The Annotated Church of the Old Mermaids

One-1

One

Get the starfish outta your eyes, sister.

Sister Sheila Na Giggles Mermaid

Myla walked the wash1 looking for trash in the dirt. She looked for treasure too. One man’s trash was another woman’s treasure. And vice versa, she always said. She carried two bags over her right shoulder. Into the plastic bag, she dropped garbage; into the ruby-colored cloth bag, she put those bits of refuse she believed she could sell on Fourth Avenue, at the Church of the Old Mermaids.2 It was not a real church. At least not how most people defined that word. It was the space where she put her table, chair, and wares on Saturdays, shine or shine. She called it the Church of Old Mermaids because her mother told her when she was a child that the desert had once been a vast sea. She liked imagining that the mermaids had not dried up when the sea did;3 they merely changed their attitudes. And maybe their skin and fin-ware.

Myla’s feet slip-slided over the sand as she went around a palo verde tree whose bare branches stretched out over the wash. Dry rust-colored bean pods dangled from the green twigs, like offerings from the skeletal fingers of a Catrina doll4 enticing her to snatch up a couple. So she did. She dropped them into the ruby bag.

“Thank you,” she murmured. Wasn’t about to say she wouldn’t be able to get a nickel for them. Unless she came up with a particularly good story. Like how these pods came from the wash that used to be a river where the Old Mermaids were stranded when the Old Sea began to disappear; or these pods came from a tree hanging over the wash where the Old Mermaids were first stranded, where they finally came to shore, and the first thing they did, these Old Mermaids, was to plant themselves a palo verde,5 all green, just like Mother Star Stupendous Mermaid’s tail had been, you know, before she had to leave the sea, the river, the wash.

Normally Myla did not take anything organic from the wash to sell. She removed only that which humans made, except for an occasional feather. She knew she could sell the latticed skeletons left by cacti—especially the cholla bones that grayed into exotic desert art—but she did not feel she had the right, not yet. Perhaps after she had lived on the land a bit longer. After all, ten years was only a drop in the proverbial time bucket. Sometimes she asked permission to snag an animal bone or cholla joint which she then stored in a room next to her studio apartment in the modular barn near the Crow house. She was not certain what she was going to do with these bits and pieces of the desert, but she felt as though she was retrieving pieces of long ago dismembered desert creatures. Or sea creatures. One day she would reassemble them.

But now, today, she needed to finish her walk and check on the houses in the Old Mermaid Sanctuary. Gail would be at the Crow house soon to pick her up. Myla was caretaker for the houses and land of five families while the owners were away, which was most of the year.6 The Wentworths usually came for the week between Christmas and New Year; the Castillos visited every spring for a couple of months; the Martins and Fords stayed most of the fall, and the Crows usually took up residence in October and again in March. Now in late January none of them were home.

All of the families wanted the houses to look as though they were lived in while they were away, and Myla did what she could to accommodate their wishes. The Crows encouraged her to use any part of their house since she lived on their property. They told her to watch television, swim in the pool, sit in the spa, use the library, or cook in their deluxe kitchen, but she rarely went into the house. Once or twice she had used the kitchen when she needed an extra oven.

She did like sitting by the Crow’s peanut-shaped pool. It was a deep dark indigo blue with patches of lighter blue here and there, creating the impression that one had stumbled upon a curvature in the bedrock where a natural spring pooled. The palm tree growing next it, along with other desert flora, helped further this nature fiction. Or maybe it wasn’t a fiction. The house was surrounded by the Sonoran desert.7 At midday sometimes, Myla sat on one of the lounge chairs and listened to the quiet and watched the cactus wrens hurry along the chest-high earth-colored wall that enclosed the pool area. Or at dusk, she stood at the edge of the pool and listened to the great-horned owl8 in the palm tree awaken and try to solve its daily identity crisis, “Who? Who?”

She especially liked seeing the mermaid at the bottom of the pool. David Thomas Crow had painted it when his parents drained the pool soon after Myla arrived. The mermaid was beautiful, with black eyes, a peach-colored tail, and tiny multicolored starfish in her wild black hair. She was quite voluptuous and had an uncanny resemblance to Myla, a fact everyone was too polite to mention. Everyone in the Crow family, that is. As soon as the family left that year, Myla showed the mermaid to Theresa, Gail, and George. Theresa and Gail asked her when she had posed for David Crow, a man nearly young enough to be her son. George said, “He got the chimmychangas wrong. Yours are more lifelike.” Myla couldn’t really argue with him. He was right. Hers were more lifelike.

Myla had started working at the Old Mermaid Sanctuary ten years earlier after she left her husband—or he left her. After she answered an ad in the Tucson Weekly. The owners came to town and interviewed Myla collectively. They talked with her for fifteen minutes, give or take, and then they offered her the job—pending a reference check. She had to get bonded too. They promised her a monthly stipend, studio apartment, and use of a car; she promised to care for their land and houses.

