Ceremony

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  These Laguna guys were fun all right. And they sure spent their money. She didn’t even know if there would be any money left when she asked them to help her out a little. Her roommates got tired of helping her out. They thought she was a secretary; they kept asking her what she did with all her money. She lied; she said she had to send it back home to Emma and the girls. She got dressed every day and left for work when they did. She changed her clothes in the ladies’ lounge. But it wasn’t working out. The man at the theater waited for her now; he watched her go down to the ladies’ lounge. She wasn’t surprised the day she heard the door open and close and she saw his brown shoes under the door of the toilet stall.

  These Indians who fought in the war were full of stories about all the places they’d seen. San Diego, Oakland, Germany, the Philippines. The first few times she heard them talk, she believed everything. That was right after she got to town, and the girls took her out one weekend. She had walked around, staring up at the tall buildings, and all the big neon signs on Central Avenue. Every time she rode an elevator then, she thought of the old people at home, who shook their heads at the mention of elevators and tall buildings or juke boxes that could play a hundred different records. The old Utes said it was a lie; there were no such things. But she saw it every day, and for a long time when she saw these things, she felt embarrassed for the old people at home, who did not believe in these things. So she was careful not to make the same kind of mistake herself; and she believed all the stories the guys told. They had ribbons and medals they carried in their wallets; and if the U.S. Government decorated them, they must be okay.

  She knew where to find them—which downtown bars they liked. She knew the veterans’ disability checks came out around the first of the month. She learned these things after she quit her job at the Kimo. She walked by the El Fidel, that day she quit, and she could hear them laughing and whooping it up inside, so she knew they were Indians. That day she went in only to ask for a loan, because the girls were getting behind with the rent. The guys told her to sit down. She asked for a Coke, and they told the bartender to put rum in it.

  “How do you like that!” they said, laughing and patting each other on the back. “Nothing like this at Towac, huh?”

  She sat with them all afternoon. It was dim in there, and cool because they had a table near the fan. In July the streets and sidewalks were too hot to touch. She looked for work, but every day when it started to get hot, she walked past the El Fidel to see who was there. They were happy to see her; they introduced her to their other buddies. Late in the afternoon, when she got up to leave, she would ask someone to help her out a little. By then they would be feeling pretty good. Someone always helped her out with five or maybe ten dollars. “We used to do this every night during the war,” one of them told her. “In San Diego one time, we bought the whole bar—all the soldiers and their girls—a round of drinks. That bartender shook his head; he told us, ‘I know it’s you Indians, without even looking. No one ever did that until the Indian soldiers came around.’”

  They told her other stories too. Later on, when they started looking at her and sitting closer to her. The sergeant from Isleta still wore his khaki shirt with the stripes on the arm. As he reached over to pour her more beer, he rubbed his shaky arm against her side to feel the swell of her breast. She wasn’t surprised then either. She knew if they helped her out, they would get friendly with her too. He had already told her a story about blowing up a bunker full of Japs. The story ended with him pulling out his wallet to show her a little bronze star on a blue ribbon. “Another thing was the women. The white women in California. Boy! You never saw anything like it! They couldn’t get enough of us, huh?” “No!” all the others at the table would shout. “See,” the sergeant said, looking a little crookedly at her, “I’ll tell you about this one who was in love with me.” He nodded deliberately. “Yeah, she was. I told her I was already married back home, but she didn’t care. Boy, you shoulda seen her blond hair! She had it all curled. And she was built like this up front.” He held his brown hands out in front of his chest and grinned at the others. He turned back to her and breathed heavily into her ear. “Hey, let’s go someplace where I can tell you about it.”

  But she didn’t want to go with him. “Tell me here,” she said, “I want to finish my drink.”

  “Her name was Doreen. She only needed the money because her mother was a cripple. She wasn’t like the others. She went with me because she loved me. I could still have her if I went back to California.”

  One of the guys at the table, an Apache, yelled at the Isleta sergeant. “She told that to all the guys. Doreen. That’s what she called herself. Sure she liked Indians! Because they were dumb guys like you!”

  The Apache had been watching Helen Jean; he had been watching the Isleta rub up against her. The Isleta grabbed her arm. “Let’s go,” he said. She didn’t move. The Apache jumped up, ready to fight.

  “She doesn’t want to go with you,” the Apache said.

