Ceremony (21 page)

“‘You Mexicans have no patience,’ he said, stroking her belly, ‘it never has been easy. It will take a long long time and many more stories like this one before they are laid low.’ She rolled over on top of him quickly.

“‘There is something else which takes a long time happening,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Why do I bother to lay down with you, old man?’

 

“Old age made him fearless. He flexed the old chants and the beliefs like a mountain-oak bow. He had been watching the sky before she came, the planets and constellations wheeling and shifting the patterns of the old stories. He saw the transition, and he was ready. Some of the old singers could see new shadows across the moon; they could make out new darkness between the stars. They sent Descheeny the patients they couldn’t cure, the victims of this new evil set loose upon the world.

“He reasoned that because it was set loose by witchery of all the world, and brought to them by the whites, the ceremony against it must be the same. When she came, she didn’t fool him for long. She had come for his ceremonies, for the chants and the stories they grew from.

“‘This is the only way,’ she told him. ‘It cannot be done alone. We must have power from everywhere. Even the power we can get from the whites.’

 

“Although the people detected changes in the ceremonies Descheeny performed, they tolerated them because of his acknowledged power to aid victims tainted by Christianity or liquor. But after the Mexican captive came, they were terrified, and few of them stayed to see the conclusion of his ceremonies. But by then, Descheeny was getting ready to die anyway, and he could not be bothered with isolated cures.

“He gazed into his smoky quartz crystal and she stared into the fire, and they plotted the course of the ceremony by the direction of dark night winds and by the colors of the clay in drought-ridden valleys.

 

“The day I was born they saw the color of my eyes, and they took me from the village. The Spaniards in the town looked at me, and the Catholic priest said, ‘Let her die.’ They blamed the Root Woman for this birth and they told her to leave the village before dark. She waited until they had gone, and she went to the old trash pile in the arroyo where they left me. She took me north to El Paso, and years later she laughed about how long she had waited for me in that village full of dirty stupid people. Sometimes she was bitter because of what they had done to her in the end, after all the years she had helped them. ‘Sometimes I have to shake my head,’ she’d say, ‘because human beings deserve exactly what they get.’”

“There was a child. The Mexican woman gave her to Descheeny’s daughters to raise. The half sisters taught her to fear her mother. Many years later she had a child. When I was weaned, my grandmother came and took me. My mother and my old aunts did not resist because it all had been settled before Descheeny died.”

Betonie paused and blew smoke rings up at the sky. Tayo stretched out his legs in front of him. He was thinking about the ceremony the medicine man had performed over him, testing it against the old feeling, the sick hollow in his belly formed by the memories of Rocky and Josiah, and all the years of Auntie’s eyes and her teeth set hard on edge. He could feel the ceremony like the rawhide thongs of the medicine pouch, straining to hold back the voices, the dreams, faces in the jungle in the L.A. depot, the smoky silence of solid white walls.

“One night or nine nights won’t do it any more,” the medicine man said; “the ceremony isn’t finished yet.” He was drawing in the dirt with his finger. “Remember these stars,” he said. “I’ve seen them and I’ve seen the spotted cattle; I’ve seen a mountain and I’ve seen a woman.”

The wind came up and caught the sleeves of Tayo’s shirt. He smelled wood smoke and sage in the old man’s clothes. He reached for the billfold in his hip pocket. “I want to pay you for the ceremony you did tonight.”

Old Betonie shook his head. “This has been going on for a long long time now. It’s up to you. Don’t let them stop you. Don’t let them finish off this world.”

 

 

 

The truck driver stopped at San Fidel to dump a load of diesel fuel. Tayo went inside the station to buy candy; he had not eaten since he had left Betonie and his helper up in the mountains. The room smelled like rubber from the loops of fan belts hanging from the ceiling. Cases of motor oil were stacked in front of the counter; the cans had a dull oil film on them. The desk behind the counter was covered with yellow and pink slips of paper, invoices and bills with a half cup of cold coffee sitting on top of them. Above the desk, on a calendar, a smiling blond girl, in a baton twirler’s shiny blue suit with white boots to her knees, had her arms flung around the neck of a palomino horse. She was holding a bottle of Coca-Cola in one hand. He stared at the calendar for a long time; the horse’s mane was bleached white, and there was no trace of dust on its coat. The hooves were waxed with dark polish, shining like metal. The woman’s eyes and the display of her teeth made him remember the glassy eyes of the stuffed bobcat above the bar in Bibo. The teeth were the same. He turned away from the calendar; he felt sick, like a walking shadow, faint and wispy, his sense of balance still swaying from the ride in the cab of the tank truck. All the windows of the candy machine had red sold-out flags in them.

