Nightwing (17 page)

When the last snake was brought back to the cottonwood bower, the head of the Snake Clan made a circle of cornmeal with lines leading east, west, south, north, to the sun and to the underworld. While he prayed, the dancers threw their snakes into the circle where they writhed in a heap. Finally, all the dancers scrambled for snakes, each grabbing as many as he could carry, and ran from the plaza, down the narrow path that hugged the mesa wall, to the desert, where they would run for miles more before releasing the reptiles.

Youngman, Cecil, and a second deputy called Frank gave back confiscated cameras and directed tourist traffic out of the parking lot in the squash field and when the lot was almost empty they had some cold beers on the tailgate of Cecil’s station wagon.

Anne hadn’t shown. Obviously, Youngman thought, she had better things to do.

“Not the worst Snake Dance I ever seen. Not the best,” Cecil directed the spray of his beer away, “but not the worst.”

“Your brother looked good,” Frank burped.

“A little shaky at the start,” Cecil frowned. “Like I told him, though, you can’t fight it. You got the belief in you, you’ll be okay.”

“Who was it got bit?” Youngman tried to get into the spirit.

“What’s his name . . . Butterfly. No, Butterfly’s brother. Oh, I’m gonna rag him tomorrow,” Cecil laughed. “Wasn’t it swell to see Powell with those snakes?”

Cecil scratched his crotch with satisfaction. Frank was the deputy from Walpi pueblo; he had enough white blood to give him whiskers and a long nose, and behind his back friends called him Horseface.

“See when they let those snakes get in the crowd?” he nudged Youngman. “That fat blonde. Thought she was gonna stay in the air for a month at least.

“A laugh riot,” Youngman said.

“They wanna come and see the dance, they take their chances,” Cecil said. “No one asked ’em. This ain’t Gallup. They wanta get drunk, see some phony dances and Roy Rogers, they can go to Gallup.”

“You know Roy Rogers got Trigger stuffed in his house?” Frank turned serious.

“No!” Cecil was disgusted. “Stuffed with what?”

The few vehicles left in the lot were Hopi panel trucks and Walker Chee’s Le Sabre.

“Wonder what Chee’s hanging around for?” Youngman accepted a smoke from Frank.

“Business,” Cecil said in a small voice.

“Business?”

“That’s what I hear. Bastard’s got no respect at all.” Cecil spat on the ground.

“What kind of business?”

“Oh, some shit about letting the headpounders do all the policing of the joint lands. Doing us a favor, as usual. Hell, it wasn’t joint land until the Navajos got to their friends in the Bureau and stole the land from us. By the time the headpounders and the Bureau get finished we’re gonna have just enough land to piss in from a squat.”

“Speakin’ of Chee, I ran into a funny guy a couple weeks back,” Frank said. “Big pahan with reddish hair, said he was a doctor. Drove a funny truck.”

“I met him,” Youngman said. “What made him funny?”

“Nothing; first time I saw him. Second time, I ran into him down at Five House Butte. He asked me about bats. He ask you about bats?”

Cecil and Frank stayed to open some more cans while Youngman walked back to the pueblo. The noise of family get-togethers came out of screen doors, along with aroma of fried rabbit. Through one window he could see Chee and some other Navajos with the old men of the pueblo. Youngman sat alone where the plaza ended in thin air. He let his feet hang off the edge.

The sun burned level with his eyes. He looked down between his boots, where a juniper tree struggling on an outcrop obscured the long drop. With field glasses, he might have been able to see the dancers returning from the desert. Dark spots moving at a lope through shadows that could lie across half a mile of sand. The air was a haze, purple to the east, golden to the west. Beyond the desert, on the other side of the mountains, the towns would just be lighting up. Winslow, Flagstaff, Tucson, Phoenix. Boulevards, palm trees, motel neon, swimming pools, all lit, all powered by water that was bought, stolen, divided, overestimated and disappearing. Ho-ah-ha, everybody wants rain.

Bats, though. Why would the pahan who was after a slice of old Abner want bats? If he did want them, why wasn’t he at the Carlsbad Caverns where there were millions? What was so secretive about looking for bats?

Everyone had seemed to be all right at Momoa’s ranch, he thought. And wondered why he’d bothered thinking of Momoa until he remembered that was where Anne was heading. Abner and the Loloma boy were both attacked east of Gilboa. She was going west. And she had a radio.

