Josiah went to see her the day after the cattle were delivered. He talked to Tayo in a low confidential tone and told him not to let Auntie or old Grandma find out. They were outside at the woodpile, each with an arm full of kindling, but he whispered to Tayo as if Auntie were only a few feet away from them. He straightened up and glanced over Tayo’s head at the sun, which was almost down, and spoke in a more natural tone. “Anyway,” he said casually, “I’m only going up there to thank her again for letting me in on a good deal.” He changed his shirt and put on a stiff new pair of Levis and wiped off his fifty dollar boots with the towel that was still damp from drying his arms and face. He told Tayo to get the sharp scissors out of Auntie’s sewing basket, and he trimmed the hairs in his thin mustache. Tayo followed him outside into the cool dim evening. Josiah looked at his own reflection in the truck window, stroking the hairs of his mustache into place. He made Tayo promise to tell Auntie and Grandma that he had gone to Paguate on business. Tayo nodded, but he figured they already knew where Josiah was going anyway.
She was sitting in the shade on her wicker chair; her eyes were closed and her face was relaxed. He liked to look at the way her light brown skin had wrinkled at the corners of her eyes and her mouth, from too much laughing she liked to say. She knew he was standing there because the stairs up to the second floor porch were loose and squeaked. “Sit down,” she said, without opening her eyes, “enjoy the springtime with me.” He liked the way she talked. There was something in her eyes too. He saw it the first time when she had said, “I’ve seen you before many times, and I always remembered you.” Josiah could not remember ever seeing her before, but there was something in her hazel brown eyes that made him believe her. He sat on the straight-back chair beside her and looked over at the big cottonwood that grew next to the porch, its branches sweeping and wide, hiding a portion of the northeast sky.
On the fourth day something buzzed around inside the jar.
They lifted the buckskin and a big green fly with yellow feelers on his head flew out of the jar.
“Fly will go with me,” Hummingbird said. “We’ll go see what she wants.”
They flew to the fourth world below. Down there was another kind of daylight everything was blooming and growing everything was so beautiful.
The hot weather and the fact that Lalo had always bootlegged beer to the Lagunas and Acomas brought him there one day when she was sitting in the shade of the porch outside the bar. She spoke first, asking if he had a cigarette paper. Josiah was surprised that a Mexican woman had spoken to him, and he gave her the paper without looking at her face. He stared at the sack of Bull Durham in her lap and watched the way she rolled the cigarette without spilling any tobacco. He was suddenly aware that she was watching him, and he mumbled something about it being a hot day, and then left with his paper sack full of cold beer. But the rest of the afternoon, and that night too, he had an uncomfortable feeling that he had forgotten or lost something at Lalo’s. After supper he went out to make sure his work gloves were on the seat of the truck. He reached into his pocket and counted the money to make sure Lalo had given him the right change. He didn’t sleep well that night either, and even while he dreamed he was still aware of this feeling, that something had been left behind. So the next day he went back to Cubero. It wasn’t until he drove past the Cubero store and found himself looking to see if she was sitting on the porch that he realized his heart was beating like a boy’s, and it was too late. He knew then what it was he had left behind.
She looked up and smiled as if she had been waiting for him. She got up from her chair as he came up the steps and gestured at the bright sun and cloudless sky. “It’s too hot down here,” she said, walking to the stairs at the end of the long porch. He didn’t say anything; he just followed her up the spiral stairs.
“Some things I don’t remember too well,” she said, “names of the places, names of the people, or even their faces. These small towns like El Paso and Socorro were full of people passing through the way I was. I danced. That was all that was important.”
She got up from the bed and disappeared through the curtains across the doorway. Josiah heard her cranking the Victrola; the needle scratched over the flamenco music. She brought out the shoes from a trunk under the bed. They had been wrapped carefully in white tissue paper: shiny black leather with high square heels. She hitched the blue silk dress higher on her wide hips and held the edges of the fabric in both hands as she arched her back and tossed her head. At first, all he was aware of were the heels of the shoes beating rapidly against the floor, and he wondered if Lalo and the afternoon customers in the bar downstairs could hear it. But as the music gathered speed, he forgot about how she made the room shake, because the spinning and tossing of her body and the momentum of the music had gathered him close, and he found himself breathing hard and sweating when the Victrola finally ran down.
She sat back down on the bed beside him and wiped the shoes on the hem of the blue dress before she wrapped them up again and put them back in the trunk. “They called me the Night Swan,” she said. “I remember every time I have danced.”
If she had not been so young, she would have realized that he was nothing, that the power she was feeling had always been inside her, growing, pushing to the surface, only its season coinciding with her new lover. But she was young and she had never felt the power of the dance so strongly before, and she wanted to keep it; she wanted it with a great ferocity which she mistook for passion for this man. She was certain about him; he could not get enough of her. He would lie beside her under the blanket and his eyes would be fevered even after he was limp and incapable of taking any more from her. She kept him there for as long as she could, searching out the boundary, the end to the power of the feeling. She wanted to prowl those warm close places until she discovered the end because at that time she had not yet seen that the horizon was an illusion and the plains extended infinitely; and up until that final evening, she had found no limit.
She knew it before he spoke. His eyes were still feverish as he spoke and his fingers quivered like the legs of a dreaming dog; at that moment he wanted her more than he had ever wanted her. And it was for that she would not forgive him. She could have accepted it if he had told her that her light brown belly no longer excited him. She would have sensed it herself and told him to go. But he was quitting because his desire for her had uncovered something which had been hiding inside him, something with wings that could fly, escape the gravity of the Church, the town, his mother, his wife. So he wanted to kill it: to crush the skull into the feathers and snap the bones of the wings.
“Whore! Witch! Look at what you made me do to my family and my wife.”
“You came breathlessly,” she answered in a steady voice, “but you will always prefer the lie. You will repeat it to your wife; you will repeat it at confession. You damn your own soul better than I ever could.”