He dreamed he made love with her there. He felt the warm sand on his toes and knees; he felt her body, and it was as warm as the sand, and he couldn’t feel where her body ended and the sand began. He woke up and she was gone; his fists were full of sand and he was sweating. The sun had moved across the sky, and he knew he had slept for hours. He washed his face in the water; the surface water was still warm, so he plunged his hands deep into the cool layer above the yellow sand. As he walked from the pool to the place she had been sitting, the moisture on his hands and face evaporated. He looked for an imprint of her feet or the outline that the cloth of her skirt made in the sand. As he moved through the grass around the pool, a small green frog wiggled out of the weeds ahead of him, and splashed into the pool. He felt shaky inside: what if there were no traces of her, no lines of sand pressed by her body, no delicate track of her blue shawl trailing into the weeds?
The imprints were there; he traced his fingers lightly along them. He had not dreamed her; she was there as certainly as the sparrows had been there, leaving spindly scratches in the mud.
“I’m over here,” she said. Her voice came from the east side of the narrow canyon. He scrambled over the big rocks; a chipmunk skittered ahead of him; he was afraid she would disappear like the echo her voice made. His bare feet and the ends of his toes were raw from the sandrock. He stood on the boulder above her, breathing hard. She was sitting on the edge of a sandy bank beside a big moonflower plant. The blue silk shawl was spread open by her feet, and she had filled it with freshly dug roots and leaves from many different plants. She gathered up the shawl without looking at him and climbed up the rock to join him.
They climbed a steep trail where niches for toes and fingers had been worn into the yellow sandrock after centuries of use. She pulled herself to the top with a branch of bearberry shrub, and offered him her hand. Coming over the edge, the canyon and the rock of the cliff seemed suddenly gone as if he had stepped from the earth into the sky; where they were, the sky was more than half the world; it enclosed the mesa top where they stood.
“You never told me your name,” he said.
“I’m a Montaño,” she said. “You can call me Ts’eh. That’s my nickname because my Indian name is so long. All of us kids did that.”
He nodded. “We did that too, at home. Nicknames.” He thought about Rocky then; his baptismal name had been Augustine, and “Rocky” had been as close as he had wanted to come to the Indian name old Grandma’s sister had given him. “You have brothers and sisters,” he said, wanting to find out about her.
“Yes,” she said, looking off into the distance, toward the Black Mountains in the south. “We are all very close, a very close family.”
He started to ask where they were then, where they lived, because he had only met the hunter; but her eyes were shining, and they told him things that her words never said.
“I have a sister who lives way down that way. She’s married to a Navajo from Red Lake.” She pointed south, in the direction she was looking. “Another lives near Flagstaff. My brother’s in Jemez.” She stopped suddenly and laughed. “You know what they say about the Montaños.” The tone of her voice said that of course he knew what the people said about her family, but Tayo couldn’t remember hearing of that family.
“Up here, we don’t have to worry about those things.” She was right. They would leave the questions of lineage, clan, and family name to the people in the village, to someone like Auntie who had to know everything about anyone.
They walked back together. In the distance he could see the spotted cattle scattered across the valley between the mesas; the yellow bull their cousin Romero lent them was grazing a distance from the cows, as if he still feared their horns. Their hides reflected the color of the sunset like clouds on the west horizon.
“How did you know I’d be here?” he said, still watching the cattle.
She laughed and shook her head. “The way you talk!” she said. “I was here almost a week before you came. How did you know that I’d be here? Tell me that first.”
He went with her to learn about the roots and plants she had gathered. When she found a place she got comfortable, spreading her blue shawl on the ground after she had cleared the area of pebbles and little sticks and made sure no ants were disturbed. She sat flat on the ground and bent over close to the plants, examining them for a long time, from the petals, sprinkled with pollen, down the stem to each leaf, and finally to the base, where she carefully dug the sand away from the roots.
“This one contains the color of the sky after a summer rainstorm. I’ll take it from here and plant it in another place, a canyon where it hasn’t rained for a while.”
While she gathered plants, he watched the cattle grazing in the tall yellow rice grass that grew above the arroyo just to the edge of the juniper trees. They had stopped moving south. They had worked the direction out of their systems and had settled into the place. Josiah would have said that it was because they were so smart, and they could tell a good place when they found it: springs and good grazing. And what about Romero’s yellow bull, he could hear Josiah say, winking when he said that; but the speckled cows had not seen the yellow bull that way, at least not in the beginning.
Romero’s bull was short-legged and broad, and his color was yellow sandrock broken loose from a cliff. He had small yellow eyes and a hump in his neck. Romero found him standing on three legs at the Prewitt rodeo grounds the day after a rodeo. The left front leg was hanging at a broken angle, and none of the white people at Prewitt wanted to bother with the bull because the meat would be tough. Romero told them he would haul the bull away for free.
