The fires had all grown cold. There had been silence for a long time. No one was crying. He could stand up, the pain between his legs was a bright hard knot, he could not feel its center, but as he walked toward his father he kept going down in a limp on one knee. The old woman had tied a red bandanna around the wound of Hallelujah Bob’s head and he stood before the bright lights of the car with his wounded head held high. He stopped before his father and looked up, “Hallelujah Bob, we must drive down from this mountain together. Your head needs a doctor.” His father did not even look him in the face as he turned around and slapped him full on the cheek, “Never! The people have medicine for my wounds. Never! We are too strong for this, it has happened before. There are the old ways. The girl will have her Dance. The Girl of the Dance will race the small girl to the foot of the mountain. I will not drive her, it is the way, the sacred stick will make the Girl’s weak legs strong. The Girl of the Dance will defeat the small girl in the race, she will defeat her old self, she will come the Woman. She has acted true to the ways. She will have her a Dance.” He looked at his daughter who stood naked before him, her brown body was bruised, her young flesh was worn within, but she leaned tall on the strength of the sacred stick. The water glistened in his eyes, but did not fall, “Go!”
The Girl ran. Swiftly into the night she disappeared; the small girl running far behind.
The people were waiting in front of the big room. They sat beneath the stars on battered orange crates. They had seen the fires on the mountain. The fires had spoken the truth of the Sign. Now the fires were dead and the people had lit their own fires, awaiting the Girl to come the Woman off the dark mountaintop. Paint cans full of water had been dumped on the ground to keep the dust down from the Dance of the Girl. They waited beneath the stars to dance. Then they saw the headlights of the car, and way before its line of light they saw the Girl come running out of darkness; she ran far ahead of the small girl. The women rose up into a circle on the dance ground and the Girl ran into their center holding the sacred stick high over her head. The women joined hands around the Girl, the power of their chant rising into the black night as their dance shook the ground, “Hé wine, ho wi ne, he wine; ho wí na, hé wine, ho wí na.” When the stars burned at the top of the Sky the people gathered into the big room, the lantern swung from the rafter over the long feast table. Hallelujah Bob stood before the people with the red bandanna wrapped around the wound of his head and spoke of how the Girl had acted true to the ways and come into the new day of her time. She had come through the First Season a Woman. He asked all his friends who saw her fires on the mountaintop to come and share the first happiness of her time, to feast and dance into the new morning. He spoke of how the Dance was being held because the Indians always had it. He spoke long of the old ways beneath the swinging lantern as the people feasted on store cakes and shining cans of pork and beans. The brother of the Girl sat on an orange-crate tilted against the wall, he did not feast, but drank from the bottle that passed through the hands of his friends until the light in his head grew stronger than the hollow pain between his legs. He was pulled outside into the circle of the Dance, moving in the chant of the people, locked into the swaying movement until the Sun washed the night away and was ready to break over the Earth. His sister was brought again from the big room to face the rising Sun. She wore a white slip and held her head high as the old woman streaked white ash from her hairline to her chin and told all the people this Girl would have no headaches, then the mark of the ash was made on the Girl’s arms, “Have strength to carry many babies.” The ashes were smeared on her calves, “Have the power to work all day without having to sit down.” The old woman rubbed the Girl’s stomach with bits of sagebrush, “Have no cramps. Do not complain.” The sagebrush was sprinkled over her head, “Be smart. Go to highschool. Get a job. Do not quit.” The bits of sagebrush were gathered from around her feet and mixed with pork and beans, the Girl took a mouthful and spit it to the the ground. “Do not be a pig. Go without. Give your food to others.” As the Sun broke over the Earth the old woman poured a tin bucket of water over the Girl’s head, “The Girl dies out of you. You have come the Woman. Go to school. Get a job. Get married.” The Sun broke down over all the people’s heads as the Girl tossed her gift of nickels and dimes wrapped in bright strips of cloth tied to sagebrush twigs into their midst. She walked back into the big room and sat at the long empty feast table on an orange-crate. She drank a cup of black coffee, her head fell on her outstretched arm. Her aching body lay slumped on the orange-crate, outside it was a monday morning, the people were wedged together standing in tight groups in the back of their old pickups, the Sun beating down on the faded word stamped in steel across the tailgates, FORD. They started their engines and drove out across the land.
