Ceremony (34 page)

“Scream!” Emo said. “Scream loud so he can hear you.”

The screwdriver was slippery in his hands. It nauseated him to see Harley’s body jerking and twitching in the sagging barbed wire, with hands and knives so greedy for human flesh. He fought back a bitter stomach taste; the sweat was running down from under his arms, following the hollow ridges of his ribs. He had to hug his arms close to his side to hold off the shivering.

They had a paper bag they had emptied of wine bottles. Emo was holding it with the palm of his hand supporting the bottom of the bag because it was soaked with blood and the brown paper was beginning to dissolve around the bleeding chunks of human skin. Emo shifted the bag to his other hand and held the bloody palm up to Harley; but Harley’s eyes were closed, and he did not seem to be conscious of anything Emo said.

“Look at this, you half-breed! White son of a bitch! You can’t hide from this! Look! Your buddy, Harley.”

Emo jumped forward with a bottle of wine; it splashed over the ground at Harley’s feet, and unlike the blood, which clotted in shiny lumps on the sand, the wine soaked in thin and quick.

“Have some, buddy!” Emo said as he shoved the bottle into Harley’s mouth. The glass against the teeth made a brittle grinding sound, and Tayo heard Harley groan. He closed his fingers around the screwdriver and squeezed it until it was part of his hand. He understood that Harley had bargained for it; he realized that Harley knew how it would end if he failed to get the victim he had named. But Tayo could not endure it any longer. He was certain his own sanity would be destroyed if he did not stop them and all the suffering and dying they caused—the people incinerated and exploded, and little children asleep on streets outside Gallup bars. He was not strong enough to stand by and watch any more. He would rather die himself.

He knew he could get to Emo before Pinkie or Leroy could stop him. They were drunk. Emo’s words were thick and slurred. Pinkie had stumbled to his knees beside Leroy, squatting next to the fire.

He visualized the contours of Emo’s skull; the GI haircut exposed thin bone at the temples, bone that would flex slightly before it gave way under the thrust of the steel edge.

The wind came suddenly and fanned the coals into yellow flames; Leroy jumped back and stumbled hard against Pinkie. Pinkie pushed him away and Leroy fell.

“You fucking little queer!” Leroy kicked sand in his face and Pinkie lunged at him. Emo stood close to them; the fat under his chin was wrinkled with his grinning. The fire’s reflection made two flashing yellow eyes on Emo’s glasses. The wind was moving clouds rapidly across the sky, and as they crossed over the moon, darkness and light rolled back and forth like the men wrestling on the ground. The sand their feet kicked loose made a swirling trail in the wind.

The wind made his sweat go cold. This was the time. But his fingers were numb, and he fumbled with the screwdriver as he tried to rub warmth back into his hands. There would be no one to help Emo. But Tayo stayed on his knees in the shadows. Leroy had a knee on Pinkie’s throat, and he could hear raspy choking sounds. Emo was laughing loudly, pointing at the body hanging stiffly, swaying a little in the gusts of wind, then pointing at Leroy kneeling on Pinkie’s throat.

 

The moon was lost in a cloud bank. He moved back into the boulders. It had been a close call. The witchery had almost ended the story according to its plan; Tayo had almost jammed the screwdriver into Emo’s skull the way the witchery had wanted, savoring the yielding bone and membrane as the steel ruptured the brain. Their deadly ritual for the autumn solstice would have been completed by him. He would have been another victim, a drunk Indian war veteran settling an old feud; and the Army doctors would say that the indications of this end had been there all along, since his release from the mental ward at the Veterans’ Hospital in Los Angeles. The white people would shake their heads, more proud than sad that it took a white man to survive in their world and that these Indians couldn’t seem to make it. At home the people would blame liquor, the Army, and the war, but the blame on the whites would never match the vehemence the people would keep in their own bellies, reserving the greatest bitterness and blame for themselves, for one of themselves they could not save.

He crouched between the boulders and laid his head against the rock to look up at the sky. Big clouds covered the moon, but he could still see the stars. He had arrived at a convergence of patterns; he could see them clearly now. The stars had always been with them, existing beyond memory, and they were all held together there. Under these same stars the people had come down from White House in the north. They had seen mountains shift and rivers change course and even disappear back into the earth; but always there were these stars. Accordingly, the story goes on with these stars of the old war shield; they go on, lasting until the fifth world ends, then maybe beyond. The only thing is: it has never been easy.

They heaved the body into the trunk and slammed the trunk lid and car doors shut. The red taillights shrank into the distance; the chalky ring of ashes merged into the moonlight. The wind gusted across the tire tracks and imprints of human shoulders and hands; and there was nothing left but broken bottles and a black mark on the ground where the fire had been.

 

He would go back there now, where she had shown him the plant. He would gather the seeds for her and plant them with great care in places near sandy hills. The rainwater would seep down gently and the delicate membranes would not be crushed or broken before the emergence of tiny fingers, roots, and leaves pressing out in all directions. The plants would grow there like the story, strong and translucent as the stars.

His body was lost in exhaustion; he kept moving, his bones and skin staggering behind him. He dreamed with his eyes open that he was wrapped in a blanket in the back of Josiah’s wagon, crossing the sandy flat below Paguate Hill. The cholla and juniper shivered in the wind, and the rumps of the two gray mules were twin moons in front of him. Josiah was driving the wagon, old Grandma was holding him, and Rocky whispered “my brother.” They were taking him home.

