ANDREA LEWIS White Sands

ANDREA LEWIS

White Sands

1 A lone coyote crests the mesa, lopes the line against the moonlit sky. She’s all inside her skin, inside her gray-gold fur, alpha female, shoulders working, jaw slack. She catches scent of Bernadette and waits.

2 The fifth-grade filmstrip showed the head of a longhorn steer inside the outline of a girl. A cartoon uterus and tubes. The monthly burden, colorless, flowed out politely, like the white sand in an egg timer. Cramps––the dragon teeth gnawing at her pelvis––would lessen if you touched your toes.

If I touch my toes, I’ll barf. Bernadettewaits for Theo on the hood of her stepdad’s Bel Air. She wants to climb up to the early morning moon. It droops behind the fire-eaten sign for Okie Joe’s. She wants to enter that coyote and outrun the pain, anyplace but here, this town, their house, her mom, who can’t stop buying crystal barware, accent pillows, accent tables, swizzle sticks, sunburst clocks, and bottles of booze so big they come with sculpted handholds in the glass.

3 You’re such a virgin, Rosa always says. She flaunts it every chance she gets, the sex she had with Rory right here in Okie Joe’s. They did it there on the glass-strewn floor, with peanut shells and mouse shit for a mattress, Sputnik blinking through the blown-off roof. The place exploded years ago, torched by passing galactic aliens, the locals like to say, because it’s up against the Missile Range and Trinity.

Rory, of the blond stubble and fleece-lined denim jacket, kills coyotes from the cockpit of his Cessna, banking low across the yellow foothills in the rising yellow sun, 22-gauge and a cowboy hat, with the alpha female down below.

4 The Laramide Revolution saw the lift of the southwestern spine of the Rocky Mountains that forced into the light of day on our lonely planet a swath of dazzling gypsum that allowed itself for seventy million years to be eroded, etched, scratched, and pulverized into the retinascraping two-hundred-and-twenty-four-square-mile phenomenon in the Tularosa Basin in New Mexico that people call White Sands.

5 Rory pulls the trigger. Unperturbed, the alpha female trots her trot beneath the waning moon, beneath the diamond-point of Venus, beneath the mothership, the fading stars, the satellites.

6 Bernadette crouches by the liquor cabinet and upends her purse––used pink Kleenex, ticket stubs, The Catcher in the Rye––to find the yellow tin of Anacin. She swallows six with Dr. Pepper and leaves for school. She hopes the pad won’t leak along the way. As always, there is Rosa on the corner by the Baptist church, her woven purse from Juarez lumpy with Hostess treats and hairspray, mascara and movie mags. You’ve got that pain-crease in your forehead, ’Dette. Let Theo do it out there on the dunes and you’ll feel better. They squeeze into the smoke-fogged senior bathroom where girls in letter jackets sit on sinks to light their Kools and never let you wash your hands.

7 The Story of Menstruation, a ten-minute animated Disney film made in 1947, was narrated by Gloria Blondell, voice talent and actress, sister to the more famous Joan Blondell. Gloria was not mentioned in the credits. Use of the word vagina in the script is believed to be a first in the world of film.

White Sands Missile Range, in south central New Mexico, is the largest military installation in the United States. It occupies 3,200 square miles of the Tularosa Basin, and it surrounds the gypsum

dunes of White Sands National Monument. It is home to the Trinity Site, where the world’s first nuclear weapon was detonated.

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, into low Earth orbit on October 4, 1957. Its radio signal, transmitted at 20.005 and 40.002 MHz, was easily detected by amateur radio operators around the world. Sputnik completed 1,440 orbits of Earth and burned up on reentry on January 4, 1958.

8 Theo’s locker smells like crushed baloney, plus the Anacin’s worn off. In all his tromping through coyote tracks and chamisa, feather grass and scorpions, he’s found a single shiny scrap of the mothership. Bernadette rubs it with her thumb. It’s like my mom’s silver lamé pedal pushers. Theo has a bullet head and slanted eyes. Down the hall, a kid yells, Theo! The spacemen called! They want you back! Bernadette would like to burrow in a den with pups and go to sleep. Theo thinks: V=IR. Ohm’s Law. How to overcome Resistance and experience the Voltage that is Bernadette? Come out there with me, he says. I know there’s more.

9 “Rosa, I’m not doing it in the sand.”

“Well then, go to Okie Joe’s like I did.”

10

First light.

Rory turns his collar up and taxis out. He’d rather be jerking off to thoughts of Rosa, but two more longhorn calves are out there with carotids leaking blood onto the desert floor.

Bernadette puts on a pad, three pairs of panties, and her hiking boots. She commandeers the stepdad’s Bel Air and fishtails out of town for Okie Joe’s.

The alpha female checks her pups. Tilts her head when she hears the plane. Creases her forehead, licks a pup, and trots away.

Theo launches Morning Suns onto half-lit lawns. He has a year-old rubber in his jeans and the shred of mothership tied to his bike. The Schwinn’s a symphony of clanks and grinds. He pedals out toward Bernadette.

11 She crests the mesa underneath the hanging moon. Now she is all inside the gray-gold fur, catching scent of Theo, shying from his grind of metal, shying from the plane that banks aloft. She sets a course by the dimming stars and lopes away.