Gods Without Men (30 page)

The glow. Deighton couldn’t be sure. The moon was bright. Perhaps it was just reflecting off the child’s pale skin.

As he walked back to the camp, the world started to feel real again and with the return of normality, he began to be afraid. Every few paces, he felt compelled to look behind to check if he was being followed. At the edge of camp, he found Pete Mason carrying a load of kindling. Had he seen anything? Pete shook his head. Joe Pine was passing a bottle with Serrano Jackie. As Deighton came up they hid it. He waved his hands, trying to show he didn’t care about the whiskey. An Indian and a white boy? No, sir, no one like that.

Finally he shook Segunda Hipa awake.

“Segunda, there was a man and a boy here.”

“Go away!”

“A man, and a little white boy.”

“I didn’t see anything. I’m sleeping.”

“Yes, yes. But you must know something. Who has a white child?”

“White mothers have white children. Go away now.”

“I saw them, Segunda. The boy was glowing.”

She muttered irritably and rubbed her eyes. “Go to bed, you two-headed sheep. You didn’t see anything special.”

And she pulled the blanket over her head. He swore under his breath and put his head into the fug of the large wickiup. Picking his way over grumbling bodies, he found Eliza. The space beside her was vacant.

“Where is he? Where’s Willie Prince?”

“Go away. Please leave me alone.”

She rolled over. Exasperated, he went back to his spot under the ramada. Around him the camp was silent. He filched a few branches from Pete Mason’s kindling pile and sat up for a while in front of a desultory fire, trying to work out what he’d seen. After a while he gave up.
It was just too cold to think. He wrapped himself up in his blankets and tried to go to sleep.

He was back in the Bois de Belleau. It was early in the morning and he was standing in a trench on the northern edge of the woods. It was a shallow trench, recently and hastily dug, and water was seeping through its unlined sides, pooling in a deep puddle at his feet. Across the field floated long white scarves of mist and the dawn chorus was in full swing, though when he looked up he couldn’t see any birds, just the charred, broken branches of the trees. High overhead hung a German observation balloon, a bloated eye looking balefully down on him. As he walked along the trench, the mud sucking at his boots, he realized he was completely alone. His unit had abandoned the position. Afraid, he watched for movement among the trees, signs of an advance. About the blackened stumps flowed a disembodied luminescence, an eerie algal glow.

At dawn he endured a shattering bout of coughing. His chest felt like it was on fire, and there was blood in the filthy handkerchief he tugged out of his pocket and pressed against his mouth. He’d known for a while that the desert air wasn’t having the effect the doctors had hoped. In his firm opinion, good health was largely a matter of mental attitude; he refused to become one of the prematurely aged, neurasthenic scarecrows he’d seen hobbling about the veterans’ hospital in New Jersey. They were men who’d left the best part of themselves in France.

He found Eliza brewing coffee. Wordlessly, she handed him a tin mug. They drank together companionably, and it was like the early days when he first brought her out to the desert, when he thought he’d found a companion.

“What now, Eliza?”

“I don’t know.”

“I have to go back to town. Will you come?”

“No.”

“I see. And what do you propose to do out here in the wilderness?”

“I will shift for myself, I suppose.”

“That’s not a practical suggestion, not for an unprotected white woman.”

“That never seemed to concern you before.”

“You’re under my protection.”

“Really, David? I’ve never felt very protected.”

“Where will you go? How will you live?”

“Does it matter to you?”

“I must ask. Are you—this Willie Prince …” He couldn’t make the words come out.

“He’s a good man, David. A kind man. You were many things to me, but you were never kind.”

He could, he supposed, have talked to her about love, tried to woo her back. But that sort of thing had always seemed ridiculous. He’d never been able to play that character, the stage-door Johnny. Even when he still had all his face.

