He got used to her leaving the bar with men, giving somebody a dollar to buy the boy food while she was out. After he ate, he slept under the tables and waited for her to come back. The first time she did not come back, the man who swept floors found him. He did not cry when the man woke him; he did not cry when the police came and tried to ask him his name. He clutched the last piece of bread in his hand and crouched in the corner; he closed his eyes when they reached for him. After a long time, she came for him. She smelled good when she carried him and she spoke softly. But the last time he remembered the white walls and the rows of cribs. He cried for a long time, standing up in the bed with his chin resting on the top rail. He chewed the paint from the top rail, still crying, but gradually becoming interested in the way the paint peeled off the metal and clung to his front teeth.
When she came for him she smelled different. She smelled like the floors of the room full of cribs, and her long hair had been cut. But she came back for him, and she held him very close.
They stayed in the arroyo after that. The woman with the reddish hair helped them drag twisted pieces of old roof tin from the dump, down the banks of the river to the place the other shacks were, in sight of the bridge. They leaned the tin against the crumbly gray sides of the arroyo. His mother rolled big bricks up from the riverbed to hold the pieces of cardboard in place. It was cold then, and when the sun went down they built small fires from broken crates they found in the alleys and with branches they tore from the tamaric and willow. The willows and tamarics were almost bare then, except for the branches higher than a man could reach. One of the men brought an ax with a broken handle, and the drunks who lived in the arroyo chopped down the tamarics and willows, laughing and passing a bottle around as they took turns with the ax. The only trees they did not cut down were the ones the people used. A strong, stinging smell came from that place. He learned to watch out for shit and in the winter, when it was frozen, he played with it—flipping it around with a willow stick. He did not play with the other children; he ran from them when they approached. They belonged to the woman who stayed under the bridge, with low tin walls to block the west wind. That winter he heard a strange crying sound coming from under the bridge, and he saw the children standing outside the low sides of the shelter, watching. He listened for a long time and watched. The next day it was quiet, and the woman carried a bundle of bloody rags away from the bridge, far away north, toward the hills. Later on he walked the way she had gone, following the arroyo east and then north, where it wound into the pale yellow hills. He found the place near the side of the arroyo where she had buried the rags in the yellow sand. The sand she had dug with her hands was still damp on the mound. He circled the mound and stared at a faded blue rag partially uncovered, quivering in the wind. It was stiff with a reddish brown stain. He left that place and he never went back; and late at night when his mother was gone, he cried because he saw the mound of pale yellow sand in a dream.
Damp yellow sand choking him, filling his nostrils first, and then his eyes as he struggled against it, fought to keep his eyes open to see. Sand rippled and swirled in his dream, enclosing his head, yellow sand and shadows filling his mouth until his body was full and still. He woke up crying in a shallow hole beside the clay bank where his mother had thrown the old quilt.
He slept alone while his mother was with the men—the white men with necks and faces bright red from the summertime, Mexican men who came from the section-gang boxcars at the railroad, looking for the women who waited around the bridge—the ones who would go down for a half bottle of wine. The black men came from the railroad tracks too, to stand on the bridge and look down at them. He did not know if they looked at him or if they were only looking at his mother and the women who lined up beside her, to smile and wave and yell “Hey, honey” up to the men. The white people who drove by looked straight ahead. But late one afternoon some white men came and called until the women came out of the lean-tos, and then the men yelled at them and threw empty bottles, trying to hit them. The woman with reddish hair threw the bottles back at them and screamed their own words back to them. The police came. They dragged the people out of their shelters—and they pulled the pieces of tin and cardboard down. The police handcuffed the skinny men with swollen faces; they pushed and kicked them up the crumbling clay sides of the arroyo. They held the women in a circle while they tried to catch the children who had scattered in all directions when they saw the police coming. The men and the women who were too sickdrunk to stand up were dragged away, one cop on each arm. He hid in the tamarics, breathing hard, his heart pounding, smelling the shit on his bare feet. The summer heat descended as the sun went higher in the sky, and he watched them, lying flat on his belly in the dry leaves of tamaric that began to make him itch, and he moved cautiously to scratch his arm and his neck. He watched them tear down the last of the shelters, and they piled the rags and coats they found and sprinkled them with kerosene. Thick black smoke climbed furiously into the cloudless blue sky, hot and windless. He could feel the flies buzzing and crawling around his legs and feet, and he was afraid that the men searching would hear them and find him. But the smell in the remaining grove of tamaric and willow was strong enough to keep them away. The men in dark green cover-alls came with steel canisters on their backs, and they sprayed the places where the shelters had been; and in the burned smell of cloth and wood he could smell the long white halls of the place they kept children. At sundown he woke up and caught sight of the headlights on the traffic across the bridge. He stood up slowly and looked restlessly toward the arroyo banks, thinking about food.
