“‘There is something else which takes a long time happening,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Why do I bother to lay down with you, old man?’
“Old age made him fearless. He flexed the old chants and the beliefs like a mountain-oak bow. He had been watching the sky before she came, the planets and constellations wheeling and shifting the patterns of the old stories. He saw the transition, and he was ready. Some of the old singers could see new shadows across the moon; they could make out new darkness between the stars. They sent Descheeny the patients they couldn’t cure, the victims of this new evil set loose upon the world.
“He reasoned that because it was set loose by witchery of all the world, and brought to them by the whites, the ceremony against it must be the same. When she came, she didn’t fool him for long. She had come for his ceremonies, for the chants and the stories they grew from.
“‘This is the only way,’ she told him. ‘It cannot be done alone. We must have power from everywhere. Even the power we can get from the whites.’
“Although the people detected changes in the ceremonies Descheeny performed, they tolerated them because of his acknowledged power to aid victims tainted by Christianity or liquor. But after the Mexican captive came, they were terrified, and few of them stayed to see the conclusion of his ceremonies. But by then, Descheeny was getting ready to die anyway, and he could not be bothered with isolated cures.
“He gazed into his smoky quartz crystal and she stared into the fire, and they plotted the course of the ceremony by the direction of dark night winds and by the colors of the clay in drought-ridden valleys.
“The day I was born they saw the color of my eyes, and they took me from the village. The Spaniards in the town looked at me, and the Catholic priest said, ‘Let her die.’ They blamed the Root Woman for this birth and they told her to leave the village before dark. She waited until they had gone, and she went to the old trash pile in the arroyo where they left me. She took me north to El Paso, and years later she laughed about how long she had waited for me in that village full of dirty stupid people. Sometimes she was bitter because of what they had done to her in the end, after all the years she had helped them. ‘Sometimes I have to shake my head,’ she’d say, ‘because human beings deserve exactly what they get.’”
The people asked,
“Did you find him?”
“Yes, but we forgot something.
Tobacco.”
But there was no tobacco
so Fly and Hummingbird had to fly
all the way back down
to the fourth world below
to ask our mother where
they could get some tobacco.
“We came back again,”
they told our mother.
“Maybe you need something?”
“Tobacco.”
“Go ask caterpillar.”
“There was a child. The Mexican woman gave her to Descheeny’s daughters to raise. The half sisters taught her to fear her mother. Many years later she had a child. When I was weaned, my grandmother came and took me. My mother and my old aunts did not resist because it all had been settled before Descheeny died.”
Betonie paused and blew smoke rings up at the sky. Tayo stretched out his legs in front of him. He was thinking about the ceremony the medicine man had performed over him, testing it against the old feeling, the sick hollow in his belly formed by the memories of Rocky and Josiah, and all the years of Auntie’s eyes and her teeth set hard on edge. He could feel the ceremony like the rawhide thongs of the medicine pouch, straining to hold back the voices, the dreams, faces in the jungle in the L.A. depot, the smoky silence of solid white walls.
“One night or nine nights won’t do it any more,” the medicine man said; “the ceremony isn’t finished yet.” He was drawing in the dirt with his finger. “Remember these stars,” he said. “I’ve seen them and I’ve seen the spotted cattle; I’ve seen a mountain and I’ve seen a woman.”
The wind came up and caught the sleeves of Tayo’s shirt. He smelled wood smoke and sage in the old man’s clothes. He reached for the billfold in his hip pocket. “I want to pay you for the ceremony you did tonight.”
Old Betonie shook his head. “This has been going on for a long long time now. It’s up to you. Don’t let them stop you. Don’t let them finish off this world.”
The dry skin
was still stuck
to his body.
But the effects
of the witchery
of the evil thing
began to leave
his body.
The effects of the witchery
of the evil thing
in his surroundings
began to turn away.
It had gone a great distance
It had gone below the North.
The truck driver stopped at San Fidel to dump a load of diesel fuel. Tayo went inside the station to buy candy; he had not eaten since he had left Betonie and his helper up in the mountains. The room smelled like rubber from the loops of fan belts hanging from the ceiling. Cases of motor oil were stacked in front of the counter; the cans had a dull oil film on them. The desk behind the counter was covered with yellow and pink slips of paper, invoices and bills with a half cup of cold coffee sitting on top of them. Above the desk, on a calendar, a smiling blond girl, in a baton twirler’s shiny blue suit with white boots to her knees, had her arms flung around the neck of a palomino horse. She was holding a bottle of Coca-Cola in one hand. He stared at the calendar for a long time; the horse’s mane was bleached white, and there was no trace of dust on its coat. The hooves were waxed with dark polish, shining like metal. The woman’s eyes and the display of her teeth made him remember the glassy eyes of the stuffed bobcat above the bar in Bibo. The teeth were the same. He turned away from the calendar; he felt sick, like a walking shadow, faint and wispy, his sense of balance still swaying from the ride in the cab of the tank truck. All the windows of the candy machine had red sold-out flags in them.
The station man came inside. He looked at Tayo suspiciously, as if he thought Tayo might be drunk, or in there to steal something. In his anger Tayo imagined movie images of himself turning the pockets of his jeans inside out, unbuttoning his shirt to prove he had stolen nothing. A confrontation would have been too easy, and he was not going to let them stop him; he asked the man where he could buy some candy.
“Down the road,” he said, not looking up from the cash register. His milky white face was shaded with the stubble of a red beard. There were white hairs scattered among the red, and the skin across his forehead and at the corner of each eye was wrinkled as if he had been frowning for a long time. The backs of his hands were covered with curly reddish hair; the fingers were black and oily. He had never seen a white person so clearly before. He had to turn away. All those things old Betonie had told him were swirling inside his head, doing strange things; he wanted to laugh. He wanted to laugh at the station man who did not even know that his existence and the existence of all white people had been conceived by witchery.