"Cloud flowers lie over the mountains, cloud flowers are blooming now over the mountains. First the lightning flashes in the north, then the thunder rumbles, then the rain falls, because flowers are blooming," the singers sang.
Though there wasn't a cloud in the sky, the dancers bounced happily, hop, turn, a cob in one hand, a lightning wand in the other. Their worn, clean coveralls and crisp, faded dresses made them look like dolls of sober industry. The women and girls didn't raise their knees as high as the men or stamp their heels as hard. But they recognized Joe. He saw their glances stealing towards him and caught their whispers when he as much as turned.
"In the fields you can see melon flowers," the singers sang. "In the fields you can see cornflowers. In the fields the water bird sings and overhead the black clouds grow." A hundred dancers softly made the ground tremble.
One more revolution of the circle and he'd quit, Joe told himself. The circle moved so slowly, though. The entire population of Santiago seemed to be present, dancing or on the roofs, surrounding him and waiting for him to do something. So many of the women looked like Dolores. Not just Dolores the famous old potter, but Dolores as a young woman, Dolores as a girl. Half-toe. Turn.
Two of the clowns took folding chairs away from the ladies from Santa Fe and sat, pretending to gossip, put on lipstick, adjust girdles. A third patrolled the edges of the plaza, keeping back the spreading line of tourists. He threatened a spectator who had come halfway to the circle from the east end. It was the younger cowboy trying to get a better look at Joe, and he ignored the tubby, old clown waving him back. When the clown uncoiled a whip and cracked it at Billy's feet, Billy knocked him down.
The entire circle slowed, watching the confrontation. Joe saw the tribal policemen hanging back; they didn't want a hassle with the Indian Service. Without being aware of it, Joe was through the dancers. He seemed to cover the distance to Ben in a few steps. Billy pointed a warning finger.
Joe stepped over Ben, took Billy by the front of his shirt and, with one hand, lifted him high off the ground. The cowboy kicked and swung his fists while Joe carried him to where most of the crowd watched under the cottonwood. Joe intended to set him down gently, but, released, Billy somehow flew over the first two rows of spectators to the base of the tree.
As the crowd retreated, Foote's sombrero rolled forward. Chairs folded with claps. One man laughed. Al worked his way to Billy, laughing the whole time as if his friend had participated in a great joke. Clowns joined in as if Joe were fooling. Foote and the entourage from the Hill, Harry Gold and the tourists from Santa Fe started laughing anxiously, because they wanted to believe it was a set-up performance and the huge clown was nothing to be afraid of. Anna Weiss didn't smile. She hadn't stepped back. She watched Joe as if a giant had stepped out of the blue sky.
The drummer never missed a beat.
The circle went on turning.
Afterward, men who were clowns washed in the river a couple of miles outside Santiago. Since he wasn't really a clown, Joe washed alone where cottonwood logs and sand had stopped up a pool. Thimbleberries with white, papery buds grew thickly down to either shore. Black paint slowly yielded to oatmeal soap and a yucca brush.
The sun was dazzling on the surface of the Rio. It took Joe a while to realize he was not alone, to see Anna Weiss watching from the smooth flank of a log that rose out of the sand.
16
In Unit 20 at the Cordoba Motel, daylight made a hot, white edge round the window blinds.
She twisted, spread herself, and as she settled into him he put his hands on her hips and helped her down. Widening, her eyes never left his. Despite the drawn blinds, she glowed, as if inner-lit. Yet her eyes were luminously dark, her hair was dark, the tips of her white breasts were dark. Deep inside her, he still rose. As if he had stepped off a high building a long time ago and only now was hitting ground. Falling and rising at the same time.
"I've never made love with a giant before."
He turned her on her back and drove deeper. Perspiration shone between her breasts. As she wrapped her legs round him, the bed groaned. Anna pulled him in with her hands until he was lifting her high with each stroke.
Her shoes and fedora were by the door where she'd dropped them as soon as she came in. Her jumpsuit was sprawled, empty, across the middle of the floor. His uniform lay over a chair.
