Familiar Artifacts

FAMILIAR ARTIFACTS

Lorraine Ray

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2018 Lorraine Ray

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

MIXING WITH WITCHES

MRS. WAINWRIGHT, LIFT YOUR HEAD

SQUAW DRESSES

KAISER A THING OR TWO

CIRCUITOUS LEMON ECONOMY

THE PEERLESS ORATOR

LITTLE HALF-BURNT COCKY-BABY

SCAT!

THE GOOD LIBRARIAN

EL HILO

BEWITCHING EARTH

MAELSTROM

MICRO TALES

MIXING WITH WITCHES

After I bought her homemade tamales for several months, Mrs. Rodriguez and I became friends. Or perhaps I should say better friends than we had been, for I felt free to ask her what I wanted to know about an area of Arizona where she was born. I suppose another way to look at our relationship is that she was more friendly to me so I would continue buying her tamales, and I was more friendly to her so I could feel comfortable asking her my peculiar question. Frankly, I might have been her only customer, the only person silly enough to give her ten dollars for a dozen of those skimpy things. Mrs. Garcia, another of my co-workers at the Klaxon Call Center, dissed the amount of meat in the tamales and claimed ten dollars a dozen would be asking too much for plump, well made tamales, while Mrs. Rodriguez created and sold flattened failures. I stood up for Mrs. R’s efforts, arguing that they weren’t as bad as all that and claiming I liked the flavor, etcetera. Mrs. Garcia cackled. Then the very next day Mrs. Garcia tried to sell me a badly-sewn blue satin pillow with extremely scratchy lace around the edges! I struggled to keep from showing my annoyance while politely refusing it.

Both of them, Mrs. Garcia and Mrs. Rodriguez, took me for a gringa chump and I vowed never again to purchase anything from people at work. Buying from co-workers usually turns out like that kid book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. One thing leads to another and pretty soon you’re forced to admire their children’s art projects, listen to a pitch for a timeshare condo in Florida, try on their mother’s knitting or consider a hideous blue satin pillow. And while you have to examine that homemade stuff you have to figure out a way to keep from buying all of it without offending them.

Anyhow, during the time I was still paying for the bad tamales, this Mrs. Rodriguez character told me how I could find the shop I had been thinking of, the odd place my grandfather loved to visit. That was what I wanted to know from her. Apparently it was out on the Old Guernivaca Road a ways—I would come to pipe corrals and a sign on plywood saying Tienda Xoxtil and that would be it, the real deal. She thought they did still sell cans of chocolate covered ants, rooster combs, and powdered grasshoppers. Just as I remembered. Probably, she joked, the same tins I’d seen there when I was eight. "Nobody buys that shit. Makes sense that a gringa would ask about it."

And the walls of the shop actually were plastered with huge bullfighting posters; she remembered that all right. But when I mentioned that my grandfather knew the bruja (that is to say the witch) who owned the place, Mrs. Rodriguez shook her head slowly and started chuckling. "Bruja, you talking about that kook who runs the store? she chortled. You say some pretty funny crap sometimes, even for a gringa."

Being subjected to this lady’s ridicule peeved me. My grandfather was as Mexican as she was, and of course that did make me, his granddaughter, less Hispanic than her, so I suppose it was alright if she thought she ought to call me gringa. I wasn’t about to put her right, for to do so would just cause difficulties. However I became determined to meet the witchy owner of the odd shop. And so the very next Saturday when I was off work I drove out alone on the winding dirt road, leaving the valley from the far southeastern edge of the city and travelling toward the little town of Guernivaca, Arizona.

Very early in my journey I realized the road I traveled had seen little use. The miserable ranches in that district tended to be the short-term obsessions of town dwellers whose interest in playing cowboys arose sporadically. Their livestock perished, their windmills fell into ruins, and nearly every third ranch was up for sale, or had been years ago; the signs looked awfully faded. I passed a failed winery and ranch with rows of gigantic abandoned trucks. That was the region around Guernivaca; an archetype of the American success story in the desert Southwest.

