Dust Devil

by Bonds, Parris Afton

  "You said you were bored. Wait. If you change your mind. I’ll see that you get back.”

  Christina did not miss the implications in his words. Chase Strawhand was not a man to be gelded. He would probably send her back with some fat, blanketed chief with a stovepipe hat jammed on his head. Well, this is what she had wanted. And being out under the stars with a man like Chase, even if he was not wild for her like Serge, was better than suffocating at the tedious ball. And where was Serge? she wondered. The latest gossip had it that he had followed up her rejection by pursuing Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress—or was it the movie actress, Alice Faye?

  Chase maneuvered his Torpedo Ford through the flow of horses and buckboards, past the main grounds of the pueblo where most of the tourists would be found on a weekend snapping away with their Kodak Brownies. "We’re not stopping here?”

  Chase shook his head. "Un-uhh. Further back in the canyon of the pueblo reservation is a small band of Navajos. They’ll be having their own ceremony tonight.”

  "At the church?” she asked, somewhat skeptically.

  "Mmm-huh.” Chase kept his attention on the road as the Ford bounced over a series of ruts.

  The January air was colder there where it whistled down the narrow valleys, and Christina shivered despite the heavy mink coat. Then, back in the trees a dim light flickered, growing steadier as they neared a log and mud hogan. Four or five ponies and a Model-T were off to the hogan’s left near a lean-to.

  Her desire for the warmth of the cabin drained as Chase switched off the engine. A ribbon of mist swirled about the hogan. From inside came mournful wailing occasionally broken by a shrill chant. "Will they be angry — that you’ve brought me?”

  Chase’s expression was unfathomable. "I think the shaman’s expecting you.”

  * * * * *

  Christina smiled, uncertain if Chase was joking. And he was not sure himself. The previous summer he had made a cursory tour of the pueblos along the Rio Grande to get a better idea of how much of the flood control project was involved in the Conservancy Act. At one pueblo he had stopped before an old shaman who was sandpainting. Half¬fascinated — half-derisive, Chase had stood with the crowd of tourists and watched the old man dribble the colored powders on the ground, painting some ancient divinity.

  The chanting that accompanied the sandpainting meant little to Chase. But there was something commanding about the shaman who looked almost mummified. Furrows ribbed the taut skin about the great hawklike nose, and long, straggly, bone-white hair framed the arresting face. About one veined wrist was an unusually designed bracelet of silver and turquoise.

  After some minutes Chase realized the old man’s piercing gaze had singled him out from the crowd of tourists. Still in a sing-song chant, the shaman began to speak to Chase in the common Navajo. "There is a medicine hogan — not meant for tourists’ eyes. Come some evening, and I shall tell you of the Long Walk made by your mother’s mother.”

  Chase’s laugh had been mocking, "Your hocus-pocus won’t work on me, grandfather,” he replied, uncaring that the tourists stared at him now during this incomprehensible interchange. "My mother’s mother was a white woman.” That much he knew for sure, reluctantly revealed to him by his father. That and the information that his mother’s father had been a Navajo of the Tahtchini clan.

  The shaman let the sand play out between his horny fingers, never looking at the form the grains made. "Nevertheless your mother’s mother made the Long Walk. You will make the Long Walk.” His eyes at last released Chase, and Chase felt as if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers.

  "You are old, grandfather. You don’t know what you say.” Without looking up this time from the sandpainting he continued to make, the old man said, "Bring the woman of the moon. Her pale beams reflect on your past.”

  Glad that he had broken away from the traditional superstition that bound so many of his people to ignorance, Chase had turned away with a half-pitying, half-scornful laugh for the old-timer, who was known as Guayo Santiago.

  But, curiously, over the past months he had been drawn back to the medicine hogan on the few weekends he had no assignments due or research work needed for AID. And each time the old man had mentioned the pale moon woman.

  No one looked up when Chase and Christina entered. Seven other people lined the sides of the octagonal log hogan. Smoke drifted up from the firepit through the smoke vent in he center of the hogan. But it was not the smoke that pervaded the small room with the acrid smell.