He went to the car, only to discover that the rest of his food had gone. There’d be nothing for breakfast, and it would be early afternoon before he made it back to town for a hot meal. A little gang of children watched him rummage in his footlocker. He knew they were probably the thieves, and though it broke all his rules—about decorum, about maintaining a good relationship with one’s informants—he found himself screaming at them, calling them degenerates, street Arabs, nonsensical insults that diminished him even as they came out of his mouth. Of course they just stared impassively until he’d worn himself out and collapsed into another fit of coughing. Angrily he cranked the starter on the Ford. The car was unhappy in the cold, but caught after a minute or two, the chassis juddering as he hunched in the driver’s seat and released the brake. He headed out of the camp, watched as he passed the communal trash heap by a little girl clutching an open can of corned beef, spooning out greasy chunks with her fingers.

He bumped his way along the track, following twin ruts he’d made more or less entirely himself in the months he’d been coming to Kairo. Gradually he picked up speed, his journey punctuated by evenly spaced creosote bushes. He’d often wondered about the gridlike regularity of their growth, something to do with the limited water supply; each kept the same considerable distance from its neighbors, like homesteaders on forty-acre plots. As he drove on, the circulation returned to his face and
hands. The morning was crisp and bright, the hills the color of honey. He began to feel better, and regretted he’d lost his temper with the children. By the time he reached the main road and the first of the new cabins, he was humming snatches of doughboy marching songs, honking the horn for emphasis: smile!—smile!—
smile!

He reached town earlier than expected and ran the car up in front of Mulligan’s Hotel, grunting a hello to the rheumy-eyed old clerk, who was sitting in his usual guard-dog position on the porch, studying a newspaper with the aid of a magnifying glass. As usual his room smelled like something had died under the floorboards. Deighton accepted full blame; the chambermaid, a timid Mexican girl of fourteen or so, had refused to touch it since he’d shouted at her for disturbing his papers.

He gulped down a cup of lukewarm water from the jug on the washstand and stripped down to his underwear, throwing his clothes over the pyramid of boxes that took up most of the floor space. Their contents, thousands upon thousands of index cards, some covered in his tiny backward-slanted handwriting, some in Eliza’s loops and whirls, represented the fruits of a year’s hard labor. Most of them were notes on the group of Uto-Aztecan languages he’d been studying, a card for each word or word stem, each distinct element of grammar. Others dealt with the People’s material culture, their philosophy, the fragments they still remembered of their old songs. His employer, the Bureau of American Ethnology, had given him a six-month grant to write a preliminary report, with a vague promise of more money if the findings were interesting. So far, through extreme frugality, he’d managed to make the money last twice the scheduled time. Eliza had complained about the poor rations and his absolute prohibition on fripperies, but he thought she’d grasped the importance of their sacrifice. It really was too bad that she’d fallen by the wayside. The time and effort he’d invested in training her had gone to waste.

Though Washington had little real interest in the ethnology of the Mojave, they liked the idea of sending a decorated veteran to a place where he might recover from his injuries. Before he volunteered for France, Deighton had worked with coastal tribes in Oregon and Washington state (it was his proud boast that he knew more about the mythology
of salmon than any white man alive), but the doctor at the veterans’ hospital had told him the Northwest was out of the question. “All that rain and fog? You’d be dead within a year.” Deighton had worried the man would tell him he’d go blind. At the field hospital in Château-Thierry he’d spent a week in darkness, his weeping eyes like two rotten eggs beneath his bandages.

He trudged down the hall to the bathroom, got into the tub and crouched in a few brackish inches of water, scrubbing off a crust of sweat and dust. Then he went back to the room and rummaged around for something clean to put on, watched dolefully by the devotional print of the Virgin of Guadalupe he’d tacked up by the mirror. The image was a private joke, a dig at the Congregationalism of his youth, with its even temper, its puritan disdain for idolatry. Agony and redemption and lace and gold leaf. That, in his opinion, was a real religion.

He stood for a moment, holding a shoe, then knelt down to retrieve the other from the mess of reeds and willow twigs under the bed, relics of an attempt to teach himself some of Segunda’s basket weaves. Dressed at last, he ran a hand over his chin and realized to his annoyance that he’d forgotten to shave. There was always something. He couldn’t be bothered to go through the rigmarole of taking his shirt off, warming water, stropping the blade. Besides, there probably wasn’t a man in town who’d either notice or care.

