Ceremony (33 page)

Waves of heat caught him, and his legs and lungs were vapor without sensation; only his memory of running and breathing kept him moving and alive. He stumbled and ran behind the sun, not following but dragged with it across arroyos, over mesas and hills. At sundown he was lying on the sand at the bottom of the long mesa, feeling the heat recede from the air and from his body into the earth. The wind came up and he shivered.

 

He crawled through the strands of barbed wire. Twilight was giving way to darkness. He scooped water off the top of thick green moss that clogged the steel water trough under the windmill. The water was still warm from the sun and it tasted bitter. He sat on the edge of the trough and looked across the wide canyon at the dark mine shaft. Maybe the uranium made the water taste that way. The sandstone and dirt they had taken from inside the mesa was piled in mounds, in long rows, like fresh graves.

 

Old Grandma told him while he was still sick and weak, lying in the darkened room. She shuffled in and sat down on the edge of his bed. “I have been thinking of something,” she said. “It happened while you were gone. I had to get up, the way I do, to use the chamber pot. It was still dark; everyone else was still sleeping. But as I walked back from the kitchen to my bed there was a flash of light through the window. So big, so bright even my old clouded-up eyes could see it. It must have filled the whole southeast sky. I thought I was seeing the sun rise again, but it faded away, and by that time all the dogs around here were barking, like the time that bear was prowling around the trash pile. You remember that, sonny, how they barked. ‘My, my,’ I said to myself, ‘I never thought I would see anything so bright again.’” She was patting his arm as she talked, tapping out the story with her hand. “Your auntie laughed at me when I told her what I saw. But later on that day, Romero came around. He said he saw it too. So bright that it blinded him for a moment; then later on he could still see it flashing when he closed his eyes.” She paused, as if she were trying to think of the right words. “You know, I have never understood that thing I saw. Later on there was something about it in the newspaper. Strongest thing on this earth. Biggest explosion that ever happened—that’s what the newspaper said.” She was shaking her head slowly from side to side. “Now I only wonder why, grandson. Why did they make a thing like that?”

“I don’t know, Grandma,” he had answered then. But now he knew.

 

He had been so close to it, caught up in it for so long that its simplicity struck him deep inside his chest: Trinity Site, where they exploded the first atomic bomb, was only three hundred miles to the southeast, at White Sands. And the top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, on land the Government took from Cochiti Pueblo: Los Alamos, only a hundred miles northeast of him now, still surrounded by high electric fences and the ponderosa pine and tawny sandrock of the Jemez mountain canyon where the shrine of the twin mountain lions had always been. There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid. From the jungles of his dreaming he recognized why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah’s voice and Rocky’s voice; the lines of cultures and worlds were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery’s final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate colors of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.

 

He walked to the mine shaft slowly, and the feeling became overwhelming: the pattern of the ceremony was completed there. He knelt and found an ore rock. The gray stone was streaked with powdery yellow uranium, bright and alive as pollen; veins of sooty black formed lines with the yellow, making mountain ranges and rivers across the stone. But they had taken these beautiful rocks from deep within earth and they had laid them in a monstrous design, realizing destruction on a scale only
they
could have dreamed.

He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.

He turned. The moon was rising above the last mesa he had crossed from the east. A transition was about to be completed: the sun was crossing the zenith to a winter place in the sky, a place where prayers of long winter nights would call out the long summer days of new growth. Tonight the old priests would be praying for the force to continue the relentless motion of the stars. But there were others who would be working this night, casting loose countermotions to suck in a great spiral, swallowing the universe endlessly into the black mouth, their diagrams in black ash on cave walls outlining the end in motionless dead stars. But he saw the constellation in the north sky, and the fourth star was directly above him; the pattern of the ceremony was in the stars, and the constellation formed a map of the mountains in the directions he had gone for the ceremony. For each star there was a night and a place; this was the last night and the last place, when the darkness of night and the light of day were balanced. His protection was there in the sky, in the position of the sun, in the pattern of the stars. He had only to complete this night, to keep the story out of the reach of the destroyers for a few more hours, and their witchery would turn, upon itself, upon them.

 

 

 

 

The headlights appeared suddenly from the northeast, tiny points of light, blinking as the vehicle bounced over the road. The small hairs on his neck bristled, but he reasoned with himself: many land-grant people and white ranchers used that road too. He would know soon if the vehicle kept going west or if it turned south down the sandy road overgrown with weeds, and came toward the mine. Cold moved over him when the headlights turned, bigger now, visibly weaving down the road; he could hear the hum of the engine now. They were coming.

He ran past the shaft to the boulders that had been bulldozed away from the opening. The night was getting colder; he could see the steam from his breath in the moonlight. He climbed up boulders big as boxcars and squeezed himself into a hollow space between them. It was warm there, the sandrock still held the sun’s heat. He leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the narrow opening so that he could see everything.

He expected Leroy’s pickup truck, but as the vehicle rounded the last curve before the mine, he could see it was a car. For an instant he thought it might be land-grant people, and his muscles tensed, ready to jump down and run to flag them down for a ride. But there was something too familiar about the sound the car made, a broken muffler sound he had heard before. Emo.

