Dancing at Shiva

© 1999 Liz Martin
All rights reserved.

"Goddammit, I hate fucking brahmas!" I slammed my hand on the crumpled hood of the truck, cursed, and snatched the hand back. At first I thought I'd just seared the skin off it. The desert sun was hot as only Texas can be in September. My palm tingled with a numb, icy feeling that came with bad burns. My hand shook. I shook. Shock, I reckoned, like to the time Frank cut hisself above the boot with the chainsaw when we was backburning. Grabbing the shaking hand by its wrist, I stared at a line of crimson seeping out of my palm. The slice went from wrist to pinky finger. The wreck had put paid to the front of my Ford and one of the saw-edged rusty bits that had supposedly been a bull bar had ripped up my palm. Bull bar. God must think He was pretty damn funny.

"Dammit!" I screamed at the sky. I fisted my hand around the pain and shook it at the dry white heaven. If the Almighty answered, He did it with a snigger hidden in the sound of the radiator hissing. The last water I was like to see for ten miles leaked out in a plume that drifted a foot along the gravel road before evaporating into the greedy air. Hadn't been a car gone by all day. Wasn't like to be one, neither. I was the only fool who'd come out all this way hunting rattler for the hatbands. Last idiot to come out here at all had been Judd Teakle, and he'd disappeared checking out a new location for a crop the sheriff didn't need to know about. A search party found Judd's rattletrap, baking in the sun, but no Judd. 'Course he might have been smart enough to light out for Mexico before it got too hot in another way for him. Deputy Pete said Sheriff Daley knew all about Judd's crops and was fixing to bust him one.

There was nothing else to do, so I kicked the tire, hurt myself, limped in a circle and kicked the damned dead brahma bull right in his fly-buzzed hump, so white it looked like he'd been scrubbed and bleached. I'd always hated the shitty, imported, foreigner breed. No color. No work. No use in 'em. Just fancy-looking, show-stealing fajitas on the hoof. Couldn't even pull a plough with that useless hump.

"Come out of nowhere." I kicked the bull again. His skull flipped itself over into the road ditch, blood leaking from a big, white, triangular nose and down his fatty dewlap. The dirt soaked up the driblets. "Why'd ya' do that, bull?" The road had been empty. I'd come around a curve. I'd been able to see around it a ways back on the twisty road, but up close it was blind. He must've come out of the bar ditch between time. Time I spotted him, he was square between my stuck wipers and trotting towards me like he had a prayer meeting to make up the road. He never veered when I hit the horn, kept coming when I slammed on the brakes. Crazy damn bull. Stupid. I glanced side to side and couldn't figure out what he'd been doing out here. Barbed wire. Scrub. Bone white soil. No cattle.

"Damn." I stepped back from the wrecked Ford. Shaking my head in disgust, I just said "Damn," again, grabbed the shotgun and water tin and started walking the ten miles to Shiva Farm.

Folk around here say Shiva's a heathen, foreigner god. Don't know about that, but the new folk up to Shiva Farm are surely both heathen and foreign. Frank says he bets they're Indians, from India. Bob says not to bet on it, 'cause he's delivered mail from some place like Tie-land or Tie-bet and a tie bet always goes the wrong way. I get a kick out of that every time.

The three of them come driving into town once a month with their half-nigger skin and the two women wrapped up to the eyeballs so a feller can't get a good look. The old one's ugly and wrinkled and I figure she's got a mustache hidden under that gold-colored silk. The young one ... well ... I heard tell of harems and slave caravans and things in those places they come from. From the look I got once at a pair of big, brown eyes under a dot of red, I reckon some sheik tried for her and her Pa decided it was time to get on a boat and drift over to the U.S. of A's welfare office. I reckon she's got a diamond in her belly button, too. I reckon I'm going to find out someday.

Maybe tonight, I thought, trudging up to the gray weathered gate with the sun full in my face. Round and red, it balanced like a seven ball on a cuestick on the peaked roof of the temple I'd heard they'd built out front of dead Widder Grisolm's farmhouse. Steps and columns circled the round building. A big, flat, empty white stone filled the whole inside. Candles burned on the ground, on the stone, in little metal holders on the columns—everywhere, like firefly glints. All them red tiles in the roof reflected gleams and shafts of the setting sun so that it near blinded me walking up on it.

Even so, a man'd have to be blind and dead not to see the girl perched up on the falling-down fence with her back to the gravel road. A snake of braided hair with a red hairbow in the shape of a skull, for Chrissake, pushed her costume-party getup against her back. I could see directly through that red silk. If I hadn't been parched by then, a sight like that would have dried my mouth right out. Some of them like it in the harem, I hear tell.

She had a tiny little finger drum in her palm and I could just catch the beat of it every time her thumb stroked down. It came like a pulse, low under the buzz of the evening breeze and insects while she watched her Pa lead a good, fat bull out of a pen into an alfalfa field. The rest of the country around town was in a drought, but they looked to be doing just fine. The bull was the double of the one I'd hit, but fatter and whiter, like they spent all their time at Shiva Farm washing and feeding the thing by hand. A couple of cows lay legs-folded in the mud of the pen, chewing cud. I didn't see no more. Two cows, two bulls. What a waste. I knew plenty of white, God-fearing croppies who'd kill for two bulls. Only one, now. The thought cheered me right up.

