Stallion Gate (16 page)

The parking lot was an oat field beaten into dust. More cars were coming than leaving. Augustino’s jeep was next to the gray Army sedan in which Joe had brought Oppy. He still couldn’t find Fuchs’ Buick.

Augustino asked, “The ones in the black and white greasepaint, Sergeant—are they idiots or traitors?”

“The clowns?”

“Whatever,” Augustino said, “that was a serious breach of security. They singled out Dr. Oppenheimer here in public view and identified him with explosives. Any outsider with a background in physics had to notice him and Teller. The imitation of the general was in the worst possible taste. What is the religious purpose behind that?”

“You’d have to ask them, sir.”

“I’d love to. Who are they?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“A tribal secret?”

“I guess so, sir.”

“There’s a great deal you’re not telling me these days, Sergeant. Do they dance again?”

“This afternoon, sir.”

“Same clowns, same people?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I think it would be wise for you to drive the Director back to the Hill now, before there’s another incident. You do agree, Dr. Oppenheimer?”

Oppy stared back at the plaza. “I thought we had good relations with these people. I thought we were friends.”

“What other incident, sir?” Joe asked Augustino.

“Just drive the Director to the Hill. Follow me,” the captain said after a pause.

Augustino led the way in his jeep, but all traffic leaving the lot for the highway had to pass over a narrow cattle guard. Joe stopped for incoming cars while the jeep went ahead. As always when they were alone, Oppy sat up front with Joe. He tapped on the dash impatiently, as if a herd of morons were holding him back. Word of the dance had spread. From Santa Fe, open buses dropped off tourists, who hurried on foot across the cattle guard. Joe recognized a short figure with a camera and binoculars around his neck from the
bar of the La Fonda, the New Yorker named Harry Gold.

Joe dug into his pocket and gave Oppy what looked like a wire-mesh button. “That’s a microphone Augustino put in your house while you were gone. It’s time you knew what’s going on around you.”

Oppy held the microphone up to the light of the windshield as if he were examining some curious artifact.

“It was hidden,” Joe said. “It wasn’t put there for your protection. He’s watching you, he’s after you.”

“I know.” Oppy’s voice had fallen to a whisper. He turned the tiny microphone over and over.

“Tell General Groves,” Joe said. “Tell the general that his head of intelligence thinks you’re a Red spy.”

“The general knows.” Oppy looked at Joe with a clear gaze of resignation and contempt. It was an inner look, a meditation. He put his hand out the open window and dropped the microphone onto the dirt outside. “You can’t help me, Joe.”

“You’re in charge of the most important lab in the war and you’re scared of a captain? They can’t do anything without you. You’re the goddamn bomb.”

“It’s … a temporary situation.”

The cattle guard was clearing. Augustino’s jeep waited far up the road.

Joe got out. “Then I’ll help Augustino.”

Oppy slid behind the wheel and asked, “Help him?”

“He wants to know who those clowns are. It takes an Indian to stop an Indian, right?”

“Joe—” Oppy started to protest. He began again. “Joe, twenty more days. After Trinity, no one can touch us.”

On his way back, Joe made a wide circuit of Santiago. Fuchs’ car was gone, probably halfway to the Hill by now. The Indian Service riders, Billy and Al, were drinking beers in the back of a tribal police car in an alley. All around the plaza, Indians ate fried bread on their roofs. Under the plaza cottonwood in an island of shade, tourists ate sandwiches. Waxed papers floated over the ground on waves of dust.

Around the shaft of sunlight that came down the ladder leading up to the kiva roof, three clowns repaired their black and white stripes from Mason jars of body paint. Two clowns without caps rested on the built-in benches of the walls. The last stood in the shadow of the corner to drink a Coke and piss into a pail. All turned to the side door as Joe came in.

He hadn’t been in a kiva for almost twenty years. Outside, the kiva of the clowns was a plain adobe house. Inside, though, the walls were painted in shapes barely visible in the dark. Snakes. Swallows. Stepped mountains and red and white clouds. The zigzag lightning slats of a dismantled altar stood between Spanish chests of prayer sticks and dance wands. In the middle of the floor was the traditional hole that led to the center of the earth. The clowns themselves seemed half-figures: white blocks, bars of black. Even so, Joe saw that one of the clowns without caps, a clown with loose gray hair, a heavy belly and spindly legs, was Ben Reyes.