She moved in almost immediately. Soon she was walking the wash every day, many times a day. In the beginning she felt a bit like La Llorona, weeping and wailing for her lost children. Only she did not have children.9 So she wailed for her lost life. Not that she thought about her life. She did not think about much of anything then: She felt. She felt sad, angry, lost, lousy. She felt the sand beneath her shoes and tried to keep her balance so she would not fall left into a prickly pear stand or right into a cholla tree, or the other way around. Sometimes she let David Thomas Crow walk with her. When she cried, he did not tell her everything would soon be all right; he did not tell her to look on the bright side or say time heals all. He never seemed uncomfortable with her sorrow—or anything else about her.10 Every once in a while he would put his hand on her back, lightly; this gesture steadied and relieved her, either by drying up the tears or causing them to flow more profusely.

She drank too much then. She hadn’t been a drinker before, and she wasn’t one afterward. But for a month or more, she used alcohol as her medicine, like someone with a cough taking cough syrup. That was how she thought about it. Just to stop the hacking ache.

Then one night the Old Mermaids came to her in a dream.11 They swam the wash, which was filled with sea water, and motioned to her to join them. One of them reached down to the sandy bottom and pulled up an old glass bottle and held it out to her. When she awakened the next morning, she stumbled into the wash and found the same glass bottle—or one that looked like it. Her life changed in that instant. She felt as though she had heard the call of the wild—or the call of the Old Mermaids. The Church of the Old Mermaids was born that morning. She stopped drinking, and David painted the mermaid at the bottom of pool.

David left soon after she stopped drinking, and Myla hadn’t seen him since. His mother, Sarah, gave her updates on him now and then, but Myla did not ask a lot of questions about his life. She remembered that month only vaguely, and she was afraid she might find out she had done something embarrassing to drive him away. Besides, he was out of her life, and she did not like to dwell on the past. That was long gone.

Myla leaned over and picked up a piece of gray metal from the sand.12 It looked like the top half of a shepherd’s staff. She dropped it into the ruby bag and kept walking. She passed several pieces of concrete in the sand. She had not yet figured out how so many blocks of concrete ended up in the wash. Even when the arroyo became a river again—temporarily during the monsoons—concrete could not float. Could it? She supposed the force of water could move just about anything.

She stepped over a mesquite log with an orange plastic rope wrapped around it. She did not feel like unraveling it now. Maybe one day. She had been considering that orange rope for many days now—maybe even years. She shrugged. It must be that no one needed it yet.

The wash split, and she followed the left branch. She had not been here for a while. No horses and few other creatures had traveled this way either, judging from the lack of tracks. She stopped in the shade of an old mesquite. She always overdressed on these chilly mornings. Now the cool blackness of the mesquite felt good. Several prickly pear pads had draped themselves over the mesquite trunk that bent toward the ground a bit before curving up. The prickly pear pads looked wrung out, as though they had been traveling a long distance and had finally succumbed to exhaustion and thirst. The cactus had found a good companion in the mesquite. Very grounded. Rooted. Mesquite had the deepest root system of any tree, she knew.13 Someone had once found a live mesquite root 160 feet beneath the surface, in a copper mine. Myla put her hand on the mesquite trunk. Mesquite trees knew how to hold their ground. Old souls, she thought when she saw one like this, crouched toward the desert floor yet still reaching out to the world around it. Its yellow leaflets appeared almost fluorescent next to its dark branches and trunk.

In the sand near the base of the tree and the prickly pear was a piece of rusty metal; about a foot long and six inches across, it looked vaguely like a skeleton of the push part of a miniature lawn mower. Not that she had seen a mower in a long while. The Wentworths had a square of grassy lawn in the front of their house when Myla first moved into the Old Mermaid Sanctuary. They gave her detailed instructions on how to keep it living and thriving while they were away. She read the instructions and watched each day as the lawn shriveled and then died.14 She had George pull out the sod and let the desert floor be again. Eventually she talked George into helping her plant some prickly pears, chollas, and a young palo verde. By the time the Wentworths returned, the land looked like desert again. Mr. Wentworth asked her what had happened. She told him, “Putting sod like that on the desert is like putting a bad toupee on a bald man.” He frowned, not understanding. “It covers up his beautiful bald head which was what was attractive about him in the first place,” Myla said. Mr. Wentworth smoothed his hand over his shiny head and nodded. They never mentioned the lawn again.

Myla picked up the piece of metal and slipped it into the ruby bag. “Thank you, Mesquite,” she said.

She walked out of the shade and went to the main artery of the wash. A crow called out. She looked up as it flew over her, its wings whooshing-whooshing against the dry desert air.

“Good morning, crow,” she said. Sometimes she wished she was a crow. At least when she was walking the wash. Crows could spot treasure in the dirt even if they were looking down from the moon.

She looked away from the flying crow and at the ground and saw the metal loop to an earring sticking out of a dent in the sand made by a horse’s hoof. She reached for it with her cotton-gloved fingers and pulled it out of the dirt. Hanging from the bent metal was a tiny red dreamcatcher with a metal feather at its center. She could get a good price for this with the right story, but maybe she would keep it for a bit, to see if anyone had lost it. She slipped it into the left pocket of her slacks.