  The smell was that of peyote. Although the possession of peyote was a crime under New Mexican law, the Indians were subject only to federal law, and under federal ruling peyote was not a narcotic and could thus be used in the religious ceremonies of the Native American Church.

  On the room’s west side the old shaman sat near a half-formed sandpainting. To his left was another Indian with a massive, bulldog face. "That is Cedar Chief,” Chase whispered. He will help the Road Priest, the old man making the sand-painting, by sprinkling powdered juniper on the fire. Before Road Chief is the altar — there, with the large peyote blossom.”

  Christina wrinkled her nose at the bitter smell, and he said, "It’s the peyote you smell. Later, when the Road Chiefreadies the kettle drum and the ceremonial praying and singing begin, you’ll smoke the peyote.”

  "I think I’d rather have one of my own cigarettes, thank you.”

  He shrugged. "You might change your mind. Wait.”

  He took a seat on the dirt floor, cross-legged, and Christina did likewise, carefully arranging her skirts and floor-length fur coat around her.

  Sacramental food was passed around, a pozole of corn, and the mournful wailing began again. A person here, an old woman there. "They are confessing their sins,” Chase explained in a whisper.

  A middle-aged woman with a rebozo covering her head began weeping, and Christina said, "Good Lord, if I began confessing my sins we’d be here all night.”

  "We will be.”

  She rolled her eyes upward, muttering, “What have I gotten myself into?”

  The old man whom Chase had named Road Chief began stopping before each person with a shallow basket filled with what appeared to be rolled cigarettes.

  "Take one,” Chase advised. "You’re about to begin your journey on the Peyote Road.”

  "And Daddy warned me against smoking,” Christina said with a mocking sigh as she took one.

  Road Chief returned to his place before the sand-painting. Cedar Chief began the slow, steady beat of the hollow, deep kettle drum. It was eerie — the weeping and wailing of confession, the ceremonial praying, the singing and smoking.

  “It’s pleasant,” Christina murmured, “but not as strong as I had expected. But shortly after midnight the old Road Chief passed about peyote buds that had been sliced and dried. One bite, and Christina had to know she was taking her Road Trip.

  A Road Trip was like a series of timed depth charges. Chase, watching her, could judge her progress from his own past experience. The unsettling of the stomach, and thirty minutes later, the flushed face. Pupils dilating, salivation increasing. Christina’s eyes grew wider, and she smiled — a slow smile, and he recognized she was experiencing a sense of exhilaration, like the swift intake of pure oxygen.

  His own exhilaration was more muted, more reverent. The old Religion of the Gods formed more a part of his introspective thoughts than he realized — despite the fact he had denied both the old gods and the white man’s God the missionaries at the Indian boarding school had so vainly tried to instill in him.

  He could interpret by Christina’s closed eyes that she was focusing her own energies inward. As for him, ideas seemed to flow as rapidly in Chase’s head as the hummingbird. He was on an intense plateau, and his thoughts were uncannily luminous. He would rule the white man, not the other way around. He would make the laws. He would rule with the white woman beside him. Of course, that was what Road Chief, Guayo Santiago, had been telling him!

  It was a
dawn to dusk affair, and with the first light of the sun the religious services ended. The attendants moved awkwardly, but there were no aftereffects. Chase helped Christina to the Ford. Her lovely pale-green eyes were glazed, but he could not tell if it was from the lack of sleep or the shock of her experience.

  "Whhew!” she breathed after she had settled her long skirts inside the car and tucked her loose wisps of hair back into the fashionable pompadour. She flashed him a smile that was touched with embarrassment. '"Leaping Lizards,’ as Little Orphan Annie would say. That was some experience! I knew I had the solution to the world’s problems sometime during the night, but it seems to have slipped away.”

  "It’s customary now to take a steam bath to purify yourself,” Chase said as he whipped the car around and headed back down the bumpy, overgrown road.

  For him, every nuance, every gesture, was magnified. He caught the tell-tale pulse beating at her throat and forced himself to breathe deeply, slowly.

  “My father will probably have the state police out searching for me, but I’m not ready for our adventure to end.”