The barbed metal wire singing through the Indian’s gloved hands stopped. The sun fell behind the earth. The air became cool. Odus stood up from the work, the sweat cutting right through his blue shirt, “It’s about time we call it a day Joey, we’ve got about half of it laid up today.” He leaned against the raw wood of a post they had just set and looked back up the line of fence disappearing into the falling darkness, “Look at that, straighter than a baby’s smile. I say we quit Joey, how about you?”
The Indian followed Odus’ gaze along the long strands of barbed wire, “Not any light. We have to quit.” But he did not move, he did not even pull the thick leather gloves from his sweating hands. Where the day faded into night along the sharp line of the fence the sound of bells grew out of the air, coming down the evening distance of the road.
Odus heard the sound too. His eyes could just begin to make out the swaying shapes of the cows following with bowed heads one after the other in the dry slot of ditch between the fence and the hard black shell of the road, “Must be Ben Dora’s daughter with the milk cows.”
The sharp metal sound of the clanging cowbells was close and familiar in the Indian’s ears as the heavy beasts swaggered before him, the teats of their swollen udders dripping milk to the earth. The slow horse came behind the overburdened beasts, its gray hide blurred into the dying light so it floated like a ghost. The girl was mounted on the gray back, her white legs sticking out below the blanket slung loosely around her body swaying in the movement of beasts before her.
“Hi-you Missy,” Odus called up to her.
The skin of the blond face turned in the direction of the words, her eyes seeing only another field, fencepost, old man, Indian, fencepost, field. Her blond face turned back to the bells in the lead. The two men could now see the thick welts exposed on the flesh of her thighs and legs sticking below the blanket, but she was beyond them, the long fall of her slapping sunwhite hair already beginning to fade in the dusk as she was pulled behind in the rhythm of the cows.
“That kind of thing stops me inside,” Odus lowered his head in the darkness. Ben Dora whips her so bad she can’t stand nothin tighter on her skin than that horse blanket. Ben Dora beats everybody that bad. He beats that girl, his very own daughter. He beats his wife, all his kids, his dogs. Somebody ought to beat him, beat him with a stick, you don’t want to skin your fists on the likes of him. The only thing you ever hear Ben Dora bellow is, ‘My people were pioneers! My people owned this goddam sunk valley before the Indians! This is my valley! A pioneer made his own Law. A pioneer answers to NOBODY!’ His people never owned anything, they always worked for somebody else, the only reason they ended up in this here valley is because they couldn’t go any further, because the Pacific Ocean starts in another hundred miles, and the only reason they ever got here was because they were kicked out of the last place they were in, and the only reason they weren’t kicked out of here in the beginning is because they would have been kicked out into the middle of the Ocean. California is full of pioneers who were kicked out of every place they ever set foot in and finally couldn’t be kicked any further. So the only thing Ben Dora’s people had left was to beat each other up. His father beat him and Ben wen
t to school and got thrown out before graduating for beating everybody up. So he got married so he could beat his wife, and when he got tired of that he had some kids so he could beat them. The oldest two already run away and were put in reform school, so now he has all his beating to do on the girl. That kind of thing stops me inside, somebody ought to beat him with a stick.” He raised his face and looked around in the dying light, the darkness gathered about his head in a terrible rainbow, his old eyes wide as an owl’s, “Let’s go home Joey.”
