She sat with the sheets pulled around her and watched him get dressed. “I have been watching you for a long time,” she said. “I saw the color of your eyes.”
Tayo did not look at her.
“Mexican eyes,” he said, “the other kids used to tease me.”
The rain was only a faint sound on the roof, and the sound of the thunder was distant, and moving east. Tayo unbolted the door and opened it; he watched the rainwater pour out the rain gutter over the side of the long porch. “I always wished I had dark eyes like other people. When they look at me they remember things that happened. My mother.” His throat felt tight. He had not talked about this before with anyone.
She shook her head slowly. “They are afraid, Tayo. They feel something happening, they can see something happening around them, and it scares them. Indians or Mexicans or whites—most people are afraid of change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin, the same color of eyes, that nothing is changing.” She laughed softly. “They are fools. They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don’t have to think about what has happened inside themselves.”
She was looking at him intently, and he felt uncomfortable. He walked over to the doorway, aware of the damp earth smell outside. He had one hand on the screen door, ready to leave.
“You don’t have to understand what is happening. But remember this day. You will recognize it later. You are part of it now.” She was looking up, at the pine vigas that held the roof. She turned her head and smiled at him. “Ah, Tayo,” she said softly, and he felt that she cared a great deal about him.
“Good-bye,” he said. He pushed the screen door open, into the cool damp air outside. “Good-bye, Tayo. Thank you for bringing the message.”
He left Harley holding a bottle of Coors in both hands, talking to himself. He walked west. He could see the peaks of Mount Taylor high above everything, high above the valley. The thin winter snow was already gone from the high peaks, and the sacred mountain was a dusty, dry blue color. He could feel the heat from the ground through his boots, and shimmering waves of heat dance around him from the pavement, making him shaky, as though he were walking in a strong wind. The trucks and cars that went speeding past him made ripples in the heavy blanket of heat, but the air that circulated was only slightly cooler.
The old Mexican man brought him a bowl of menudo. They were alone in the little café. Tayo could see through the narrow kitchen to the back door, which was propped open with a chair so that cool air could find its way in and the hot air could leave by the front door, which was also open. On both screen doors the flies sat rubbing their legs together, waiting to get inside. The old man sat on a stool by the front door with a red rubber fly swatter in his right hand, watching them. Occasionally he glanced up at the low plaster ceiling, where a half dozen shiny yellow fly ribbons were hanging like party decorations. The ribbons were speckled with dead flies and a few that made feeble attempts to pull loose. He paid the old man and left, opening the screen door only enough to squeeze out and closing it quickly so that no flies got in. The sun was behind the hills southwest of McCartys by then, and he walked with the long shadows back to the bar to find Harley. He was thinking about the time when he was young and swatting flies in the kitchen with a willow switch because it was fun to chase them, not the serious business that the old Mexican man had made fly killing. Anyway, Josiah had come in from outside and he asked Tayo what he was doing, and Tayo had pointed proudly to a pile of dead flies on the kitchen floor. Josiah looked at them and shook his head.
“But our teacher said so. She said they are bad and carry sickness.”
“Well, I didn’t go to school much, so I don’t know about that but you see, long time ago, way back in the time immemorial, the mother of the people got angry at them for the way they were behaving. For all she cared, they could go to hell—starve to death. The animals disappeared, the plants disappeared, and no rain came for a long time. It was the greenbottle fly who went to her, asking forgiveness for the people. Since that time the people have been grateful for what the fly did for us.”
Tayo let the willow switch slide out of his hand. He stared at it on the floor by his feet. “What will happen now?” he asked in a choked voice.
“I think it will be okay,” Josiah said, poking at the dead flies with the toe of his boot. “None of them were greenbottle flies—only some of his cousins. People make mistakes. The flies know that. That’s how the greenbottle fly first came around anyway. To help the people who had made some mistakes.” He hugged the boy close. “Next time, just remember the story.”
But in the jungle he had not been able to endure the flies that had crawled over Rocky; they had enraged him. He had cursed their sticky feet and wet mouths, and when he could reach them he had smashed them between his hands.
Harley wasn’t there. The Mexican bartender had gone home, and now the white man who owned the place was behind the bar, dusting off the bottles with a rag. Tayo stood in the door and looked around inside, at the empty tables with crooked legs of different lengths. Someone had swept the floor, and the beer bottles and cigarette butts were piled high in the middle next to the broom leaning against the back of a chair. The stale bar air followed him out the door—smelling like old cigarette smoke and spilled beer. He stood outside facing the south, but all his feelings were focused behind him, northeast, in the direction of Cubero. He turned around. The yellow sandstone outcrop ran parallel to the big arroyo behind the bar. All he had to do was follow it. He walked to Cubero in the twilight, looking up occasionally at the mountain, where the peaks were caught in the sunset. It was warm. Over on the highway he could see headlights and taillights moving east and west, but he felt alone, as if that world were distant from him. No traffic came along the dirt road, and it was quiet except for the crickets in the rocks and a few evening insects buzzing past his face; in the distance dogs were barking. The store in Cubero was closed, and the gas pumps had locks on the handles. Somewhere he smelled chili cooking for supper. The road past the store was empty except for an old cow with a broken horn hanging near her face. He didn’t have to turn around to see the sunset.