  He was not yet ready for the night to end either. He wanted Christina now more than he had ever wanted anything, and it had nothing to do with the peyote experience. She was the embodiment of beauty, womanhood, and power; she possessed the strength and grace of the female puma . . . and he would tame her.

  "There is a summer hogan,” he said slowly as the idea took shape in his head. His smile was wicked now, all male. "Not a sweathouse like our people use. But it’s empty now with the winter here. However, we could manage to sweat away our impurities there.”

  She slid him an inquiring gaze but didn’t reply and uttered no complaint even though he half¬dragged her through rough undershrub when the Ford could go no further, tearing the frothy organdy and net gown.

  A cool mist still hovered in the morning air. Further through the trees he spotted the summer hogan. Beehive-shaped, it was formed of stout pinon poles overlaid with thick evergreens. Scrutinizing through the half-open door, he was conscious of a warm darkness broken by shafts of dawn’s light that poked through the leaves and filled the central smoke-hole. Inside the sweet smell of the night’s dampness pervaded everything, awaiting the two of them.

  He pushed the door wide for their entry, and Christina let the mink coat slide to the earthen floor and turned to face him. He saw the pulse beating at the hollow of her neck, and saw both her fear and her thrill. She was readied to be mastered.

  He buried his hands in her hair, tearing loose the carefully arranged rolls of curls. He hurt her, but he could not but take now how she trembled with the pain he caused and her justified expectation of pleasure that was to come.

  * * * * *

  The gown tore away easily beneath his determined hands, and Christina wondered how she would ever get past her father’s gimlet eye. "I’m a grown woman,” she thought rebelliously. "I don’t have to answer to him.”

  Then all thought was driven from her mind as Chase’s mouth scorched a passionate path from her parted lips to her eyelids and brushed the shell of her ear before nuzzling the hollow at the base of her neck. Her head lolled backward. "Oh, love me, Chase,” she whispered when his head moved lower to the bare breasts exposed above the wire strapless bra.

  She watched breathlessly as he pulled away and shed his tuxedo — and the last vestiges of civilization. Petting in the rumble seat after a date at the ice cream parlor had revealed to Christina the composition of the male sex. But Chase’s coppery physique, corded with muscles by years of hard work during the summer in the Kansas beet fields as a child and later, after he had graduated, as a lumberjack, made that of her college dates seem immature in comparison.

  Her fingers fumbled at the waistband of her long silk slip, and her nylons, garter belt, and panties fell away — as the remnants of her reticence fell away. After twenty-four years of waiting, she was ready now. Ready for Chase. Wanting him, needing him, immediately. She wrapped her arms about his shoulders, pulling him down into her own soft, sweet dampness.

  Chase took her there at his own leisure tempo on the deep, luxuriant fur of her mink coat with a slow pounding, driving tempo that wracked her body, so that the initial pain was diluted by the intensity of their need. Perspiration rolled off both of them to fall on the fur. Christina thought she could not get enough of him. The mounting ecstasy was more than she thought she could stand, and she wanted to cry out. But his lips silenced hers, driving her into a forgetfulness.

  * * * * *

  For Chase all thought was heightened, like the effects of the jimson weed, like the peyote bud. He envisioned the old gods, the Ye’ii, frowning down upon him for betraying his people, for coupling with the unclean pale-skinned woman. He had had other Anglo women, mostly the lower class who had frequented the reservation’s bordertowns, and one or two society matrons since coming to Santa Fe, women who found him a novelty.

  As perhaps Christina did — a diversion. But she was unlike any Anglo woman he had possessed before. She was the White Queen, the Woman of the Moon.

  And he would not let the primitive, ignorant fear of the Ye’ii’s revenge keep him from having her.

  CHAPTER 46

  Chase and Will bent over the map of New Mexico as Chase’s blunt finger traced the course of the Rio Grande River that divided the state in half. "This plat — and here, this plat — those there . . . these are the acreage that Bill 263 will tax. With Elephant Butte Reservoir going to — ”

  The door of the office opened, and Deborah came in. It was the first time in two months Chase had seen her, since Christmas when she had come by the AID office with a gift for him, a sweater she had knitted to replaced his hole-filled one. She had stayed only a moment, but he had been slightly surprised at the change in her. There was still a gamine expression to her childlike face. But there all resemblance to a child ended.

