Red Sky at Morning (18 page)

I walked down with Marcia to hear her lecture. Most of the students had turned out that evening, and there was a sprinkling of adults. We sat in front of two middle-aged Pueblo Indian men who talked quietly together in a mixture of English and Tewa, a language that sounds like someone choking on a fishbone. I don't know what they were doing there; maybe their lore was getting rusty.

Romeo was there. When I introduced him to Marcia he got very gallant and kissed her hand.

"What are you doing here?" I asked him.

"Helen is an old friend of mine," he said. "When I first came here, she was extremely kind to me, under the misapprehension that I was a Yavapai medicine man. She loaned me money and bought some of my pieces. Then I began to get bald, and she realized her error. Apparently Yavapais don't get bald."

"What a darling man," Marcia said when we returned to our seats. "I think I could have an experience with him. Yummy!"

Ratoncito came on stage and introduced the speaker. He was brief, for once.

She walked slowly from the wings, her arms folded across her chest. She wore an ankle-length squaw dress of deerskin, heavily beaded, and wrap-around moccasins. Her thin white hair was pulled back and tied with a red cloth from which one enormous eagle feather protruded like a scythe. Her cheeks and forehead were smeared with paint and she looked, generally, like Sitting Bull's grandmother.

Following her was a delicate-looking Indian boy about my age, dressed in a floppy apron that hung fore and aft, and staggering under a huge Sioux war bonnet. The effect of his costume was injured slightly by his shoes, a pair of white high-topped Keds which squeaked. He beat a small drum with a stick and pranced in a bouncy dance step, mumbling "Hey-yah, hey-yah," almost inaudibly.

Mrs. De Crispin raised her right hand solemnly and said "How!"

"This is my little friend Billy Birdwing," she went on, indicating the boy with the drum. "He's part Arapahoe and part Cheyenne, and he comes from far-off Oklahoma which, as you know, is a journey of many suns from here."

"I can make it in five hours in the pickup," an Indian behind me said.

When he was introduced, Billy Birdwing went into his mad little dance again and beat his drum frantically.

"Thank you, Billy," she said, and he stopped, looking sheepish.

"Many, many moons ago," she began, "which is the Indians' colorful way of saying 'a long time ago,' before the white man came with his evil and destructive ways bringing whiskey and gunpowder, the red man or Amerindian lived in total harmony with nature, feeding upon the mighty buffalo and the antelope. All was peace and tranquility, for to war against one's brother was to commit a sin against Gitchee Manitou or the Great Father. All Indian life was permeated with religion. Billy, will you say a little prayer for us?"

Billy set his drum down on the stage and walked forward, raising his arms. "Now I lay me down to sleep," he began, "I pray the Lord my soul to keep."

"That was very nice, Billy," she interrupted. "Can you give us an
Indian
prayer, please."

"Hey-yah, hey-yah," he chanted. He seemed lost without his drum, but essayed a few bounces in the tennis shoes.

"Indian dance is a form of prayer," Mrs. De Crispin went on. "Billy, do the eagle dance."

Billy spread his arms out to the side and performed the same step, throwing in a few hey-yahs.

"That's a dance that prays for eagles," she said obscurely. "Once the Indians were a proud race, and the arrows in their quivers were many. They trapped the tender rabbit in their snares and hunted the wily buffalo."

"Oh, come on," one of the Indians behind us whispered. "I got a couple of Guernsey cows that are wilier than a goddamn buffalo."

"They stood proud and tall on their mesas and mountain tops and were One With Nature, strong and clean-limbed. Their women were comely and their children were fat. Peace reigned in their tepees, and they drank only fresh water from the clear streams. All Indians spoke with a straight tongue.

"When the evil white man came, he brought guns and ammunition and strange diseases. He brought the bitter medicine the Indians call Fire Water. Soon the buffalo were gone, and all the great warriors were betrayed by the Great White Father."

"Which one she mean?" one of the Pueblos asked.

"I don't know," the other said. "Probably Rutherford B. Hayes. Come on, let's get out of here." They stood up and walked stonily from the auditorium.

Mrs. De Crispin noticed the exodus, and paused until they left. "I am speaking of sacred things," she said, "of matters so holy that Indians don't want to hear it discussed. Isn't that right, Billy?"

"That's right, ma'am," Billy said. "Hey-yah, hey-yah."

