He sat back in the chair and rested his head against the cool plaster wall. Through the sound of the juke box he could hear the Navajo, sitting now with his back against the screen door, singing songs. There was something familiar in the songs, and he remembered old Betonie’s singing; something in his belly stirred faintly; but it was too far away now. He crawled deeper into the black gauzy web where he could rest in the silence, where his coming and going through this world was no more than a star falling across the night sky. He left behind the pain and buzzing in his head; they were shut out by the wide dark distance.
Someone was yelling. Someone was shaking him out of the tall tree he was in. He thought it might be old Betonie telling him to get on his way, telling him that he’d slept too long and there were the cattle to find, and the stars, the mountain, and the woman.
He started to answer old Betonie, to tell him he hadn’t forgotten.
“I’m going,” he said.
“You’re damn right you’re going!” the white man said. “Your pal just got the shit kicked out of him, and I don’t want no more trouble here.”
The last bright rays of sunlight split his head in half, like a big ax splitting logs for winter kindling. He put his hand over his eyes to shade them. He moved down the steps carefully, remembering the Navajo who had been sitting there, singing. But he was gone and the Mexicans were gone too; and the sky was deep orange and scarlet, all the way across to Mount Taylor. Leroy was kneeling over Harley, balancing himself unsteadily with one hand. His shirttail was loose, making a little skirt around his slim hips. He was saying, “Harley, buddy, did they hurt you?” Leroy’s lips were bloody and swollen where they’d hit him. Harley was breathing peacefully, passed out or knocked out, Tayo couldn’t tell. There was a big cut above his left eyebrow, but the blood had already crusted over it.
They carried Harley to the truck; his legs dragged behind him, wobbling and leaving long toe marks in the dirt. They propped him up between them, with Tayo behind the wheel. Leroy was slumped against the door, passed out. He searched the dashboard for the knob to turn on the headlights. When he pulled it, the knob came loose in his hands; he was too tired and sick to laugh at this truck, but he would have if Helen Jean had been there. Because she said it: gypped again.
At twilight the earth was darker than the sky, and it was difficult to see if any of Romero’s sheep or goats were grazing along the edge of the pavement. The tourist traffic on Highway 66 was gone now, and Tayo imagined white people eating their mashed potatoes and gravy in some steamy Grants café.
During that last summer they had ridden across these flats to round up the speckled cattle and brand the calves. He took the pickup across the dip slowly, almost tenderly, as if the old truck were the blind white mule, too old to be treated roughly any more. He was thinking about Harley and Leroy; about Helen Jean and himself. How much longer would they last? How long before one of them got stabbed in a bar fight, not just knocked out? How long before this old truck swerved off the road or head-on into a bus? But it didn’t make much difference anyway. The drinking and hell raising were just things they did, as he had done sitting at the ranch all afternoon, watching the yellow cat bite the air for flies; passing the time away, waiting for it to end.
Someone groaned; he looked over to see who it was. He smelled vomit. Harley had thrown up all over himself. Tayo rolled down the window and drove with his head outside, the way train engineers did, the air rushing at his face as he watched the white lines of the highway fall past the truck.
He pulled off the highway at Mesita, and reached over and shook Leroy by the arm. He mumbled and pushed Tayo’s hand away. He shut off the engine and looked at the village. The lights of the houses were as scattered and dim as far-away stars. He left the keys in the ignition and rolled up the window in case the wind blew that night. One of them had pissed, and the rubber mat at Leroy’s feet was wet, and with the windows rolled up the urine smell steamed around him. He gagged as he pushed the door open, and something gave way in his belly. He vomited out everything he had drunk with them, and when that was gone, he was still kneeling on the road beside the truck, holding his heaving belly, trying to vomit out everything — all the past, all his life.
The Scalp Ceremony lay to rest the Japanese souls in the green humid jungles, and it satisfied the female giant who fed on the dreams of warriors. But there was something else now, as Betonie said: it was everything they had seen — the cities, the tall buildings, the noise and the lights, the power of their weapons and machines. They were never the same after that: they had seen what the white people had made from the stolen land. It was the story of the white shell beads all over again, the white shell beads, stolen from a grave and found by a man as he walked along a trail one day. He carried the beautiful white shell beads on the end of a stick because he suspected where they came from; he left them hanging in the branches of a piñon tree. And although he had never touched them, they haunted him; all he could think of, all he dreamed of, were these white shell beads hanging in that tree. He could not eat, and he could not work. He lost touch with the life he had lived before the day he found those beads; and the man he had been before that day was lost somewhere on that trail where he first saw the beads. Every day they had to look at the land, from horizon to horizon, and every day the loss was with them; it was the dead unburied, and the mourning of the lost going on forever. So they tried to sink the loss in booze, and silence their grief with war stories about their courage, defending the land they had already lost.
He followed the wagon road to Laguna, going by memory and the edges of old ruts. The air was cool, and he could smell the dampness that came out with the stars. Old Betonie might explain it this way — Tayo didn’t know for sure: there were transitions that had to be made in order to become whole again, in order to be the people our Mother would remember; transitions, like the boy walking in bear country being called back softly.
Up North
around Reedleaf Town
there was this Ck’o’yo magician
they called Kaup’a’ta or the Gambler.
He was tall
and he had a handsome face
but he always wore spruce greens around his head, over his eyes.
He dressed in the finest white buckskins
his moccasins were perfectly sewn.
He had strings of sky blue turquoise
strings of red coral in his ears.
In all ways
the Gambler was very good to look at.
His house was high
in the peaks of the Zuni mountains
and he waited for people to wander
up to his place.
He kept the gambling sticks all stacked up
ready for them.
He walked and turned around for them
to show off his fancy clothes and expensive beads.