Tayo watched him, trying to decide if the old man was lying. He wasn’t sure if they even let Indians ride trains in those days. The old man laughed at the expression on Tayo’s face. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt.
“She sent me to school. Sherman Institute, Riverside, California. That was the first train I ever rode. I had been watching them from the hills up here all my life. I told her it looked like a snake crawling along the red-rock mesas. I told her I didn’t want to go. I was already a big kid then. Bigger than the rest. But she said ‘It is carried on in all languages now, so you have to know English too.’” He ran his fingers through his mustache again, still smiling as though he were thinking of other stories to tell. But a single hair came loose from his thick gray mustache, and his attention shifted suddenly to the hair between his fingers. He got up and went to the back of the hogan. Tayo heard the jingle of keys and the tin sound of a footlocker opening; the lock snapped shut and the old man came back and sat down; the hair was gone.
“I don’t take any chances,” he said as he got settled on the goatskin again. Tayo could hear his own pulse sound in his ears. He wasn’t sure what the old man was talking about, but he had an idea. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you about these things?”
Tayo shook his head, but he knew the medicine man could see he was lying. He knew what they did with strands of hair they found; he knew what they did with bits of fingernail and toenails they found. He was breathing faster, and he could feel the fear surge over him with each beat of his heart. They didn’t want him around. They blamed him. And now they had sent him here, and this would be the end of him. The Gallup police would find his body in the bushes along the big arroyo, and he would be just one of the two or three they’d find dead that week. He thought about running again; he was stronger than the old man and he could fight his way out of this. But the pain of betrayal pushed into his throat like a fist. He blinked back the tears, but he didn’t move. He was tired of fighting. If there was no one left to trust, then he had no more reason to live.
The old man laughed and laughed. He laughed, and when his laughter seemed almost to cease, he would shake his head and laugh all over again.
“I was at the World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, the year they had Geronimo there on display. The white people were scared to death of him. Some of them even wanted him in leg irons.”
Tayo did not look up. Maybe this time he really was crazy. Maybe the medicine man didn’t laugh all the time; maybe the dreams and the voices were taking over again.
“If you don’t trust me, you better get going before dark. You can’t be too careful these days,” Betonie said, gesturing toward the footlocker where he kept the hairs. “Anyway, I couldn’t help anyone who was afraid of me.” He started humming softly to himself, a song that Tayo could hear only faintly, but that reminded him of butterflies darting from flower to flower.
“They sent me to this place after the war. It was white. Everything in that place was white. Except for me. I was invisible. But I wasn’t afraid there. I didn’t feel things sneaking up behind me. I didn’t cry for Rocky or Josiah. There were no voices and no dreams. Maybe I belong back in that place.”
Betonie reached into his shirt pocket for the tobacco sack. He rolled a skinny little cigarette in a brown wheat paper and offered the sack to Tayo. He nodded slowly to indicate that he had been listening.
“That’s true,” the old man said, “you could go back to that white place.” He took a puff from the cigarette and stared down at the red sand floor. Then he looked up suddenly and his eyes were shining; he had a grin on his face. “But if you are going to do that, you might as well go down there, with the rest of them, sleeping in the mud, vomiting cheap wine, rolling over women. Die that way and get it over with.” He shook his head and laughed. “In that hospital they don’t bury the dead, they keep them in rooms and talk to them.”
“There are stories about me,” Betonie began in a quiet round voice. “Maybe you have heard some of them. They say I’m crazy. Sometimes they say worse things. But whatever they say, they don’t forget me, even when I’m not here.” Tayo was wary of his eyes. “That’s right,” Betonie said, “when I am gone off on the train, a hundred miles from here, those Navajos won’t come near this hogan.” He smoked for a while and stared at the circle of sunlight on the floor between them. What Tayo could feel was powerful, but there was no way to be sure what it was.
“My uncle Josiah was there that day. Yet I know he couldn’t have been there. He was thousands of miles away, at home in Laguna. We were in the Philippine jungles. I understand that. I know he couldn’t have been there. But I’ve got this feeling and it won’t go away even though I know he wasn’t there. I feel like he was there. I feel like he was there with those Japanese soldiers who died.” Tayo’s voice was shaking; he could feel the tears pushing into his eyes. Suddenly the feeling was there, as strong as it had been that day in the jungle. “He loved me. He loved me, and I didn’t do anything to save him.”
“When did he die?”
“While we were gone. He died because there was no one to help him search for the cattle after they were stolen.”
“Rocky,” Betonie said softly, “tell me about Rocky.”
The tears ran along the sides of Tayo’s nose and off his chin; as they fell, the hollow inside his chest folded into the black hole, and he waited for the collapse into himself.
“It was the one thing I could have done. For all of them, for all those years they kept me. . for everything that had happened because of me. .”
“You’ve been doing something all along. All this time, and now you are at an important place in this story.” He paused. “The Japanese,” the medicine man went on, as though he were trying to remember something. “It isn’t surprising you saw him with them. You saw who they were. Thirty thousand years ago they were not strangers. You saw what the evil had done: you saw the witchery ranging as wide as this world.”
“And these cattle. .
“The people in Cubero called her the Night Swan. She told him about the cattle. She encouraged him to buy them. Auntie said that—”
The old man waved his arms at Tayo. “Don’t tell me about your aunt. I want to know about those cattle and that woman.”
“She said something to me once. About our eyes. Hazel-green eyes. I never understood. Was she bad, like Auntie kept saying? Did the cattle kill him — did I let the cattle kill him?”
The old man had jumped up. He was walking around the fire pit, moving behind Tayo as he went around. He was excited, and from time to time he would say something to himself in Navajo.
Betonie dug down into the cardboard boxes until dust flew up around his face. Finally he pulled out a brown spiral notebook with a torn cover; he thumbed through the pages slowly, moving his lips slightly. He sat down again, across from Tayo, with the notebook in his lap.
“I’m beginning to see something,” he said with his eyes closed, “yes. Something very important.”
The room was cooler than before. The light from the opening in the roof was becoming diffuse and gray. It was sundown. Betonie pointed a finger at him.
“This has been going on for a long long time. They will try to stop you from completing the ceremony.”
The hollow inside him was suddenly too small for the anger. “Look,” Tayo said through clenched teeth, “I’ve been sick, and half the time I don’t know if I’m still crazy or not. I don’t know anything about ceremonies or these things you talk about. I don’t know how long anything has been going on. I just need help.” The words made his body shake as if they had an intensity of their own which was released as he spoke.