A Gift From Quetzalcoatl, Part I

Twenty-five years ago, I exchanged $40 with a young Mexican man for a tranquilizer that promotes a peaceful, low-impact heart beat while we brazen out the flash floods of our days, and then, swings wide the gates of heaven when the last cardiac tick has tocked. - At least, according to Aztec myth, but, hey, drug companies, relax!  This commodity can't be squeezed into a prescription bottle, unless you can also get an elephant through the eye of a newt.1

When I got hooked on this little wonder drug, it came packaged as two black and white chihuahuas - the half-pint dog that Malamute lovers love to hate.  Always a cocker-spaniel person, I was surprised when I fell under their spell and carried them home with me nestled in my upturned sun hat, through the hot, slanting light of another time and place.2

Had I known that they would pay me back by piddling on all my floors, the way generations of their ancestors had done in the palace of Moctezuma, I might have turned around and handed them back to their merchant, and sped away alone, but I didn't, and there they were, electric morsels of love and life, as I would soon discover.3

On arrival home, I circled my hands around their tiny middles like seat belts, lifted them eye high, and studied them.4

They looked back, long and hard, and cast fish hooks in my minnowed soul.5

Later, I named them Yards Of Delight Always (Yoda), and Ships At The Ocean (Sato).  Time would show that each was a unique compound of the same elixir with different mind-altering properties.  They were addictive, and I took it without guilt or side-effects:  Sig:  Qs Ad PRN pain, nestling close to them for every misery, from belly ache to fiscal insolvency.6

When I look back over the   years of my life, I see the dog-seller's form and spirit, metamorphosed over time,  as the instrument that brought me an incredible gift.  Was it Quetzalcoatl, himself, the Plumed God from the Golden Age of Tula, proud, fair of face and prophetic, with feathers endearingly frayed from centuries of time travel, who sold for a pittance, all that love and mirth?7

"These are my dogs," he says, pointing to the contents of a California orange crate in the back of a lean-to strewn with agricultural artifacts under a net of dust.8

"they will lead your soul across the Nine Rivers of the Underworld.  Take them with you, and guard them well."9

Over now, are the 18 years of tender guard duty of these imps.  They have cavorted on ahead, and wait for me on the brink.  I see the fiery pup-stuff that lept from box to heart that day, was the cosmos itself in miniature.  Dense and piercing eyes; noses that read my hands with mystic skills; and indefinable - their easy ability to love me beyond all conditions, impervious to my deficits in a world of convenient betrayals.10

Instantly, they knew me better than I knew them or myself, as, with dispatch, and a buzz of fly around that shed, I was stamped useful, trainable, sensually dense.  Old habits of selfish indolence would weaken under the spar of plots cooking constantly in their apple-dome heads --11

heads that could be encompassed within my thumb and forefinger, spirits that escaped definition.12

Too fragile for corporal punishment, they moved around my digs, and redirected my plans as easily as a bulldozer moving talcum powder.  They presided, in the middle of my kitchen floor, over the sacrament of meal preparation like little priests, training my once un-fettered feet to be circumspect before moving forth.  They appeared to regard themselves as the tolerant owner of 140 pounds of clumsy homo sapiens - lock, stock and car keys --But, why not--these warm and wiggly beings had been conquering the inherent intractability in man for thousands of years.13

Some say their progenitors were linked with China as far back as the Eighth Century, B.C.  They survived the evolution of man's mind and folkways, including --on this side of the world -- the brisk pace of Aztec sacrifice, lusty for the blood of man and beast, and the coming of Cortes in 1519.  Dealing with me, they had seen, would be no sweat.14

Paleolithic pets with skills learned 15,000 years ago, they were little sisters of the wolf, retaining the archetypes of those self-sufficient ancestors in the microfiche of their apple-dome skulls, biding their time until a second lupine coming.  Compressed by selective breeding into tiny, doll-like bodies, they developed skills needed by dwarfs living close to man, namely, the ability to channel his activities. --Man, that dull-witted giant who hammered and pummelled his environment, turning matter and energy to his purposes, and could not hear the Stories In The Grasses.15

