Bella’s Last Soiree

Issue 48 • Fall 2023 • Fiction

I

Monday, September 26, 1927—First, she saw the feet. Soles, heels up. Bare to morning sun, sticking out from a thicket of red willow by the stream. Cecil held back—fifteen, twenty feet by the truck—covered her nose and mouth with her hand. But then, despite breakfast climbing up her throat, she crept closer as if death, face-down in a thicket, might lurch to his feet. Heels dirty, calluses. Tops of arches pressed into gravel, ankles exposed. Calves extended out from the willow that shrouded most of the corpse. One leg bent at the knee. Little of the white linen pant leg, bunched midcalf, visible through the foliage.

Thus, a fresh, new ache on Cecil’s soul, cancer-like, divided, multiplied.

Cecilia went by ‘Cecil’ because her parents, if they had to bear fruit thirty-five years before, had wanted a son. On this particular morning she left her crumbling adobe house in the faintest dawn light. The day that wrecked her life began handsomely enough. Across the dirt street, with sunrise, cottonwoods banking the rio would, flaunt fiery gold leaves. Normally, Cecil bicycled unless she skipped town on a back-country, plant-sampling, horse-packing trip or as her paint-splattered boyfriend called them: high-lonesome death-treks. But today a rusty Model T truck sat parked in the yard.

Beside her four-by-five view camera, Cecil loaded a wooden box of photographic glass plates onto the truck’s worn seat. In her studio last week, she treated the plates with colloidal solution, a pill of a process but cheaper than ready-made and faster than waiting for Boston to ship by rail to New Mexico. She shoved the box to the center of the seat and, when she tapped it twice, Woofie, her dog, jumped in. Stepping onto the running board, she placed a wood and brass tripod on the floor, wound down Woofie’s window, and slammed the passenger door shut. Walking to the driver’s side, Cecil swung into the seat. Through the windshield, the sun’s curve rose fiery behind mountains and filtered through the bosque—dawn through trees. Plush velvet, she thought. Mother of God!

Woofie leaned out the window and barked dog joy.

Bella had named the dog. Bella rescued all things lost, everything hungry, anything forlorn: dogs, cats, chickens, donkeys, artists. Starving one winter, Woofie found Bella’s ranch. Inside by the fire, Bella sat curled under a Hudson Bay blanket in an overstuffed chair while reading about the lost Franklin expedition. The dog struggled through snow to Bella’s window. And he said, “Woof!”

Sometimes Cecil wondered if she herself was one of Bella’s strays.

Several miles out of ear-shot from town, Bella’s hacienda afforded New Mexico an art salon and her transplanted artists, a patron. Bella had just toughed out the annual soiree, and the locals—descendants of Rio de Espiritu’s 18th century settlers—must have sighed in relief. Most of the smart set had just left the Southwest to over-run Chicago, Boston, New York, and European capitals. Bella, too, must have sighed. Yesterday, when she handed Cecil the keys, Bella said her foreman would need sleep in the morning more than he’d need the truck.

Just out of town, two headwaters met among willowed banks to form the river whose name the village took. Though idyllic, Espiritu could make a person nervous. A rattler might slither into town by mistake and shelter under the boardwalk till night when it slithered out to safety. There was wind, maddening in spring, but in any season a rogue blast might rush down the side of Mount Blanco at night. Strange lights in the night sky, cries in the forest. And the river invited wading but for quick-sands.

Cecil and Woofie drove along the tree-lined plaza with its mercantile, saddle shop, chemist, blacksmith-livery, sheriff and doctor offices. Adobe with wooden balconies shading boardwalks below. Church, northside. Cemetery. On hard springs the Model T bounced down dirt streets. In one house window, a dim light from an early riser’s lantern.

Just past the plaza Cecil motored to a fork in the road and stopped, brakes whistling. Often from here, she’d search for Unnamed Plants of New Mexico, for the book she was writing. She envied nameless green things. They held their link to deep time. The right fork led to an unidentified vegetal she’d seen in a ponderosa grove. But if she sought that green gem, why did she leave home in the dark? In truth, lately when she photographed flora, she shot it not as artefact, but art. Although Bella much encouraged Cecil to exercise her creative eye, Cecil knew exactly what she was: a jobless botanist for whom the camera was a scientific instrument. She’d only just begun to fancy herself an artist.

