“But our teacher said so. She said they are bad and carry sickness.”
“Well, I didn’t go to school much, so I don’t know about that but you see, long time ago, way back in the time immemorial, the mother of the people got angry at them for the way they were behaving. For all she cared, they could go to hell — starve to death. The animals disappeared, the plants disappeared, and no rain came for a long time. It was the greenbottle fly who went to her, asking forgiveness for the people. Since that time the people have been grateful for what the fly did for us.”
Tayo let the willow switch slide out of his hand. He stared at it on the floor by his feet. “What will happen now?” he asked in a choked voice.
“I think it will be okay,” Josiah said, poking at the dead flies with the toe of his boot. “None of them were greenbottle flies — only some of his cousins. People make mistakes. The flies know that. That’s how the greenbottle fly first came around anyway. To help the people who had made some mistakes.” He hugged the boy close. “Next time, just remember the story.”
But in the jungle he had not been able to endure the flies that had crawled over Rocky; they had enraged him. He had cursed their sticky feet and wet mouths, and when he could reach them he had smashed them between his hands.
Harley wasn’t there. The Mexican bartender had gone home, and now the white man who owned the place was behind the bar, dusting off the bottles with a rag. Tayo stood in the door and looked around inside, at the empty tables with crooked legs of different lengths. Someone had swept the floor, and the beer bottles and cigarette butts were piled high in the middle next to the broom leaning against the back of a chair. The stale bar air followed him out the door — smelling like old cigarette smoke and spilled beer. He stood outside facing the south, but all his feelings were focused behind him, northeast, in the direction of Cubero. He turned around. The yellow sandstone outcrop ran parallel to the big arroyo behind the bar. All he had to do was follow it. He walked to Cubero in the twilight, looking up occasionally at the mountain, where the peaks were caught in the sunset. It was warm. Over on the highway he could see headlights and taillights moving east and west, but he felt alone, as if that world were distant from him. No traffic came along the dirt road, and it was quiet except for the crickets in the rocks and a few evening insects buzzing past his face; in the distance dogs were barking. The store in Cubero was closed, and the gas pumps had locks on the handles. Somewhere he smelled chili cooking for supper. The road past the store was empty except for an old cow with a broken horn hanging near her face. He didn’t have to turn around to see the sunset.
The reflection of its colors made the sandstone cliffs bright gold, and then deep red. He sat on the steps of the long porch and looked at the adobe walls for a long time. Years of rain and wind had weathered away the adobe plaster, exposing the symmetry of the brown adobes which were beginning to lose their square shape, taking on the softer contours of the mesas and hills.
He remembered sitting this way, on these steps with Rocky, while Josiah went inside Lalo’s to get cold beer and bottles of soda pop for them. Lalo had retired during the war. He had sold the liquor license and closed the bar. But it had changed very little. The circular stairs were still there, at the end of the long porch. They had been cut from heavy oak planks, and they spiraled around the massive center timber like the small bones of a spine held in place by thick wooden pegs. Years of hands on the railing and feet on the steps had left the wood polished smooth and bone gray. The big tree was dying. Thick limbs at its center were brittle and white. One of the remaining live limbs brushed against the porch railing at the top of the stairs. He smelled the waxy dark green leaves, and remembered climbing the big cottonwood trees along the river and plucking heavy hanging bunches of cottonwood berries that grew on the female trees late in the summer. They had carried home armloads of the seed pods, the size of peas, full of fluffy cotton when they split open. The smell of the crushed leaves had been exciting then because the cottonwood berries were ammunition to use against the other boys from the village, who tucked their shirttails into their jeans and filled the inside of the shirts with cottonwood berries until they had pendulous bellies. Then they ran, laughing and throwing handfuls of the green berries at one another.
The cottonwood trees had not lost their familiar feeling with him. They had always been there with the people but they were much more than summer shade. After hundreds of years, when the great trees finally got too old and dry, the Ka’t’sina carvers from the villages came searching for them to cut pieces of their soft dry wood to carve.
He sat down on the upstairs porch with his back against the adobe wall and closed his eyes. In a world of crickets and wind and cottonwood trees he was almost alive again; he was visible. The green waves of dead faces and the screams of the dying that had echoed in his head were buried. The sickness had receded into a shadow behind him, something he saw only out of the corners of his eyes, over his shoulder.
The place felt good; he leaned back against the wall until its surface pushed against his backbone solidly. He picked up a fragment of fallen plaster and drew dusty white stripes across the backs of his hands, the way ceremonial dancers sometimes did, except they used white clay, and not old plaster. It was soothing to rub the dust over his hands; he rubbed it carefully across his light brown skin, the stark white gypsum dust making a spotted pattern, and then he knew why it was done by the dancers: it connected them to the earth.
He became aware of the place then, of where he was. He had never seen her again after that day. The summer kept them busy, and by early September he and Rocky had enlisted and were gone. They said that she left after Josiah’s funeral, and nobody knew where she went, only that she walked to the highway with a suitcase.
The screen door was propped open against the side of the building with a large round sandrock. He expected the door to be locked when he turned the cut-glass knob, but it swung open. The room was empty. His steps inside sounded hollow, like a sandstone cave in the cliffs. The floor was covered with a layer of fine brown dust that had pushed under the door, and between the walls and the window sash; the dust drifted up in little clouds around his feet.
The white curtains were gone, and he could see through the doorway to a small back room. Whatever had been there, the music, the currents of air that had moved so restlessly that day, was gone. He looked for some signs of what had been there, but all that was left was a hole in the ceiling where the stove pipe had been.
He stood in the dim gray light, watching the darkness push between him and the bare room. He breathed deeply, trying to find a trace of the locust-blossom perfume, but all he smelled was the white clay plaster, as timeless as the cliffs where it came from.
He walked all the way to Casa Blanca, listening to the crickets scattered around him like the stars. He climbed the old ladder into the loft of the barn behind Harley’s grandpa’s house. It was a warm night; he lay down in the old hay and he slept all night without dreams.