To mutual advantage, they became small hot bed-warmers for the bands of vulnerable human beings who peopled the cold and windy places of history, coming in that swarm of life over the ice-floed Bering Strait, spooning close to the smelly savages, and dreaming wolfish dreams.  They struggled to snag his compassion.  In the hands of benevolent gods and men, a few, like Yoda and Sato would die of antiquity around the age of 18, hoary with wisdom.16

Insignificant among other dogs, these tiny little jesters told jokes in mime that both man and dog could laugh at. With the seductive skills of Salome, they wagged their optimistic tails at the the Aztec giants who sought them out to fling their joyful, little bones  into the roaring, ritual fires.  Some of them learned to seduce the softer hearts of women and children, who hid them under clay pots, or their clothing, when the footsteps of the high priest approached.  Those who were exceptional, if only in luck, could survive, better than legions of two-legged slaves, the blood-thirst of man and Gods.17

When the conquistadors made living conditions in Tenochtitlan unbearable, the little dogs fell into the hands of the Indians, who sacrificed them, too, or  barbecued their delicious flesh, so nature selected out again, only the fastest, most illusive, or most seductive in every litter.18

Four hundred years in the hot Mexican dust passed, and the breed polished its act north out of Mexico, so when I first saw two of their descendants in Dinuba, California, late in the 20th century (and in my life!)  they were very smart, very fast and very seductive little dogs with the persona of a lap dog, and the animus of a wolf.19

Yards of Delight Always (Yoda) whose trickster genes had concentrated on speedy escape, and the lost art of invisibility, would train herself to outrun a conquistador on horseback, and could swoop across a football field, and be gone in the blink of a lizard's eye, passing into a state of disembodiment until she chose to be seen again - the location of her re-appearance, carefully picked for its implausibility, the look in her eye, one of wry amusement at my surprise to see her approaching from the North, when she had gone South, and laughing, if only to MY eyes, out of the corner of her mouth.20

Late in the afternoon, when the golden light fails, as it did in the city of Tula, she howled like a wolf to songs I am deaf to hear.  She was whippet-like, with legs too long for the taste of current breed fanciers.  Like the old Mexican-style chihuahua, she had hare-shaped toes that she used to cling, and a  soulful head and eyes. 21

Oblivious of her rank as a featherweight among dogs, she had met and humbled many muscular brutes, who were initially stunned by the experience of being rushed with hysterical, vituperation by what first appeared to be a small black bat from hell.  What happened next, depended on the character of her target, a sense of humor in the make-up of her victim, important to her chance for survival.22

Often, a yelping retreat from a large, pompous dog with quick reactions, and an ego to protect, sent her flying back across the landscape, tail tucked so tightly under her belly that she became too round for volition to carry on legs, and somersaulted forward, instead.  The size of the dog was never a factor in her decision to rush forward to slay the four-footed Caliban, who-- muscles rippling in the sun-- had been minding his own business.23

Having made the decision to allow her some freedom at the expense of her safety, I would often question my wisdom, when her sense of infallibility seemed like an act of suicide.  Was Yoda's game to be worthy to be sacrificed to the Aztec gods, willing to go triumphant to her glory?  Any rescue by me always embarrassed her, expressed by a look --impetuous youth burdened with the interference of a clumsy old relative.24

Later, when the long shadows of the afternoon lengthened into darkness, and she begged to be cuddled and held close, spooning close to me in bed, and snoring like an old drunk, I was back where I started from with no theory of her behavior at all.25

Once, witch-black all over, except for flying white paws and the blaze of a running wolf on her chest, she lived to turn white with age.26

She would have no progeny to carry forth the banner of her indomitable spirit, having bumped into few suitors small enough to do the job, and those few, driven off, even in her heat, by her attitude of cool, wolfish disdain.27

"I have flashed across the eyeball of God," her presence announced, "and will live forever.  Let Fido do that if he can."28