Book: right fork. Art: left to a canyon wall waking into young light, weathered fractures and ridges screaming out the violence of time. Inside the idling truck, Cecil flashed on a look a man gave her at Bella’s soiree; a split-second look that held a Bible’s worth of pain, and on this morning that look felt like fate. Steering wheel in hand, she turned toward art. Cecil sought rock. Today she’d seek what she’d taken too long to find, what she’d spent childhood swearing never to pursue: Art.

As the road became two-track, they climbed through sage—the gods’ perfume—through foothills, where the road traveled by meadow and stony outcrops. Cecil stopped, yanked on the hand brake, climbed out while the truck idled rough. Eyes down, she couldn’t help but study the ground for anonymous plants. She even squatted, worked fingers through vegetation; a few botanical misgivings, perhaps? But then her fingers formed a picture frame she raised to her eyes and turned to scan the landscape. Back in the Model T, she drove among cliffs, where, to one side of the track, a gurgly stream with cattails drained the upper reaches, and chickadees on boulders drank from half-cup pools.
Woofie leaned out his window.

“Is this the place, Woof? What do you think?”

As Cecil parked Woofie jumped out the window.

She loaded a few glass plates in a canvas bag, grabbed her four-by-five and tripod. Wading through grass, carpeting the canyon bottom and soggy from last night’s rain, she found her spot. A cliff wall with mineral veins glistening at dawn.

Cecil judged the shot, then mounted her camera on the tripod. She put the black cloth attached to the camera over her head. Through the view finder, eyeballed the glittering surface, upside-down and backward. She opened the shutter, focused. Set swings and tilts. Adjusted F-stop. Closed the shutter, inserted a plate, pulled out the slide.

Her heart raced a little as, at the end of a cable, she pressed the shutter button. She replaced the slide, removed the plate, and got out from under the cloth. The plate frame had a number on it: 1. In a notebook she wrote date, time, place.

Joy: That’s what Cecil felt, felt in her cells, when the image lit up her mind. Deeds so prehistoric only the rock remembered. Precambrian formation—volcanic heat, seismic pressure, geologic time. Melted, crushed, fractured, rock sculpted pain.

And Cecil, instead of recording something, (say, an anonymous plant, an innocent she’d regret outing with a name in a book, another species filched by an artificial world), she had created an image, a look that wasn’t there before, by which stone might speak. But joy, undeserved. Still, a theft, that briefly banished the lesion metastasizing on her soul.

Art. It’s what her parents did. But they weren’t photographers.

While, Cecil re-shot the wall, Woofie bounded upstream, startled chickadees, and trotted farther up the rudimentary track. In the canyon bottom, night’s damp chill hung in the air. Sun would cook the land dry and bright soon. Shots 1and 2 captured, Cecil stood in a clearing of scarlet penstemon and closed her eyes. Then, tripod shouldered, she carried her kit to the truck. Nowhere in sight, Woofie barked. At first once, then twice, then his voice high, crying, coyote-like.

Cecil walked up the track, around a bend. Something in the willows streamside not far from the foot of a cliff. Woofie yipped and scratched at the ground. Something in a thicket by the stream.

“Woofie! Come here! Right now!”

But Woofie was intent.

And then a wind shift carried the smell.

II

Nine days prior—On a Saturday around 9 p.m., the soiree commenced. It would wear on until hangovers colluded with altitude sickness to send guests back where they came from. The dead man, while still among the quick, had counted as a partier.

This year Bella had shipped contra-ban from Chicago by rail to Albuquerque. There, a man in a panel truck left the city pre-dawn to travel dirt tracks northeast to Espiritu. By afternoon, he turned his truck around to climb La Bajada Hill in reverse gear. Extra horse power inched his load up an ancient lava flow. Around midnight he delivered Bella’s order of boot-leg rum, gin, scotch, champagne, bourbon, vermouth, wine, and vodka—all in crates marked ‘shampoo.’

With Bella’s soiree, Espiritu’s population ballooned. The international set boarded steamers from Europe to New York where they bought tickets to travel west by rail. Half of Greenwich Village boarded the train while some intrepid souls suited up and piled into motorcars for fifteen-hundred miles of road dirt. All migrated west.