  The Isleta turned to her; his eyes were pinched with rage. “You bitch! You think you’re better than a white woman?” He slapped her across the face. Her teeth cut her tongue and the inside of her mouth. Tears ran down her face. The Apache grabbed him, and they started pushing at each other, in a staggering circle on the dance floor. The other guys were cheering for a fight. They forgot about her.

  She knew all the stories, about white women in San Diego and Oakland and L.A. Always blond or redhead, nice girls with sick or crippled parents at home. It didn’t make any difference to her. They drank until they couldn’t walk without holding on to her. She asked them for money then, money to send back to Emma at Towac: for the little girls. Then they stumbled up the steps to the Hudson Hotel. If she took long enough in the toilet, they usually passed out on the bed.

  Even in the wintertime, when the rooms at the Hudson were cold and the window by the bed had frost on it, they sweated beer; and they lay on her so heavily that it was difficult to breathe. Their mouths were wet and soured with beer, and when they pushed themselves down on her, they felt small and soft between her thighs. She stared at the stains on the ceiling, and waited until they gave up or fell asleep, and then she rolled out from under them.

  She looked at these Laguna guys. They had been treated first class once, with their uniforms. As long as there had been a war and the white people were afraid of the Japs and Hitler. But these Indians got fooled when they thought it would last. She was tired of pretending with them, tired of making believe it had lasted. It was almost a year since she had left Towac. There was something about Gallup that made her think about it. She didn’t like the looks of the Indian women she saw in Gallup, dancing at Eddie’s club with the drunks that stumbled around the floor with them. Their hair was dirty and straight. They’d shaved off their eyebrows, but the hairs were growing back and they didn’t bother to pencil them any more. Their blouses had buttons missing and were fastened with safety pins. Their western pants were splitting out at the seams; there were stains around the crotch.

  She reached into her purse for the little pink compact and looked in the mirror. Her hair was cut short and was tightly curled. It needed to be washed, but at least it wasn’t long or straight. She touched up her left eyebrow and put on lipstick. She didn’t like the looks of the country around here either. Rocks and sand, arroyos and no trees. After spending all her life at Towac, she didn’t need to be wasting her time there, in the middle of nowhere, some place worse than the reservation she had left. If she hung around any longer with these guys, that’s how she’d end up. Like the rest of the Indians. She smiled at the Mexican; he winked at her. He had the cash from his railroad pay check on the table in front of him. He’d help her out, give her some to send back to Towac. And this time she was really going to send some money to Emma, and she wasn’t going to waste any more time fooling around with Indian war heroes.

  He sat back in the chair and rested his head against the cool plaster wall. Throu
gh 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.

  Then he told them he would gamble with them—

  their clothes, their beads for his.

  Most people wore their old clothes

  when they went hunting in the mountains;

  so they figured they didn’t have much to lose.

  Anyway, they might win all his fine things.

  Not many could pass up his offer.

  But the people didn’t know.

  They ate the blue cornmeal

  he offered them.

  They didn’t know

  he mixed human blood with it.

  Visitors who ate it

  didn’t have a chance.

  He got power over them that way,

  and when they started gambling with him

  they did not stop until they lost

  everything they owned.

  And when they were naked

  and he had everything

  he’d say

  “I tell you what

  since I’m so good and generous

  I’ll give you one last chance.

  See that rawhide bag hanging

  on the north wall over there?

  If you can guess what is in that bag

  I’ll give you
back all your clothes and beads

  and everything I have here too—

  these feather blankets

  all these strings of coral beads

  these fine white buckskin moccasins.

  But if you don’t guess right

  you lose your life.”

  They were in his power.

  They had lost everything.

  It was their last chance.

  So they usually said “okay”

  but they never guessed

  what was in the bag.

  He hung them upside down in his storeroom,

  side by side with the other victims.

  He cut out their hearts

  and let their blood run down

  into the bins of blue cornmeal.

  That is what the ck’o’yo Kaup’a’ta, Gambler did,

  up there

  in the Zuni mountains.

  And one time

  he even captured the stormclouds.

  He won everything from them

  but since they can’t be killed,

  all he could do

  was lock them up

  in four rooms of his house—

  the clouds of the east in the east room

  the clouds of the south in the south room

  the clouds of the west in the west room

  the clouds of the north in the north room.

  The Sun is their father.

  Every morning he wakes them up.

  But one morning he went