An Allegory, Moki and Susan

If you visit Taos, New Mexico, the Mountain will retain part of your soul, if it wants you. Spirits dwell in many places in that state.

I wrote this story after reading Dante's Inferno. The sensitive reader will hear its echoes. Aside from the obvious cultural references this tale refers to some biblical passages. For those who care they are: Genesis 1:15 to 1:21, Luke 5:2, Ecclesiastes 9:4, Proverbs 30:19, Obadiah 1:14, Matthew 5:13, Matthew 6:11, Luke 8:30, Matthew 14:20, Jeremiah 7:31, Numbers 24:21, Jeremiah 14:16, Solomon 2:2, John 1:1, Obadiah 1:3, and John 12:36.

Time for timeout was over. If there were a rock to climb she'd climb it, and
what a rock it was. On a bright spring morning its shadow cast out across the
desert for miles. At sundown its umbra left the earth to cut the sky in half. It
was Tse Bitai, as the Navajo called it, the Winged Sentinel of the Four Corners,
the great Ship Rock. Even at noon in the paschal week it threw out a serrated
penumbra, a Clovis point aimed at earth. It defied time and night itself.

She'd been lazy today, tired of looking at flowers, so barehanded up the sheer
breccia tower she'd climbed, just for the fun of it. Its face was a 5.10 non-trad
pump, if you can imagine, but up the lithe little botanist had ascended like a
leaf in an updraft, not the full seventeen hundred feet, of course, nobody can do
that; this skilled young woman had gone up only as far she could, where,
luckily, she had happened upon a sunny small rock strewn cwm at about 66
feet, garnished with a lone improbable Golden Mariposa. She had been too
tired to wonder why it was there, growing out of rock, though it had been her
job to wonder why.

She had had been working hard, and she needed a few winks.

She curled up on the side of this red Olympus, uncaring of her unkempt iron-
oxide hair, and in the spring warmth, drifting, her drowsy moss-green-gray
merles rolled back -- oh! -- a start and a sleepy glance... her eyes rolled back
then to gaze upon dreamland. Draped on the precipice and as careless as a
kitten asleep in the crotch of a tree, there held warmly by her stony Pietà, she
floated into deep slumber. Blanketed in Sol's comforter, the five-and-a-half
foot Amazon, cradled in the Land of Enchantment, watched herself, as
dreamers do, dawdling in a different Land without Adam. She eyed herself
searching for a white lily in a garden of pink Carolina Phlox. She surveyed her
avatar as it dandled the purple flowers, so delicate, so rare, an Ipomopsis
sanct-spiritus offered up to her in the Sangre de Cristos, alive only in the Holy
Ghost Canyon.

She, lost in a jumble of drifting images and unaware of the Cholla and Prickly
Pair and slithering dangers in the motherland below her repose, now dreamt
she heard Moki's distant barking urging her to come home. He seemed so real
-- and he had been talking to her earlier but she couldn't understand -- and,
and -- but his entreaties -- and, and -- he had become garbled, muffled as a
penitent's prayer in a Cape Hatteras hurricane, or murmers, as if by her sweet
and frail and Baptist, deep Southern, Miss Granny Smith.

"Moki!" It was the alarm-bark going off, rousing her with the unwilling
urgency of a schoolgirl waking late for the bus. It was Mom’s hurry up call.
Now! Moki needed his water. Now! A botanist needed her work! Now! (Well,
mostly.) The field survey was supposed to be done today. Get it done, girl.
Now! Relocate that Calypso bulbosa. Find that seep. Go! Wake up!

"Ohhhhh, I'm coming", she moaned to herself. She rolled onto her tummy and
elongated into a lazy feline stretch, her skin a pink tabby of welts from her
rock-sand bedstead. She had dreamt, or had she imagined it, hmmm, not sure,
or had she just now remembered some sticky North Carolina summer six years
ago? Parties and politics, beer, philosophy and sex before graduation, love and
babies, and the drip of salt her tongue had wiped from her young friend's
penis. She droopily glanced over her shoulder at the wide Navajo plains below
and took a salt lick from her muskeg forearm. She nuzzled it, trying to
recapture the taste of him and the heavy sweet odor of his upraised arm, but it
was not he. She had turned tail on love with a man. She was independent: It
was her nature.