The only problem she had was him. He remembered the first time he and Anne camped together, up on Dinnebito Wash. Camping was a formal word for it. Just catching enough trout to eat. Making love on a blanket.

On the second night, she’d started talking about her family, and on the third night she asked about his.

“No family and no stories,” he said.

“I saw those sketches you did. That terrible bloody face in all of them. It looked full of symbolism to me.”

“Symbolism hell,” he answered. “That’s Masaw.”

To entertain her, he told her stories about Maski Canyon. The story about how Masaw escaped bloody and burned from a flaming pit that could never be put out. The story about the city of the dead. When she asked him to take her there, he put her off.

“What you mean is, this place doesn’t really exist, does it?” she laughed.

“Something like that.” He took the easy way out.

“Like ‘somewhere over the rainbow’?”

“Let me put it this way. If you’re there, you’re lost.”

One thing bothered her.

“How can you do the drawings if you’ve never seen Masaw?”

“Abner tells me what to draw.”

“He sees Masaw?”

“Abner has connections.”

“Abner’s going to poison himself with datura someday.”

“That, too.”

Wrong, as it turned out, Youngman thought.

Abner and Anne, the only two people he cared about. One dead and the other leaving. But only leaving the reservation, not him necessarily. Not unless he insisted on staying, and what for? To end up as shriveled as Stone Man or a pariah like Abner? Chee almost had him out of his job already. Cecil refused to investigate what had happened to Abner’s body.

Why not go with Anne? Or, phrased the way most whites would like to put it, why live like an Indian? Why live dirty on scrub land, sweating all day and freezing at night. With some vocational training he could work nine-to-five in an air-conditioned office and own two suits and an economy car and have two weeks’ vacation. Or, if he had sufficient cunning, become a professional Indian like Chee. Not that Anne would ever put the question that way. For her, it was merely a matter of love. Of “commitment,” as she put it. But Youngman was already committed. Being born a reservation Indian was the same as committing a crime and being sentenced to life in isolation. Quarantined with the perverse sickness that made life among whites the same as suffocation. The evidence-symptoms of this crime-disease: self-pity, suspiciousness, stupidity, and pride. Was there an Indian of the twentieth century, Youngman asked, who wasn’t schizophrenic? And who didn’t use it as an excuse? Did anyone do it as well as him?

Youngman heard steps crossing the plaza and Harold Masito sat beside him, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette of mesa tobacco, stuff that was three times stronger than store-bought. The Bear Strap priest wore his shirt formally buttoned at the neck. In the sideways angle of the sun, his face was as rough as sandstone.

“No clouds yet.” He stared at the mountains.

“Not yet.”

“You trying to think ’em up? Can’t think ’em up. We do our part and the rains come. Couple of days, maybe more. Not instant. Maybe we get a breeze tonight. Get a real rain, not like yesterday.”

“I was thinking of Abner, really,” Youngman said. “Abner and bats.”

They sat in silence for a minute, watching a mesquite ball roll over the ground far below. It bounced over some soda cans that had been pitched from the mesa. The cans could be used. Cut up and put over corn shoots in the spring.

“I been thinking about Abner, too,” Harold said. “We shouldn’t never chased him off the mesa.”

“You thought he was a witch, remember.”

“He was. But he had the power. Only kind of power we got is Masaw, this land. Abner could talk to Masaw and we chased Abner out, and now we keep losing the land. Me, I thought I was a pretty brave fellow. I shouldn’t of been scared of Abner. You weren’t.”

“I didn’t think he was a witch.”

“And now?”

“No. Someone else seems to, though. They robbed his grave. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“You mean, he’s not in it.”

“Yeah. That’s not mysterious to me. The only thing I can’t figure is what killed him. I never saw wounds like that before. Weren’t any tracks.”

Harold passed the cigarette.

“Tracks are only there when you see ’em. Abner did things right. I seen him last night, in dreams. That’s why I come out here to you now.”

“Oh?” Youngman was bitterly amused. “Now that you’ll talk to him, what did Abner have to say?”

“He said for me to help you ’cause you don’t know how to read.”

“Uncle, I can’t do much but I can read, thank you.”

“Words.”

“Yeah.”

“You find any words when you found Abner?”

“No.”

Harold grunted as if he’d made a point.