New Mexico’s ticket to modern art, Bella had an east coast clipping service. Monthly, the Espiritu post office delivered a fat envelope stuffed with clips from every New York, Boston, Chicago, London, Paris, Venice, Florence paper with news of her painters, talent she’d summoned to her altitudinous retreat, with rumors of high desert scandals, and, always, Bella’s soiree. She pasted them all—the flattering and the vicious—into scrapbooks stacked in her library for the parade of bohemes to peruse and find themselves tattled upon. Or worse, not.

The soiree could run a week or more before hangers-on left. Bella’s hacienda was out of town and, to spare villagers, she tried, not always successfully, to keep guests entertained and sedated on the ranch. Bella’s sprawling front room filled with noise and tobacco smoke under a viga-latilla ceiling. She had two pianos. At the north end, a baby grand she’d brought west. Sixty feet to the south, Cecil’s upright. They dueled, those pianos, played boozy jazz, ragtime, whatever the loudest sot yelled for.

Except for the pianists and Bella, only Cecil was not three-sheets-to-the-wind. With her tipsy boyfriend, Alexander—or as Cecil called him, Sandy—she leaned against the side of the upright surveying the room. Soon, she spotted the man she’d dub ‘Gatsby’ for his white linen suit. Brown hair parted down the middle and pomaded back. And barefoot. Months later Bella would say, “But, dearest, Gatsby wore a pink suit.” Yet, the name stuck.

When this Gatsby announced himself an artist, his claim, like a leg-hold trap, clamped onto Cecil’s soul. Although Bella much encouraged Cecil to exercise her creative eye, Cecil knew exactly what she was: an unemployed botanist for whom a camera was a scientific instrument. She’d only just begun to fancy herself an artist. But it takes one to know one and something about him wasn’t right. She bet if she looked at Gatsby’s hands, they’d be clean. Painters’ nails weren’t. Her parents’, for example. Especially with oils. Squeaky clean? Never; for an artist’s work is messy, baring the particulars. Art finds short-of-enough insight, maybe dash of grandeur, to almost counter the doubt. Art disrobes life.

Among the guests was an aviatrix. Not a crasher, this pilot was invited, a friend, and she flew a bi-plane to New Mexico. Around her neck a white silk scarf. From Tibet. The aviatrix had one change of clothes. The rest of her cargo was gas for return to the nearest fuel depot.

“Wasn’t it risky,” Sandy asked, “landing with all that fuel.”

The pilot produced a flask. “That’s what this’s for.”

“Why not ship it out by train?” asked Sandy. “The fuel, in barrels?”

She offered him the flask and said, “I’m berries on fear!”

He took a swig, grimaced, gasped. “Christ, this is the fuel!” He passed it back.

Nearby were an art dealer and a cool, elegant woman in a long black, bias-cut dress, no jewelry. They critiqued a badly dressed bottle blonde, across the room, in a tight frock with cleavage at a time when androgyny was fem. The blonde sauntered up to a lost-looking guest. A young man in a cord suit, clearly appalled by his surroundings, stood by a table of hors d’oeuvre, eating perhaps for something to do. He appeared grateful that someone joined him, even the blonde.

“Now watch this,” the dealer said. “She’s quite skilled.” The dealer picked the olive out of his drink, popped it in his mouth. “Watch her sniff out an easy mark.”

“You know so much about her,” the black dress said.

“Before that poor bastard, she was sniffing me out.” The dealer recounted how earlier he was talking with an artist, angling for a studio tour, maybe pick up a painting or two. “She went for us both till she sorted out who had the dough.”

Barely able to suppress a laugh, the black dress, said, “Won’t somebody tell her the bosom is passé?”

“She’s slathered” the dealer added, “in five n’ dime perfume.”

Overhearing the commentary on the bottle-blonde, the pilot joined in. “Such a little face on that chippy,” she said, “in danger of being swallowed into cleavage lurking below.”

“She’s not a chippy,” the dealer said.

“Well, if she can read,” said the pilot, “I’m Babe Ruth.” She raised her flask. “To the Yankees!

