It so happened that I awoke before Meredith did the next morning, the morning after Maude Moran's ridiculous tale and four days after the rodeo parade where I had seen the sand painter and the evil woman from Pennsylvania. It was a cloudy morning, a school morning, with cumulus clouds and brilliant rays of sunlight stitching them together.
I saw, through an opening in the curtain, a slice of sky; it was a keyhole cut at the bottom of the curtain where the waves of fabric gapped and allowed a glimpse of the desert sky at morning, a portion of heavenly sky, my spy hole to the day's stupendous dawn.
At first the sky was washed with pink, a comfortable rose blush, an oyster pink, delicate and smooth, which faded and was replaced by iron gray, the edges of which were flirting with shapes I couldn't fit together. But then I knew them.
I glimpsed the fantastic cloud cattle I had told the lady about there in the morning sky.
The wonderful beasts moving in a mass at my dictation, the mass of animals which were whimsically mine. It was like the white horse at the rodeo seen in the frame and my thoughts about the chain of creativity. Except that this was external to me somehow.
I saw one or two cattle, moving slowly, at first. They bumped shoulders, they heads lolling lazily. Then there were more, milling and mixing, churning and roiling to delight me.
Was I really the owner of a ghost herd, a vast empire of animals which I alone could turn across the sky at will?
At once I began using my powers and I rushed them into rivers, jammed them into crossing points and they swam, chins up, above the rushing billows, the waves of glorious gray waters where white caps peaked beside their heads. They lifted their tails and trotted together when I wanted. I could make them graze on the surface of a cumulonimbus or dive beneath. I willed them to move forward, back them into pens of clouds, turned them under trees and fixed them in place.
Certain cows would kick up their heels as I would gather them in masses and I would see their white forms falling away from the herd, scattering for their places and at times little doggies, separated from their mothers, came at their heels and received a sound kick from the biggest bulls. I could scatter them wildly over great open places, great golden meadows and gather them in the gloom. I sent them cascading wholesale down monstrously steep mountains, white heads pressed against each others necks and struggling and where the very tips of clouds played as the pine edge of the mountains I sent my herd clambering up beautiful amber hills toward the gray confines of a box canyon and spilling over the high saddles of the various ranges.
Had I voiced to that horrid lady what I had really seen?
Had I seen them before? Played with them like this, for I was so good at it? When had I made them, if I were in fact their creator?
Or had the cowboy curtains suggested them? Was it the rodeo pattern on the curtains that evoked the cloud scene I saw? The curtains had a turning brew of brown and green bronco busters, each clever cowboy in chaps and holding lariats and mounted on the back of a bucking horse; the cowboys had red kerchiefs and flying hats and teeny pockets; the horses that curled over in a useless attempt to spill their tormentors, those horses were more like crabs, their manes sharp edged like the edge of a crab shell, their lips curling back and showing their sharp teeth; here and there small green prickly pear cacti sprouted from small islands of sand.
Perhaps they really were mine. That had been my impression when I saw them on the way home from saguaro monument, and when I saw them reflected in the curving chrome of our station wagon bumper. They could very well by mine alone!
What secret pride I took in their disciplined behavior. My herding instincts were great. And I was great then, greater than ever since, controlling the empire of beauty, orchestrating my own dawn.
At the height of my personal ecstasy, a light green flood washed the sky above the Rincons and then permeated the whole sky from horizon to horizon in a great invasion of something verdant and living, but something living in the terrible sense.
The green was like something I had seen only days before, yet I couldn't remember what it was that I had seen and remembered, a tree, a leaf, perhaps I wondered, had something like that scared me? But then it came to me, yes, it had to be her terrible eyes.
It was the same green, the precise shade in fact, as the awful globular eyes of that terrible prying woman that we had seen and spoken to at the rodeo parade. The woman who I had told about the imaginary cattle.
And then it appeared. At first it seemed to be an ordinary cloud, not empowered with an extraordinary skills, but simply puffy and white. A perfectly white cloud, bountiful and clean, sliding across the sky serenely and making its way toward the east, but then I began to realize that it was an exact twin to her puffy white glove, the glove of the awful woman downtown, which was now pointing out destiny, floated low above my head, right above my house, and aiming, pointing, at the herd like some ridiculous finger sign showing the way on a road.
I tried to turn it around, to make it obey me the way the herd of cattle had. But I quickly found that it had its own will, independent of mine; it was invading my space and taking it over, seizing control of the cattle right before my eyes, rustling them where it would. Possessed as the gloved finger was by her desire, the marvelous mix of cattle fled in terror. They walked lockstep, away from me in a fury, melting away, evaporating forever, gone from our skies, and ever moving off in a flitting flirt, the disappearance of the magical moment, the casting out of all illusionary beings, the sky was denuded, unclothed. The cattle of the sky took off over the mountain toward New Mexico with a nervous flick of their tails, the calves lowing and looking at their mothers, the bulls storming away angrily, a smear of black on their bottoms, and a cloud of flies chasing them. Sunlight streamed over their hides in the last glorious vision of them, their whole churning mass a fleeing delight to the eye.
All of them chased away by a single threatening finger and this finger pointed inexorably forward in time.
END OF A PHANTOM HERD
A SECOND NOVEL WILL CONTINUE AS THE WRITER CONTENDS WITH MASHERS AND CORRALS STRAY STORIES
SYNOPSIS OF THIS VOLUME
AND MEET THE AUTHOR FOLLOW
A Phantom Herd
Novel Synopsis