Romero said he didn’t know how dangerous the bull might be after being a rodeo bull. But the horns were sawed off blunt, and he had only three good legs, so Romero took him home and doctored him. He said he worked on the animal in the loading chute, but the bull stood still and never fought while Romero worked on him. Romero busted up an orange crate and used the wooden slats for a splint that he tied up with strips of old bed sheet. It was a perfect job, Romero said, only the damn bull had rubbed the leg against the corral posts and loosened the splint too soon. That’s why the leg healed a little crooked. If he’d just left it alone, it would have been almost as good as new, Romero said.
The speckled cows had watched the bull step out of the horse trailer, and when he sniffed them out and started to approach them, they crowded together, shaking their heads and the curved horns, threatening with wild eyes. They had moved suddenly, like a whirlwind, dust and sand flying up from their hooves as they chased him back toward the truck and horse trailer. But there he spun around suddenly to face them, and they scattered. He watched them disappear into the junipers of the wide canyon to the west, and then he switched his stubby tail around his haunches a few times, and trotted after them.
The yellow bull grazed in open view, but the speckled cows stayed in the juniper, listening like deer to Tayo’s approach, their spotted hides blending into the sandy talus of the big mesa. Gradually they appeared, cautiously joining the yellow bull. Tayo sat motionless with his back against the small cottonwood tree growing in the wash. The cows kept their bodies between him and the new calves, but occasionally a calf bolted away, bucking and leaping in a wide arc, returning finally to its mother when it tired of playing. Tayo’s heart beat fast; he could see Josiah’s vision emerging, he could see the story taking form in bone and muscle.
“There’s only one more I need,” she said, pointing her chin in the direction of the gunny sacks full of roots and plants. “It won’t be ready for a while, but I’ll show you which one it is, and maybe you can gather it for me, in case I have to go before it’s ready.”
Tayo had been drowsing in the sun with his back against the cliff rock; he sat up stiffly and looked at her.
“In case of what?” His heartbeat was fast and unsteady. Her eyes had distance in them; when he looked at her he saw miles spreading into canyons and hills. She knelt down b
eside him, and he saw tears.
“Out there,” she whispered, “things are always moving, always shifting. I hear them sometimes at night.”
They walked west across the long mesa where the old ones had piled stones in circles, high above the flat sandstone mesa top far above the canyons and springs.
“This one,” she said, pointing at a tall dark green plant with round pointed leaves, deep veined like fossil shells. The flat seed pods were still thick and green, but later, in the fall, the skin would dry thin, and cold winds would strip away the hull to the last translucent membrane, holding the dark eyes of the seed inside it.
“What color of sky is inside this one?”
She shook her head. “This isn’t for color,” she said. “It’s for light. The light of the stars, and the moon penetrating the night.” It was too dense and green to be taken then; if the stem were broken then, before the final season, its wet flowing vitality would be lost in a single breath.
“I’ll remember it,” he said. “I’ll gather it for you if you’re not here.”
Their days together had a gravity emanating from the mesas and arroyos, and it replaced the rhythm that had been interrupted so long ago; now the old memories were less than the constriction of a single throat muscle. She was with him again, a heartbeat unbroken where time subsided into dawn, and the sunset gave way to the stars, wheeling across the night. The breaking and crushing were gone, and the love pushed inside his chest, and when he cried now, it was because she loved him so much.
Robert came at the end of the summer. He had come only once before, when he took the goat and the cat back to Laguna and stopped to see if Tayo needed anything. Robert had not asked any questions then, about why Tayo was sleeping out there when he could have stayed over at the ranch. This time Tayo could see something different, although they walked up the valley together as they had when Robert came before, looking at the spotted cattle, examining the calves. When they got back to the place Robert parked the truck, Robert looked uneasy.
“What should I tell them at Laguna?” Robert was looking up at the thunderclouds rolling in from the Black Mountains in the south. The roads out that way had been muddy all summer, and he didn’t want to get stuck that day. Tayo shook his head. A hawk circled high above them, gliding on air currents from the approaching storm. Thunder echoed against the cliffs, but Robert did not go. He took his hat off and wiped his forehead on his shirt sleeve.
“They want you to come home. They are worried about you. They think you might need the doctors again.”
“Oh.” His stomach fell into a crevice. His hands felt cold.
“Old man Ku’oosh and some of the others are wondering too why you haven’t come. They thought maybe there might be something you should tell them.” The words caught in his throat, and he coughed. “And Emo has been saying things about you. He’s been talking about how you went crazy and are alone out here. He talks bullshit about caves and animals.”
Tayo had never heard Robert talk that way before; he had never seen him angry before. Tayo felt lightheaded and weak. Robert sounded sad.
“You know how people are about things like that. White people are that way too. The Army might send someone to take you back.” Lightning flashed across the dark blue clouds, but for Tayo, the bolt zigzagged slowly up the dark mountain peaks of cloud, taking longer than Robert’s words had taken to reach him.
“Maybe if you came back for a while. You know, so they could see that you are all right. So you could talk to them, and then they could see what a liar Emo is.”
He nodded at Robert, but he was involved with other things: memories and shifting sounds heard in the night, diamond patterns, black on white; the energy of the designs spiraled deep, then protruded suddenly into three-dimensional summits, their depth and height dizzy and shifting with the eye.