“Oh, she can read,” the dealer said. “Gossip columns. She can tell you who Mary Pickford had breakfast with last Tuesday.”

The night wore on. When Cecil couldn’t shake Gatsby’s claim to artistry, she dragged Sandy to her target. They stationed themselves on either side of Gatsby’s chair. Cecil began interrogating him. “Oils?” she asked. “Pastels!” Finally, she was having fun. “You look like a pastels man.”

“Uh huh.” Gatsby drank from his gin and tonic. He leaned back in his overstuffed chair, rested his head against the back. Clumsily, crossed his legs; tried to push back an errant strand of pomaded hair that fell over an eye, but it took two passes, the first colliding with his nose.
Something about Gatsby, not a mean drunk. And, at the soiree, there was something polite in that. Or verging on thoughtful, yeah, even tanked to the gills; thoughtful like people weren’t anymore. And he had nice feet, uncorrupted by shoes. Still, he’d be easy to play, drunk to the point of defenselessness. Thus, Cecil, herself ill at east, couldn’t resist. So, she pounced.

Cecil repositioned in front of Gatsby’s chair. She took Sandy’s hand. “You see this hand?” She bent over and held the hand in front of Gatsby’s face. Already schnockered, Sandy, played along, amused.

“You see here an artist’s hand, a fine hand.” She ran her fingers over it. “Now, this artist is a clean man, but you’ll notice, although he scrubs with soap, paint tattoos him anyway. Especially round the nails.” She held Sandy’s hand nearer to Gatsby’s face. “Granted,” she said, “one must look closely, but on this handsome thumb, you see this tiny line of spruce green?”

Gatsby, trapped in his chair, turned his head away.

“And here, burnt umber on the knuckle.”

A man in a striped French sailor shirt, red sash about his neck, had claimed to be researching an Apache dancer role for a silent film. He walked up and bumped his glass into Cecil’s center-of-gravity, sloshing champagne. “Hey, jodhpurs,” he said to her back.

She straightened up and turned.

“How’s tricks?” the sailor-shirt said.

Cecil gave him a flat look, but Sandy reclaimed his hand and stepped up for war. “Are you,” he said, “speaking to my woman?”
“Your woman!” Cecil laughed, brushing champagne off her pants.

At which the shirt said to Sandy, “If she’s the one in jodhpurs.”

The shirt and Sandy moved away.

Cecil left her dueling suitors to it. Bent on crushing Gatsby, Cecil persevered. “Landscapes?” she asked. “Boudoirs?”
The sailor-shirt pulled the sash off his neck to grip one end in his teeth and handed Sandy the other end. Lips drawn back, canines exposed, each man eyeballed the other from his end of the sash. With one hand, each held a drink. With the other, shoved his stumbling opponent. They slopped booze on the floor.

“Y’ave two men fightin’ over you.” Gatsby spoke quietly, slurred his words. “Don’t you wanna’ be with them?”

“Not especially.”

The black dress and aviatrix dropped in.

“Why … not?” Gatsby asked.

“They have nothing to do with me,” said Cecil. “Just look at them.”

Gatsby obeyed.

The black dress leaned toward the pilot and murmured, “The artist and the critic.”

To hear Gatsby’s mumbling over the racket, Cecil stepped around to the front of his chair, and straddled one of his legs, leaned forward face-to-face, bracing her hands on the arms of his chair.

Sandy and his sparring partner shouted through their teeth.

“Boys!” Cecil called over her shoulder. “Keep it down, would you? Or go outside to play.” It wasn’t a question. “They don’t bother me at all,” Cecil said to Gatsby. “I’m so taken with your hands.”

Gatsby looked at the hand not holding a drink. Slowly turned it over.

“They’re so clean,” she said.

In a gentle way he looked confused, and Cecil wondered that she could be such a goddamn bully. Was she like the rest, only sober? Was everyone uncomfortable? To the point of criminality? Maybe she needed to drink more. “Watercolors?” she went on. “No, I s’pose not.”
“Lemme’ look at that hand!” the pilot said, barging in, bending over Gatsby and grabbing his free hand. She caressed it, ran it over her lips, then, looking Gatsby in the eye, sucked a finger into her mouth. At last releasing it, the pilot stood up straight, turned to the massing audience, and declared, “Insurance salesman, I’d say.”