It was a warm night and he wandered for a long time in the alleys behind the houses, where the dogs barked when he reached into the tin cans. He ate as he made his way back to the arroyo, chewing the soft bone cartilage of pork ribs he found. He saved the bones and sucked them until he went to sleep, in the tamarics and willows. Late in the night he heard voices, men stumbling and falling down the steep crumbling bank into the arroyo, and he could hear bottles rattle together and the sound of corks being pulled from the bottles. They talked loudly in the language his mother spoke to him, and one man sat with his back against the bank and sang songs until the wine was gone.
He crawled deeper into the tamaric bushes and pulled his knees up to his belly. He looked up at the stars, through the top branches of the willows. He would wait for her, and she would come back to him.
They took more pollen, more beads, and more prayer sticks, and they went to see old Buzzard.
They arrived at his place in the east.
“Who’s out there?
Nobody ever came here before.”
“It’s us, Hummingbird and Fly.”
“Oh. What do you want?”
“We need you to purify our town.”
“Well, look here. Your offering isn’t
complete. Where’s the tobacco?”
(You see, it wasn’t easy.)
Fly and Hummingbird
had to fly back to town again.
Robert and Tayo stopped on the bridge and looked into the riverbed. It had been dry for a long time, and there were paths in the sand where the people walked. They were beginning to move. All along the sandy clay banks there were people, mostly men, stretched out, sleeping, some of them face down where they fell, and a few rolled over on their backs or on their sides, sleeping with their heads on their arms. The sun was getting hot and the flies were beginning to come out. They could see them buzzing around the face of a man under the bridge, smelling the sweetness of the wine or maybe the vomit down the front of the man’s shirt. Robert shook his head. Tayo felt the choking in his throat; he blinked his eyes hard and didn’t say anything. A man and woman came walking down the wash below them and looked up at them on the bridge. “Hey buddy!” the man yelled up. “You got a dollar you can loan us?” Robert looked at them and shook his head calmly, but Tayo started to sweat. He started reaching deep into his pockets for loose coins. The woman’s hair wa
s tangled in hairpins which had been pulled loose and hung around her head like ornaments. Her head weaved from side to side as she squinted and tried to focus on Tayo up above her. Her slip was torn and dragging the ground under her skirt; she had a dark bruise on her forehead. He found two quarters and tossed them into the man’s outstretched hands, swaying above his head, and both the man and the woman dropped to their knees in the sand to find them. Robert walked away, but Tayo stood there, remembering the little bridge in a park in San Diego where all the soldiers took their dates the night before they shipped out to the South Pacific and stood throwing coins into the shallow pond. He had tossed the coins to them the way he had tossed them from the bridge in San Diego, in a gentle slow arc. Rocky wished out loud that night for a safe return from the war, but Tayo couldn’t remember his wish. He watched them stumble and crawl up the loose clay of the steep riverbank. The man pulled the woman up the last few feet. The fly of his pants was unbuttoned and one of his shoes was flopping loose on his foot. They walked toward a bar south of the bridge, to wait for it to open.
They walked like survivors, with dull vacant eyes, their fists clutching the coins he’d thrown to them. They were Navajos, but he had seen Zunis and Lagunas and Hopis there too, walking alone or in twos and threes along the dusty Gallup streets. He didn’t know how they got there in the first place, from the reservation to Gallup, but some must have had jobs for a while when they first came, and cheap rooms on the north side of the tracks, where they stayed until they got laid off or fired. Reservation people were the first ones to get laid off because white people in Gallup already knew they wouldn’t ask any questions or get angry; they just walked away. They were educated only enough to know they wanted to leave the reservation; when they got to Gallup there weren’t many jobs they could get. The men unloaded trucks in the warehouses near the tracks or piled lumber in the lumberyards or pushed wheelbarrows for construction; the women cleaned out motel rooms along Highway 66. The Gallup people knew they didn’t have to pay good wages or put up with anything they didn’t like, because there were plenty more Indians where these had come from.
It seemed to Tayo that they would go home, sooner or later, when they were hungry and dirty and broke; stand on 666 north of town and wait for someone driving to Keams Canyon or Lukachukai to stop, or borrow two dollars and ride the bus back to Laguna. But Gallup was a dangerous place, and by the time they realized what had happened to them, they must have believed it was too late to go home.
Robert was waiting for him on the hill. “Somebody you used to know?”
“Maybe,” Tayo said. The sun was above them now, in a deep blue sky like good turquoise.
He looked back at the bridge, and he made a wish. The same wish Rocky made that night in San Diego: a safe return.
“What kind of medicine man lives in a place like that, in the foothills north of the Ceremonial Grounds?” Auntie wanted to know. Grandma told her, “Never mind. Old man Ku’oosh knows him, and he thinks this man Betonie might help him.”
