“I need you to walk the deep down,” Auntie Creo said, right before she cut off her left index finger and hung it around Rendezvous’ neck. “Take this with you. You’ll need a story.”
Then Auntie Creo jabbed her hand in front of Rendezvous’ face, pointing with a finger that was no longer there. “It’d better be a good story. Otherwise, the monster will eat you.”
Three days later, Auntie Creo died.
Everyone knew you didn’t bring a forest story into the desert. But monster stories were usually set in the woods. Countless narratives with the same ingredients: the monster, the forest, some young thing it wanted to devour.
Rendezvous Jones didn’t have a forest. She had an endless stretch of red-brown earth, where the tallest things around were two-hundred-year-old saguaro cactus. The plants of the desert were prickly and short and well spread out, but their roots went deep. Most people only ever saw barren land.
If you brought a forest story to the desert, the monster would eat you.
Rendezvous brought a forest story anyway.
It was important to set the scene. She tapped her foot on the dry earth and said, “A cactus forest is still a forest.”
With Auntie Creo’s finger tied around her neck, Rendezvous walked.
It was Grandad Javelina who told her that Auntie Creo once survived walking the deep down. “She took a Coyote story.”
For a man with a peccary’s head, he spoke well. He looked her up and down and said, “I don’t think a Coyote story will work for you. It’s not your roots.”
Rendezvous Jones was born in Daegu, South Korea and adopted by a white family in Scottsdale, Arizona. When she ran away, she slid into the in-between cracks and lived alongside the desert fiends. The beasts, ghosts, and magical-otherwise that occasionally wore human faces but always reflected the plants and creatures found in arid climate. She wouldn’t ever belong to the land like Aunt Creo did.
“What do other people take?”
Grandad Javelina puffed his pipe. “Last one to walk took Little Red Riding Hood. That’s a bad one. Too many versions where the monster wins. Auntie Creo always said you can’t beat a monster with a slaughter story, only a clever one.”
It didn’t take long for the monster to find her.
What other stories did people try? Rendezvous wondered. If you walked Beauty in the Beast, would the monster fall in love with you? If you walked Angela Carter, would you become the monster? Sometimes the monster is just hungry, Grandad Javelina said. Then it doesn’t matter what story you walk; it’s going to have a bad ending.
Like stories, the monster probably looked different to everyone who saw it. Rendezvous didn’t try to define the monster, just acknowledged it as a black shadow with long teeth and longer claws. It opened its mouth wide enough to swallow her whole.
“You’re going to eat me?” Rendezvous didn’t waste any time jumping into the story she chose. “Don’t you know who I am? I’m the King of the Desert!”
The monster paused.
“Don’t believe me?” Rendezvous challenged. “Then walk behind me. You’ll see how everyone treats me.”
The monster didn’t move, so Rendezvous started walking.
Behind her, the monster followed.
Auntie Creo was the one who learned how to make kimchi. She watched YouTube videos. Auntie Creo was always trying to get Rendezvous to learn more about Korea, buying her books filled with folk tales Rendezvous didn’t recognize as hers.
“Why are you doing this?” Rendezvous asked once. “It’s not like I’m ever going back to Korea.”
Auntie Creo said, “You’re asking me, when we live in this land where multiple streets still have the words Indian School in their names, why I think it’s important you know about the culture that was stolen from you?”
That very effectively silenced Rendezvous, but Auntie Creo drove the point home. “A creosote bush will grow and regrow itself. Learn your roots, and you will grow forever.”
Rendezvous took a step. The monster took a step. She could feel the monster right behind her. Hot breath prickled the hair on the back of her neck. Saliva dropped and rolled down Rendezvous’ back. Every footstep Rendezvous took, the monster shadowed.
This was the deep down—a little bit of unreality where a monster roamed. If you walked with a good enough story, maybe you could walk out again.
A step, another step, the monster stepping right behind like an echo of her own footfall. Rendezvous kept her back straight and walked like a king.
Everything in the desert was terrified of the monster. The cactus ghosts, the javelina gangs, the coyotefolk, the vampire wrens. The nightmare folk of venom and poison bowed down to the monster when it walked, because even a nightmare had things to fear.
Everyone bowed to the monster, and they bowed to Rendezvous whose footsteps the monster walked in.
Auntie Creo liked Korean folk tales. Her favorite was the fox, the King of the Forest, who borrowed a tiger’s own power to escape being eaten. “That fox was like Coyote,” she said, and Rendezvous thought that was her way of saying their roots might have come from different places, but they still grew the same.
When she reached the end, Rendezvous stopped walking. She could still feel the breath of the monster on her neck.
Then the monster laughed.
“They all bowed to you. You truly are King of the Desert.”
When Rendezvous dared to look around, the monster was gone. Not wasting any time, she crouched down and dug a hole. Then she buried Auntie Creo’s finger.
Rendezvous didn’t have to wait long. The little girl emerged from the ground. The little girl with Auntie Creo’s eyes and Auntie Creo’s smile. Auntie Creo’s clone who was Auntie Creo and not. The little creosote girl giggled and said, “That was a good story!” Then she disappeared into the desert to plant her roots somewhere else.