  Her lovely dark brown hair was no longer coiled in braids but hung loose, touching the small of her back, with the sides and front rolled away from her face, emphasizing the full cheekbones and tilted cinnamon-brown eyes. And she had been dressed in spiked heels and a wraparound print dress that displayed her soft curves and shapely legs.

  Today her small figure was outlined in a tightly fitting paprika-colored sweater and men’s khaki trousers. "What do you think?” she asked the two men as she twirled for them. "It’s the latest rage.”

  "Then it’s true?” Will asked with a straight face. "Eleanor Roosevelt’s doing away with the female sex?”

  Deborah made a face at Will. "No! And besides the slacks make it easier to work with the outdoor props that Roger’s photographing — which brings me to why I’m here.”

  She turned pleading eyes on the two men. "I’m running up to Taos to set up an exhibition for Roger at one of the galleries, and I thought you two — and May, if she can get away from the kitchen long enough, Will — would like to go along. I’ve got Roger’s Stutz Bearcat, and I thought we could stop off at the Picuris pueblo on the way. They’re holding a ceremonial dance tonight — the last of the season.”

  "Count me out,” Will said. '"Gangbusters’ is on tonight, and you couldn’t pry me away from the radio with a crowbar.”

  Deborah looked at Chase and flashed an elfin smile. "It’s a Mountain Chant. Say you’ll come.”

  Chase slid down in the swivel chair, his hands clasped behind his head. He wanted nothing better than to go back to his attic room and crash for the night. But there stirred in his blood the childhood memory of the mysterious Mountain Chants — the succession of ceremonial dances, the jugglery and legerdemain that took place around a huge fire from sundown to dawn, the eerie shadows that leaped and the wild beat of the rattle and the drum.

  And there stirred in his blood the more recent memory of the New Year’s Peyote Ceremony held in a back canyon. Eight weeks had passed since that night — eight weeks of seeing Christina’s aloof expression at the Capitol or occasionally at the nearby Tapatio Restauran
t where many politicians met for lunch or an after-work drink; and always Chase wondered what Christina was thinking behind that mask of cool control.

  She had avoided him the one time he had happened to meet her alone —in one of the Capitol’s corridors. She had drawn away from him as if his touch burned her. But Chase had pinned her against the tiled wall, his hands on either side of her as his mouth angrily took hers, and her hands had slipped up around his neck to entwine in his collar-length hair. Yet when Senator Folley had called out for her, Christina had seemed relieved the spell was broken.

  Chase grabbed his corduroy hunting coat. "See you tomorrow, Will.”

  They made one stop, at the St. Vincent’s Sanitarium where Deborah lived. "The good sisters have more rooms than patients,” she explained, laughing at Chase’s surprised expression. "And besides, they offer excellent accommodations and good food for a modest sum. I’ll be just a moment — I’ve some paintings I have to cart up to Taos for Roger.”

  When she returned to the car, a good-looking young Indian with clean-cut brown-black hair and a friendly face helped her with the paper-wrapped paintings. "Gregory Red Bird,” she said, introducing him to Chase.

  The young man, who was of medium height, took Chase’s hand.

  "Greg’s taken the room down the hall from me. His sculpturing class was called off, and I invited him along.”

  Greg smiled wryly at Chase. "I’m a full-blooded Navajo, but you’d never know it. I’ve never seen a night chant before, so Deborah thought it was time.”

  Deborah’s enthusiasm was contagious, and Chase could only agree, though as he shifted the Stutz into second he could not figure out why the man’s presence should irritate him. He found himself feeling more than ever like Deborah’s big brother, and when Greg put his arm on the seat behind Deborah who sat between the two of them, he felt like asking just what Greg’s intentions were.

  As Chase maneuvered the Stutz around the hairpin curves and along the narrow Highway 68, Deborah explained to Greg the nature of what he would see that evening. From that point their conversation turned to exhibitions and galleries and New Mexico’s creative giants like Ellis, Weston, and Lawrence.