Vanishing Act (13 page)

When the sun started to fill the room they turned the lights off and made breakfast. As they washed and dried the dishes at Jimmy’s sink, Felker said, "What’s next?"

Jane pulled the plug in the sink and let the water go out. "We need to sleep." She had kept it up for almost twenty-four hours now. She wasn’t sure she had burned the dream out of her mind, but she knew she hadn’t been doing him any good for the past hour or two. "If you wake up before I do, spend the time thinking about the future. Try to pick out things you’re not sure about. Forget the past. There’s nothing deader than that."

14

Jane woke up in the dark room. She felt agitated, troubled. There was a throbbing of drums far off, and then the voices of the people singing the Ga-dashote. The chorus of voices in the first column of dancers was singing, "Ga no oh he yo," and the other column of dancers would answer, "Wa ha ah he yo."

"Are you awake?" Felker was in the room.

"Yes," she said. She pulled the covers up to her neck and sat up. "What is it?"

"I was going to ask you the same thing."

She laughed. "I’m sorry. You startled me. Are you dressed?"

"Sure. As soon as I heard the war drums, I figured I’d better."

"Give me a minute."

She watched his shadow slip out and the door close. Then she got out of bed, turned on the light, and searched her bag for clean clothes while she tried to bring her mind back up from the panicky feeling she had gotten in the deep, restless sleep. She caught sight of herself in the mirror on Jimmy’s dresser when she stepped into her jeans. She looked frightened.

She walked out into the living room, brushing her hair. "Mattie will be here in a few minutes to find out why we’re not at the dance."

"Shouldn’t we wait for her?"

"No. If we don’t go now, we’re being rude." They walked out into the field and headed for a long, low building a distance off. There were lights, cars, and the sound of the drums and voices. "It’s not a war dance, by the way. It’s called the Trotting Dance. It’s the first dance you do in a big celebration."

"What are we celebrating?"

"Thanks to the Maple."

"You mean the tree?"

"It’s the first big party of the year, because the first good thing in the spring is that the maple sap starts running. Then there’s the Green Corn Festival, Strawberry Festival, Harvest, New Year’s. You know, the usual."

"New Year’s I know about. What do they do on New Year’s?"

"They used to strangle a white dog and hang it on a pole."

"The usual."

"And then they’d have the guessing of dreams."

"That sounds like fun. Did you just have a dream?"

"Yes."

"Can I guess it?"

"No."

As they walked through the cool night air toward the low building, the music seemed to grow louder. The doors, one on each end of the building, kept opening to let more people inside, and each time a light would shine out into the darkness and the sound of the singing would rise. The beat of the drums and the squash-shell rattles were amplified by the thumping of hundreds of feet.

When they reached the edge of the light shining from the doorway, Felker stood still and listened. "Getting shy?" Jane asked.

"A little." The music changed. It slowed down, and this time a lone male voice that reminded Felker of a zydeco singer, with breaks and falls in his clear baritone, sang, "Ya ha we ya ha!" and the two or three hundred voices, men and women and children, chanted, "Ha ha." "I’ve got to wonder what they’re going to think of me."

She reached out and touched him. She put her arm through his and gently tugged him toward the building. "Think of it as a Polish wedding. Everybody is welcome and everybody is here."

He started to walk along with her again. "That I can understand. Just like in St. Louis."

"Not like St. Louis," she said. "This is Poland."

The door swung open and they were inside. The room was a big public meeting hall, with benches along one wall but bare otherwise. The people were in four giant moving circles, one inside the other. As the outer circle passed by them, here and there a brown face would grin at Jane or a head would toss its long black hair to reveal glittering almond eyes that focused on her and only passed shyly across Felker. But there were other faces he would not have expected to see here— people with white skin and light hair who didn’t look any more like Indians than he did. He started to feel less conspicuous.

Jane tugged his arm again to pull his head closer and said into his ear, "Remember, Polish wedding. Join the fun and you’re a guest. Stand around and you’re a stranger."

Felker took a deep breath and stepped forward to enter the outer circle, but once again Jane held his arm. "Boys in front, girls in back." She pushed him into the line in the middle of a string of men. Three little girls who had seen him try to step in among them giggled, careful not to look at him. He saw Jane slip into an inner line between Mattie Wilson and a woman in her late twenties, who looked over her shoulder to clasp Jane’s hand and then release it. They danced until people were hot and winded, and then the leader stopped singing.

