Moonlight Water
Authors: Win Blevins
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To our family and friends and everyone walking in
Hózhó
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CONTENTS
Part One: In Which Robbie Meets Creation
2. Standing in the Door to Hell
4. How Do We Get There from Here?
Part Two: In Which Red Arrives. Somewhere.
9. Moonlight Water, a Feathered Spy, and the Law
11. The Lonely Ranger and Tonto
17. Troubles to the Left of Us, Troubles to the Right
23. The Past Leaps Up to Bite You
36. The Bird Leading the Blind
41. Gianni Productions, Unlimited
43. Struggles and Uncertainties
Tom Doherty Associates Books by Win Blevins and Meredith Blevins
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TEACHINGS OF THE NAVAJO BLESSING WAY
Be generous and kind
Haáh wiinit'Ã
Acknowledge and respect kinship and clanship
K'ézhnidzin
Seek traditional knowledge and traditions
Hane'zhdindzin
Respect values
HwiÅ iÅi
Respect the sacred nature of the self
Ãdá hozhdilzin
Have reverence and care of speech
Hazaad baa áhojilyá
Be a careful listener
Hazhó'ó ajÃists'áá'
Be appreciative and thankful
Ahééh jinÃzin
Show positive feelings toward others
Há hózhó
Express appropriate and proper sense of humor
DÅoh hodichà yá'átéhÃgÃà hazhó'ó bee yájÃÅti'
Maintain a strong reverence of the self
ÃdiÅ jÃdlÃ
Maintain enthusiasm and motivation for your work
Hanaanish ájÃÅ'Ãinii bÃzhneedlÃ
Have a balanced perspective and mind
HanÃtsékees k'ézdongo ájósin
âfrom a poster in the elementary school at Moonlight Water
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In Which Robbie Meets Creation
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Roiling and rebellious. Gray water heaving with great white sharks. Ships sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge packed with mysteries from China. Fortunes earned and burned. Writers and millionaires made. Mark Twain and Mark Hopkins. San Francisco has eaten giants and ordinary dreamers alike. It has sculpted them from legends and landfill along the Barbary Coast.
Crushed, reborn, or created. The city does not care. Rock musician or railroad magnate, all the same. San Francisco was built on visions. Dead dreams, shiny ones, those unspoken, and those stillborn. Rob Macgregor was just one more soldier in the city's army of waking dreamers. One night, sleeping in his boat, Robbie was handed a possibility from the city's ancient chest of dreams.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Cruising. Dark highway punctuated by the two headlights of his Alfa convertible. In the distance a bridge teetered toward the east side of the bay, a span that always made him edgy.
Up the steep angle toward a summit. He knew perfectly well that from there the bridge simply curved out of sight, downward. But he often imagined, teasing himself, that at the top it ended. Simply ended. And, in this particular dreamscape, his fantasy turned to reality. When he got to the apex, he flew off the end of the bridge into empty air.
Fear bolted through his veins like a psychedelic nightmare. The Alfa hit the water like a missile and slid toward the bottom. Robbie felt the water rise in his body from his feet to his legs to his belly and on up. When it flowed into and out of his nostrils, he knew he was about to die. He was paralyzed.
The convertible bumped onto the sandy bottom nose first, then tail. As it settled to horizontal, the water gushed out his throat, his mouth, and his nose. Rage to live rose with it.
Spasmodically, he tried to jerk in breath, knowing it would drown him, and â¦
The miracle happened. It was air. He was breathing sweet air.
As quickly as a lightning bolt is gone, water was air, and life was death.
Relaxing, he looked around. Sea urchins. Small fish. Off to the left, a bed of kelp. The cells of his body calmed, and he felt welcome here. He opened the door of the car, put his left leg on the bottom of the bay, and stepped deeper into his dream.
He saw himself climb out of the bay on the east side. He was buck-naked. In front of him all the towns of the East Bay had disappeared. In that direction, toward the middle of the America this urban man barely knew, he saw no streets and no houses, only hills cloaked in trees and darkness. He turned, sat, and looked back at the watery grave of his fine car, oddly at peace.
People gathered, walked around the edge of the bay, and pointed. Their mouths moved, but he heard nothing. They didn't notice the naked Robbie.
