Bewitching Earth Read online

Chapter Two

  I had discovered you that November at a white elephant sale.

  I lived, as you knew, in one of the older dorms under the football stadium. I shared a stuffy room, my roommate was seldom there, and we shared common bathrooms, with the men urinals still standing as crazy urns in the women’s. I think it was the week before the sale when the half-sheet, the bright pink flyer advertising the Anthropology Department’s sale, sprawled on the ledge below the mirror in the common bathroom. Reading the biggest print on the flyer, I was excited by the idea of a White Elephant sale, something I had never been to before, and I carried the flyer back with me and left it on the old beige painted desk. Immediately I planned to attend, to chose several good Christmas presents there for my older sister and younger brother, both of whom liked oddities as much as me. As days went by, however, several midterms occupied my mind and I had forgotten all about the sale until that Saturday afternoon when I chanced to slide my French textbook over and rediscovered the bright pink ad.

  By then it was already past three o’clock, and I have a strange fear of arriving near the closing of a sale or at the moment when a shop owner locks up his shop, of being in any place frankly that is announcing an imminent closing. I hate a pool when the lifeguard whistles the swimmers out for lightning or when an alarm goes off and a gate bangs closed. I don’t think I told you about that phobia of mine. There’s nothing I hate more than the feeling that I will be accidentally locked into a department store. It’s an odd phobia, I wonder if it has a name,

  This White Elephant Sale, which began at ten that morning, was due to end at five, and it was way past three, but in an uncharacteristic move I got my purse and left for it anyway.

  I left my room and walked in the dark hall; blue and pink carpeting stretched ahead. I fell against the brass bar of the door and left the stadium in a fine, jazzy mood, enjoying the bright palms and pigeons of our desert campus. I was planning my winter holidays, celebrating some superior grades, wondering what the sale would be like. The campus was unusually quiet that day.

  You appeared late in the day, too, and to me you were much like some ethnographic prize or exquisite oddity that a museum docent had set aside under a table in a box for a relative who never showed. Surrounded by several admirers (why I didn’t see them I’ll never know), wearing suspenders and an outlandish ethnic shirt, as I stood in line to pay for my purchases (a guitar and an alpaca shawl), you told me you were knowledgeable of Nayarit art.

  You also explained that the New Guinean crocodile snout tucked under your arm, which I thought resembled a pot roast (an you laughed at what you said was an apt description, it was as though you were then approving of my wild imagination), was in fact originally meant for the bow of a boat. It wasn’t an antique, you explained; it might have been carved within the last forty years. For my part, the moment I saw you I wondered how I’d gotten so lucky.

  When I walked out, suddenly, I was with you, or you managed to be with me, in the sun-stricken cactus garden outside the museum, and you were talking about the time you spent in New Guinea. You were born in southern Indiana, you explained, on an apple orchard and your Irish parents had convinced you at eighteen to embark on a missionary trip to New Guinea to spread the gospel. I had never met such a witty person, a person so knowledgeable of anthropology, archaeology, and antiquities in general. While you talked every specimen, every tiny poignant pincushion cactus became enchanted. Your assessment of me was a little less sanguine. “You have a pleasing air of innocence.”