Page 16 - WTP Vol. VIII#2

When Bluejay (continued from preceding page)
himself down on the garnet red sofa, hogging it all, and putting his bare feet on the armrest, high-arched and brown as toasted piñon nuts.
Samantha the cat came in, a Balinese with sapphire blue eyes, and wove a feline spell around Jodi’s bare ankles, tickling in a slow, sensual way, before jump- ing into her lap. She’d settled in one of her favorite velvety armchairs.
Then Mrs. Frey, Luisa, came in, laden with heavy gro- cery bags.
“I got some nice lean lamb at Kaune’s,” she said to the room at large, conversationally. “I thought I’d make tagine—maybe the one with prunes and egg- plant Bo likes.”
Luisa floated vaguely through rooms and family con- fabs and tempests, equally, liking to style herself on Judith Bliss in Noel Coward’s Hayfever, which she’d played in New Haven in college.
“I hope you’ll stay for dinner, Jodi, and watch the moon walk with us?”
Jodi nodded, delighted to be asked, but Anya explod- ed at that, her simmering come to a head.
“No one should watch it. It isn’t right.”
Jodi could see that, as she often did, Anya felt hurt all the way down, sore in the marrow of her bones, sore to her little toes, which clenched sometimes like fists. Her friend believed it was an impure act, a sacrilege, that big brute men should trespass on the moon, in those clunky space boots, just as if it was theirs. As if they owned it or something.
In seventh grade Anya had liked to tell (and write down carefully in green ink on pages of Luisa Frey’s Crane stationery) long, detailed myths about the moon, the stars, the planets and their moons in turn, each with a personality, a story. They fell in love, they ran away, they danced. The moon was the darling, the most treasured of all. The daughter of
a chieftess who lived on the banks of an immense green river kept them all as treasure in a fragrant mothproof cedar chest, carefully guarded by a lonely coyote who’d fallen in love with the family’s English sheepdog, Aethelwulf. They were like chess pieces, each one unique. She took them out and played long games with them, for nights on end, with potential suitors, the pieces forming patterns new each time again, like constellations, mandalas, Tarot readings, configuring the world and its future—until one day Bluejay stole them from her, and on his way to Blue-
jay Way, where he lived with his friend the Night Owl, El Noctámbulo, dropped them by accident in the darkness, in a bottomless inky pool of loneliness and desolation, on his way across the sky. And there they stayed, spellbound, starcrossed, moonstruck, beyond all hope of rescue.
“There’s a Civil Rights protest at Cape Kennedy, say- ing the money being spent on flying to the moon should be spent helping to end poverty for African Americans instead. And I read that the Atheists are suing to stop prayers in space,” Olivia told her sister, trying to placate her.
“They ought to stop it all,” Anya pronounced. “It’s rape. Rape of the heavenly bodies. As if what they’ve done to the people here on earth isn’t awful enough.” She repeated mulishly, “They ought to stop it all.”
“And me as well?” her father, Aaron Frey, asked mildly, ruffling her brunette curls as he came in.
“You know I hate it, what you do.”
“He only studies and evaluates, doesn’t hurt any- thing,” Luisa Frey told her daughter mildly. “He respects the Native religions, you know—all those beliefs about the world you believe too.”
“His work is trespass.”
Aaron Frey worked in Los Alamos, twenty miles north of Santa Fe, where the atomic bomb was built. He was a physicist, a researcher, working among
the scientists who’d sold their souls, Anya believed, and countless others with her. It didn’t matter to her that he hadn’t been there then. It had been built, and dropped; that wasn’t going to go away.
Los Alamos was just a fact of life to Jodi, as taken-for- granted as the Anasazi cliff dwellings nearby. As her schoolwork, grammar and math. Los Alamos was up a hill with steep switchbacks, past water tanks that looked like giant coffee pots. It was a town built on mesas, with deep canyons dividing one part from another, as if it were itself a product of fission. Their class had gone by school bus to the science museum the year before. They’d seen the hollow bomb casings that were displayed in the museum patio. The bombs that had stupid nicknames—Fat Man, and Little Boy. Jodi was only interested in the science that went on there, in the labs where Aaron Frey had been hired to work. She didn’t see why she should be expected to agree with Anya, her intense and rather silly friend who made up those completely untrue stories and believed in the myths of the Pueblo Indian tribes, the Mayan Popol Vuh, and Disney things like Peter Pan
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