The station man came inside. He looked at Tayo suspiciously, as if he thought Tayo might be drunk, or in there to steal something. In his anger Tayo imagined movie images of himself turning the pockets of his jeans inside out, unbuttoning his shirt to prove he had stolen nothing. A confrontation would have been too easy, and he was not going to let them stop him; he asked the man where he could buy some candy.

“Down the road,” he said, not looking up from the cash register. His milky white face was shaded with the stubble of a red beard. There were white hairs scattered among the red, and the skin across his forehead and at the corner of each eye was wrinkled as if he had been frowning for a long time. The backs of his hands were covered with curly reddish hair; the fingers were black and oily. He had never seen a white person so clearly before. He had to turn away. All those things old Betonie had told him were swirling inside his head, doing strange things; he wanted to laugh. He wanted to laugh at the station man who did not even know that his existence and the existence of all white people had been conceived by witchery.

He told the truck driver he didn’t need to ride any farther. The sun was behind him and a warm dry wind from the south-west was blowing enough to cool the sweat on his forehead, and to dry out the wet cloth under the arms of his shirt. He walked down the ditch beside the highway, below the shoulder of the highway. He didn’t want any more rides. He wanted to walk until he recognized himself again. Grasshoppers buzzed out of the weeds ahead of him; they were fading to a dry yellow color, from their bright green color of spring. Their wings flashed reflections of sun when they jumped. He looked down at the weeds and grass. He stepped carefully, pushing the toe of his boot into the weeds first to make sure the grasshoppers were gone before he set his foot down into the crackling leathery stalks of dead sunflowers. Across the highway, behind the bar at Cerritos, there was a big corn field, but the plants were short and thin, and their leaves were faded yellow like the grasshoppers. There would be only a few cobs on each plant, and the kernels would be small and deformed. He wondered what the Mexicans at Cubero thought. Their cattle were thin too. What did they do? Drop down on their knees in the chapel, sweaty straw hats in their hands, to smell the candle wax and watch the flickering red and blue votive lights? Pray up to the plaster Jesus in rose-colored robes, his arms reaching out? “Help us, forgive us.”

He heard a truck slowing down on the highway behind him. He turned around and saw Harley hanging out the window, waving at him. He swung the door open before the old green truck had come to a stop and stumbled out of the seat grinning, holding a bottle of Garden Deluxe Tokay in each hand. Harley patted him on the back and pushed him toward the truck. Tayo could see Leroy was driving, but there was someone else in the truck, someone sitting in the middle, between them.

“Hey buddy—meet Helen Jean,” Harley said, and winked crookedly, as if he had been drinking for a while. She was wearing tight blue western pants and a frilly pink western blouse. She didn’t say anything, but she smiled and moved closer to Leroy. Leroy grinned at Tayo. She rubbed her leg against Leroy, but she was staring out the window while she did it, as if her mind were somewhere else. Leroy and Harley were happy; they had wine and two six-packs, and they didn’t watch her the way Tayo did. Her perfume was close and heavy; breathing it was like swallowing big red roses; it choked him. He turned his face to the fresh air rushing in the window.

“Good thing you’re skinny, buddy. Otherwise we couldn’t shut the door!” Leroy shifted through the gears. The woman grinned at him because she was straddling the gear stick and he kept brushing against her thigh whenever he shifted gears. Harley nudged her in the ribs with an elbow and offered her the bottle.

“Look at her! She drinks like a pro,” Harley said, delighted. “We found her in Gallup last night, didn’t we?”

