Chapter two Goddess Country

's fingers were so long, so quick on the drum that they, not

the bonfire, seemed to spark. Her long earrings caught the light and drew Katie's eyes. She was aware of a half dozen women in the shadows, women who lived on the land and swayed, hummed, or beat smaller drums to R's rhythm, shifting with the stinging smoke, fragrant with sage that had been dropped on the fire, the only light in the damp nighttime woods. Chick from the store was there too, drumming, sweating by the fire.

"Not our cool Katie," mocked R.

Katie had carefully constructed her image. It brought beaucoup dinero on the local TV stations where she'd worked for the last eight years, starting with an internship while she was a senior in college. To tone down her off-camera, driven energy, she'd adopted a sexy slouch that telegraphed both indifference and allure. But her hair, which was severely parted and fell in a short stark black frame around her glasses, was the real knife-edge Katie. Except for giving up the on-camera contact lenses, she'd kept her Katie-self intact these three months of living here with Jeep, and she'd been ready to flee back to the Gen X scene any time. But around R, this magnificent matriarch who seemed to define not only Spirit Ridge but women's spirituality-meltdown.

Sweaty and shivering, dazed by the firelight, she stumbled on roots and rocks, following as R glided into the quiet piney night. She could still turn back. "She wants more than your nubile bod, Kate-o," Jeep had warned. "She wants your soul." Katie hadn't exactly told Jeep that she wanted R, but Jeep had guessed right.

She squatted near R. As they peed, a bullfrog harrumphed in the woods. The night was chill and she pulled her jeans up quickly. Rain gathered into large drops in the trees above and dropped to the forest floor around them. R's smile was serene. Something about that serenity agitated Katie-because she wanted it? Because she was scared of it? Because she feared it was a mask?

Inside her yurt, R fed the small woodstove with deliberate, flowing movements.

Katie spoke to quiet her yearning silence. "You're a really hot drummer." The wood snapped as it caught. Its heat did nothing for her shivering.

"Hot buns!" shrieked Toto, the brilliant blue, yellow, and scarlet macaw that R had taken in when its gay male owner died.

Katie had never seen R embarrassed before. "Don't be offended. He's a very loving creature, but otherwise typically male." R broke up a rice cake. Toto sidled onto R's shoulder, rubbed cheeks with her, and took the snack in his foot. "My drum is another voice. Before I found my lesbian self and began drumming, everyone told me I had no ear. They were right. Patriarchal music is noise to me."

Jeep wouldn't recognize Katie. She'd say she'd morphed into a clueless chick, frantic with desire, reading off some alien teleprompter. Katie was feeling for a new language and finally sensed what Jeep's fumbling beneath the surface of language was all about. The words she tried on felt clumsy. "I could see your spirit dancing over the bonfire."

R seemed to accept this as homage due. "I wondered if she'd dance for you. She's very ancient."

"How old are you?" Katie asked. R's earlobes looked like they were permanently elongated from the heavy earrings she wore.

R hesitated just enough that Katie knew she'd stepped over a boundary. Even the community's nickname for R, Rattlesnake, belonged to a creature whose first line of defense was a courteous warning. But it was hard to stop asking, asking, asking questions. She'd always been like that, even before asking questions became a career. If you had all the answers there were never surprises.

R held her hands up to the woodstove, turned them this way and that, reaching out. Katie felt pulled into her force field. R reached over and removed Katie's glasses and set them out of reach. "You don't need these."

Instantly Katie was a scrawny light brown girl again, with the still, expressionless posture of an invisible child. Her shivering was deep inside. The year she'd started school, her father hadn't come back from Mexico. She'd secretly memorized the eye chart because she didn't think her gringa mother could afford glasses. The blurred teachers never knew what to make of the Delgado girl-so bright, so slow, so creative, so secretive.

"What brought you to Spirit Ridge?" R asked while Toto gently groomed her hair with his formidable beak.

Katie took her time answering. First, when she heard about the new school shooting in Santee, California, this month she'd felt such relief that she didn't have to go down there and cover it. School shootings really got to her. But what had brought her here? She remembered once, when she was very small, going down to Mexico to see her dad's family. The Virgin Mary statue and the candles impressed her and she'd been fascinated by her old, old great-grandmother's ceaselessly clicking rosary beads. She'd wanted some of her own. The memory glowed like some sacred journey she'd taken, perhaps an initiation rite. The two Sundays they were there, she'd gone with the grandmothers and all her cousins to a small country chapel. It was white-hot, and the holy water her grandmother sprinkled on her at the door was a cool benediction.

"I've been living lies since day one. School was this I'm-just-likethe-white-girls trip. What was I thinking? I lived in a lousy trailer park! TV land is all hype-sound bites, putting a spin on reality, packaging tragedy to entertain. Being nice to boys even when they treat me like a hooker on retainer. I learned to do all that real young."

"What a horrid way to live."