“Bravo,” said the black-dress, clapping. “Virtuoso!”

Which triggered a hearty applause. They’d drawn a crowd. Egged on, drunk on encouragement, Cecil pushed the pilot away and leaned over Gats. But he met her eyes, he gave her a look that lasted a second in time—and the rest of her life, too. The look asked, Why? And something in Cecil changed.

Gatsby held his glass up to Cecil’s face and, in a sing-song voice, said, “Re-fill.” He gently pushed at her arms. “Ge’ off me,” he muttered adding a “please,” that shamed her. She stepped out of his way. He leaned forward, tried twice but failed, falling back into the voluptuous chair. Cecil took Gatsby’s drink, put it on the floor with her own, took each of his hands in hers, leaned back as far as she could, and pulled him out of the chair to stand. When he wobbled, Cecil put an arm round him. “There we go,” she said.

“Tha-ank you.” He staggered off to the bar where he spilled a gin and tonic on his wrinkled linen suit and babbled about a lost treasure someone had discovered. A heap of gold bars, an 1880s strong box with deeds, gold, silver coins.

Around 2 a.m., the pianists conspired to play together. At the far end of the room, Bella, who didn’t relax at her own events, sat on the bench beside the player at the baby grand. Like Bella, Cecil did not enjoy Bella’s soirees. For Sandy: that’s why Cecil said she went, and for Bella, too. Pianos playing in concert, the reluctant partiers lost themselves in Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun. But, for a roomful of inebriates, musical sobriety felt morose. Guests hollered obscenities, one threw a celery stick from his drink hitting the back of Cecil’s head. An ingénue from Hollywood burst into tears and ran out into the night tearing off her clothes.

Cecil circulated. More into observation than revelry, she could nurse a highball all night. Surrounded by screaming people dancing, mean drunks yelling, punching faces, breaking teeth. Romanizing noses. Laughing people posing. Arrivistes. Parvenus. Semi-conscious sots in chairs. A flapper snorted cocaine. A man stood unseeing, staring blind, unconscious on his feet. A corpulent bloke peed in a potted plant, closed his eyes, and sighed.

Later Sandy found Cecil by the baby grand pianist, together pounding out ‘I Wanna Be Bad.’ Sandy took Cecil’s hand, led her to a chintz loveseat, and flopped into it pulling her down with him.

“All acted out?” she asked.

Sandy glared at her from the corner of his eye.

“ ’atta boy.” She slapped his thigh. “Sandy’s all better now.”

The pair slouched on the loveseat. Gatsby had somehow found his way back from the bar and climbed, miraculously, onto the coffee table by Sandy’s propped feet. Gatsby teetered as he blathered and gesticulated about Black Jack Ketchum’s hoard. Black Jack Ketchum, famous outlaw.
A career alcoholic, this Gatsby, if ever there was one. So how, Cecil wondered, could she see something childlike, even sweet, in his need to share his Wild West tale? Yet there Cecil sat, germinating pity on a soul whom minutes before she’d disgraced. Any fool knows sobriety at a party extorts a price. Instead, one must drink into amnesia. The blessed can forget.

And there tottered Gatsby, barefoot on the table: Black Jack Ketchum this, Black Jack Ketchum that. “You know, da’ one robs trains?” Gats was the show now. Spectators convened. Of course, the black dress. Aviatrix. Bottle blonde. The dealer.

When Gatsby said, “Gold in zum cave zum where,” the flyer pooh poohed, “That’s the wrong story, sweet pea. Black Jack’s a different tale!”

The crowd whooped. Hurled invectives, laughed until the bottle blonde stepped up on the coffee table. She took Gatsby’s arm, stabilized him, got him off the table, walked him away.

“Wish we’d let him finish,” said the dealer. “I liked his story.”

Cecil looked at Sandy. He took a long draw on a cigarette mounted in a holder, tipped back his head, exhaled.

III

Nine days later, 4 a.m.—Cecil sat up in her bed, propped against pillows in the dim light of a bedside lamp. “I don’t see why Bella does it,” Cecil said in a sleepy voice. “I don’t think she likes those people.” The smell of coffee wafted to the bedroom, just off the kitchen.