“Psoot-bah!”
Ben said; it was an order for a dog to scram. “Get out!”

“There are two Indian Service cowboys out there,” Joe told the other clown without a cap. “I think they came to arrest you.”

“You pointed him out,” Ben said.

“Fuchs pointed you out,” Joe told the other clown.

The clown’s long brown hair fell to his shoulders. Despite the dark of the kiva he still wore sunglasses from the morning dance. He tilted his head and smiled at Joe as if sharing a joke.

“You gave the firecracker to Oppenheimer and didn’t try to take it back,” Joe said. “Even if you were pretending to be blind out there, you bumped into too many people.”

“Not bad for a real blind man, though,” Roberto said.

“Not bad.”

“They’d really dare do it?”

“You pulled a shotgun on the wrong Kraut. He’s our Kraut and there’s a war on. I don’t know how he knew you would dance, but he knew and the captain in charge of security on the Hill knew, and they pointed you out to a pair of Indian Service riders. Don’t worry; Fuchs and the captain fingered you and ran. The cowboys watched the dance for five seconds and only saw you from a distance. Bring in someone else to dance. You’ll have all afternoon to get back to Taos.”

“Coke?” Roberto asked. “You thirsty?”

“No, thanks.”

“Hot out there, isn’t it?”

“If you’re going to get someone, you better do it now.”

Roberto removed his dark glasses and laid them on the bench. His eyes looked not only shrunken but painted out.

“Well, it’s not as simple as that, Joe. No one is allowed in or out while clowns are here. I don’t think anyone but you would break the rules.”

“If six clowns don’t come out of here, the riders will come in for you.”

“You dance,” Roberto said.

“Him?” Ben asked.

“There’s no one else,” Roberto said.

“It would be a joke,” Ben said.

“You show him what to do,” Roberto said.

The three clowns by the ladder squatted and talked among themselves. It would be a great disgrace to include someone as ignorant as Joe Peña in a ceremony. On the other hand, it would be a great disgrace to have an elder from another pueblo arrested in Santiago.

“No,” Joe spoke up. “For once Ben is right. I only came to warn you.”

Roberto acted genuinely puzzled. “What good is a warning if you won’t help?” he asked. “That’s a fake warning.”

“From a fake Indian,” Ben said.

“Fair warning.” Joe held up his hand and made it a wave as he moved to the door. “From here on, I don’t even know you.”

“He went away an Indian and came back a black man,” Ben said. “He went into the Army and became a white man. Maybe there’s no one there at all anymore. Now, his brother was an Indian.”

“Ben,” Joe said and shook his head.

“Best thing that happened to his mother was she died before today,” Ben said.

Joe returned from the door. “Ben, Ben, Ben. Don’t say another word.”

“I need your help,” Roberto said.

The paint was so thick and greasy that he felt as if his whole body were a mask. His hair was tucked into the striped cap, which was tied by a black thong under his chin. The other clowns painted black outlines around his eyes and mouth, and knotted black scarves around his neck, wrists and ankles. I can’t believe this, Joe thought; this is happening to someone else. He felt as if he were standing apart and watching himself be prepared, that he was just lending his body. The tail of the long black breechclout trailed on the floor. No moccasins were big enough, so he was going barefoot. Roberto suggested that he stay within the circle of dancers as much as he could. Everyone gathered at the ladder and shared a last cigarette. Roberto wore his white Taos blanket, ready for a separate exit. One of the other clowns had the dark glasses now. Ben tucked a bullwhip under his arm. The sun had moved west, making the light from the roof dimmer, the angle sharper, and Joe had the sensation that the kiva was sealing over him.
Finally, they climbed the ladder one by one, Joe last.

They burst off the roof and down an alley, dogs and boys running at their side. Although Joe tried to hang back, sheer length of stride brought him to the front. There was a tunnel of shade, then the brilliant, droning heat of the plaza and a bigger crowd than before. All the northern roofs were crowded. Outsiders had doubled in number and spread across the whole southern side of the plaza. Only the watching priests and elders were the same, as if they hadn’t moved since morning. Joe expected that at any moment someone would shout, “That’s not a real clown, that’s Joe Peña!” He chased an old lady and a girl into the dancing line.

