paco. Shortly after Jay's arrival, as he was strolling through the acres of booths, he spotted a wind-up, blackberry-colored, 1957 Buick. It was priced at double what Jay calculated it was worth. He didn't want to spend the money. He wandered the fair for a time, then had a change of heart and decided to go back for the tiny Buick, but he couldn't remember the booth and aisle numbers where he had seen it. He searched for quite a while, past booths whose owners were busy re-packing their wares to leave. Some of the booths were already bare and the vendors gone.
Just as Jay was about to give up, something made him reach into the pocket of his Lakers jacket--among the remembrances Julia gave Jay after Paco died. In the pocket Jay found ticket stubs for the last Laker game he, Julia and Paco attended together. He studied the stubs. Senate Section G, row 17. Jay hurried to row 17. Halfway down, he discovered the booth he was looking for. The Buick was still there. "I feel like Paco is never very far away." Jay stated, as he concluded the tale. Most of the people at the table seemed skeptical. "No, really," Jay continued, "when I'm in a spot, he never fails to show."
Now, to make true-believers of the four others at the table, whom had all known Paco, but not very well, Julia suspected Jay was going to tell them about the Milwaukee press check last summer. She was right.
"I was overseeing a run of bus shelters for the new Harrison Ford movie," Jay said. "No matter what I told the press foreman to do, no matter what he did on his own, we couldn't get the color of the faces to come out right. We tried about fifteen ink combinations, coming closer to what it should look like each time, but always a little off in one direction or another.
"Finally, at about three o'clock in the morning, when we're just about out of time because the crew needed to start the next scheduled run, I heard Paco's voice telling me to up the yellow ink to a point on my own I would've figured was way too high." Jay fell silent. Julia could see that he was moved.
"And?" wondered Alison.
"And, I did as Paco suggested. It came out perfectly. He was always a lot better at color than I am."
Two waitresses arrived carrying trays with the group's orders. When one of the waitresses set a plate of tri-tips and fries on the table before Julia, Julia pushed it away. For the balance of the meal, as everyone chatted around and across her, she gazed at, but didn't see, the memorabilia hanging on the walls in the John Wayne bar.
All the way into the restaurant from the rental car in the parking lot before dinner, Jay had held Julia by the elbow and delivered a hissed lecture to her about her dour mood, her rotten attitude, and the other capital crimes he felt she had committed that day. Julia, or the best part of her anyway (but the part which no longer had much say in things), was contrite that Jay was upset, because Julia really hadn't really meant to lose her drivers license, or to forget to speak to Jay during the flight, or dawdle and remain aloof from Jay's friends during the hike. No one wanted to have a Merry Christmas more than Julia did. Under normal circumstances, and, if she had never been an adjunct member of the Berelli clan, the Grand Canyon would've been an ideal spot for doing that. Everyone she had encountered in the Southwestern/Alpine-looking village, decorated to the hilt for the holidays, seemed to be radiating holiday buoyancy. Unfortunately, everyone else's cheer just deepened Julia's gloom.
Now, as Jay drove her back toward Grand Canyon Village, because Julia had decided she didn't want to see the Grand Canyon movie showing at the IMAX theater with the others following dinner, he was still riding her.
"What will you do instead, go back to your room and mope?" he wanted to know, as they arrived in the Village.
"Maybe I'll go for a walk."
"Jules, it's dark, it's getting cold. Did you even bring a jacket any heavier than that ragged suede thing?"
"Let me out here," she said, as they neared the miniature railway station on the road below the El Tovar Hotel.
Jay slammed on the brakes. "Fine. Suit yourself."
"I'm thinking about going home, Jay," she revealed as she climbed out of the car.
"I don't want to hear about it. You're not going anywhere!"
As Julia climbed the steep stairs from the train station to the approach to the El Tovar Hotel, she heard Jay burn rubber as he drove away to meet the others back at the IMAX. To her right, Julia saw the lights winking out in the Hopi House gift shop and gallery across the way as it closed for the night. The building, like several others in the Village, was designed by one of America's first prominent female architects, Mary Elizabeth Jane Coulter. Its rough and terra-cotta stone walls--along with the flow of its terraced rooftops--emanated a strong Hopi Indian tang. Julia had meant to go in there and perhaps pick up a Christmas present for Jay. Maybe tomorrow.
Longing for the safe familiarity of her own bed, of her cats, Julia turned left to stroll for a time along the paved walkway paralleling the canyon's south rim. Tomorrow, she knew, was going to be a terrible day, possibly one better spent at home in Los Angeles. It had been short-sighted to make this trip with Jay.
She had known he would find a way to talk about how he could still feel Paco's presence. Jay seemed to need to talk about it often and in detail. Talking about it was obviously a comfort to him. But whenever he described the ways, small and large, that Paco was still somehow guiding and watching over him, Julia felt an inescapable and taunting mortification.
She felt the same way when others among Paco's intimates related stories similar to Jay's. There were many. Libby (always a bit bottom-heavy) claimed, for instance, that a Bloomingdales' winter close-out last April, Paco had discouraged her from buying a purple wool coat-dress that was 30% off, by telling her it made her look like a giant eggplant. Julia had also heard that Uncle Nick had entirely abandoned "the system" and was now strictly betting longshots on the basis of the hot tips Paco whispered in his ear. Uncle Nick was winning oodles.
The most stunning example of Paco's uncanny reach, the one that most moved, mortified and scared Julia, had occurred when Steve Quinn's brother died in February. Steve caught a red-eye flight to O'Hare Airport. He spent the night, as the plane hurtled through the cloudless dark, pressed into his windowseat, alternately dozing and silently crying.