Leroy nodded. His eyes were bloodshot.

Harley passed him the bottle. Tayo shook his head.

“You want a beer?”

Tayo shook his head and pointed to his stomach.

“Sick? Hey Leroy, this guy says he’s sick! We know how to cure him, don’t we, Helen Jean?” She nodded. Tayo could see the lines at the corners of her eyes and a slight curve of flesh under her chin. Her hair was short and curled tight, and her eyelashes were stiff with mascara; she kept reaching into her tooled leather purse between her feet for her lipstick, rubbing it back and forth until her lips were thick and red. She wasn’t much older than they were.

Tayo leaned out the window to make more room in the cab, but Harley, Helen Jean, and Leroy enjoyed squeezing close. He wanted to be still walking, but he knew them too well. It was no use to refuse a ride from them when they were drunk, because they’d follow him along the shoulder of the highway for ten miles in low gear until he got in with them. He wanted to catch a grasshopper and hold it close to his face, to look at its big flat eyes and shiny thin legs with stripes of black and brown like beadwork, making tiny intricate designs. The last time he held one, Rocky was with him, and they had staíned their finger tips brown with the tobacco juice the grasshoppers spit.

“Hey!” Harley said. “What you watching?”

“Grasshoppers.”

She giggled.

Harley shook his head and made him hold the wine bottle. “Here. You better have some. You’re in bad shape, isn’t he, Leroy? Watching grasshoppers when we’ve got Helen Jean here to watch, eh?” He laughed again.

The bottle was sticky. It was almost empty. He watched the weeds in the ditch speeding by. In another month the grasshoppers would be dead; autumn wind and old age would chill them bone white, leaving their hollow shells to swirl with the dry leaves in the ditch.

“Hey! You like my truck?”

Tayo nodded.

“Where’d you get it?”

“No money down! Pay at the first of the month!”

“If they catch him!” Harley laughed.

“Yeah! They have to catch me first!”

Harley bounced up and down on the seat laughing. “They owed it to us—we traded it for some of the land they stole from us!”

Helen Jean didn’t smile, but she said, “Gypped you again! This thing isn’t even worth a half acre!”

Tayo laughed then, too, because it was true. He could smell fumes from a loud busted muffler, and he was going to make a joke about how the white people sold junk pickups to Indians so they could drive around until they asphyxiated themselves; but it wasn’t that funny. Not really.

They were getting close to Laguna, crossing the overpass by New Laguna; Leroy shifted into second gear for the hill.

“Thanks for the ride,” Tayo said. “You can let me out any place along here.” He gave the wine bottle to Helen Jean. She steadied it between her thighs, and pulled the cork out again.

“Easy, easy!” she said to Leroy. “You guys already spilled one bottle all over me.” She was either an Apache or a Ute. Her face was angular, and something about her nose and eyes reminded him of a hawk.

Leroy slowed down and pulled off the right shoulder of the highway.

“Hey! Wait! He’s going with us. Aren’t you, Tayo? Huh, buddy!” Harley had Tayo by the arm and was leaning close to him, breathing wine fumes in his face. Harley was sweating and his face was shiny. They had been his friends for a long time; they were the only ones left now. He hesitated and Harley saw it. He started whooping and slapping Tayo on the back; Leroy revved up the engine and threw it into low gear. The rear wheels spun sand and pebbles against the fenders, and the truck skidded and swerved back on the pavement. He did a speed shift into second gear and gunned it across the bridge, up the hill past Willie Creager’s garage. Helen Jean squealed and laughed because Leroy’s driving threw them hard against each other; Harley had his arms around her neck, bellowing out war whoops and laughs. The old truck was vibrating hard; the steering was loose and the front end wandered across the white line into the other lane, and each time a car was coming at them head-on before Leroy wrestled the wheel around and steered the truck over again. White people selling Indians junk cars and trucks reminded Tayo of the Army captain in the 1860s who made a gift of wool blankets to the Apaches: the entire stack of blankets was infected with smallpox. But he was laughing anyway, the bumps shaking laughter out of him, like feathers out of an old pillow, until he was limp and there were tears in his eyes.