Ceremony (27 page)

 

He opened his eyes to a bright blue sky and clouds that were full, but very high: and for an instant he was waking up years before, on a nameless island in the Pacific. He thought he had been hit, and he began to call for Rocky to help. Then he saw the color of his sleeve of his shirt, and felt the dry lava pebbles pressing into his raw hands.

He could remember seeing the sunny bright day and the faint autumn colors emerging in the scrub oak; he remembered thinking how funny it was to be in such trouble in the middle of the day, when it was nighttime and darkness that were suspected occasions of danger. He remembered seeing the skeleton pine tree in the distance, above a bowl-shaped dry lake bed, and the last cow bolting through the opening in the wire, kicking her heels at the wire as she plunged through, disappearing over the horizon. He remembered all this clearly, even the way the mare fell, her front legs sliding in the rocks, and the slow shivering roll of her body as she fell.

The smell of mountain sage surrounded him, and he realized he had skidded through a sage bush; twigs of sage and oak leaves were caught in his hair and crumbled down the back of his neck. When he tried to move, the inside of his head pounded; so he lay flat and spat out the gritty mountain clay. His ribs hurt when he breathed, but he could move his fingers and lift both legs. He closed his eyes, telling himself that he could afford to rest a while longer, lying to himself the way he had on cold winter mornings when the room was still dark and there was no fire in the stove.

“Where were you going so goddamn fast?” The voice was hostile, and it had a drawling Texan sound. He raised himself up on one hand and looked at them. They were both tall and lanky, with light brown hair; and except for their faces they were the same: boots scuffed and dusty, jeans faded to the same shade of blue; even their shirt-sleeves were rolled to the elbow in the same manner. But the one with the narrow face was agitated and angry. He kept demanding to know what Tayo was doing there.

“Poaching deer?” he said, stepping so close to Tayo’s hand that he could feel weeds, crushed by the boot, pressing against his fingers; and for an instant he thought he might step on his hand to make him talk.

“Maybe you were rustling yourself a little beef, huh?”

He would let them believe anything they wanted. The other man had a small round face and no chin, but his eyes were calm.

“Are you hurt?” he said. “Can you stand up?” He put his hand on Tayo’s left arm and squatted down beside him to get a better grip. Tayo kept thinking about the cattle and the gaping hole in the fence; but they didn’t act as if they had noticed anything except him. Behind the drumming pain inside his head, he had one thought: to keep them occupied with him, to keep them away from the next ridge.

“You better go back for the truck,” the cowboy with the round face said. “I think he might be hurt.”

“Shit! There’s nothing wrong with the son of a bitch! Let him ride behind the saddle with me.”

As they pulled him to his feet, his vision spun away, pulling his head into a shower of bright lights. He stumbled against the big palomino; it snorted and shied away.

“Whoa! You jackass! Whoa!” They boosted him up, behind the creamy-colored tooled leather saddle. His ears buzzed and he had to grip the saddle strings tightly to stay erect. The horse sidestepped nervously, feeling the awkward load shifting from side to side on its back. Just as the Texan swung his long thin leg over the saddle, Tayo leaned over and vomited all over the sagebrush.

The pain swelled out of his head, pounding through his ears until it hit his belly, and waves of nausea surged up. The sun was going down, and the round-faced man was hunched over on a boulder, with his back to the cold wind. He had his hands in his pockets and was chewing tobacco, working his jaws furiously and spitting savagely, sending the brown juice all over the ground around his feet. He saw that Tayo was awake, but he didn’t speak. The skin on the cowboy’s face was wrinkled; it had been rubbed dry and red by the wind and sun. Under the blue bandanna he wore around his throat, the skin was still milky and tender. He wasn’t much older than Tayo; maybe they both had been in the war together. He acted as if he wanted to forget the whole thing and let the Indian go. But the Texan had gone back for the truck; he wanted to take the Indian back. Maybe because their boss expected them to do something once in a while: shoot a coyote or catch a Mexican. But it was getting late, and the wind was bitter with the snowstorm that had masked the peaks. It would be dark by the time they got him back to the ranch headquarters, and then they would have to drive him all the way to the jail in Grants. It was a lot of trouble just for an Indian; maybe it would be too much trouble, and they would let him go.

