The Saguaro Arms
by James Sallis
Because the jaguars have no spots, at first we don’t see them in the room’s corners. Shadows, perhaps: nothing more. Though we hear the sound of their breathing from acoustic niches formed in those moments the radio falls silent.
Earlier we listened to NPR, the same news as that we left behind, as though, thrown across our backs or tucked into the corners of boxes and trunks, we have brought these events along with us. Reports on escalating violence, on the collapse of yet another cease-fire and subsequent forfeiture of this week’s ‘safe zone’ in San Marco’s revolution. Grown large on hunger and despite, now the children of the original freedom fighters are coming down from the hills.
How terrible, Carey says as I open a second bottle of wine, a Brazilian cabernet, auguring down into the cork, working the machine’s arms (shaped like a woman’s legs) to lever out the cork with a satisfyingly plosive exclamation, and refill our glasses. How sad.
Yes, I say. Life.
But how can we accept it.
Life?
No, the terribleness of it. The sadness.
As though we could do anything else - but I do not say this.
Outside, blackbirds flush from power lines, sweep away in a flat arc and, clustering, drawn to some unseen center, return. They settle back at random on the lines, like musical notes, perforations on player-piano rolls, braille.
What kind of life can they have had, after all, Carey asks.
Or any of us - another thing I don’t say. As this lowering sun hauls down its carry-on luggage of remorse.
I stand looking at the bottle’s label, a Brazil shape formed of grapes. It resembles Texas, which we have crossed on the way here.
Carey wears the cranberry-color shirt that brought us together, a consoling gift from mother Jeanne. Carey’s latest relationship had crumbled to disinterest and disaffection, while my own year-long romance stammered and tripped and blathered away, trying to explain itself, like a poor comedian. Great shirt, I said. She told me about it. We went for coffee. Bare bones of narrative.
Nights when she wears it Carey washes the shirt by hand and puts it out to dry on a hangar over the tub. Calais. Made in USA. Seated on the toilet, I keep watch. One corner of the front pocket is stained with ink. The narrow seam along the bottom has begun unravelling. Threads like a plant’s tendrils reach down for the tub.
And so, ponderously, as though on camelback, swaying, over desert and between dunes, we’ve come to this foreign land, where the sun fights its way down through layers of color, where saguaro lift arms in welcome all around us and salamanders with cowlike skulls sail the backs of lit windows each night.
And where, too, rising from the couch beside me from which we’ve watched ‘authentic’ recreations of live, unrecorded broadcasts of Armstrong Circle Theater, Playhouse 90 and Dave Garroway, you go off to sleep alone in the nest of blankets and pillows you’ve made of our bathtub.
There, in that other country, my name is remembered. Here I work at whatever I can find.
You think of the child at these times, I know, smallest of the things we left behind. Newborn, with perfect tiny fingernails at the end of plump fingers, the child would not look at us however we hailed and drew it. Picked up, it went rigid. Turned right or left in its crib, it remained there till the whole weight of its skull settled to that side.
We had barely ensconced ourselves here when the jaguars appeared. At first we ignored them. During the journey, after all, there had been so many dangers. Nor are the dangers necessarily over, I feel. Each morning elderly men in crewcuts and bolo ties emerge from behind the redundant locks of ranchstyles to run up the flag. Each evening they emerge again to retrieve those flags. All day they stand peering out their windows, light from massive TV’s washing up behind them like a tide. These men bear watching.
As you settle into your tub then, night closing around you, day hanging out backstage bitching with the other bit players till it’s time to go on, I sit listening to neighborhood gunfire, to the wheeze and pump of accordions through Juan’s window next door.
From their corners the jaguars watch me. Even after I turn off the lights their eyes gleam and flicker. Against moonlight on the back of my windows, as on photographic plates, appear the silhouettes of salamanders, perhaps a dozen of them, facing this way and that. Like myself, like the jaguars, awaiting what I will do next.