Raindrops rattled on the hood of the pickup. Robert kicked at the left front tire; the recap was beginning to peel loose.
“Thanks,” Tayo said, “thanks for telling me.”
He watched Robert drive away. The rain ran down his hair into his shirt; it had grown below his ears and touched his neck. He thought of Emo then, always with a GI haircut.
“Death isn’t much,” she said. She was sitting on the sand, with her feet out straight in front, arranging short willow twigs into bundles, tying them with fluffy cotton string that she had twisted by hand. They had found a calf in the arroyo that morning; small black ants were already making trails across the head, from the nose to the eyes. The belly was bloating out as the sun climbed higher in the sky.
“Sometimes they don’t make it. That’s all. It isn’t very far away.” She looked up at him intently, and then continued.
“There are much worse things, you know. The destroyers: they work to see how much can be lost, how much can be forgotten. They destroy the feeling people have for each other.”
He took a deep breath; it hurt his chest. He thought of Josiah then, and Rocky.
“Their highest ambition is to gut human beings while they are still breathing, to hold the heart still beating so the victim will never feel anything again. When they finish, you watch yourself from a distance and you can’t even cry—not even for yourself.”
He recognized it then: the thick white skin that had enclosed him, silencing the sensations of living, the love as well as the grief; and he had been left with only the hum of the tissues that enclosed him. He never knew how long he had been lost there, in that hospital in Los Angeles.
“They are all around now. Only destruction is capable of arousing a sensation, the remains of something alive in them; and each time they do it, the scar thickens, and they feel less and less, yet still hungering for more.” She gathered up the bundles of twigs and started walking southwest.
“Old Betonie said there was some way to stop—”
“It all depends,” she said. “How far you are willing to go?”
They walked together over the sandy ridge above the wash, across stones that had tumbled down from the clay mortar of walls washed away by time, the geometric patterns of rooms and kivas flowing into the white arroyo sand, where even the shards of pottery were rolled to pebbles, all their colors and designs soaked back into the earth.
The position of the sun in the sky was delicate, transitional; and the season was unmistakable. The sky was the early morning color of autumn: Jemez turquoise, edged with thin quartz clouds. He breathed deeply, trying to inhale the immensity of it, trying to take it all inside himself, the way the arroyo sand swallowed time.
She was looking at Pa’to’ch, and the hair was blowing around her face. He could feel where she had come from, and he understood where she would always be.
The she-elk was bigger than life, painted in pale lavender clay on the south face of sandstone, along the base of the cliff. Her great belly was swollen with new life as she leaped across the yellow sandrock, startled forever across the curve of cliff rock, ears flung back to catch a sound behind her. The priests who painted her each year always cried when they stood back from the cliff and saw her. “A’moo’ooh! A’moo’ooh! you are so beautiful! You carry all that life! A’moo’ooh! With you, the cliff comes alive.”
They restacked the stones that had fallen. She laid the willow sticks she had tied inside the small square enclosure, and he laid a flat sandstone over the opening at the top. The rain and wind were overtaking her, rubbing away the details of her legs; the sun was bleaching her hooves into faint outlines, merging into the cliff.
“It’s almost gone,” he said.
“The clay is washing away,” she said. “Nobody has come to paint it since the war. But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.”
They stayed until the sun had gone to the end of the valley and the she-elk was a dark blue shadow on the cliff.
She laid a dry piñon branch on the coals; smoke curled out of the gray scaly bark like wooll
y hair until yellow flames burst around it. He saw her face in the light that came suddenly and bright; she was crying. He wanted to kneel down and put his arms around her and tell her not to cry, but his connection with the ground was solid; his arms clasped his knees to his chest like arms of another person, pulling numb legs to a strange chest. Only his brain moved, wet and heavy against the contours of his skull, favoring curvatures of bone and concave niches. When he spoke, it was from a mouth independent of himself, and he had to listen to the sound of the words to know what he was saying.
“What is it? Why are you crying?” The anger in his voice surprised him. She looked at him. The skin on her face was darker where she had smeared the tears with the back of her hand.
“The end of the story. They want to change it. They want it to end here, the way all their stories end, encircling slowly to choke the life away. The violence of the struggle excites them, and the killing soothes them. They have their stories about us—Indian people who are only marking time and waiting for the end. And they would end this story right here, with you fighting to your death alone in these hills. Doctors from the hospital and the BIA police come. Some of the old men from Laguna come too. They drive over there in their patrol cars.” She pointed across the big arroyo to the place where the sandy wagon road was washed out. “They walk this way. The doctors have medicine to quiet you. The others bring guns. Emo has told them you are crazy, that you live in the cave here and you think you are a Jap soldier. They are all afraid of you.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “They’ll call to you. Friendly voices. If you come quietly, they will take you and lock you in the white walls of the hospital. But if you don’t go with them, they’ll hunt you down, and take you any way they can. Because this is the only ending they understand.”