The entire plaza seemed to wheel around him. His paint was already washed with sweat. He saw Foote. Jaworski and Harvey had come. The drumming started. At the east end of the plaza, among the very last tourists, he saw the Service rider named Al. At the west end was Billy.

Just long enough for Roberto to get to the house, Joe told himself. As the circle of dancers began to turn he slipped through it and used it as a screen. The steps weren’t hard to pick up; a slow 4–4 beat. Hop, slide, half-turn. Without warning, the singers and drummer went to a fast 3–4, then back to the slow 4–4. Joe stumbled, but it was taken as a joke; after all, he was a clown.

The whole idea was that everyone did precisely the same step in the same way without embellishment or standing out. The circle was a cosmic gear moving clouds,
calling in game, drawing up corn. Any individuality was a loose screw.

“First the lightning flashes in the north, then the thunder rumbles, then the rain falls, because flowers are blooming,”
the singers sang.

Though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the dancers bounced happily, hop, turn, a cob in one hand, a lightning wand in the other. Their worn, clean coveralls and crisp dresses made them look like dolls of sober industry. The women and girls didn’t raise their knees as high as the men or stamp their heels as hard. But they recognized Joe; he saw their glances stealing toward him and caught their whispers when he so much as turned.

“In the fields you can see melon flowers,”
the singers sang,
“In the fields you can see corn flowers. In the fields the water bird sings and overhead the black clouds grow.”
A hundred dancers softly made the ground tremble.

One more revolution of the circle and he’d quit, Joe told himself. The circle moved so slowly, though. The entire population of Santiago seemed to be present, dancing or on the roofs, surrounding him and waiting for him to do something. So many of the women looked like Dolores. Not just Dolores the famous potter, but Dolores as a young woman, Dolores as a girl. Half-toe, turn.

Two of the clowns took folding chairs away from the ladies from Santa Fe and sat, pretending to gossip, put on lipstick, adjust girdles. A third patrolled the edges of the plaza, keeping back the spreading line of tourists. He threatened a spectator who had come halfway to
the circle from the east end. It was Billy trying to get a better look at Joe, and he ignored the tubby, old clown waving him back. When the clown uncoiled a whip and cracked it at Billy’s feet, he knocked the clown down.

The entire circle slowed, watching the confrontation. Joe saw the tribal policemen hanging back; they didn’t want a hassle with the Indian Service. Without being aware of it, Joe was through the dancers; he seemed to cover the distance to Ben in a few steps.

Billy pointed a warning finger as Joe stepped over Ben, took him by the front of his shirt, and with one hand lifted him high off the ground. The cowboy kicked and swung his fists while Joe carried him to where most of the crowd watched under the cottonwood. He had intended to set him down gently, but, released, Billy somehow flew over the first two rows of spectators to the base of the tree.

As the crowd retreated, Foote’s sombrero rolled forward. Chairs folded with claps. One man laughed. Al worked his way to Billy, laughing the whole time as if his friend had participated in a great joke. Clowns joined in as if Joe were fooling. Foote and the entourage from the Hill, Harvey, Gold and the tourists from Santa Fe started laughing anxiously because they wanted to believe it was a staged performance and the huge clown was nothing to be afraid of. Anna Weiss didn’t smile. She hadn’t stepped back. She watched Joe as if a giant had stepped out of the blue sky.

The drummer never missed a beat. The circle went on turning.

Afterwards, men who were clowns washed in the river a couple of miles outside Santiago. Since he wasn’t really a clown, Joe washed alone where cottonwood logs and sand had stopped up a pool. Thimbleberries with papery white buds grew thickly down to both shores. Slowly, black paint yielded to oatmeal soap and a yucca brush.

The sun was dazzling on the surface of the Rio. It took him a while to realize he was not alone, to see Anna watching from the smooth flank of a log that rose out of the sand.

In unit 20 at the Cordoba Motel, daylight was a hot white edge around the window blinds.

She twisted and spread herself, and as she settled into him, he put his hands on her hips and helped her down. Widening, her eyes never left his. Despite the drawn shades, she glowed, as if inner-lit. Yet her eyes were luminously dark, her hair was dark, the tips of her white breasts were dark. Deep inside her, he still rose. As if he had stepped off a high building a long time ago and only now was hitting ground. Falling and rising at the same time.