Rodeos came and rodeos went, and that year that one had gone for us. We didn't actually see the rodeo parade or for that matter the rodeo itself, but that was the case most years. Our Western Heritage, which we proudly boasted of to Easterners, frequently didn't involve any real participation.
"I wonder how that old guy's picture turned out," I said, talking to my sister about the Navajo and his sand painting when I slipped between the bed sheets later. We swore we could hear the babysitter fumbling around with the unplugged stereo. "I wish we could go down and see it tomorrow. He'd probably be done by now, don't you think?" I asked this cheerfully, denying myself the authentic, rather shocked reaction I had had to its bomb-blasted, mechanical corn maidens and peculiar squash executed in colored sand.
"It won't be there anymore," said Meredith, drawing back a fist and landing a vicious punch in the center of her pillow.
"What?"
"I said 'It won't be there,'" Meredith repeated impatiently.
"Why not?" I asked in surprise.
"It'll be gone. Wiped out. That's why." She flopped her head down on her pillow and I could see her eyes gleaming a little in the dark bedroom we shared. I wondered if she was happy or crying.
"Huh? Why? Who's going to do that?"
In my young mind I believe I imagined a persistent vandal drooling happily as he loped through the streets of downtown Tucson. There were people like that, I knew it before I read about them, strange individuals who bought tickets to the museums of the world only to lunge forward crazily with a hammer and smash the toes off famous statues. Theirs was a strange compulsion, a desire to spoil the work of others. To the vandal it was exquisite agony to view intact art. Throwing acid on the Mona Lisa, razor-slashing a Van Gogh, all of this was the work of such people. They weren't like me when I destroyed my own art, that was the critic inside me exerting too much influence and the urge I had never involved destroying someone else's art. In my mind I saw this sand painting vandal sneak up to a rear door of Rosefield's and pry it open. He tiptoed through the dark store and climbed onto the window display through that secret door I'd seen. There he came to his knees and joyously, triumphantly, swiping the sand painting until the sand had blended to a uniform brownish gray. Like a Dick Tracy character, his pimply face was as featureless as the sand painting after he had finished with it. Featureless except for his evil, laughing, drooling mouth.
"Who would do that?" I asked.
"The guy himself, silly. Don't you know that Navajos wreck their sand paintings? Right after they make em." Meredith yawned. "It's some kind of Indian hoo-ha. They don't let their artwork last beyond the sunset of the day they make it. The teacher told us that in school when we saw a painting at some old dumb-o museum they drag everyone to. At the university. You'll go there and see the same sand painting, I bet. It was supposed to be destroyed, but they saved it to show kids like you and me."
"I don't like that. Them wrecking their own art."
"Why not?"
"It makes me feel sad."
"It's not any sadder than anything else."
"It is sadder."
"Listen, lots of things get destroyed right after they're made. God does it all the time. We had a sister that lived a day. God did that."
"What?"
"God does it every day."
"But that makes way for new stuff."
"Yeah, so the old man is freeing up the world of the burden of absorbing his creation. He takes it away with him and makes way for a new creation."
That impressed me. Oh, I'd be lying if I said I actually thought of the deep symbolic meaning of the impermanence of art or anything. I wasn't quite so profound at six years of age. But within a few years, when I was writing and destroying my art, I thought about that Navajo, what it meant to create only for yourself and to take it away with you, imperfectly remembered, as all life's memories are, leaving no record for others. Like a spy who destroys the records of his spying.
It was like a memory I had of a shoebox full of clay snakes. I had gone home from a relative's house with them, perhaps having made them there, having rolled them out between my eager hands, and those clay snakes in the shoe box were completely animated to me, as real as any pet. I could feel them through the cardboard crawling above my knee. The moonlight, through the car window, shone down on them and they were magical. But when I tried to write about it later, the snakes were only oily and still, glued to the bottom of the box. My art was never good enough to capture the perfect, elusive, imaginary animals.
It was several years later before I read about writers who imprisoned themselves in rooms, even in cork cells within those rooms, in an effort to recapture their past perfectly, recording every detail of the moment, every impression and sensation. But soon enough I understood the temptation they succumbed to, the maddening desire to record accurately some fleeting vision of beauty.
Yet somehow I also knew the past was an illusion, an irreproducible glob of messy moments made up of static clumps like my clay snakes. The prodding pricks of paint at the end of the pointillists' brush. Their daubs of color were individually imperfect yet with distance the eye would blend the various colors to form a colored shape. Distance from the object to the viewer's eye-was it age for the writer?
And there was something more that I knew. Reproducing the past would only be an ecstatic state, desirable for the writer, so long as everything there was pleasant. If all you have to remember is the smell of coffee and croissants, or the perfect yellow edge of a pat of butter on a blue plate, you have nothing to terrify you. Dwelling there might be pleasant and not an uncomfortable obsession. But some of us have things we remember which we'd just as soon forget. In most writer's pasts I was sure no naked man with a knife between his teeth came out of a streambed after him, or drew him to the side of a car asking for the directions to a park only to try and pull him through the car door. He lived in no dangerous desert on the forgotten edge of a continent. That fate was mine.
But the best stories have a morsel of horror still clinging to the bone. Lurking in my past, my irretrievable unreality, shades of a much worst time beckoned with their terrible tales untold.