Outside, the afternoon dimmed. Inside a pearly grayness crept along the walls. The room was decorated with photographs of the Alhambra. The pictures trembled as he held her against a wall so that only her toes, barely, touched the floor. The whole wall trembled, like a vertical sheet.
She was weightless and strong. She seemed to ride him, to be on all sides of him, to swallow him and be swallowed at the same time.
When they moved away the wall bore the damp imprint of her back and his hands.
Her body had both a blue paleness and a sheen of life. His belly looked black against hers.
As he lifted her, the bed, the entire room seemed to rise. The more and deeper he had her, the further he went the next time, until he felt himself dissolving.
The radio in the room, the Capehart console, looked like an old trombone player napping in a chair.
The walls could be paper pages now, ready to burn, tear or fold back and drop him into space.
"You're crazy to do this," he said.
"Oh, yes, I've been certified."
"Certified?"
"Officially," she said and smiled.
It was the dual moment of knowledge. The learning of legs, hands, skin, sweat, when the body is the whole terrain and obsessive scope of attention. Every word echoes on and on and becomes the color of action. Breath synchronizes and the sheets twist.
They sat cross-legged on the bed, the ashtray and haze of smoke between them. Although the heat of the day had faded, their sweat shone.
"I was in love," she said and lit a cigarette for him and put it between his lips. "I loved a French boy. He was very poetic. I loved a German boy. He was very depressed. It was fun to be in love. What I liked was the element of irrationality. This isn't love at all; this is pure irrationality."
He inhaled, filled his lungs and let the smoke escape so his breath filled the room. Of one thing he was certain. "You've never been in love before," he said.
Her gray eyes watched as if from a cat's distance. Until they closed and she arched. With her hair back, her forehead seemed higher, the lofty brow of genius, so the black hair was the giveaway, swaying, a flag whipping the dark above him. Until he pulled her head down and opened her mouth with his, and she gathered his hair in her fingers and would not let the kiss go.
She asked, "You've been in love?"
"It was a flight to the moon, a night in June. Icy fingers up and down my spine, that same old witchcraft when your eyes meet mine."
She rested the tip of her finger between his eyes.
"Tonight is the last night in June."
"I knew one of them was right."
In total dark, he took her from behind, the deepest, final fit, the groove of her back against his chest. So deep it seemed he flowed into her for ever. So still, they both shook to the pounding of her heart.
The car was a Plymouth two-door she had borrowed from Teller at the dance. Joe had found jazz on the radio. Stars lit the road. Wind whipped Anna's hair around her face.
"I loved King Kong," she said. "I would have traded places with that girl. King Kong was very popular in Germany. And, you can play the piano."
"Great."
"And a boxer. I asked all about you."
"Was a boxer."
"You were good?"
"Not bad. I got interested in other things."
"Music?"
"I love the piano. I love the weight, the shape. Something about a concert grand, playing a high E in an empty house."
"And women? Is it the same, the high E in an empty house?"
"Well, a little. How did you get involved in neutrons?"
> She thought for a moment, but Joe could already hear her voice. Most important for him was that a woman should have her own voice, and he'd never heard anyone like Anna.
"I could always see numbers. It's like having your own world, or a world you only share with a few others. Prime numbers.
Positive numbers and negative numbers in patterns like physics. I did a paper on reaction multiplication when I was sixteen to amuse myself. I was in a sanatorium."
"Why?"
"Hysteria. Anemia. Pregnancy. It depended on which doctor you talked to. I was lucky to be in the sanatorium at all because they weren't supposed to take Jews, but my father, although he had lost his professorship at the university, was so respected I was allowed in. The sanatorium had once been a monastery with gardens and orchards, even lemon trees, that ran in terraces to the river, the Elbe. In one garden was a bower of honeysuckle that stirred with bees. I retreated there. I tried to think of things so small and insignificant that they would be almost pure mathematics, that they would have nothing to do with the larger, real world. I watched the bees move from flower to flower. This was just after the Meitner-Frisch article on fission– you remember that?"