A tow truck backed to the water's edge. Cop cars wheeled in. Divers put on wet suits, and still no one noticed the naked Robbie.
Before long the Alfa was cable-hoisted to the bank.
Robbie felt a tremolo. Who or what might be in the driver's seat? Robbie Macgregor, the once-celebrated rock musician, now a corpse?
He couldn't look.
But he did look.
Nothing there. No one. Seat empty.
Robbie felt a pulse of sweet exhilaration.
I am invisible. I am a no-man. I could â¦
He peered into the waters and wondered.
Never mind. Why examine a miracle? Why try to wrap it in puny words? I am
free.
Photographers showed up, the crowd swelled, and not a soul saw Robbie Macgregor sitting there.
He stood up and held his hands high. He shook his hips. He laughed into the sky. No one heard, and no one noticed.
He turned and looked at the darkened lands, the unknown eastern side of the bay across from the city where he had grown up, become a man, learned music, got rich, and got ⦠Never mind.
I could walk over those hills into a new world and do anything.
He started to shiver. Fear? Excitement? Didn't matter.
I could do and be anything, anyone.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
When Robbie woke in the middle of the night, he couldn't get back to sleep. He sat on the deck of his sailboat and waited quietly, drank coffee through first light to the dawn, and let images from the dream play in his mind. They faded some and got jumbled in their order. But he held its core in a pocket of his soul. He knew he'd been carrying the shadow of this dream for a long time.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Later that day Robbie walked the shore of a half-moon beach to the south, and then far to the north. He let the dream play like a musical score in rhythm to his steps while he turned his life around and around in his mind.
When he got tired, he sat on a low stone, took off his sneakers, and wriggled salt-sand between his toes. The tide was out, and the anemones on the seaward side of the stone had closed. Wondrous anemones.
He picked up a stick of flotsam and drew in the sand. He loved drawing, and he'd let himself drift away from it. In fact, he'd drifted away from many parts of himself. Fallen into doing music he didn't love, playing it only for other people, living out other people's fantasies. He wasn't sure exactly what his own way
was
anymore. One hell of a predicament.
He rubbed out the drawing and started a new one. After a while it grew, it had life, and he thought it wanted to be a man dancing. Robbie danced a lot onstage. That sketch felt pretty good, but he rubbed it out, too. One day it might be easy again. Could be.
He walked to a beach shack, bought a hero sandwich, found another boulder to sit on, and ate slowly. The tide was starting in now.
What do I know? Nothing.
He ate.
If I knew something, what would it be?
That my dream was about me dying. And an invitation to being born.
He wadded up the sandwich paper and stuffed it into a jeans pocket. Put his shoes back on. Walked again. He walked all afternoon. The incoming waters slushed around his sneakers. He looked at the sun, setting far to the west. Which, he said to himself, thinking of Japan and red paper fans, was also the East. He smiled at how many possibilities each direction held.
He took a few steps onto drier sand and walked toward the parked Alfa.
What do I know?
I want to walk over those East Bay hills, low and curved like lion paws. I will go as a new person, a blank slate, waiting for a life to be written.
As he walked, he carried that knowledge in each step, and he knew it in his flesh. Felt it the way a man feels his desire to meld himself heart and soul with a particular woman. Knew.
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Several weeks earlier, just north of San Francisco
Denial. Robbie had been fending off reality for years, and he never needed his denial fix more than now.
So there he was, sitting at the kitchen counter of his fancy house, Anchor Steam at hand before breakfast, toying with the break in a new song. “You'll come,” he said. “Just one simple break, why are you holding out on me?” He could have been talking to his wife. Music was like that sometimes.
Robbie often talked to his songs as he wrote them, especially now when it was getting harder to bring them into the world. Frustration ate at him as lyrics and melodies hid in the shadows. Sometimes he whipped his songs into being, his words a charging team of horses. Other times he seduced them into life. Performing under the name Rob Roy, he threw his tall, burly body around the stage with the madness of a Scot warrior going berserk, and he belted out songs like battle cries.
Robbie played half the musical instruments known to man, sang choruses with the brassiness of a trombone, and wrote every kind of music imaginable and some that wasn't.
Rolling Stone
once wrote that his songs resembled classical music gone Grateful Dead. Robbie thought they meant something positive, though he didn't know what.