He walked across the street to the Chinaman’s and sat down at a table as far away as possible from the chill draft blowing under the door. The Chinaman’s daughter served him a plate of some mess that tasted slightly of chicken. As usual, he tried out his few phrases of Cantonese on her. As usual, she giggled and pretended not to understand.

Back at the hotel he cleared the desk of some rubbish of Eliza’s, lit the lamp and tried to work on his latest batch of notes. It was impossible to concentrate, and for the hundredth time he found himself leafing through the
Itinerary
of the Spanish friar Garcés, the first white man to travel through the high desert, or at least the first to write an account of his journey. Deighton would very much have liked to converse with the old Franciscan, who’d had the privilege of seeing so many things as he wandered, carrying little but a cross and a picture of the Holy Virgin.
He had the book in Professor Coues’s translation, which, though copiously annotated, was a source of great frustration. The Spaniard, intent on evangelizing the Indians, had recorded little about their language and culture. There were strange gaps in the narrative, periods of days or even weeks with no entry. One in particular bothered him. He suspected Garcés had been at the spring at Kairo, and from there had traveled back toward the river. But the
Itinerary
was silent, and Coues had provided no elucidation. All the country with which Deighton was most familiar was missing from the narrative. It was as if Garcés had just vanished and reappeared in another place.

At last he flopped into bed, dropping seamlessly out of consciousness and into the Bois de Belleau under heavy nighttime bombardment. Blue lightning flashes outlined splintering trees; shell bursts silhouetted running men and cascades of rock and earth. He was standing at the edge of a crater, shouting words of encouragement to troops that were no longer there. The whole scene was taking place in silence. He could touch things, see things—the vibration of the ground, the tangled undergrowth—but the only sound was a high-pitched insect whine. He woke into a blaze of winter sunlight, not knowing where or even who he was. For a few blissful seconds he was just a consciousness, a presence in the clean white flare, there to apprehend it for its own sake, without story or purpose or lack of any kind.

He dressed and went over to the Chinaman’s, where he found a table of local worthies setting the world to rights over plates of greasy eggs. Among them was Ellis Waghorn, the Indian agent. Deighton had never been able to fathom why Waghorn worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He spent as little time as possible on the reservations under his jurisdiction. Local rumor had it that his interests lay more with redrawing reservation land boundaries to the benefit of the Southern Pacific Railroad than with the welfare of native people. He was talking to the pharmacist and the owner of the general store. They nodded a greeting. Waghorn smirked, his mouth full of cornbread.

“Morning, Professor. Caught yourself any interesting diseases out there at Kairo?”

Deighton shrugged. For months, Waghorn had been insinuating that
“some squaw” was the real reason for his interest in the Indian band at the oasis. As furious as the suggestion made him, he never took the bait. Waghorn pressed on.

“We were just discussing the lights Old Man Parker saw a few nights back. You see anything out where you were?”

“Lights?”

“Floating lights. Bill Parker said they was just hanging there like Edison bulbs.”

“I didn’t see anything of that sort.”

“So what are you up to out in the desert if it ain’t watching the stars?”

He ignored the other men’s hearty laughter. “Same as ever. Language work, mostly. They have a very unusual grammatical structure.”

“That a fact?”

“Actually, Mr. Waghorn, I have a question for you. Do you know of any recent intermarriages among the Indians out at Kairo?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, Indian men and white women?”

“No, sir, I should say not. They keep themselves to themselves.”

“It’s just—well, I saw a white child.”

“Half-breed, you say?”

“No, white. Very white, as a matter of fact. Boy about five years old. Walking along hand in hand with an Indian man.”

By now, people at neighboring tables were taking an interest.

“Hear that, Ben? Some Indian’s got hold of a white boy.”

“What do you mean, ‘got hold of’?”

“Professor saw him.”

“You sure about this?” asked Waghorn. “Where was it?”

“I don’t think it was—that is, I don’t think there was anything untoward about it. The boy seemed happy.”

“I ain’t heard of no one losing a child,” said Tompkins the pharmacist.