As the plane was about to land, the woman sitting next to him, who had been throwing sidelong glances of concern at him the whole flight, laid a comforting hand on Steve's arm and asked what the trouble was.
"My brother was killed in a crash on the Illinois Interstate," Steve said "We weren't that close the last few years, and I've never been more sorry about anything, because in his own way he was kind of a singular guy."
"I understand what you're going through," Steve's seatmate said. "I lost someone recently, too. A co-worker, and a very good friend. Nothing's the same with him gone. Without him, work doesn't have the same family atmosphere it had because of him. His name was Paco Berelli. Everyone misses him."
The moment the woman revealed Paco's name, Steve had later told Julia, it felt to him as though Paco had laid a comforting hand upon his shoulder, and that he'd felt it there ever since.
In the village, near the Kolb Brothers' studio, two photographers who had come to the Grand Canyon from Pennsylvania at the turn of the century to capitalize on the nascent tourist trade, Julia gazed out over the canyon. She was near the head of the Bright Angel trail again. In the starkly bright moonlight, she could clearly see sculpted detail of the craggy rock walls she had viewed earlier in the day.
She wondered about the eagle. Maybe she had even returned to this spot to see it again, although she didn't really expect to. Where did the eagle sleep?
She wasn't frightened of the great bird on the trail that afternoon. She hadn't felt in any danger as she hiked back up Bright Angel, and it continued to shadow her. Nor did she feel in danger now, although she sensed it was somehow still watching her.
By the time Julia returned to the El Tovar, chilled and still anxious for the comfort of her own bed and the warm friendliness of her cats, she had made a decision.
Walking through the lobby, past the twenty-five foot, elaborately decorated Christmas tree, Julia spotted Jay in the cocktail lounge, alone at the bar, sipping a beer. She joined him. She shook her head when the bartender asked for her order.
"Tomorrow," Jay said looking down into the foamy top of his beer glass, "is the first anniversary of Paco's death."
Julia nodded. She had been painfully aware of the approaching anniversary for weeks. "I've decided to go home in the morning," she told him. "I think I'll be able to cope better there."
He turned to look at her. She couldn't read his expression. Was it disappointment? Defeat? Whatever it was, it was tinged with a fatigue she had never before seen. She almost reached out to touch his arm, almost said something about how she understood that Paco's death had critically wounded Jay, too. As the words were coming up her throat and about to roll off her tongue, he took the keys to the rental car out of his pocket and laid them on the bar. "With the driving phobia, good luck getting yourself to the airport," he said.
Without another word, he got off the bar stool and left.
***
Whether it was an amalgam of what she knew--had read and studied over the years--what she still believed at that point was her own extremely troubled conscience, and the geographic quadrant she happened to be in, for the first since Paco passed, that night Julia dreamed.
In her dream, Julia was the messenger she-eagle, Kwahu. As Kwahu, she soared through the timeless camber of the Grand Canyon, over the trembling green-gold Colorado River at the canyon's scored depths. Like a Jedi pilot, banking left, then right, she glided unhindered through the jutting, jagged and canted escarpments, tagged with pinon and juniper and could see, that taken all together, the canyon was not just a trivial accident of nature, but an eloquent example of The Sculptor's finest work.
Over the burnished red ruins of twelfth century Tusayan, she flew, then across the juncture of the Colorado and the Little Colorado Rivers where according to Hopi lore was located the sacred aperture, the sipapuni, from where all life emerged, and to where the dead returned. She sailed over the no-mans-land of the Painted Desert, with its mounds whorled in violet, bright rust and slate. Far away in the Southern distance, she saw the three Hopi Buttes thrusting powerfully upwards: the Southwestern version of the pyramids at Cheops. Onward, she kited, skimming over the ragged spires of Coal Canyon, across the glittering shale of the Vermilion Cliffs: moving on and up and toward some arcane eternity.
She soared on, buffeted upwards, then downwards, until she felt the weariness in her wings and descended Black Mesa, which covered the Four-Corners region and resembled the splayed back of a large but hand. Lower she flew, until she could clearly see the hand's wind-chafed knuckles with the smaller Hopi Mesas--Third, Second and First--as chewed fingertips; the ragged Hopi villages clinging bravely like hangnails. Within night's black infinity, the stars hung ripe and heavy and pluckable.
Over Third Mesa, Over Second, as on she flew to First. She skimmed past the village of Hano, then Sichomovi, until she finally approached what seemed to be her destination: the village of Walpi, terraced out of rock like a teetering flight of stairs to the stratosphere, jutting up from the steep mesa's very promontory.
When Julia awoke before daybreak she felt as though an invitation had been extended. She knew precisely what she had to do, and she felt almost equal to the task.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF SALVATORE BERELLI
October 17, 1960
I have been so miserable that I haven't even been equal to keeping up my journal. During these last two weeks, while Juanita has been so busy taking care of Dewey's family as her wedding robes were fashioned, I have taken to going for long curative walks that aren't curing anything. I often have company on these walks: Juanita's puppy. He's apparently as much in need of someone to commiserate with as I am. The puppy, whom she calls Unnawiy (the name is entirely apt, I think), has such a bright soul. He's making a dog lover of me.
Dewey remains rather silent and withdrawn. At night, he's not in his bed next to mine. Neither is he in the lean-to with his bride. About this, I'm both anxious and relieved.
(to be continued)
Click on the paw print to return Home