She glanced at me sideways as I leaned on the rail, grinning at her. I figured she'd go shy and leave, but she just looked at me steady-like with those big eyes like to swallow a man up. "Howdy," I said. The outline of her lips showed through a chiffony veil thing, also red, but see-through, next to nothing there in thickness. Sweet lips. Dark brown against smooth copper skin. Setting the shotgun on its butt against a post, I winked at her and wiped the sweat off my face. "Hot," I said. "Car broke down." I didn't figure her Pa would take to kindly to helping out if he knew I'd killed his extra bull.

She kept right on stroking on the drum thing.

Thrum, thrum, thrum-thrum. It tickled me inside my ear, and lower. Damned if her eyes didn't drop then, right to my zipper and the stiffy beginning behind it. Her eyes flicked back up. No blush. No words, just that low-down beat.

I licked dry lips with a swollen tongue. "Your Pa's got a tow bar, don't he?"

Thrum.

"Could use a drink a water, Miss...." I'd left the empty water tin by the side of the road halfway back.

"Collie," she said, low, in a sweet, clear voice that made me shiver.

Thrum.

"Collie." I mopped my face on a dirty shirt to hide a smirk. Like a dog? "Pretty name. Reckon you could get a man a drink of water while I talk to your Pa?"

"Dance?" she said softly, like it was a question, or a correction.

"Ummm." Was she simple? "Later, maybe, if you want. It might be too late to start back tonight but—" Shading my eyes to glance ahead into the field where the old man had staked out the bull, I forgot all about water or gals or wrecked Fords.

He was dancing with the bull.

Framed against the sun sinking behind the columns and curving roof of the temple, for a second the old man seemed to be jewelled and wearing some sort of stripy, tiger-skin-looking dress flapping about his knees. I blinked and he was in Levis and muddy boots, but still dancing. Arms out to his side, palms flat to the sky, he bobbed and ducked and shifted side to side with his neck and shoulders sliding like a 12-gauge breech click-clacking into place without moving the rest of the gun. Long strands of gray hair bounced in a knot at the nape of a mostly bald head. He rounded his mouth on whatever heathens sing when they're dancing for their god. The brahma stood placid and stupid in front of him, its legs spraddled out four ways to Sunday and its eyes fixed on the him like it was puzzled.

"Miss Peg better not ever get a look at this," I breathed in awe. The Women's Auxiliary would shut down Shiva Farm and run its folk out on a rail.

"Howdy, stranger," Collie said.

"Huh?" I turned my head.

"Come'n set a spell. We been expecting you. Seems like every turn you cut it closer and closer."

"Huh?" I said again, confused by how much she sounded like Mary Kate Beckett over to Minton way. Seemed funny, this gal looking so foreign, dark-eyed and silky and all.

"Least you made it before the setting," she allowed. This time I said nothing, but she must've seen it in my face. "Solstice sun. Day equals night. Balance is important. Why're you sent in human shape?

I stared. She wasn't simple; she was two dips short of a chaw. "Sent?"

"To start the new dance." She reached out her other slim hand for mine.

"I don't want to start anything but my truck and that ain't gonna—"

She interrupted, patient-like, like she meant to try extra hard to explain something. "Birth to existence to death and start over." Picking up my hand, she turned it over, traced the moist scab there, throbbing in time with my heart and the drum she never quit sounding. "Creator to Sustainer to Destroyer and back again. Always been like that, always will be. 'Round and 'round and can't be broken." My insides were jumping and it was hard to concentrate on a proper answer, staring at the top of her veiled head. She flicked a fingernail to dig under the sweaty crust of blood on my palm. "What is Created must be Destroyed. What is Destroyed will be Created."

Blood welled up, stinging. I couldn't pull away my hand or speak.

Her Pa froze still as a statue against the temple. The circle of the sun made a flaming backdrop. The columns of the temple and he and the bull showed as nothing but black lines against it. He held a snaking sort of sword I hadn't seen before. The blade ran with Hellfire light.

I wanted to move. I couldn't. Holding my hand, she held all of me somehow.

"Rest a mite with us, stranger." She let my hand slide so that she could reach up towards my face. In the field, the old man cut the bull's throat. Swoosh. Right through the dewlap. Blood sprayed his boots, the soil, and the bottom step of the temple. The bull crumpled to a white heap. Her hand cool on my cheek, she turned my face to hers. My face tingled, like that damn ... that damn burn I'd gotten ... when ... where...? Her eyes were dark, and infinitely deep. Falling into them, distantly I knew that I crumpled, too, to fingertips and toes, my back all humped up and hurting. I tried to scream but my throat was blocked, the flesh loose and sore. The beat of the drum was in my blood. Her darkness was around me.

The girl slipped off the rail onto the road. Dimly, I heard a fading echo from somewhere else. Next harvest, you can dance with Pa.

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