 

The creosote and tar smell of the railroad tracks woke him from the dreaming. The cinders made hollow crunching noises under his boots. He had come a long way with them; but it was his own two feet that got him there. He stepped high over the steel rails and went down the cinder-bank roadbed toward the river. When he felt the dampness of the river, he started running. The sun was pushing against the gray horizon hills, sending yellow light across the clouds, and the yellow river sand was speckled with the broken shadows of tamaric and river willow. The transition was completed. In the west and in the south too, the clouds with round heavy bellies had gathered for the dawn. It was not necessary, but it was right, and even if the sky had been cloudless the end was the same. The ear for the story and the eye for the pattern were theirs; the feeling was theirs: we came out of this land and we are hers.

In the distance he could hear big diesel trucks rumbling down Highway 66 past Laguna. The leaves of the big cottonwood tree had turned pale yellow; the first sunlight caught the tips of the leaves at the top of the old tree and made them bright gold. They had always been loved. He thought of her then; she had always loved him, she had never left him; she had always been there. He crossed the river at sunrise.

 

 

 

At the center of the kiva, old man Ku’oosh was poking kindling into the potbellied stove. The new adobe floor was still curing and the hairline cracks were not yet filled with plaster. The whitewash was only partially completed, and the kiva murals were veiled under the white clay wash, not yet repainted for the winter ceremonies. The old men nodded at a folding steel chair with ST. JOSEPH MISSION stenciled in white paint on the back. He sat down, wondering how far the chair had gone from the parish hall before it came to the kiva. He looked at them sitting on the wooden benches that went all the way around the long kiva. They nodded at him, and when Ku’oosh was satisfied with the fire he joined them. In the southwest corner there were boxes and trunks with tarps pulled over them to protect them from uninitiated eyes.

It took a long time to tell them the story; they stopped him frequently with questions about the location and the time of day; they asked about the direction she had come from and the color of her eyes. It was while he was sitting there, facing southeast, that he noticed how the four windows along the south wall of the kiva had a particular relationship to this late autumn position of the sun.

 

 

 

At noon one of old Grandma’s grand-nieces brought Ku’oosh two lard pails. The steam from one smelled like red chili stew; the other was full of oven bread and pieces of fried bread. They passed around the pail of stew, using pieces of bread to scoop out the meat and to soak up the chili. When they had finished, he followed them to the back of the kiva where the gourd dipper floated on top of the water pail; he drank last, and after he drank, Ku’oosh poked at the fire and dropped the dipper into the flames.

When the sun was dropping near the center of the west window, they stood up. They were going home to rest and eat supper; they would be back later, after dark, old man Ku’oosh told him. He could have water, but no food; he was not to leave the kiva. Ku’oosh showed him an old enamel chamber pot with a lid. He said to drink the water cupping it in the hands.

 

 

 

They found Harley and Leroy together in the big boulders below the road off Paguate Hill. The old GMC pickup was crushed around them like the shiny metal coffin the Veterans Office bought for each of them. In that way it was not much different than if they had died at Wake Island or Iwo Jima: the bodies were dismembered beyond recognition and the coffins were sealed. The morning of the funeral an honor guard from Albuquerque fired the salute; two big flags covered the coffins completely, and it looked as if the people from the village had gathered only to bury the flags.

 

Auntie talked to him now the way she had talked to Robert and old Grandma all those years, with an edge of accusation about to surface between her words. But after old man Ku’oosh had come around, her eyes dropped from his face as if there were nothing left to watch for. But she said that now the women at Church came to her privately, after mass or before the bingo games, to ask her how she had managed all those years to face the troubles which had been dropped into her lap. And she remarked to old Grandma, dozing beside her stove with the dial turned all the way to HIGH, and to Tayo who was oiling his hunting boots: “I tell them, ‘It isn’t easy. It never has been easy,’ I say.”

 

She came in from mass that morning with a look of triumph.

“Pinkie finally got killed,” she said, without even bothering to remind them she had said it would happen all along, ever since he had lost those sheep of hers while he was at their sheep camp.

“How did it happen?”

“Yes, what happened?” old Grandma said, coming out of a doze to sit up straight in her chair.

“He was washing dishes at Sarracino’s sheep camp.”

“Aww, that lazy old thing,” old Grandma said. “How could he have been washing dishes?”

“Remember how I warned you, Tayo? I told you I didn’t want that crowd hanging around our ranch with their drinking and carrying on.”

“Was Emo there?” Tayo asked.

“Well, he was the one! He did it! Pinkie was standing there, washing dishes in a pan on top of the stove. The others were sitting around the table drinking. They say there were empty beer cans and wine bottles all over the place. Anyway, they say they got to playing around with that rifle Sarracino keeps there.”

Old Grandma scuffed her slippers against the floor in front of her chair and rattled her cane against the chair leg. “Dear, could you give Tayo that money in my pocketbook? I think my stove is getting low on oil.” She buttoned the top buttons of her old black sweater and pulled her shawl up around her chin.

“Mama,” Auntie said, “I’m
trying
to tell you how poor Pinkie got killed instantly. Shot in the back of the head. Besides, Robert filled it yesterday.”

Old Grandma acted as if she didn’t hear what Auntie said. “Is he in jail?”

“The FBI called it an accident.” Auntie shook her head. “After all the trouble he made for us—that time with Tayo—but I heard they told him to go away. They told him to never come back around here. The old man said that. They told him.” Auntie paused. “I heard he went to California,” she said.