“So what was I going to read?” Youngman asked with exasperation. “Some scribbles of sand on the floor? Look, it’s a little late for you to come around on Abner’s behalf. I didn’t chase him off the mesa, you did. With witch stories—”

“He stole the tablet. He told me in my dream.”

“What?” Youngman was stopped short.

“He stole the Fire Clan tablet so the Pahana couldn’t come back. The real White Brother has a corner of the tablet and when he comes we’re supposed to put the tablet back together and everything will be okay. We always had that tablet even before we got to this world so we’d know the Pahana when he got here.”

“Before this world?”

“From the Mayan world. Abner could read Mayan.”

“Oh.” Youngman kept a straight face. “He never mentioned it to me.” How about Greek and Latin, he thought to himself.

“We had to leave the Mayans ’cause life was too easy there.”

“Sounds like a good reason.”

“Here with Masaw we have to tend to the ceremonies to get any rain and corn at all. That’s how we stay close to the right way. I know it’s hard but we were chosen—”

“Not chosen,” Youngman lost his patience. “Fucked. We are the God-fucked of the earth. Look at us! Walking around in rags, eating corn other people wouldn’t throw to pigs, sleeping in hovels, and what do we do but spend all our time congratulating ourselves on being the most God-fucked and hopeless people on earth. Because that’s what we are and nobody did it to us, we did it to ourselves. And we’re so fucking dumb we’re proud of it.”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Youngman was ashamed. Harold regarded him with shock.

“I’m sorry, uncle. That was unfair and stupid. Okay? You were telling me about the tablet Abner stole.”

“There is such a tablet.”

“I’m sure there is,” Youngman tried to mollify Harold.

“We took it to Washington to President Taft, I remember, to see if he was the Pahana.”

Let me guess, Youngman thought.

“Was he?” he asked.

“No.” Harold stayed downcast.

Youngman found himself disconcerted by the memory of the altar Abner had set up in his shed. Abner had left a place on the altar for the tablet.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” Harold’s face brightened, “now that Abner gave it back to Masaw. The Pahana missed his chance. You aren’t going to leave the reservation, are you?” Harold added.

“Why should I?” Youngman was surprised.

“Talk is you’re going to get fired. Chee’s in there saying he’s going to give us a lot of help but he wants you fired.”

“The elders wouldn’t do that and neither would Cecil.”

“Not up to Cecil. And Chee, he’s a good talker. And maybe it’s ’cause you took up with that white girl. You think there was no bad feelings about that?”

“Just between her and me.”

“Well, that’s the way it is,” Harold shrugged and slapped his palms down on his knees. “Gotta get back. My boy he brought up some ice cream in a ice bucket. You finish this.” He gave Youngman the last of his cigarette.

Fired, Youngman thought. He hadn’t thought much of his job until now. Except that it wasn’t worth a damn and if he couldn’t hold a job like that what could he do?

“Abner told me another thing in that dream,” Harold said.

“Yeah?”

“He said for you to show me those pictures you took of him.”

Youngman sat up and exhaled a stream of pungent smoke that fluttered against the air. The prospect of being fired remained in his mind but it did occur to him that he hadn’t told anyone about the pictures he took of Abner dead in the shack. No one else knew about them except Anne and the campers. Maybe they’d talked to Selwyn.

“Okay,” he said slowly, “I’ll bring them. I don’t have them on—”

He touched his shirt pocket and felt something flat, and brought out the Polaroid snapshots of Abner spread-eagled on the ground. Youngman thought he’d filed them away with the death report; he’d been sure he hadn’t put them in his pocket.

“I guess I was wrong. What do you want them for?”

“To read for you.” Harold took the pictures.

He’d forgotten to file the snapshots, that was all, Youngman told himself.

The old Bear Strap Clan priest studied the photos slowly, one by one.

“Coyote is you. Shrike is Masaw’s bird, brings him messages. Fire is . . . ,” Harold frowned, “fire is broken. Spirals and swastikas are backwards. They’re backwards. He did it.”

Harold’s face fell like a wall crumbling. His eyes were first surprised and then furious.

“We shouldn’t of chased him, we should of killed him.”

“Read the rest for me,” Youngman asked.

Harold ripped the photos in half and threw them into the wind that rose up the mesa wall. Youngman tried to snatch some out of the air, but the shredded pictures skipped away, over the drop to the desert.