The Indian freed his hot hands from the leather gloves, letting the cool air calm his stinging fingers. He gathered all the iron tools he had worked with through the day and placed them carefully in the bed of the pickup, then climbed into the front with his friend. The engine shook to a start and the glare of the headlights bounced back at him off the road’s black shell as the truck rolled slowly, the white moths coming quietly out of the night, crashing their soft bodies against the clear glass of the windshield until the road home could hardly be seen. He heard Odus talking again, “We got most of that fence today. Tomorrow’s Sunday so we’ll get back to it on monday. I’ll pick you up at the same time, at six.” The truck rolled by a house, its headbeams firing up the yard. Through the moth splattered windshield the Indian could see a man stalking in front of the house, his shoulders stooped, the bullneck swinging his head back and forth as he bellowed, “WOMAN! Get your ass moving and open the goddamn door!” He stood up in front of the door and began kicking it with the needlepoint of his boot. “Get your ass MOVING!” He stepped back from the door and flung the empty whiskey bottle in his hand through the window of his own house. The shattering glass could be heard just above the engine of the pickup as it rolled beyond the house. In the tight cab of the truck the Indian heard his friend’s words again, “That kind of thing stops me inside. Ben Dora should be killed. Beat with a stick. You don’t want to skin your hands.” Then the words stopped and there was only the sound of the engine, the sidelight from the headbeams lighting up a barn and small house along the road. “Well, here we are Joey.” The pickup pulled over and the Indian climbed down. He looked up to his friend in the darkness of the cab, the owl eyes blinked back at him, “Well Joey, another day another buck. All a buck buys a man is another day.”
The pickup drove off into darkness. The Indian opened the door of the small barn and led his horse out into the cool night. He rubbed his palm against her neck, then ran her around in a wide circle, around and around, following in his own trail. He brought her back in the barn and slowly kneaded her body before forking hay into her feed trough. He locked the barn and went into the room of his house. The rabbit was waiting for him like a cat, hunched up before the open back door with its ears laid straight back and its nose twitching at the green odor of alfalfa he had fed the horse coming off his hands. He took the bottle of whiskey off the dresser top and yanked out the cork. He could hear the gulping of his throat in the silence of the room as he drank. He waited for the light to come up through his blood like the beating song of ancient Birds and fill his head. He waited, listened to the blood pounding against his temples, then stumbled across the room to the open door and looked up at the swirling stars, they dazzled his eyes and he took another swig off the bottle then came back in and took up the old black leather accordion hanging by its straps on the chair next to his bed. He hitched the accordion onto him so the straps formed a leather X across his back. His callused fingers bent and ran over the cracks worn in the dull glimmering of the mother-of-pearl keys, pressing the WRECK OF NUMBER NINE full into the room. The loud music swaggered out the door and up into the swirling stars.
They came across the mountains. They came in a big car. They were big, like their car. They wore white shirts with narrow ties knotted up around their elbow smooth necks. The Indian watched their big car come out of the mountains and into the valley. The car came straight at him down the black road. He watched it pull off onto the dirt in front of his house, little shots of loose dust puffing off the back wheels. They killed the engine of the car and stood before the one room house, their heads jerking in circles as they looked at the house, the pine trees riding out from behind it up to the mountain, out across the valley to the distant birds skimming the low drifting steam white clouds. There was a look on their faces he recognized, he had seen it many times before. It was the same frozen look on the face of a squirrel run over flat on the highway. One of the men peered beneath the rim of his blunt machine-shaped felt hat with a clipped pheasant’s feather tucked beneath the slick band, “Mister Joseph Birdsong?”
The Indian stuck the stiff stub of a dry piece of weed between his teeth and rammed it through into his mouth, sucking at the sweet lump of tartar he dislodged, “I’m Joe Birdsong.”
“Oh fine. Do you mind if I remove my hat?”
“I don’t own the outdoors.”
The man took off his felt hat and wiped the halo of tiny sweat beads off his forehead. “May we come up?”
“I guess.”