Already up, Sandy making breakfast. In painter’s pants, no shirt, he brought in two bed-trays and set one over Cecil’s legs. On the trays, a carafe, coffee cups, saucers, a little pitcher of cream, linen napkins, silverware. A lean six-footer, sandy hair, he put the second tray at the foot of the bed.

In bare feet, he crossed the shiny floor, dirt tamped centuries before, hardened and sealed with ox-blood.
An over-grown marmalade tabby sat on the deep adobe window sill. Lester was a cat and a half with a head the size of a grapefruit and polydactyl feet.

“Social obligations,” Sandy said, rubbing his chin, then stepping into the kitchen. “That’s why Bella does it.”
Cecil poured two cups of coffee. Added cream, lots of cream, to one and stirred. Sandy returned from the kitchen with two plates, huevos rancheros, carried one plate plus a basket on his arm, another plate in that hand; in the other, a bottle of Kahlua. He poured a shot into the cup without cream.

He grabbed his own tray from the foot of the bed, and climbed back in.

Cecil put a hand on the back of her neck and rotated her head. Since a child, stress lived there. She picked up her fork, took a bite of eggs. Closed her eyes. Savored.

The cat jumped off the window sill, onto a cherry bureau with a mirror-rattling thud, then leapt onto the blanket chest at the foot of the bed.
“Oops, almost forgot.” Sandy moved his bed tray aside and got up to retrieve from the kitchen a tiny plate of scrambled eggs cut in tiny bites and a tiny bowl for cream. The cat waited at the foot of the bed, observing while Sandy flattened a place on the quilt, grabbed a book—The Jungle—from Cecil’s shelves, and set the cat’s plate on Upton Sinclair. He poured cream in Lester’s bowl. The cat breakfasted.

“You behaved like Bella’s guests,” Cecil said.

“Did I?” Sandy sipped his spiked coffee. “Don’t recall.”

At the foot of the bed, the cat licked the last cream from the bowl and looked sphinx-like first at Sandy, then at Cecil.

“I don’t remember much.” Sandy laughed a little. “But I do remember you behaved like Bella’s guests.” He served her a biscuit. “My ferret.”

“Me!”

“Poor Gatz. You minced the man. He’ll never be the same.”

“Why pick on me! I was zozzled.”

“But you weren’t.” He laughed. Sipped Kahlua coffee. Said “Christ, that’s tasty,” And “I confess, sunshine, I was proud.”
After breakfast, Cecil got up and dressed to load the Model T parked in the yard.

IV

Noon sun beat down. The coroner, already blotto. They all stood in the canyon bottom along the two-track road and stared at the pungent body Cecil and Woofie found earlier that morning. The sheriff tied a bandana over his nose and mouth and took a pair of gloves from a back pocket. Protruding from the willow thicket by the creek, soles of shoeless feet, dirty white linen pantlegs rumpled up around the calves. The sheriff pushed branches out of the way, stepped into the thicket, examined the body. “Gimme’ a hand,” he said to the coroner. Who tripped over a rock and fell on his face. Which he bloodied.

Sandy had ridden back to the scene with Cecil in Bella’s truck when they led the sheriff and coroner to the deceased.
“Christ almighty,” Sandy said of the coroner. He jogged back to grab a pair of gloves Bella’s foreman left in the truck. The smell of death gagging him, Sandy waded into the brush and helped the sheriff drag the body onto the grass. While the coroner stumbled holding his head, Sandy and the sheriff turned the body over. Buzzing flies had laid eggs in the meat of what had been a face but was now an open wound the size of a football.

Cecil turned away, suddenly, to vomit. And not for the putrefaction. But for the look. The look Gatsby gave her at the soiree. The look that asked, Why? The look that barfed her breakfast.

The sheriff wiped his gloves on the grass, took one off. He stood, then shaded his eyes as he glanced up at the cliff-top a hundred and fifty feet above. “Well, I’d have to say, the clumsy sucker fell. Tripped and fell. Cut and dry.” He spit tobacco juice. “These gall-darn East Coasters… .”

Ten years on and Cecil still wasn’t used to local slurs. She walked to a break in the willows knelt by the stream and rinsed her face. She cupped her hands, filled them with cold water, sloshed it in her mouth, and spit in the grass.