Bull's-eye. She'd finally found someone who thought like her. She needed a moral compass to point her way or her ambition would take her over-or was she only about ambition? "I first started looking at Oregon as a story because I saw that a cottage industry had been created around ballot measures-homophobes were supporting their families by fundraising from people's fears. It's the women who'll save the planet, you know." Even on the land, in this hiatus from the fast lane, her enthusiasm came roaring over her like the flames consuming the kindling in the woodstove. "In the name of Christianity a handful of gluttonous people were calling for ridiculous laws and taking gay rights and abortion as platforms because they knew these would get people going. Why wasn't anyone talking about this? These men were using a religion that grew out of love and celebration to make money off of hate." R added a small log. "They were arsonists-starting fires of hate. When sacrificing gay people and pregnant women stopped bringing in enough money they threw in taxes and anti-government initiatives. It was so clear to me! I wanted to tell the story and debunk the whole operation."

"Men have perverted spirituality for all of history to get power and money."

"Well, duh, I started to see that. And people like me have been exposing them at their stupid hate tricks just as long. But it'll never stop. I could never uncover all the wrongs. We just hit a new century and everything was the same and I wasn't going to change anything with a story or by being a national TV news anchor. All of a sudden I was dead in the water."

"Many women return to the land to escape something."

"It's not about escape for me, R."

"Oh?"

"I've been intimate with the evil that men do out there-crime and criminals, political deals, natural disasters, abuse of kids, animals, women. It's numbing. It's been corrupting my sense of purpose. I need some moral grounding because I don't think I ever had a personal sense of what's right and wrong for me. And that's something you need in my business." It frightened her to even think it, but she said, "If it's still my business. I'm thinking I don't have what it takes."

"Or you have too much."

"Meaning?"

"Don't they call newscasters 'talking heads'? Implying empty heads? Surely you can do better than that."

Did R really believe she could do better? "Some of them primp and read the prompters, but I know fine investigative reporters who also read news into the cameras. Don't believe everything you hear, R."

"I know only one investigative reporter whose personal ethics and spiritual journey have led her to Goddess country. That doesn't recommend the group to me as a whole."

Katie wanted to run out and find a few more to prove there were good people in the broadcast field. Why did she feel she had to apologize for her profession to this woman? "Goddess country. I like that. I need to write it down." She fumbled in her jacket pocket for the packet of index cards she carried. "I really have to get out of this habit of taking notes on everything. It's a compulsion."

"Or your work." Was R condemning her again or was there a note of admiration in her voice?

"I can't live so compromised any more, R," she said, wondering if she wanted too much.

"Do you think you've found a place without compromises here?"

She wasn't that stupid, but she wanted to believe it. "Haven't I? Look at you. No men in your life, living on your own terms, at a subsistence level maybe, but tell me you're not independent. And here, the word goddess has nothing to do with sex goddesses. I need to be in your Goddess country, to breathe in the air of this free place, to know free women. You're not about money and power and fame. You're about getting away from all that."

"I'm honored that you include me in such idealized company."

Katie felt like a little kid again. "Am I idealizing? That's what I see. You're a beautiful, strong, and free woman." She was sounding like R again. Didn't she have a language of her own?

R bowed her head. "Thank you. I honor your courage in leaving work you no longer believe in."

"This is strange, but I love it when you talk like that, all formal."

Toto screeched, "Talk dirty, talk dirty!"

R kissed his gaudy head and put him in his cage. "My heart speaks."

"At first I thought you were way corny, but feel." She dared press R's hand against her pounding heart. "I think it's because I actually found someone on this planet who's comfortable inside her own skin."

R's eyes were both powerful and placid. "I only know how to listen to…" She opened her arms as if to include the universe.

"The factory I came out of forgot to give me those instructions."

"Do you really think so poorly of yourself? I see a self-possessed woman. A woman who watches. That's what attracts me to you." With no warning, R pulled off her sweater and the white thermal underwear she wore, then pressed Katie's hand against her bare breast and drumming heart.

"You're awesome," said Katie, lips not quite touching R's. She began to shiver again, but she felt flushed from head to toe. This woman, this woman. Was it love she felt for her or greed for what R was?

R's face and breasts glowed in the firelight. "I can't give you anything you don't have."

"I have nothing of value. I'm a bottomless pit." She sounded like R again, but she did feel empty, dizzy with possibility and self-doubt. She wanted the woman's quiet power, and she wanted to be rid of her own chatter and constant motion. She wanted to change the disk from Nine Inch Nails to goddess chants. The rational Katie knew no one could do this for her, but for once in her life she refused to listen.

R dropped their hands. Was that firelight in her eyes or anger? "And you want me to fill you up."

"No, I don't."

"Oh yes you do."

Light-headed with desire, Katie groped her way behind R up the narrow wooden ladder to the sleeping loft. She drank R in like water. She couldn't make her hands stay still, couldn't keep her whole thirsty being from this great oasis. Was this sex or some sort of worship? Maybe there was something to the term sex goddess.

"You're so cold," she told R under the pile of musty-smelling covers. "Let me give you my heat."

R took it.

CHAPTER THREE