“Good, then we can do business.” The two men followed the Indian in through the open doorway and set their briefcases among the clutter on the table. The one with his hat off turned the corners of his pale lips up in a smile, “I well suppose you know why we are here?” He heard the Indian’s words coming back to him but he paid no attention, the calculating blink of his eyes was registering the dim twinkle of the cracked mother-of-pearl keys on the accordion next to the bed, he walked over and looked at the wall covered with photographs of horses torn from magazines, horses bucking and galloping, horses wedged in between the fading photographs of women, all of the women big, heaving and moving, running across wooden bridges or twirling ropes over their heads at rodeos. He turned around, “What was that you said Mister Birdsong? I didn’t quite catch it.”
“I said I know why you’re here.”
“We are here because you neglect to answer our letters, an oversight on your part, I’m sure. We know you receive the letters because they are all registered, and you have signed your name for them. We have proof of your signature, we know you are receiving. We think you misunderstand our purpose. We want to work hand in hand with you. We want to be your friend.”
The Indian looked into the eyes of the man as he spoke, he looked at the other man who still had on his hat, there was a metal pin stuck to the front of the hat, it was the miniaturized likeness of two golf clubs crossed like swords, “Can I get you a glass of water?”
“… we are only interested in your friendship and personal advancement, and, ah, why thank you yes, it is a hot morning, water would be fine.” He took the glass of water offered him and drank it clean, “Now Allen, perhaps you could give Mister Birdsong the Presentation?”
“Why of course, what a pleasure,” the man with the hat straightened his tie and brought out a key from his coat pocket. He placed his briefcase on the bed and unlocked it, then snapped the lid up with two loud cracks. He removed a brochure off the top, unfolding its large creases until it was flattened and smoothed out nearly the length of the bed. Spreading across the top of the glossy paper in high red bold letters was RESORT MOUNTAIN LAND PROPERTIES–Α NEW CONCEPT IN LIVING! The man pointed with the shiny silvertip of his ballpoint pen to the first big colorful box on the brochure, “Here you may recognize a comprehensive aerial photograph of the Sierra Valley the way it is today, the highest true valley in all of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It’s flat, a few lightly traveled roads, a small saw-mill, three little towns, and scattered about several ranch houses with out buildings, nothing of any importance really.” He moved his silvertip over the slick surface, “Here you have an artist’s concept of an improved Sierra Valley. A concept of dynamic yearround living, innovative planning, interlocking recreational usage, and all this in natural balance with the existing landscape and its wildlife.” He moved the silvertip across the next four squares, “This is the airstrip, and the causeway leading from it to here, the shopping complex with restaurant and bowling alley, here yo
u have your country club and tennis courts and Olympic size pools. You may not be aware of this Mister Birdsong, but our environmentalists specialists feel that since the Sierra Valley is marshy on its northerly periphery, an area which incidentally is the headwaters of the Feather River, a river which extends three hundred twisting miles to the Pacific Ocean, studies conclude a feasible lake with fortynine million cubic feet of water in this area, flooding over a land distance of two thousand acres, providing a yearround recreational diversion, affording boating, waterskiing, fishing and appropriate snack food areas. Here, you can see the wonderful sketch of the Marina on the south side of the lake, right at the end of Shoreview Drive, and here,” he grabbed the two ends in his hands and flipped the brochure over in a current of its own wind, showing one vast colored sketch of the valley’s center covered by a city of huge painted metal boxes surrounded by swaying palm trees. He stood back smiling, pointing his silvertip at the large glare of paper, the hot room popping out beads of sweat beneath the rim of his hat. “This is what it is all about. A city of MOBILE HOMES a Mile High In The Sky At The Top Of The Sierra Nevada. Thirty thousand yearround residents, twenty thousand second vacation homes. This isn’t just any MOBILE HOMES city, this is bigger than anything in Florida, even bigger than anything in San Diego. MOBILE HOMES are the wave of the future, inexpensive to buy, inexpensive to maintain, taxes are next to nothing. Why, in the year 2,000, there won’t be anything but MOBILE HOMES. Just check land prices here in California if you want to see what land prices in the other states will be tomorrow. California is the future today. And we think the future spells M-O-B-I-L-E. MOBILE HOMES.”
Rabbit Boss Page 37