Suddenly, Felker heard an unearthly noise, like a dozen men growling and bellowing. The drums started again, and people grinned and backed off the floor. A strong hand gripped his arm. He turned to see an old man with skin like the brown leather on Jane’s bag. He was grinning so his black eyes narrowed. "Come on," the old man said. "You’ll get trampled."

Felker walked with the old man to the bench by the wall. "I’m Basil Henrick," said the old man.

"John Felker." He shook the old man’s hand.

The door on the east end of the building flew open and ten men danced into the room wearing dark blue carved wooden masks with pointed leather ears and tufts of fur on top, huge eyes, and big teeth. They grumbled and grunted, bent over and glared at the people gathered around the walls. As he watched, he saw one of them pass Jane, who was on the other side of the building with about five young women. Some of the women wore Indian skirts with elaborate embroidered pictures on them and a loose red tunic above, dangling earrings, and big silver brooches like plates. Others were dressed like Midwestern farm girls after church, in modest dresses, skirts, and sweaters. They all seemed amused by the men in the masks, who were now roaring and grunting as they danced.

"This is the Buffalo Dance," said Basil Henrick.

"Buffalo Dance?" said Felker. "I didn’t know there were buffalo around here."

This seemed to please Basil Henrick. "There weren’t. War parties ran into herds of buffalo around the Kentucky salt lick." He stared at the dancers and nodded his head to the beat of the drums. "They said, ’What in the hell are those?’ Couldn’t get over it."

Felker found himself smiling. "What were they doing way down there?"

"Fighting Cherokees. They fought pretty regularly everywhere from Maine to South Carolina, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. Any place farther than that, I figure they just went once in a while to steal women." The old man looked at Felker. "You know Janie from college?"

"No," said Felker. "I met her through a mutual friend."

"Yeah," said Basil. "You look over there at Janie, the first thing you notice ain’t her mind. You don’t say, ’Now, there’s a scholar.’ " He gave a hoot, then said, "Her daddy used to bring her up here when she was little. They’d go up to Toronto and see a show or something and then come down here and put on the blanket and be Indians again. Fine man. When he fell, must have been five or six hundred people went to the mourning council down in Tonawanda."

"Fell? What do you mean?"

"He was working a construction job. Big bridge out west somewhere. A cable snapped and down he went."

"Terrible," said Felker.

"It’s good money, and the Iroquois crews have always been able to get work because we’re not afraid of heights, but people die."

"You’re really not afraid of heights?"

Basil shrugged. "I sure as hell am. I was a railroad man myself. I got to see plenty, but I saw it from ground level. I think the part about not being afraid is bullshit. An Iroquois just trains himself to tolerate it. They used to say a warrior needed a skin seven thumbs thick." He pinched his arm. "Mine is maybe five thumbs thick."

The buffalo dancers danced out the door to cheers from the crowd.

"She putting you up at Jimmy’s?"

"Yes," said Felker.

"I figured. Mattie loves to have young people around."

"Has she brought other people for visits? I mean, strangers?"

Basil looked at him slyly. "Can’t say."

The drums grew louder, there were rattles and clicking sticks, and the door flew open again. This time it was twenty-five men, all in breechcloths and paint, wearing feathers and bells on their knees, ankles, and arms. The dance was quick with sharp, violent movements, and the music was different now.

"What’s this one?" asked Felker.

"War Dance. The Wa-sa-seh, that’s the real name. It means Sioux dance. I figure when Great-Great-Grandpa had fought his way past the Mississippi, that’s who he ran into in the open country. It made an impression."

"They lost?"

"My guess is that’s an understatement. A war party that far out was probably no more than thirty fellows. On the average day out there, it wouldn’t have been too hard to run into a couple hundred Sioux warriors out for their morning pony ride, and those guys weren’t about to take any shit from us. Grandpa probably beat it back to the woods as quick as he could."

"You sound like you wish you’d seen it."