"I think I was fighting in Chicago that day. I must have missed it."
"Bees and neutrons are, a little, the same. The paper was only a few pages and it couldn't be published because I was a Jew." For a moment Anna looked into the canyon, and to the mountains beyond, to distant lightning collecting at a peak. "You didn't tell anyone, did you, about Harvey? You didn't report your friend Roberto either, did you?"
"That doesn't mean I agree with Roberto."
"Or with Harvey and me."
"Two more weeks to Trinity and then it will all be over. Maybe it will fail." He could feel her disappointment. "I hate arguments. I'm a coward. True arguments are full of words and each person is sure he's the only one who knows what the words mean. Each word is a basket of eels so far as I'm concerned. Everybody gets to grab just one eel and that's his interpretation and he'll fight to the death for it. Roberto's from Taos, which he thinks gives him the right to say 'up' is 'down'. Harvey's from Texas, which makes it strange he and I agree on a goddamn thing. As for you and me?"
"Yes?"
"Which is why I love music. You hit a C and that's a C and that's all it is. Like speaking clearly for the first time. Like being intelligent. Like understanding. A Mozart or an Art Tatum sits at the piano and picks out the undeniable truth."
"You're going to hear about me," Anna said slowly. "That I'm insane and a tramp. I don't care what people say, but I want you to know that only one is true."
"Which one?"
"Which one is important to you?"
Joe hesitated, and during that long moment they neared the first checkpoint. Joe kept the MPs supplied with cigarettes and ration coupons; he'd expected to be waved through as usual. Tonight, the checkpoint was a Western scene, the sort of painting daubed for tourists: the amber light of a shed reaching out to men on horseback, the riders slouched and weary, horses steaming in the night air. But also jeeps with their headlights on, blocking the road on each side of the checkpoint shed. He stopped fifty feet before the shed and left the Plymouth's lights on.
"Stay here," he told Anna as he got out. "If anyone asks, we were driving around, you don't know where."
The horses were lathered bright in the headlights. Among the riders was Sergeant Shapiro. Corporal Gruber had one arm in a sling.
Shapiro laughed.
"Fell off his horse, Chief. Broke his fucking arm."
As Joe pushed into the shed, Captain Augustino looked up from the map he was sharing with Billy and Al. The captain was sleek in an Eisenhower jacket. The two cowboys were crusty from a day's riding. Al's little eyes and mouth were drawn tight and there was a white stubble on his jaw line. Billy's hair hung lank, dirty and yellow.
"Speak of the devil." Augustino looked delighted, as if some deserved amusement had come his way at the end of a weary day. "Come in, come in, Sergeant Peña. You know our friends
Al and Billy from the Indian Service. Billy's the one you tossed like a sack of manure at the dance."
The shed was small for four men and a pot-bellied stove. The light was a hanging bulb. On the walls were a clock, map, telephone, a yellowed silhouette guide to German planes, clipboards with old orders of the day, license lists, sign-in and sign-out sheets. Joe suspected that the only names signed out and not back in were his and Anna's.
Augustino paused to let the general discomfort grow. "You missed the excitement, Sergeant."
"Yes, sir?"
"Absolutely, Sergeant. Why, we had a regular posse out, a dragnet looking for an Indian friend of yours. You know, your friend who assaulted one of our guests with a shotgun. The same friend whose place you took at the dance. Weren't you supposed to be driving the Director?"
"He wanted to know the identities of the dancers, sir. So I joined the dance."
"Just like that. Did you determine any identities?"
"No, sir. They didn't take off their paint around me."
Al snorted. "You didn't know the dancer whose place you took was about to be arrested?"
"How would I know that?"
"Excellent question, Sergeant," Augustino said. "That's just so excellent it's what we've been asking all day. These gentlemen suspect some kind of informer, but it's my belief that they're dumb and you're smart. Who's right, do you think?"
"I wouldn't know that either, sir."