Ships At The Ocean (Sato), so named because she once attempted to follow a duck by running on water, and was three yards out on the surface of the pond when she heard me yell, and sunk like a stone, took a harder path of survival.  Awkward, and too proud to be slapstick like Yoda, she spent her little life concentrated on charting the depths of man's will, that blind bulldozer, and consequently worried, weighing tomorrow's possibilities against her Jungian memories.  No matter how deep the goose-down bed, how loving the hand, how delectable the food, she was joyless.  A change of fortune was not the exception, it was the Rule.29

Sato troubled her trapped wolf brain trying to decipher the sounds that I, her tensely vertical pack mate spoke.  She measured their tone and force for their nuance of meaning, assigning values to each syllable, unravelling the knotted tangle of human intentions, pondering the two-faced phrase, and my stroking statements of perpetual love, as if evolution had not carried her far enough to be safe from primitive man, or the lightning decision of his mate, to cook what is handy.30

I...Love....You...What did each of those sounds mean really - under what circumstances was this true, how much, and for how long?  There are limitations in contracts with man, she knew, and she lived in ulcerous anticipation of a breach.  My Sato had eaten the apple on  the tree of life, and lost her animal innocence, like me, and we shared the discomfort of apprehension.31

She feared losing face with her canine peers, especially Yoda, "the popular girl at the dance".  With bone-chilling angst, she abhorred being swooped up, and dropped down by human, possibly Aztec hands, a plaything of destiny indifferent to her vote.  While Yoda would feel no inconvenience being shot from a canon, Sato  hated the gentlest of forces deflecting her from her laid-out course of action; and because of this bad state of mental tension, she had urgently pressed Yoda into service as Scapegoat Number One, as if the millennium of sacrificial fires continued as always.32

So upon that happy-go-lucky rascal,  Sato heaped the blame for all imagined omens of evil portent with vicious snarls, and gnashing, flashing incisors.  "Hark!  Whose footsteps are those approaching?", she seemed to whisper, "and WHO does HE want?"33

In a fight with a ravening beast, though, Sato girded her 4- pound self34

with the courage of Caesar, albeit, a small one, always because Yoda had opened the question of who was superior to whom with some mulish canine, the little one leaping to defend the cabal, a black powder-puff sparking with rage, ending the encounter the way a slight schoolteacher quiets large, unruly children.  Nobody knows how.35

Whereupon, Sato resumed what had become her main goal in life, which was to achieve, as soon as possible, a state of total invisibility, existing not as a corporeal body threaded with nerves, but as a cloud shadow drifting slowly from hill to hill.36

Did the groundwork of her mind sustain the image of the Aztec Princess who kept 1500 chihuahuas around her, each with its personal human slave to care for, and to amuse the little dog, who dined on minced slave testicles, and human babies?  According to these old tales, when the dog died, the slave was killed.  37

No psychology of mine seemed able to loosen these delusions of her privileged vulnerability.  As no psychology of man, can free me from mine.38

As for myself, Dumb- of- Nose, who can not hear the Stories In the Grasses, or sense the footstep of the gods, I was always happy to be their pawn, and loved them with spiritual entrancement, like an Aztec woman, giving their presence in this modern century, safe harbour. 39

I strive to overcome the human density that leaves me dull of sense, and weaving the frayed fabric of human syntax.40

Though, they are gone now. Betrayed in the end by my own loving hands, as Sato seemed to suspect,  when each by each, in their suffering decline, I made the decision to set  free  all that soul in tiny  tortured places, I will never stop missing the days when every day they warmed me to laughter and the pleasure of their presence.  Though I opened the larder of their simple pleasures on command, capturing with my opposable thumbs their  delicacies, lulled them to sleep in the warmth of my lap, and stroked their velvety fur to our mutual ecstasy, I will always feel like a typical member of my species: one who often  betrays what is loved best.41

I strive to hone my only virtue, compassion.  I strive to give them stature.42