Black pebbles and the ancient gray cinders the mountain had thrown poked into his backbone. He closed his eyes but did not sleep. He felt cold gusts of wind scattering dry oak leaves in the grass. He listened to the cowboy collect tobacco juice in his mouth and the squirting liquid sound when he spat. He was aware of the center beneath him; it soaked into his body from the ground through the torn skin on his hands, covered with powdery black dirt. The magnetism of the center spread over him smoothly like rainwater down his neck and shoulders; the vacant cool sensation glided over the pain like feather-down wings. It was pulling him back, close to the earth, where the core was cool and silent as mountain stone, and even with the noise and pain in his head he knew how it would be: a returning rather than a separation. He was relieved because he feared leaving people he loved. But lying above the center that pulled him down closer felt more familiar to him than any embrace he could remember; and he was sinking into the elemental arms of mountain silence. Only his skull resisted; and the resistance increased the pain to a shrill whine. He visualized each piece of his own skull, fingering each curve, each hollow, testing its thickness for a final thin membrane worn thin by time and the witchery of dead ash and mushroomed bullets. He searched thin walls, weak sutures of spindle bones above the ear for thresholds. He knew if he left his skull unguarded, if he let himself sleep, it would happen: the resistance would leak out and take with it all barriers, all boundaries; he would seep into the earth and rest with the center, where the voice of the silence was familiar and the density of the dark earth loved him. He could secure the thresholds with molten pain and remain; or he could let go and flow back. It was up to him.

 

He heard the truck motor stop and doors slam. The voices were muffled by the distance, but the Texan had not come back alone.

“Hey! I found something! Remember those lion tracks we found last spring? Well there’s fresh ones all over the place! Around the number twelve windmill. A big son of a bitch! Tracks the size of my palm!” The new voice was high pitched with excitement.

The cowboy got up from the boulder stiffly and spat out the last of the tobacco wad.

“Well, what about this guy?” he said. “I thought you wanted to take him in.”

The Texan cleared his throat. “Shit,” he said, “greasers and Indians—we can run them down anytime. But it’s been a couple of years since anybody up here got a mountain lion.”

“Okay, okay. You were the one that wanted to mess with him, not me.”

“Shit, by the time we got him back, the lion would be long gone.”

“Just leave him where he is and let’s go get the lion hounds before it gets dark.”

“Yeah, we taught him a lesson,” the Texan said, his voice fading in and out with the wind. “These goddamn Indians got to learn whose property this is!”

 

When he woke up again they were gone, and the wind had calmed down; but the air was heavy and damp. The sky was full of storm clouds. The pain and the pounding inside his head were gone, but when he sat up he had to move slowly to avoid jarring the soreness inside his skull. His feet and hands were numb from the cold, and his legs were stiff from lying still so long. He sat rubbing his legs and feet, with a cold breeze at his back. If he went a few yards over the top of the ridge, he would be in the scrub oaks, out of the storm.

The oaks grew thick and close to the ground. He knelt at the edge of the thicket, looking until he found a narrow winding trail through the fringes of oak. The deer made trails through every thicket, and some of the big thickets had two or three trails running parallel to the top of the ridge; they moved into the thickets after sunrise and spent their days in the thickets, sleeping and feeding on acorns, crossing a clearing only to reach another stand of scrub oak. The leaves accumulated in deep layers of years, and his feet sank under the new copper leaves that had already fallen this year. The deer made beds in shallow niches deep within the thickets where the oaks grew tall and made canopies of limbs and branches.