The reflection of its colors made the sandstone cliffs bright gold, and then deep red. He sat on the steps of the long porch and looked at the adobe walls for a long time. Years of rain and wind had weathered away the adobe plaster, exposing the symmetry of the brown adobes which were beginning to lose their square shape, taking on the softer contours of the mesas and hills.
He remembered sitting this way, on these steps with Rocky, while Josiah went inside Lalo’s to get cold beer and bottles of soda pop for them. Lalo had retired during the war. He had sold the liquor license and closed the bar. But it had changed very little. The circular stairs were still there, at the end of the long porch. They had been cut from heavy oak planks, and they spiraled around the massive center timber like the small bones of a spine held in place by thick wooden pegs. Years of hands on the railing and feet on the steps had left the wood polished smooth and bone gray. The big tree was dying. Thick limbs at its center were brittle and white. One of the remaining live limbs brushed against the porch railing at the top of the stairs. He smelled the waxy dark green leaves, and remembered climbing the big cottonwood trees along the river and plucking heavy hanging bunches of cottonwood berries that grew on the female trees late in the summer. They had carried home armloads of the seed pods, the size of peas, full of fluffy cotton when they split open. The smell of the crushed leaves had been exciting then because the cottonwood berries were ammunition to use against the other boys from the village, who tucked their shirttails into their jeans and filled the inside of the shirts with cottonwood berries until they had pendulous bellies. Then they ran, laughing and throwing handfuls of the green berries at one another.
The cottonwood trees had not lost their familiar feeling with him. They had always been there with the people but they were much more than summer shade. After hundreds of years,
when the great trees finally got too old and dry, the Ka’t’sina carvers from the villages came searching for them to cut pieces of their soft dry wood to carve.
He sat down on the upstairs porch with his back against the adobe wall and closed his eyes. In a world of crickets and wind and cottonwood trees he was almost alive again; he was visible. The green waves of dead faces and the screams of the dying that had echoed in his head were buried. The sickness had receded into a shadow behind him, something he saw only out of the corners of his eyes, over his shoulder.
The place felt good; he leaned back against the wall until its surface pushed against his backbone solidly. He picked up a fragment of fallen plaster and drew dusty white stripes across the backs of his hands, the way ceremonial dancers sometimes did, except they used white clay, and not old plaster. It was soothing to rub the dust over his hands; he rubbed it carefully across his light brown skin, the stark white gypsum dust making a spotted pattern, and then he knew why it was done by the dancers: it connected them to the earth.
He became aware of the place then, of where he was. He had never seen her again after that day. The summer kept them busy, and by early September he and Rocky had enlisted and were gone. They said that she left after Josiah’s funeral, and nobody knew where she went, only that she walked to the highway with a suitcase.
The screen door was propped open against the side of the building with a large round sandrock. He expected the door to be locked when he turned the cut-glass knob, but it swung open. The room was empty. His steps inside sounded hollow, like a sandstone cave in the cliffs. The floor was covered with a layer of fine brown dust that had pushed under the door, and between the walls and the window sash; the dust drifted up in little clouds around his feet.
The white curtains were gone, and he could see through the doorway to a small back room. Whatever had been there, the music, the currents of air that had moved so restlessly that day, was gone. He looked for some signs of what had been there, but all that was left was a hole in the ceiling where the stove pipe had been.
He stood in the dim gray light, watching the darkness push between him and the bare room. He breathed deeply, trying to find a trace of the locust-blossom perfume, but all he smelled was the white clay plaster, as timeless as the cliffs where it came from.
He walked all the way to Casa Blanca, listening to the crickets scattered around him like the stars. He climbed the old ladder into the loft of the barn behind Harley’s grandpa’s house. It was a warm night; he lay down in the old hay and he slept all night without dreams.
Fly started sucking on
sweet things so
Hummingbird had to tell him
to wait:
“Wait until we see our mother.”
They found her.
They gave her blue pollen and yellow pollen
they gave her turquoise beads
they gave her prayer sticks.
“I suppose you want something,” she said.
“Yes, we want food and storm clouds.”
“You get old Buzzard to purify
your town first
and then, maybe, I will send you people
food and rain again.”
Fly and Hummingbird
flew back up.
They told the town people
that old Buzzard had to purify
the town.
“I’m feeling better,” Tayo said, “I’ve been doing okay. I can start helping you now.” He poured Robert a cup of coffee and carried it over to the table; his hands were shaking when he set the cup down. Robert didn’t say anything. He stirred the sugar into the coffee slowly, silently, as if getting ready to say something. Maybe there would always be those shadows over his shoulder and out of the corner of each eye; and in the nights the dreams and the voices. Maybe there was nothing anyone could do for him. Robert looked up at him. “The other day old man Ku’oosh came to the house. He told your grandma what some of the old men are thinking. They think you better get help pretty soon.”
“But I haven’t been in trouble for a long time, not since that time with Emo.”
“I know, but there are other things too.”