She rolled onto her behind and sprang up --

"C’mon Susan, get moving", she growled under her breath, and in a quick
salute she shaded her eyes just as a Captain surveys the horizon above the
eternal seas. She imagined the San Juan basin's misty rises and mesas to be
frozen swells which were never to crash upon this Galleon of the Desert, though
they shimmered and rolled in the spring's sun warmed eddies. They spread
across the surface of an immobile ocean, still but for the Pronghorn detritus
drifting upon it. This great sparkling desert lagoon enfolded her Great Ship
and she felt safe upon its high deck.

"Hey!" she cried out. She spied that seep she had been looking for all morning,
and it was right over there in a little arroyo, only a 660 yard dash away from
the great Titan’s foot. Strange there would be slickrock nearby, considering the
geology of the place, but hey, who was she to argue with Creation's creation?
So, armed with the view of the waters above the firmament, she decided to go
to the waters below it. She wanted to hurry. She was tired and she wanted to
go home. She had been in the field for six weeks by now.

"You bet," she chortled in time with her syncopated thoughts, "check it out and
thy grid be done, eh Professor? Find the flower, just find the flower and get
some Ph.D. smiles, huh? A bath too! Get paid -- money, yeah, money, money!
Yup. Good Life. Warm bath? Yeah, oh you bet, bed bath and beyond."

Deciding to go she stepped over the edge of the sheer crag and peered straight
down. "Don't rock-a-bye with vertigo now -- be very careful --" she warned
herself, and checked her route descending. It was only a 5.5 scramble, much
easier than Mama Jugs over at Très Piedras and -look- there was Moki right
there down below, really not all that small when viewed from way up here and
sounding like he was yaowling from as close as the basement stairs. Why was
it, she wondered, that high seems so much higher than long seems long? She
was only sixty-six feet up, but what a drop. On the level ground she could have
crossed it in merely nine or ten bounds.

"I guess we really aren't supposed to leave this good earth" she pondered. For
all she knew heaven might be only as high as a stroll across the garden is
distant. In any case it was too far to jump with only beat-up kneepads to
cushion the fall, and only Angels can fly, as everybody knows, for goodness sake.
The knee pads were for tonight anyway. There were also 1600 feet of
intimidating stone standing erect behind her, and Moki was being just as
insistently loud in any direction. It was time to shove off.

Moki, as in Mookie Wookie, Chucky Chookie, Dookie Dookie was an Australian
Shepherd, called an Aussie by most, a midsized dog. This one was a midget of
a man clad in a shiny black McIntosh, the shoulders over which his mother had
casually thrown a white furry stole. For color, she had given him one eye of
brown and the other of blue, and had added a dollop of copper above each for
good luck. His young owner loved his colors. But mostly, she loved his
friendship and his loyalty. She was comfortable with his size, too. She had
come to hate big ugly dogs ever since her Dad's Mastiff had torn and tortured
her and taken her from the front a long time ago.

"Hey Mook! I'm comin'!” she yelled. She couldn't tell if he had heard her or
not. Seemingly the same updraft that carried his implorations up to her
deflected hers to him, as if the Seraphim had come to bat them away.
So: Down: Quickly. This Tomb Raider of the sky had awakened to her
catamenial time and the pressure of her monthly rhythm. Soon, blood would
flow from the seep of her womb and in-between her open legs, when her little
prince would feed the multitude of his lusts. She was obligated. It was her
rhythm. It was her nature.

"Well, let's go," she thought. "Why is it always easier to go down than to climb
up?" She slung her backpack over her camisole -- Ow! a little sunburn. "Ha, a
little heat for a long cold naked night", she thought was a sly smile.
Eyeing the route again, she swung around and cast her socks and Swooshes
over the edge as nonchalantly as stepping onto a New York fire escape. It was
easy purchase, but her first step would be a wide stretch to the right. No
problem, though, so she opened her legs and -- whee -- a puff of updraft
fingered up her loincloth shorts. It was the cool touch of a fisherman's hand;
and it lifted the scent of her own bait to her. The chilly touch hurried her on.
She noted the sun had swung to the west.

So, being a woman who judges while she works, and therefore always seems to
see ahead, she leapt from jag to jag like a cougar mounting a ridge. Each jump
she took in the huff and puff was a leap of faith, an utter joy of flight, as safe as Icarus at midnight.

"-- But say: be careful! Think. A living dog is better than a dead lion, y' know.
You’re no eagle with a nest among the stars, woman. Test first. Cling tight.
Master Moki. Sex tonight. Now go. Third of the way, half of the way, most of
the way down, dash away, prance away, black furry down, and -- Oh rats!"

Here she came to a ledge, just wide enough to creep along. A mouse scurrying
along a shelf would go faster. Should she take it on all fours or creep along
clutching the wall? She reflected a moment. Her backpack might throw her off
balance, and she still had to negotiate an outthrust at the end, so in one
movement she slid it off and pitched it down over the side. It was no sacrifice.
By now she was only 20 feet above the desert floor and there wasn't anything in
it that would break -- except... Moki!

"Wow. Are you okay, Mook?" She looked down and bellowed with concern. He
could've been sitting under a balcony when the thing came down like a bomb
and nearly brained him. He had jumped six feet out of his skin and was
scurrying around picking up bits and pieces, but otherwise he seemed fine.
When he looked up, though, he seemed to say to her that she would get hers
later.

"What did you say to me?" she rasped as she tilted her head like a Bobcat
eyeing a vole. "You know, I could stay up here for ever if I wanted to, and
there's nothing you could do about it. New Mexico is full of cute little
Chihuahuas, but there's only one of me." Then, when she flicked her pony tail
as extra defiance, by God, if he didn't wink back at her, or maybe it was just a
wild hair, who knows?

Well, inch along it was going to be. The lady climber squished against the wall,
kneading the rock. A breakout here could be trouble. She had to be sure of her
grip. This was her last caress of the Titan so as a goodbye it puffed dust into
her mouth and made her swallow. "A little too much salt of the earth", she
thought.

Cautiously, she trod to the right. The dust which had settled on the ledge
yesterday or millennia ago looked to be as fine as baby powder and may have
been just as slippery, so with each cigarette smushing step she ground her
tenneys down to bedrock. It wasn't tough going, but she attended to each
placement of hand and foot, looking both up and then down like a bored
parishioner at prayer. As she did, her nodding pony tail feather-dusted the
excess soot from her pink sensitive back and tickled the spot that the backpack
had irritated. It foretold of a velvety stole that would caress her later that
night, and she juiced a little, like the seep, the damp where a mother's flower
becomes a seed.

Well, here she was at the outcrop with Moki barking instructions from below.
Hell, there was no need for all that noise. Brother, howling like a man who has
abandoned all hope. Come on. Gees.

"Awright, awright, hold your pants on", she grumbled her irritation. “I'll be
there in a second." She would have to concentrate to get around this jut, and
she didn't need some inhuman screeching in her ear. Out she stretched into
the ether, all sixty-six inches of her, until her limbs were as taught as a bosque
Cottonwood. Ah. There. Footing, blind it was, but footing. Now all she had to
do was circumnavigate this thing by slithering around its base. Not hard, but
ouuuuu, the breccia gouged and pinched and scratched at her tits like a
sadistic lover. She was happy her breasts weren't all that big: The way they
were compressed, a couple of springy boobs would uncoil and sproing her right
into the nether world.

Now it was only six jumps rock to rock, and she would be at her Master's door.
Bounce. Bouncy. Bounce. By now she was so dusty she poofed like an open
bottle of Talcum powder. Bounce. Bounce -- whoa! -- a little far that last one.
Her sudden stop made her rock and sway for balance and flail like a kitten at a
baptism. Steady, steady now. This next jump would have to be a four-point
landing. She crouched, this great Lioness, this noble Huntress, this Fearsome

Predator. Her loins a-quiver, muscles taut for the kill, eyes fixed on the prey,
she pou-... "Awwwwww".

"Moki! Move -- you're in the way." She sounded more puzzled than angry.
Why was he right there anyway? "Come on Mook, move. Mooooove, pleeeze."
She waved him off like a bad landing on a carrier. He was reluctant. Then it
dawned on her, of course: He could smell her, and probably he had smelled her
all the way down the face. Sure, that was it. They had been at this current
camp, no more than a cooler and an icky old sleeping bag on the ground, for six
days already. He didn’t smell so bad, for a dog or an eidolon anyway, but fair
Susan was so dirty she looked like a piece of basalt and reeked like a chunk of
sulfur. All the better for him, though; she was just the way he liked her: She
stank to high Heaven.

"Okay, a little more", she kept waving "okay, okay, more if you want'a bite of
this apple of your eye. Just one more step -- good." He was out of the way.
"Okay, here I come! Okay?” She waggled. “Okay. Okay, here I come.!”
She sprang like a Lynx...

Plop -- she alighted into a crouch right in front of him. "Miss me, big guy?"
She almost meowed with Cheshire smiles. If anyone had had any doubt a yelp
meant a yip yup, their reunion was nose to nose, eye to eye to eye, blue n'
brown n' green-gray n’ scratch n' sniff n' snuff n’ stuff, home for Christmas,
graduation day, chocolate chip cookie joy. They petted and panted. They
wagged pony and puppy dog tails; they flounced and pounced, and popping
open the final bottle of Evian from the backpack, they lapped it to the last. So
sated, they shared her scent, his scent, and their last supper of Fig Newtons. He
showed some pink, and she grew damp: time to finish. Get to camp. "Not
long", she purred. She meant it. She gave her word. Thus he marked the spot
and off they went, his tail a flapping vestment, her backpack a trailing
supplicant scraping across the desert floor.

The two finished the day in quiet. They had no real need to talk because it
seemed each could guess the other's thoughts. They were a team, after all, so
well-trained that back in North Carolina the two had been Triad Flyball
champs, founders of the team The Bleu Bayous, in fact. She could charge him
out of the gate and down the course with a wink and a nod, and he would
respond instantly. At his peak Moki had run the course in 15:36, a near state
record. God, they had been good. They had just loved showing off in front of a
crowd of bright and caring, shining, admiring eyes, Lord, oh yes they did; but
after a while he had lost a step and a second, and then he had lost some more.
It wasn't fun anymore, he seemed to say, and Susan had agreed.

Anyway, for a no-nonsense kind of girl like her, Botanical Survey, the stuff of
the professoriate, was so much more satisfying than had been Environmental
Reclamation, with its mucking around in menses-red Carolina gumbo,
steaming with who-knows-what toxins, with its spying on sweltering, stinking
pig farms and their owners, and with her jacking off overheated Tarheel
undergrads during sticky evenings' diversions. The desert, on the other hand,
she knew to be pure in its dry contrasts of color and light, hot and cold, good
and evil. It left no doubt. That was its nature.

The two made their way to the seep in no time, just in time. The sun was low
and the desert's daily breath was waning. Its last puffs waft cold: it's Legion's
chilled hands stroked wavelets of goose bumps onto her naked arms and legs.
The girl wasn't tired now, but knowing she must stay naked for the next many
hours in Easter week chill already had turned her body languid. She longed for
the toasty glow of her bright afternoon nap, the cuddle-up warmth of her
bedroll -- "Nonsense. C'mom. Focus --" she scolded herself.

She knew she must put all of that out of her mind, warmth, softness, goodness,
and such. She must suffer in the cold tonight. She must become a Piscean
sacrifice there to feed some unseen multitude. She had to. It was her nature
now.

She was compelled. Once six years ago as a rebellious post-grad gamine, as
just another flaky summertime runaway to the Big City, then one smoggy
August eve she had offered body and soul just for the fun of it. It had been a
hazy, boozily spinning, kinky kind of alkaloid ritual, just a stupid Passion play
gametic stunt when it started, when she had lain upon a Cross inside a
Pentagram on a New York rooftop. That's all. That's what she had thought
then. That's what she had thought then amid a swirl of cats' eyes and the scent
of Rosemary as she splayed out like an Ichthus scratched onto a Roman floor.
That's what the girl had thought, wrongly, in her ignorance. There are no
prayers uttered in jest, neither from a Gotham rooftop nor from the high places
of Tophet: So now she was obligated. Now she was compelled. She had
sacrificed her innocence, so now she had an Owner, so now she had a
Watchdog.

She was driven on. She had to finish the work of the day to start the work of the
night. With an explosion of activity, she noted such things as time,
temperature, topology, GPS location, and surrounding flora. Thus occupied
she had not noticed that the sunset had fired her Great Rock into the fury of a
jealous lover, turning its face red against the darkening sky. Just as the self-
absorbed always seem to do, she remained oblivious until its reflected pink
light cast an accusing finger of shadow across her field notes as her pencil
coupled with its page. So strong had been her dwelling place, however, her
nest that had set in rock this morning, that the Winged Sentinel pulled at her
and beckoned her to come back. Sighing, she felt its wistful tug in the way a
traveler remembers a goodbye kiss, but the light of the world was fading, still
and all, and she had to complete her journey.

"Here it is!” the young botanist proclaimed. Here in the slanting adumbration
she spied what she had come to find. Peeking out from behind a tuft of the
terrible Tribulus terrestris, the noxious Goathead, and undistinguished but to
the experienced eye, sprang the ethereal shoots of the lavender crowned
Calypso orchid. They were so light-green fresh and new, so small, fragile and
winsome she wondered if they must have grown in the land of Adam. In this
seep, as the lily among the thorns, sprouting in this moist crack was proof that
purity could stand alone among the slithering dangers in the land of Cholla and
Prickly Pear….

“Of which vertu engendred is the flour” as her frail ol’ Granny Smith used to
say. The girl smiled at the dear memory. "With some April showers… I miss
you Granny... look down on me." She asked as she paused in a contemplation
that took no more time than a missed step.

"Zip. Pow! Done!" she bellowed, jabbing her fist upward in a power salute.
“I’ll be home tomorrow!” She snapped her notebook closed and plunked it into
the backpack. "Hallelujah!" The echo from the Big Rock was the last spoken
word the girl would hear until the next day when the Professor would travel up
Route 666 from Gallup.

Unlike the boisterous warmth of breezy midmorning, the stasis of night would
demand utter quiet of her. She knew that. Of course, in the beginning had been
the Word, and from her a whole chatterbox full, but in the inner ring of
darkness she would become too cold to speak. The two, she and he, could finish
the night in silence, though. They had done it before. They were a team, after
all, and tonight he would be Captain, and control her with a wink and a nod.
Moki, always impatient, knew how to push her along. Like a Centurion
prodding a captive his incessant bumping kept goosing his little slave onward.

Down in the arroyo, after they had crossed over a dry stream marked Cocytus
on the grid map, he halted the girl and allowed her one look back at her loving,
fading purple Ship Rock. Her work was done, and he must have known Susan
would not pass this way again. Did he know that the pride of her heart had
deceived her, she who had dwelt in the clefts of the rock, whose habituation
had been high; that she had said in her heart, "Who shall bring me down to the
ground?" Did she even know it herself?

Up and out of the gloomy well he nuzzled her, and then he pulled on the
backpack once, twice, three times. As on command his chattel revealed her
collar, a simple device of restraint, which she presented to him as reverently as
a chalice, as a grail. She raised it to her neck, and snapped it into place. It had
no adornment except a "D" ring on a strap which hung down her breastplate,
but it held in it the universal meaning of submission. He owned her.

Moki never wore a coller of course, but in sex she must. He knew his bitch
never doubted it. He divined she never had to: they were a team, after all, so
well trained that even short of camp, little more than, really, a beat up sleeping
bag and a cooler perched on a rise, he could bump her to a stop, sniff her to her
back, force her legs apart, and as he had done often when they had been a-
froggin' back East, roll in her carp to conceal his own scent. He would be quick
though, with his perfuming ritual, brief this evening, because tonight not even
this unhallowed choreographer could defy time and night itself. He had
obligations too. He was as scripted as instinct, without the choices his co-star
may have had just this morning. His dark little film noir had a firm play date
and it was plotted under a starless proscenium, so he nipped her up and
onward toward that stinky old sleeping bag, her ill-lit stage.

He pranced her along, salivating less with intelligence than with the Pavlovian anticipations of the spectacle to come. Could he visualize this child's comedic shakings as a mockery of a girl shivering to death, or did he predict the future in the way the
soulless always seem to do? He had come to expect her infantile moans, those
familiar delightful soliloquies of icy suffering, but in the end it did not matter,
neither to him, nor to the unhearing umber universe above, nor any longer to
the Great Rock, near but forgotten.

-- -- And the award goes to... well done. Bravo! Encore! -- -- Good boy. Nice
puppy.

The Sun was dying over the edge of the world, so it was less than night and less
than day in camp. Red was black; white was gray. Against creation's last glow
Moki observed his little bitch puff into the static evening air checking to see
her breath, judging the temperature thereby. Not frosty tonight, he saw, not
yet anyway, but soon it would be too dark to tell even with her moss-green-
grays, or with his blue and brown, with a dollop of copper. They were a team,
however, these two, so with a wink and a nod he had her unfurl the mise-en-
scene where he would stage her, --Crackle and Fwap!-- She did so with such a
fly-cast snap he started aback a few feet. He steadied though, when his fading
bratling fished into her backpack for her knee pads and then landed them home
with an authoritative Velcro crunch. She seemed so unhesitating, so self-
assured, so almost eager, knowing what was to come. Was there something he
did not know? Could she defy time and the night itself?

He watched as the girl dimmed to an apparition in the evening's amber glow.
To him all became gray as all becomes gray to those without a soul. His eyes
could no longer follow her as she flicked off her Kleenex shorts and tissue
camisole. They vanished into the living black. His world had become flat now
and she was without contrast. Her lilting mons pubis was all he could see of
her in the breathless din. He watched her blend into a floating detritus on a
murky lagoon as she became merely a triangle of black sex hovering
disembodied over a dark unforgiving sea. Her eyes were gone and she had no
shape. Thus this fearsome Mistress of the Day who while she had the light,
believed in the light, that she might be a child of the light, in his world clotted
into a dark gelid shell of fishy incense, rotting taste, and warm cunt only.

In starlessness the sire would breed her. He would batter her perineum. He
would bloody her cervix. He would make her bleat like a demon if he wanted to. He would degrade this formless breathless child on a blackened stage in an
unseen amphitheater beside the Winged Sentinel of Heaven. He would tie with
her for hours, in his pleasure letting her freeze before a crowd of uncaring
obsidian eyes. He had to. He was obligated. He was compelled. It was his
nature.



Epilogue

Time has slipped away from me, fifteen years since I wrote the allegory. I have
defied nether time nor night itself, nor its infirmities.

Just as in memory the narrative and the wish become one, so its passions and
meanings blend to and indistinct whole. What did the story mean?

Did she survive that night?

The professor found her mid-morning the next day laying spread eagle and
naked on that ratty old knapsack. She was groggy and incoherent. She
remembered only cold darkness and a feeling of being adrift throughout the
night. Moki was lounging about 60 yards away, quiet, but watching as always.

This he told me in an email, not in a text, a few months later.

The professor mentioned that he had wrapped Susan in some blankets, revived
her with a swill of Old Gawdawful, and washed her feet as best he could. He
said he rushed her to San Juan Regional in Farmington, where she recovered
within a few days.

The professor brought her home to the McDonald Ranch in the Jornada del
Muerto to regain her strength. She left him six days later, trusting Moki to his
care. She said she had things to do in North Carolina and would call soon. He
never heard from her again.

Moki lived on for a while, but died somewhere on the ranch outside of
Alamogordo. The professor said he had died from a Legion of distempers, but I
infer that he had shot him.

The professor too, has gone missing. I tried to contact him last Easter to tell
him that I may have found Susan on Facebook, wrongly, as it turns out, but he
has left the college, and his IP address, so the provider tells me, never existed.
His ranch wasn’t a ranch at all anymore, but was part of a government
property.

He was a mystery. I wish I had known him better.

I don’t know what happened to Susan.

The highway from Gallop has been renamed.