He lay in a shallow depression and heaped piles of dry leaves over himself until he felt warm again. He looked up through the branches and the leaves, which were yellow and soft, ready to fall; the sky was heavy and dark, and purple veins striated the gray swollen clouds dragging their bellies full of snow over the mountaintop. The smell of snow had a cold damp edge, and a clarity that summer rain never had. The scent touched him deep behind his belly, and he could feel the old anticipation stirring as it had when he was a child waiting for the first snowflakes to fall.

 

He lay there and hated them. Not for what they wanted to do with him, but for what they did to the earth with their machines, and to the animals with their packs of dogs and their guns. It happened again and again, and the people had to watch, unable to save or to protect any of the things that were so important to them. He ground his teeth together; there must be something he could do to still the vague, constant fear unraveling inside him: the earth and the animals might not know; they might not understand that he was not one of them; he was not one of the destroyers. He wanted to kick the soft white bodies into the Atlantic Ocean; he wanted to scream to all of them that they were trespassers and thieves. He wanted to follow them as they hunted the mountain lion, to shoot them and their howling dogs with their own guns. The destroyers had sent them to ruin this world, and day by day they were doing it. He wanted to scream at Indians like Harley and Helen Jean and Emo that the white things they admired and desired so much—the bright city lights and loud music, the soft sweet food and the cars—all these things had been stolen, torn out of Indian land: raw living materials for their ck’o’yo manipulation. The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead.

 

It was still dark when he woke up, and he could feel flakes of snow blowing in the wind. He couldn’t see if the sky in the east was getting light yet, because the storm clouds were still dense and low. He shook the snow off his hair; the oak leaves had held a shell of snow around him. He stood up and brushed the leaf dust away and pissed a yellow steaming slash through the snow.

He walked southeast. He went slowly because his whole body was sore and because the snow was rapidly covering the ground, even the big rocks, making it difficult to follow the trail even as the darkness dissolved into gray light. The sky was dense and gray; it was difficult to estimate distances. He turned and looked back in the direction of the mountain, but it was hidden in a swirling mass of wet clouds. He ate a handful of snow, blinking the flakes off his eyelashes as he tried to face the direction the storm was coming from, because the cowboys had gone that way. A gust of wind brought the center of the storm down, and big flakes fluttered around his head like summer moths crowding the sky, rising high over the edges of wet black lava and the tips of yellow grass.

The snow was covering everything, burying the mountain lion’s tracks and obliterating his scent. The white men and their lion hounds could never track the lion now. He walked with the wind at his back. It would cover all signs of the cattle too; the wet flakes would cling to the fence wire and freeze into a white crust; and the wire he had cut away and the gaping hole in the fence would be lost in the whiteout, hidden in snow on snow. Under his feet the dark mountain clay was saturated, making it slippery and soft; the ranch roads would be impassable with sticky mud, and it would be days before the cowboys could patrol the fences again. He smiled. Inside, his belly was smooth and soft, following the contours of the hills and holding the silence of the snow. He looked back at the way he had come: the snowflakes were swirling in tall chimneys of wind, filling his tracks like pollen sprinkled in the mountain lion’s footprints. He shook his head the way the deer shook snow away and yelled out “ahooouuuh!” Then he ran across the last wide flat to the plateau rim.

The snow packed under his feet with a hollow sound. The big snowflakes still crowded behind him like the gauzy curtains in the woman’s house. He stood on the rimrock and looked over the edge, down on the dark evergreens and piñon trees growing thick on the steep canyon slopes. He had to walk about a hundred yards north to find the place where the trail went down between two big piñon trees. He pulled a piñon cone from the snowy branches and shook the fat brown piñons into his hand. He ate them as he walked, cracking the shells one by one, working the nut meat loose with his tongue. He spit the shells into the snow below the trail and tried to see into the distance below the mesa, over the edge of the steep trail where her house was. Then behind him he heard someone singing. A man singing a chant. He stopped and listened. His stomach froze tight, and sweat ran down his ribs. His heart was pounding, but he was more startled than afraid.