Someone got out and raised the car hood. The other door opened and two more got out. He could hear voices and the sound of water splashing on the ground. He recognized Pinkie’s laugh. He smelled a fire and saw three figures bending over a small fire. It flared up suddenly and he saw their faces: Leroy, Pinkie, and Emo. But Harley was missing. They were feeding dry tumbleweeds to the fire, holding them high over their heads and circling the fire before they let go and the tumbleweeds exploded into fiery balls that lighted up the area around the windmill where the car was parked. They had a bottle they passed between them, and Leroy staggered when he walked down the old barbed-wire fence, gathering tumbleweed tangled in the bottom wire. Pinkie pounded on the hood of the car, and the metallic booming echoed against the sandstone across the narrow valley.

Tayo’s knees and elbows hurt from resting against the rock. He dropped to his belly and pulled his head back, away from the crack between the rocks. The destroyers. They would be there all night, he knew it, working for drought to sear the land, to kill the livestock, to stunt the corn plants and squash in the gardens, leaving the people more and more vulnerable to the lies; and the young people would leave, go to towns like Albuquerque and Gallup where bitterness would overwhelm them, and they would lose their hope and finally themselves in drinking.

The witchery would be at work all night so that the people would see only the losses—the land and the lives lost—since the whites came; the witchery would work so that the people would be fooled into blaming only the whites and not the witchery. It would work to make the people forget the stories of the creation and continuation of the five worlds; the old priests would be afraid too, and cling to ritual without making new ceremonies as they always had before, the way they still made new Buffalo Dance songs each year.

Emo pulled down the collapsed frame of the watchman’s shed and threw the boards on the fire. The flames extended the circle of light. Pinkie dropped the tire iron; it clattered down the front fender to the ground. They stood behind the car, passing the bottle, taking long swallows, pointing over to the mine shaft and into the rocks where he was hiding. He wondered if they knew he was there, or if they were only planning something else. He wondered if they had tracked him like a thirsty animal, certain they would find him near the only source of water in that area.

He was hungry, and he felt shaky and weak. He hadn’t eaten since Ts’eh had left, and he had vomited all the beer. The warmth from the stone was beginning to fade; his Levi jacket was thin, and he could feel the cold leaking through worn places at the elbows and under the arms. He had seen them now and he was certain; he could go back to tell the people. He was in no condition to confront them. He watched how slowly the moon was rising, and hunched his shoulders against the cold. He would be lucky just to make it home that night.

He looked down at them. If he had not known about their witchery, they might have fooled him. People had been drinking out in the hills on wood-hauling roads and sheep-camp roads since they first bootlegged liquor to Indians. Standing around the fire, passing cheap wine around; Pinkie smashed the empty bottle against the water trough. There were circles of charcoal, tire tracks off side roads and, since the men came back from the war, broken bottle glass all over the reservation. His throat got tight. He might be wrong about them. Harley had helped him last year; he had come and got him moving again. He was exhausted; the fear and the running from that day and from the night before had left him weak. He needed to rest. This ceremony was draining his endurance. He could not feel anything then, not for Josiah or Rocky and not for the woman. Maybe the other Navajos had been right about old Betonie.

Emo and Pinkie kept him there; Pinkie found the tire iron and was pounding the hood of the car again. The sound set his teeth on edge and angered him in a way he had not felt since the day he had stabbed Emo. It was the sound of witchery: smashing through the night, shrill and cold as black metal. It was the empty sound of his nightmares; even the voices he recognized. He covered his ears with both hands and ground his molars together.

The pounding stopped with the scream. He moved forward suddenly, bruising his knees on the rock. The trunk lid was raised and they were standing around it. The screaming was coming from inside the trunk. He pressed his forehead against the rock until he could feel its print on his skin. He turned his head with his ear between the rocks, frantically trying to catch the sound. Harley. He watched them drag him into the light from the coals. Pinkie dropped something into the coals and the fire sprang up; it was Harley’s red-and-white Hawaiian print shirt, but in a moment the fire turned the white print bloody red. Leroy and Emo stripped off his jeans, and Pinkie dropped them into the fire. Harley twisted and rolled on the ground; his hands and feet seemed to be tied. Pinkie dropped his boots into the fire; their soles made thick black smoke, and the light from the fire was temporarily obscured. Harley screamed again, and this time Tayo climbed out from the boulders. He heard laughter and when he looked around the corner of the boulder, his heart went numb in his chest, and he wasn’t aware of his own rapid breathing any more. In the moonlight he could see Harley’s body hanging from the fence, where they had tangled it upright between strands of barbed wire. Harley’s brown skin had gone as pale as the cloudy sandstone in the moonlight, and Tayo could see blood shining on his thighs and his fingertips.

He reached into his hip pocket for the screwdriver. He felt the wooden handle and the sharp edges at the end. Squatting close to the ground, he followed the long shadow cast by the continuous mounds of mining debris. He knew what they were doing; Harley had failed them, and all that had been intended for Tayo had now turned on Harley. There was no way the destroyers could lose: either way they had a victim and a corpse. He was close enough to hear them.

“We told you to watch him. We told you to stay there.”

“We told you. We told you, and now you know what you got for yourself.”

Pinkie held his leg, and Leroy cut the whorl from the bottom of his big toe. Harley screamed hoarsely; the sound trailed off to a groan.