Once I approached Guernivaca proper I noticed an awfully lot of cows standing in stark fields staring hopelessly off at the horizon, swishing flies away with their scrawny tails and chewing their cuds. Most likely minute cuds. What was there to eat? Almost all of them appeared to be hovering near death. Actually, I feared that several of them had successfully made it to death and these probably rested somewhere under the vast clouds of flies.

Flies, flies, and more flies. They seemed to be my only other companions out there on the lonely road; whenever I came to a stop they landed on my windows and crawled around urgently as though they wanted in at me.

Following Mrs. Rodriguez’ instructions, when I passed Patagonia Road I slowed my car to search for the strange store.

Mrs. Rodriguez was right. Tienda Xoxtil wasn’t hard to find if you kept on the lookout for the sign. A big old splintery board propped against a rusty orange and yellow tractor. The sign stood about ten feet tall with letters which had been recently dabbed with bright green paint. Under the name of the store the single word rarezas, oddities, had been scrawled with a crabbed hand. Daubs of paint in the same dazzling green color decorated the board haphazardly. It looked like it had been painted by a kid.

A moonscape of deep craters jolted me as I pulled into the dirt lot in front of the old adobe store where a Plymouth with handicapped plates and no hubcaps nosed into the front concrete steps. The store itself was white plastered adobe, exactly as I’d recalled. Over the years the surface of the store’s plaster had cracked horizontally and great hunks of exposed adobe brick had washed away, making a cavity, a cliff cave, at about knee level. The sight startled me. I suddenly remembered something. Fifteen years earlier, I had played in those same miniature cliffs with a toy burro and a chain of black and silver plastic bears which my grandfather had given me from the many rum demijohns he drank. A boy named Nasario had been with me that day, laughing at the toy bears, and I was sure that I’d given him one or, I wondered, had he been imaginary?

I parked the car under a mesquite tree, the only flat spot in the shade, and hurried to enter this old store. I was going to see the owner, this witch from my past! It felt to me as though I were about to do great things, to journey into a place of my childhood and see it again.

Up the three steps, a splintery door greeted me. A serape screened the glass, but I took hold of a loose doorknob and twisted it. The door yielded with a loud creak and I stepped in with a bit of a stumble on a high threshold.

Upon entering, I felt my heart beat in a persistent, loud drumming. To be honest I was rather terrified, but soon I found it was all as I had remembered.

The store’s contents revealed themselves slowly, like unwrapping a candy. At first I stood rooted to the entry where I absorbed the strange smells, so fusty and wicked, the wooden shelves painted turquoise and the oak warped and water-stained floors. All around me, huge matadors on bullfighting posters swooshed their capes. Veronicas, that’s the name of one of their moves. The undulating red capes swirled in front of infuriated pop-eyed bulls and behind the bulls were shouting crowds of well-dressed spectators.

After I had taken in the posters, I then discovered one overflowing barrel standing beside me which was labeled shark fins and another barrel in the corner labeled… Bats!

It took courage to walk slowly up the store aisle directly in front of me and discover an assortment of canned and bottled bugs advertising themselves with dusty faded labels. On the lower shelves pulverized roots and berries towered in baskets. I turned a corner to see mysterious love salves slathered into miniature mason jars and cloth dolls with spooky dark eyes piled crisscross in a cardboard box like so much vengeful firewood.

I crept down the next aisle grinning happily to myself. I had actually found it! The crazy shop of my dreams! This was the strange place I’d been to with my grandfather; one of the places he’d begged us to take him after his stroke. And I’d thought I’d imagined it!

Ah yes, I remembered something more. Hadn’t he bought me a doll from that very glass case? The one I glimpsed with the huge brass cash register on top? The doll’s head was clay, the hair done in silky black braids. With cheeks painted in red circles, yes, of course. The doll wore a red felt skirt and a green blouse. I still had the head. Where had I buried the body?