"Well, I have an intimate and high regard for you, Sergeant, I do." He smoothed the map with his hands. "Now, we have spent a vigorous day on every highway in northern New Mexico and riding up every dirt road and arroyo around Santiago pueblo. We did find some rattlesnakes. I think it was Corporal Gruber who had a nasty spill. Your friend, however, seems to have vanished."
"He must be pretty fast, sir."
"And blind at that, Sergeant. Both shocking and remarkable. And how was your day, Sergeant? Was it a full one?"
"Yes, sir, I was still trying to carry out the Director's request. Unfortunately, I was not successful."
"Wherever he was, that's where we'll find his blind friend," Billy told Augustino, "and we won't have to scramble into every pisshole Indian ruin again."
"Were you alone, Sergeant?" Augustino looked out at the Plymouth. "Alone on this quest?" The captain took the sign-out sheet off its hook, "Don't answer. Don't do anything until I'm back."
Then Augustino was out of the door and striding eagerly to the Plymouth's headlights. Joe could make out Anna's silhouette inside the car.
"Tossed me like a sack of shit, huh?" Billy asked.
"It was the captain's expression," Joe murmured and watched Augustino lean through the Plymouth's window.
"Now, Billy acted like a genuine asshole today, interfering in a ceremonial, and I'd like to apologize." Al had a wheezy, singsong voice. "In exchange, I want you to tell me who tipped you we were going to pick up your blind pal. Someone did, because you didn't figure that out on your own. Please, I've been kicking Indian ass for twenty years, I know Indians. Turn round, please, when I'm talking to you."
In Al's hand was his rust-spotted, short-barreled Colt, an old-fashioned model called "The Shopkeeper's Friend". Al was a small man – cowboys tended to get worn down like fence posts – but the gun made him a little larger, as if he were levitating. Billy leaned back.
"This is Indian country," Al said. "The Indian Service is the only thing that keeps it running in any civilized manner. Abuse the Indian Service and you undermine the system that keeps you people alive."
Joe looked out of the window. From his gestures, Augustino was asking Anna to step out of the car.
"At the very heart of the system is respect. Billy and I spend weeks surrounded by Indians, enforcing the laws. Laws about sheep, about booze, about proper schooling. All that keeps us safe from all the drunken bucks is respect. Hell, otherwise they'd have to send the cavalry in with us every time, wouldn't they
? Look at me."
Al's eyes were screwed up with the earnestness of communication. His hat had moved back, showing hair stuck flat as feathers on the white and shining upper half of his forehead.
"That's why what you did today to Billy was so dangerous, because it undermined our professional respect. Even if it was nothing but Pueblos who saw. Thank God it was Pueblos, not Navajos or Apaches. So, Billy apologizes."
"I apologize," Billy said quickly, as one word.
"Now," Al said, "you tell us who tipped you and you tell us where your blind friend is."
Through the window, Joe saw Augustino stepping back as if Anna were getting out of the car.
"Son of a bitch, you look at me!" Al raised the gun to Joe's waist. "Listen, you're just one more buck to me, one more bar-room hero. You come back with your stories as if this was the only war in history. You bucks came back from the First War the same way and I trimmed you down fast. You don't want to talk, then watch while I blow your balls off. Because you're a fucking Indian and I'm the Indian Service and you're not acting right."
Al's hand was steady, broad, calloused at the web from handling rope. He moved the ploughshare hammer back.
"No," Joe said. "No, this is a United States Army post. I'm a staff sergeant carrying out the orders of the Director of an Army project. You're a shitkicker and a sheepfucker and you won't do anything."
Al paused, snorted, lowered the Colt and eased the hammer forward. The door opened behind Joe and Augustino returned, alone.
"You were right," Al told Augustino, "it's going to take a while after this war to get things back to normal."
Augustino looked at the gun.
"Out," he told Al.
"I was just—"
"Out, both of you."
While the cowboys slipped past Joe and through the door, Augustino sat on the map. He took a cigarette from a case, lit up, sighed.