"With binoculars," said Basil. "Not up close. In the good old days, sometime around 1650, they took a census. They put one kernel of corn in a big basket for each person. That would have been maybe seventeen or eighteen thousand people. Throw in the rest of the Iroquois tribes, it was maybe fifty thousand. That’s not a lot to fight the whole world."

When the warriors disappeared, Felker looked for Jane, but he couldn’t pick her out in the crowd. Two men walked to the middle of the floor and sat down face to face, with a drum and a pair of rattles. They sat quietly talking to each other for a few seconds, and nobody paid much attention to them beyond not stepping on them. Finally, the drum and the rattles started, the two men nodding their heads together to keep time, and at an invisible signal they began to sing.

"Fish Dance," said Basil. "Come on. I’ll show you."

He waited for the column of dancers to pass, then stepped into its wake, dancing backward, and pulled Felker with him.

Felker’s eye caught a movement to the side, and he turned to face Basil. As he did, Jane stepped between them and began to dance with Basil. Two young women Jane had been talking to across the room stepped in together and began to dance with Felker.

"Two partners, John," said Basil. "Only honored guests get two."

Felker grinned and gave a little bow to his two dancing partners. They were both dressed in Indian skirts, with elaborate embroidery at the hem and up the front to look like flowers. They had deerskin leggings with a slit in the front to show the beadwork on their moccasins, and they wore long silver earrings that glinted against their long black hair. All of their movements were precisely simultaneous. When they turned to dance forward, they spun like a pair of matched horses and took him by surprise so he had to glance over his shoulder to be sure he could change direction without stumbling.

The two singers in the middle picked up the pace gradually, and their volume went up with it. In the noise of the feet of so many dancers and the song of the two men, it was possible to forget that this was a world that was gone. The two young women were unmistakably a kind of offering to a warrior who had come in from some battle, and they were still that. They weren’t some pale echo of an old tradition because here they still were, no less real than they had ever been. They were more than a ceremonial welcome, more than a symbol of abundance: They were the antidote to death. Their ornaments said so. It was written in all the colorful flowers embroidered on the clothes of these women from a nation that was always at war.

The dance ended and the two women shook his hand. One of them said, "I’m Emma. You’re catching on very well."

Felker said, "Thank you. I appreciate your giving me a chance to learn." In his peripheral vision he was watching as the other girl whispered something to Jane, who made a wry face and pinched her so she had to retreat, laughing.

The music started again, and Jane stepped in front of Felker and began to dance. "Enjoying yourself?"

"I’ve been in tighter spots than this," he said. He glanced around. "Hey, my interpreter’s gone. What’s this one called?"

She said, "It’s called Shaking the Bush."

The people regrouped as the clear, melodious voices of the singers cut through their murmuring. Emma stood before a young man who looked like an Indian warrior in a movie, and Felker recognized him as one of the war dancers. The warrior and Felker were shoulder to shoulder, dancing with Emma and Jane. All over the room these double pairs formed, the women choosing their partners and then all four dancing to the sound of the drums and rattles.

In the heat and the noise, Felker’s mind began to lose the simple habit of insisting that it see only what was in front of his eyes. He looked across at Jane in her blue jeans and white blouse, and Emma in her costume of an ancient Seneca woman, and the two images began to merge and then to trade places. There was no difference at all. They could have been sisters—for all he knew, were sisters in the strange, ornate family system they had—or even the same girl seen at different times or in different aspects, like a ghost. Emma was smiling, but Jane was staring straight into his eyes, as though she was reading something there.

He studied her closely and then said, "Why is it called Shaking the Bush?"

"It just is."

He leaned closer and realized that her eyes were glistening, welling up. "What’s the matter?"

"Nothing," she said, and quickly looked away. After a second she brushed her sleeve across her eyes and looked straight into his gaze again, unflinching.

After a time the music stopped. The man who had been singing stood up and gave a loud and apparently serious harangue in Seneca. Women went to the end of the room and collected covered dishes and put jackets on sleepy children. Young couples drifted out into the darkness with their arms around each other.

Felker and Jane walked in silence across the dark field. The night was still and cold now, and their breath puffed little clouds of steam into it. Jane said, "Well, what did you think?"

"I think the world got screwed up when we stopped living in villages. Having tribes, I guess. There were tribes in Scotland, where my family came from. They painted themselves blue and went out to throw stones at the Romans."