The Gallup Ceremonial had been an annual event for a long time. It was good for the tourist business coming through in the summertime on Highway 66. They liked to see Indians and Indian dances; they wanted a chance to buy Indian jewelry and Navajo rugs. Every year it was organized by the white men there, Turpen, Foutz, Kennedy, and the mayor. Dance groups from the Pueblos were paid to come; they got Plains hoop dancers, and flying-pole dancers from northern Mexico. They organized an all-Indian rodeo and horse races. And the people came, from all the reservations nearby, and some came from farther away; they brought their things to sell to the tourists, and they brought things to trade with each other: white deerhides, and feathers, and dried meat or piki bread. The tourists got to see what they wanted; from the grandstand at the Ceremonial grounds they watched the dancers perform, and they watched Indian cowboys ride bucking horses and Brahma bulls. There were wagon races, and the ladies’ wood-chopping contest and fry-bread-making race. The Gallup merchants raised prices in motels and restaurants all Ceremonial week, and made a lot of money off the tourists. They sold great amounts of liquor to Indians, and in those years when liquor was illegal for Indians, they made a lot more money because they bootlegged it.
Old Betonie’s place looked down on all of it; from the yellow sandrock foothills the whole town spread out below. The old man was tall and his chest was wide; at one time he had been heavier, but old age was consuming everything but the bones. He kept his hair tied back neatly with red yarn in a chongo knot, like the oldtimers wore. He was sitting on an old tin bucket turned upside down by the doorway to his hogan. When he stood up and extended his hand to Robert and Tayo, his motions were strong and unhesitating, as if they belonged to a younger man. He watched Tayo look around at the hogan and then back down at the Ceremonial grounds and city streets in the distance. He nodded his head at Tayo.
“People ask me why I live here,” he said, in good English, “I tell them I want to keep track of the people. ‘Why over here?’ they ask me. ‘Because this is where Gallup keeps Indians until Ceremonial time. Then they want to show us off to the tourists.’” He looked down at the riverbed winding through the north side of Gallup. “There,” he said, pointing his chin at the bridge, “they sleep over there, in alleys between the bars.” He turned and pointed to the city dump east of the Ceremonial grounds and rodeo chutes. “They keep us on the north side of the railroad tracks, next to the river and their dump. Where none of them want to live.” He laughed. “They don’t understand. We know these hills, and we are comfortable here.” There was something about the way the old man said the word “comfortable.” It had a different meaning—not the comfort of big houses or rich food or even clean streets, but the comfort of belonging with the land, and the peace of being with these hills. But the special meaning the old man had given to the English word was burned away by the glare of the sun on tin cans and broken glass, blinding reflections off the mirrors and chrome of the wrecked cars in the dump below. Tayo felt the old nausea rising up in his stomach, along with a vague feeling that he knew something which he could not remember. The sun was getting hot, and he thought about flies buzzing around their faces as they slept in the weeds along the arroyo. He turned back to Betonie. He didn’t know how the medicine man could look down at it every day.
“You know, at one time when my great-grandfather was young, Navajos lived in all these-hills.” He pointed to the hills and ridges south of the tracks where the white people had built their houses. He nodded at the arroyo cut by the river. “They had little farms along the river. When the railroaders came and the white people began to build their town, the Navajos had to move.” The old man laughed suddenly. He slapped his hands on his thighs. His laughter was easy, but Tayo could feel the tiny hairs along his spine spring up. This Betonie didn’t talk the way Tayo expected a medicine man to talk. He didn’t act like a medicine man at all.
“It strikes me funny,” the medicine man said, shaking his head, “people wondering why I live so close to this filthy town. But see, this hogan was here first. Built long before the white people ever came. It is that town down there which is out of place. Not this old medicine man.” He laughed again, and Tayo looked at Robert quickly to see what he thought of the old man; but Robert’s face was calm, without any mistrust or alarm. When old Betonie had finished talking, Robert stepped over to Tayo and touched his shoulder gently. “I guess I’ll go now,” he said softly.
Tayo watched him walk down the path from the old man’s place, and he could feel cold sweat between his fingers. His heart was pounding, and all he could think about was that if he started running right then, he could still catch up to Robert.
“Go ahead,” old Betonie said, “you can go. Most of the Navajos feel the same way about me. You won’t be the first one to run away.”
Tayo turned to look for Robert, but he was gone. He stared at the dry yellow grass by the old man’s feet. The sun’s heat was draining his strength away; there was no place to
go now except back to the hospital in Los Angeles. They didn’t want him at Laguna the way he was.
All along there had been something familiar about the old man. Tayo turned around then to figure out what it was. He looked at his clothes: the old moccasins with splayed-out elkhide soles, the leather stained dark with mud and grease; the gray wool trousers were baggy and worn thin at the knees, and the old man’s elbows made brown points through the sleeves of the blue cotton work shirt. He looked at his face. The cheekbones were like the wings of a hawk soaring away from his broad nose; he wore a drooping thick mustache; the hairs were steel gray. Then Tayo looked at his eyes. They were hazel like his own. The medicine man nodded. “My grandmother was a remarkable Mexican with green eyes,” he said.
He bent down like the old man did when he passed through the low doorway. Currents of cool air streamed toward the door, and even before his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the room, he could smell its contents; a great variety of herb and root odors were almost hidden by the smell of mountain sage and something as ordinary as curry powder. Behind the smell of dried desert tea he smelled heavier objects: the salty cured smell of old hides sewn into boxes bound in brass; the odor of old newspapers and cardboard, their dust smelling of the years they had taken to decay.