“Oh.” Tayo knew. There were other things. “It isn’t just me, Robert. The other guys, they’re still messed up too. That ceremony didn’t help them.”
Robert didn’t answer. His face was still; Tayo didn’t know the last few minutes if it was anger or sadness he saw. He got up from the table slowly; all his energy had drained out of him.
“I’ll go,” he said softly, “whatever they say.”
The old feeling was back again. He wanted to fade until he was as flat as his own hand looked, flat like a drawing in the sand which did not speak or move, waiting for the wind to come swirling along the ground and blow the lines away. He could hear what Auntie would have to say; he could see her rigid face, her jaws clenched against the things which were being said about him in the village. He would let them take him—whatever they wanted, because they were right. They’d always been right about him.
“The traveling made me tired. But I remember when we drove through Gallup. I saw Navajos in torn old jackets, standing outside the bars. There were Zunis and Hopis there too, even a few Lagunas. All of them slouched down against the dirty walls of the bars along Highway 66, their eyes staring at the ground as if they had forgotten the sun in the sky; or maybe that was the way they dreamed for wine, looking for it somewhere in the mud on the sidewalk. This is us, too, I was thinking to myself. These people crouching outside bars like cold flies stuck to the wall.”
They parked the truck by the Trailways bus station and walked across the railroad tracks. It was still early in the morning, and the shadows around the warehouses and buildings were long. The streets were empty, and on a Saturday morning in Gallup, Tayo knew what they would see. From the doorway of a second-hand store he could see feet, toes poking through holes in the socks. Someone sleeping off the night before, but without his boots now, because somebody had taken them to trade for a bottle of cheap wine. The guy had his head against the door; his brown face was peaceful and he was snoring loudly. Tayo smiled. Gallup was that kind of place, interesting, even funny as long as you were just passing through, the way the white tourists did driving down 66, stopping to see the Indian souvenirs. But if you were an Indian, you attended to business and then left, and you were never in that town after dark. That was the warning the old Zunis, and Hopis, and Navajos had about Gallup. The safest way was to avoid bad places after dark.
The best time to see them was at dawn because after the sun came up they would be hiding or sleeping inside shelters of old tin, cardboard, and scrap wood. The shelters were scattered along the banks of the river. Some of them were in the wide arroyo that the creek cut through Gallup, but the others were in the salt-cedar and willow thickets that grew along the stream banks. Twice, or maybe three times a year, the police and the welfare people made a sweep along the river, arresting the men and women for vagrancy and being drunk in public, and taking the children away to the Home. They were on the north side of town anyway, Little Africa, where blacks, Mexicans, and Indians lived; and the only white people over there were Slav storekeepers. They came at Gallup Ceremonial time to clean up before the tourists came to town. They talked about sanitation and safety as they dragged the people to the paddy wagons; in July and August sudden cloudbursts could fill the arroyos with flood water and wash the shelters away.
They had been born in Gallup. They were the ones with light-colored hair or light eyes, bushy hair and thick lips—the ones the women were ashamed to send home for their families to raise. Those who did not die grew up by the river, watching their mothers leave at sundown. They learned to listen in the darkness, to the sounds of footsteps and loud laughing, to voices and sounds of wine; to know when the mother was returning with a man. They learned to stand at a distance and see if she would throw them food—so they would go away to eat and not peek through the holes in the rusting
tin, at the man spilling wine on himself as he unbuttoned his pants.
They found their own places to sleep because the men stayed until dawn. Before they knew how to walk, the children learned how to avoid fists and feet.
When she woke up at noon she would call the child to bring her water. The lard pail was almost empty; the water looked rusty. He waited until she crawled to the opening. He watched her throat moving up and down as she drank; he tried to look inside to see if she had brought food, but the sun was high now and the inside of the shelter was in shadow. She dropped the pail when it was empty and crawled back inside. “Muh!” he called to her because he was hungry and he had found no food that morning. The woman with the reddish colored hair, the one who used to feed him, was gone. Her shelter was already torn down, taken away in pieces by others in the arroyo. He had prowled for garbage in the alleys behind the houses, but the older children had already been there. He turned away from the shelter and looked up at the traffic on the bridge. Once he had crawled up there and stood on the bridge, looking down at the shelter, and then around at the street where it crossed the tracks; he could even see downtown. She had taken him with her when he was very small. He remembered the brightness of the sun, the heat, all the smells of cars and food cooking, the noise, and the people. He remembered the inside, the dark, the coolness, and the music. He lay on his belly with his chin on the wooden floor and watched the legs and the shoes under the tables, the legs moving across the floor; some moved slowly, some stumbled. He searched the floor until he found a plastic bar straw, and then he played with piles of cigarette butts he had gathered. When he found chewing gum stuck beneath the tables, he put it in his mouth and tried to keep it, but he always swallowed it. He could not remember when he first knew that cigarettes would make him vomit if he ate them. He played for hours under the tables, quiet, watching for someone to drop a potato-chip bag or a wad of gum. He learned about coins, and searched for them, putting them in his mouth when he found them. Once they had lived somewhere else, a place full of food. He dreamed about that place in the past, and about a red blanket that was warm and moved rhythmically like breathing.
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