“It’s Gatsby,” Sandy said, grimacing, turning his head from the stench. “I recognize the suit.”

“Gatsby?” asked the sheriff.

Sandy stepped back. “Guy from Bella’s party. Said he was an artist.”

“And that’s his name?” His voice incredulous.

Had the sheriff read the book?

“We called him that.”

Cecil walked over, but not too close. Not close enough to see the maggot infestation. She stood by Sandy, who held his arm over his nose and mouth. He backed away a few steps.

“Gatsby,” Cecil said in a hoarse voice. How wicked she’d been. All he did was pretend. Why couldn’t she leave him to his fantasy? But, no, she made it clear she knew he was a phony. She broadcast it to the smart set. She leaned forward, braced herself with hands on knees.

Sandy shed his gloves, threw them in the willows. He grabbed Cecil’s arm, led her toward the trucks.

She ran her eyes up the side of the cliff and wondered: What sort picks on a drunk? Well, she knew what sort. The sort that knows she’s the fraud, after all. “Judas,” she muttered. Maybe he was an artist. Of a different sort. Yes, she thought he was.

Sandy pulled her close, put his arms around her, and held her head to his chest so she couldn’t turn and see. Cecil wiggled free. He smelled of death now.

Meanwhile, the sheriff and wobbly coroner managed to load the body, dropping it once when the coroner tripped over an arm dragging on the ground, into the bed of the county truck.

Cecil drove home. Driving settled her stomach. Her throat knotting up, she navigated the curvy two-track in second gear, downshifting at times to first. Massive boulders narrowed the track. Cecil and Sandy bounced over ruts on the hard springs of Bella’s old Model T, swerved around curves. The rain last night had turned low spots to bogs, through which Cecil floored it lest they mire in, mud flying off wheels, clods thumping on the fenders. A long-eared squirrel darted across the track to scramble up a ponderosa tree. Gatsby. He deserved better.

“Why couldn’t I leave him alone?”

“Don’t go there Ceece.”

“I tormented him.”

Sandy watched Cecil for a long moment before he said, “Stop the truck.”

Cecil slowed down, shifted to neutral. She nearly stood on the brake to halt the forward roll.

Sandy slapped the seat. “Sit by me.”

Cecil slid to the middle and Sandy turned to face her.

“Cecil, he fell. The sheriff nailed it. Gatsby fell. He didn’t jump.” He took her hand in his. “Are you so egotistical to think that just because a sober woman at a drunken party in the wilds of New Mexico didn’t buy his act—? How crazy are you, buttercup?”
Cecil didn’t answer.

“What we just saw—” He nodded a wavy strand of hair off his forehead. “I’m in shock, too. I just”—he shook his head—”react differently.” Then he said, “Let’s walk.”

“No!” she said. “I want out of this canyon.”

V

Cecil slid back to the driver’s seat, turned on the ignition, released the hand brake, depressed the clutch, and wrestled the shifter into first. When she failed to humor the clutch, the old truck lurched forward a few times, then a few times more, and took off fast, rattling toward town. They each raised an arm now and then to shield faces from branches that whipped through windows. Driver and passenger bounced on the hard springs till Sandy hit his head on the cab roof. And Cecil slowed down.

When they reached Espiritu plaza, Sandy said to stop at the mercantile. “Need to buy the foreman gloves.”

Cecil watched him walk away. A man was dead. A not-so-bad man. And with all due respect for the wonder of life and how there ought to be a law against squandering one, Gatsby was gone. Entirely.

Was it so fragile? Strangely, since the soiree Cecil caught herself doing something weird: Praying. And the same futile prayer: Forgiveness. Asking. Baloney! Pleading! Yet, as she watched Sandy enter the mercantile, she thought, what’s there to grant it? You got to scrounge inside the brain, worm around in slimy convolutions. Forgiveness? Hooey! Make it up, invent it.

Because the last act complete, we each crumble into trillions—a malodorous condition, rotting bodies feeding maggots—to survive as elements to be recycled for whatever. Hence, the fundamental: Deeds and words, done and spoken by us, to us—they get afterlife.

Issue 48 • Fall 2023

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry