Small Town

“I can sort of imagine what somebody like that might be going through. Feeling so much pain, so much loss, and having to do something about it. I’m not presuming to guess how it is with this particular guy, but I can imagine how it might be.”

Esther Blinkoff sat back, folded her hands. “There’s your next book,” she said.

He felt a little silly buying the cornmeal.

He picked it up at the Gristedes on Hudson Street, and had to decide between the white and the yellow. Both were stone ground and both cost the same, and he actually found himself checking the nutritional information box on the packaging, as if a higher vitamin C level in one might make all the difference. He decided yellow was a more traditional color of cornmeal, and that seemed reason enough to go with it.

The smallest package was eight ounces, and he figured that would last awhile.

He’d been walking home from another coffee shop interview, this one at Reggio on Macdougal Street with a reporter from People magazine. She’d brought a photographer, a very tall dark-skinned young man who never made a sound, but who somehow communicated a desire to photograph Creighton in Washington Square Park. He’d changed film and cameras several times, taking endless shots until Creighton told him that was going to have to be enough.

On the way home, a shop window caught his eye. Someone had arranged a desert diorama, with sand and cacti and, incongruously, quartz crystals and other mineral specimens. But what got his attention was a group of stone carvings of animals, fetishes similar to the turquoise rabbit. There were no rabbits, but there were several bears (unlikely in a desert, you would think) along with some dogs and other creatures he couldn’t identify.

He entered the shop, and found a glass case with a great many more fetishes, some an inch long that could have been stamped out with a cookie cutter, others very elaborately and realistically crafted, including an eagle whose every feather was defined and a snarling bobcat or lynx that looked positively fierce.

The shop attendant, a black girl with her hair fixed in blond cornrows and rings on six of her fingers, explained what the fetishes were. The bear was a powerful figure in the Native American cosmology, he learned, and thus was the most common subject for carvers, even in areas where actual bears could not be found. And what he’d taken for dogs were in fact coyotes, and the coyote was the great trickster of Indian folk myths.

“Wile E. Coyote,” he said.

“Except he’s the one who gets tricked all the time. This one’s probably a badger, and of course you get owls and birds. Here’s a rabbit, an owl, a frog. A buffalo, you see plenty of them.”

And would he like to take one of them home and feed it? He said he didn’t think so, that a friend had given him a fetish and he just wanted to get some sense of what it was and what to do with it. Did you pray to them?

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you sort of honor their spirits, you know? And absorb their energy. And of course you have to feed them.” And she’d explained about the cornmeal, and showed him a selection of small shallow dishes suitable for the purpose. The nicest one was a piece of lustrous black pottery, and he was astonished to learn they wanted forty-five dollars for it.

“It’s Santa Clara,” she said, “or San Ildefonso, I can’t always tell the difference. See, this bowl here is Santa Clara, and this one’s San Ildefonso, but on a small piece like this one, it’s harder to tell. Oh, wait, it’s signed, Maria Sojo. Well, she’s a well-known potter, and she’s Santa Clara, so now we know it’s a Santa Clara piece, and that’s why it costs that much. Some of these others don’t cost half that much and” — she grinned — “I don’t think the little animals can tell the difference.”

But he liked the black one, and said he’d take it. While she was wrapping it he said he bet there was a lot she could tell him about the fetishes and pottery, and that he’d really like to take her to dinner and learn more.

She smiled, her whole face lighting up, and touched one of the rings on her left hand. “Now this gets sort of lost in the shuffle here,” she said, “but it’s a wedding band.” He started to apologize, but she told him not to, that she was flattered. “You ever see me without the ring,” she said, “ask me again, okay?”

A few days ago he’d moved some books to create a niche for the rabbit. Now he spooned cornmeal into the black dish and placed it in front of the little animal.

He checked his messages, returned a call from Roz. She was holding off on foreign sales until she had Darker Than Water in hand, but reported that his French publishers wanted to renew contracts on his earlier titles, and to acquire one book they’d passed on first time around.

Nothing succeeded like success.