Rocky slit the throat. Blood spilled over the grass and into the dirt; it splashed on his boots. He didn’t believe in drinking the warm blood as some hunters did. Tayo held a hind leg; it was beginning to get stiff. Rocky cut off the musk glands and testicles. He slit the belly open carefully, to avoid spilling the contents of the stomach. The body heat made steam in the cold air. The sun was down, and the twilight chill sucked the last of the deer’s life away — the eyes were dull and sunken; it was gone. Josiah and Robert came then and unloaded their rifles and leaned them against a scrub oak. They went to the deer and lifted the jacket. They knelt down and took pinches of cornmeal from Josiah’s leather pouch. They sprinkled the cornmeal on the nose and fed the deer’s spirit. They had to show their love and respect, their appreciation; otherwise, the deer would be offended, and they would not come to die for them the following year.
Rocky turned away from them and poured water from the canteen over his bloody hands. He was embarrassed at what they did. He knew when they took the deer home, it would be laid out on a Navajo blanket, and Old Grandma would put a string of turquoise around its neck and put silver and turquoise rings around the tips of the antlers. Josiah would prepare a little bowl of cornmeal and place it by the deer’s head so that anyone who went near could leave some on the nose. Rocky tried to tell them that keeping the carcass on the floor in a warm room was bad for the meat. He wanted to hang the deer in the woodshed, where the meat would stay cold and cure properly. But he knew how they were. All the people, even the Catholics who went to mass every Sunday, followed the ritual of the deer. So he didn’t say anything about it, but he avoided the room where they laid the deer.
They marked the place with Tayo’s T-shirt spread across the top of some scrub oaks. It was getting dark when they started hiking back to the truck. Tayo wrapped the liver and heart in the clean cheesecloth Josiah carried with him. An early winter moon was rising in front of them, and a chill wind came with it, penetrating feet and hands. Tayo held the bundle tighter. He felt humbled by the size of the full moon, by the chill wind that swept wide across the foothills of the mountain. They said the deer gave itself to them because it loved them, and he could feel the love as the fading heat of the deer’s body warmed his hands.
Harley slid another bottle of Coors across the table to him and said, “Hey, man, we didn’t come here to stare at the walls. We can do that anytime. We need some music.” He walked over to the juke box. “Something to get us happy right now.” Harley was a little nervous; he remembered the time Tayo went crazy in the bar and almost killed Emo. He remembered how Tayo had sat staring at the wall, not saying anything all afternoon while the rest of them had been laughing and drinking beer and telling Army stories. Harley told the others not to bother him, but they were drunk and they kept after him. Finally, Tayo jumped up and broke a beer bottle against the table; and before they could stop him, he shoved the jagged glass into Emo’s belly.
Tayo smiled and looked over at Harley. “I won’t push any broken bottle into your belly, Harley. Your belly’s too big anyway.”
Harley laughed. “You sure scared us that time, man. Skinny as you are, it took three guys to pull you off him.”
“You know what they say, Harley, ‘Crazy people are extra strong.’”
Harley shook his head; he was serious. “No, Tayo, you weren’t crazy. You were just drunk.”
They all had different explanations for the attack. Emo claimed they never got along, not since grade school when they had rock fights in the school yard; he said Tayo had wanted to get even with him for a long time.
They all had explanations; the police, the doctors at the psychiatric ward, even Auntie and old Grandma; they blamed liquor and they blamed the war.
“Reports note that since the Second World War a pattern of drinking and violence, not previously seen before, is emerging among Indian veterans.” But Tayo shook his head when the doctor finished reading the report. “No?” the doctor said in a loud voice.
“It’s more than that. I can feel it. It’s been going on for a long time.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it all around me.”
“Is that why you tried to kill Emo?”
“Emo was asking for it.”
The wind stirred the dust. The people were starving. “She’s angry with us,” the people said. “Maybe because of that Ck’o’yo magic we were fooling with. We better send someone to ask our forgiveness.”
They noticed hummingbird was fat and shiny he had plenty to eat. They asked how come he looked so good.
He said Down below Three worlds below this one everything is green all the plants are growing the flowers are blooming. I go down there and eat.
“You were real lucky, man. Real lucky. You could’ve gone to jail. But they just sent you to the hospital again. If it had been me, I probably still been sitting in jail.” Harley’s words were becoming disjointed and he was accenting the words at the beginning and swallowing the ending sounds until it didn’t sound like English any more. He had another beer and then he was rambling on to himself in Laguna.
Emo rattled the Bull Durham sack. He bounced it in the palm of one hand and then the other; he took another swallow of whiskey. He had to have two or three swallows of whiskey before he’d talk; he took out the little cloth sack when he was ready.
“You know,” he said, slurring the words, “us Indians deserve something better than this goddamn dried-up country around here. Blowing away, every day.” He laughed at the rhyme he made. The other guys laughed too because Emo was mean when he was drinking.
“What we need is what they got. I’ll take San Diego.” He laughed, and they all laughed loudly. He threw the bag up in the air and caught it, confident of his audience. He didn’t see Tayo sitting back in the corner, leaning back in the chair with his eyes closed. He didn’t know that Tayo was clenching all his muscles against their voices; he didn’t know that Tayo was sweating, trying to fight off the nausea that surged at him whenever he heard the rattle in the little bag.
“We fought their war for them.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Yeah, we did.”
“But they’ve got everything. And we don’t got shit, do we? Huh?”
They all shouted “Hell no” loudly, and they drank the beer faster, and Emo raised the bottle, not bothering to pour the whiskey into the little glass any more.
“They took our land, they took everything! So let’s get our hands on white women!” They cheered. Harley and Leroy were grinning and slapping each other on the back. Harley looked over at Tayo, who was reading the label on the beer bottle. (COORS BEER brewed from pure Rocky Mountain spring water. Adolph Coors, Co., Golden, Colorado.) He looked at the picture of the cascading spring on the bottle. He didn’t know of any springs that big anywhere. Did they ever have droughts in Colorado? Maybe Emo was wrong: maybe white people didn’t have everything. Only Indians had droughts. He finished off the beer; Harley was watching him and gave him another one. He couldn’t hear the rattling in the little bag any more, but he could still see Emo playing with it. He was thirsty. Deep down, somewhere behind his belly, near his heart. He drank the beer as if it were the tumbling ice-cold stream in the mountain canyon on the beer label. He kept drinking it, and Harley kept shoving the bottles across the table at him. Attention shifted from Emo to Tayo.