I was thinking of him, of Nando and all he meant to me, when a withered and wrinkled hand snaked out from a doorway behind the cash register and grasped the curtain. The cloth parted and the proprietress limped out from a shadowy back room.

She was incredibly old. As ancient as sin, as the expression goes, yet she was still trying to hide the toll the years had taken on her. She was one of those very old women who try desperately to hold off the inevitable slump in their looks; she wore a wig and her eyebrows had been sketched in black pencil. She had drawn them all wrong, crookedly and halfway to her hairline. Her real eyebrows could be seen emerging under the thick pink powder which coated her face. She’d daubed some powder on the backs of her withered hands. Cataracts impaired her vision and vivid red lipstick had been smeared hastily on her lips. The smear only approximated a human mouth.

Hi, I said stupidly. I don’t know why I spoke English, but I knew my Spanish sucked.

She jerked her head in my direction. Hi, she responded and began moving toward me. She followed the sound of my voice.

Something about the crabbed way she was coming at me worried me, so I darted around that shelf to another aisle. But she kept moving with me, following my footsteps. I’ve wanted to shop here for years, I said, trying to make my voice sound relaxed and merry.

Oh? she breathed.

I took a dive into another aisle. Yes. I came here with my grandfather many times, years ago, I gushed. Why was I planning to parade our family history in front of an old woman in a strange shop? What was I thinking?

Oh, she said, your grandfather? She shuttled her legs forward stiffly. I noticed she wore tennis shoes and loose gray nylon slacks. The slacks flapped at the front in a silly way when she walked and one of her shoelaces dragged behind her.

Yes, I flitted away from her again.

Her face contorted. She stopped coming after me and groped her way to a spot beside the counter.

Is there anything you wanted? she asked eventually. I noticed she spoke slowly and breathlessly.

No, not really. Well, I wanted to look around. That’s all. Just to look around. Then I realized what I was saying was rather tasteless. Why disturb this old woman and buy nothing? I’m sure I’ll buy something, but I’m not sure what.

All right. Her voice sounded grim.

I inspected her potions and because she didn’t follow me, I grew bold again. I picked out a rose cream and something to remove freckles. My grandfather just loved it here, I gushed when I brought these items to the counter. I could use these. I took out the cash and she snatched it from me. I was owed some change, but I decided not to mention it.

What was his name? This grandfather of yours. She dropped the salves into a small brown bag with the name of another shop on it.

Breverton. Fernando Breverton. I replied proudly.

Breverton, Fernando, Fernando, Breverton?

Twisting his name backward and forward that way, she made it sound nonsensical. It was like she was preparing to chant it or something and needed to snap it in two first!

Yes. I brought his picture. I wasn’t sure why I had brought my grandfather’s photo with me nor why I pulled it from my backpack and stepped close enough to her to hand it over. Did I actually think she would remember him? I knew he was charismatic, but not everyone fell prey to his charm.

She held it close to her cataracts. Handsome enough. I don’t remember him, though.

My disappointment was probably palpable. It was a long time ago, I demurred. I reached my hand out to get the photo back from her, but she continued holding it. I could sense incredible strength in her fingers as I tried to tug it from her. I let her take it.

Let me bring him back, she offered vaguely. Probably I’ll need Fluser-deep and Wimple-max and pinch of soap. Maybe two groklimics and a wentro. That’s a good Hellbroth Boil. Was he Hispanic?

Half, but whaaa? I began in shock after hearing her strange vocabulary.

Then no soap, she snapped.

Soap! Bring him back? I responded in shock. I’m not sure if it was the offer to bring someone back from the dead, or the fact she used soap to do it, that terrified me.

She spun around slowly. Isn’t that what you wanted?

Boy, she had me there. I probably did think subconsciously that something like that was going to be offered. Now that I faced it honestly, I disgusted myself. What was I trying to do? Had I become a total kook because of nostalgia?

From the dead you mean?

Sure, yeah. I’ll do it for you. In a wink. One wrinkled eye crunched into something resembling a convulsion.

She glanced at the photo and looked around the store shelves nearest her as though there were a