"Today, after many cruel defeats and deceptions, the Red Man is a third-class citizen unless he goes the way of the white man. Billy Birdwing will tell you of the agonies this has caused him."

Billy Birdwing replaced her at the microphone, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. "My Inyan name is Tse-hunk-ana-obobwi which means Boy With Wing Like a Bird, but the white man call me Billy Birdwing 'cause they can't say Tse-hunk-ana-obobwi."

"Disgraceful," Mrs. De Crispin murmured.

"They send me to the Disciples of Christ School and try to make me a Disciples of Christ. My father he's already go the white man's way. He got the John Deere tractor franchise in Anadarko. But I don't want to go that way 'cause the white man speaks with a forked tongue. I want to go the Inyan way, in the path of my ancestors."

"Wonderful," Mrs. De Crispin said.

"So now I do a little dance for you call Deer Woman Dance. My friend Mrs. De Crismer she gonna do the dance with me, 'cause it takes two people to do this dance, a man and a woman. Mrs. De Crismer is a great friend of all Inyans."

Billy picked up his drum, and gave her the down beat. They both went into the hey-yah routine, and plodded around in a small circle. Mrs. De Crispin, dancing like an arthritic stork, got a bad kink in her leg and had to stop and rub it, but Billy bounced until he came to the end of the song. There was silence when the drum stopped until Ratoncito came back on the stage, clapping his hands hysterically to get the applause started.

"How you like?" Marcia asked me. "You got the old lore?"

Romeo met us on the auditorium steps and offered us a ride home in his truck. "What do you think?" he asked me. "Isn't she an odd old bird?"

"I was expecting something a little more scholarly," I said. "Maybe a fire-making demonstration with two dry twigs. I don't think she did her research."

"She's been making the same talk for twenty years," Marcia said. "I've heard it four times. Always with a different Indian boy, naturally. This one was the worst. Where does she get them?"

"I believe she travels yearly to Indian reservations and shops for them, like apples," Romeo said. "She has a lot of money, you know."

We drove through the snowy streets in silence for a while, and Romeo pulled up near the rectory. "Can we go to your studio?" Marcia asked him. "I'd like to meet your mistress."

Romeo was aghast. "My what?"

"Your mistress. I understand you keep a mistress, and I've never met a real one. It would be part of my education."

"Has this idiot been. . . ." He pointed to me.

"Oh, no. He didn't tell me anything. It's just one of those things you hear around, like 'So-and-so's going broke' and 'So-and-so's got a whale tattooed on his stomach' and things like that."

"Occasionally, only very occasionally," Romeo said, "a young woman comes to model for me. Sometimes these women have little money, and I allow them to stay at the studio. At present I am without a companion."

"What about Shirley?" I asked.

"The Thyroid Wonder should be back in the San Francisco Bay area by this time. And if she hasn't run out of pills she's doubtless down at Fisherman's Wharf calling everybody a Guinea bastard."

"I'd love to model for you, Mr. Bonino," Marcia said. "I have absolutely no modesty about my body."

"Get in your house, young lady, and pray for forgiveness. It's cruel to tempt an old, sick man. If your father had any decent human instincts he'd beat you to a pulp."

"Well, some day I'm going to get in with that wild artistic group. It's the only thing that makes this town different."

"The 'wild artistic group,' as you put it, has an average age of fifty-seven, and most of us have heart disease and bladder trouble. Go home. Out!"

I walked her to her door and said good night, while Romeo waited. "I'll see you in the morning," I said, "when the barking dogs arouse the sleeping tepee village and the smell of roasting coyote is in the air."

"My sisters will prepare me," she said. "I shall come to your wickiup in my white doeskin dress and lose my innocence on your buffalo robe."

"I will give you little ornaments to put in your hair, black as the crow's wing. I will give you red flannel and a looking-glass so that you may groom yourself."

"I'd also like to have a little spending money and a charge account at Wormser's," she said.

"Good night, Maiden Who Walks Like a Duck."

"Good night, Warrior Who Chickens Out at the Least Sign of Trouble."

"Hurry up, Josh, before I freeze," Romeo yelled.

We drove to his studio, and he offered to share one of my father's bottles with me, to toast the departure of Shirley. "You were right," he said. "If I hadn't started her on the thyroid she'd have stayed around here for years and finally grown on me, like a fungus."

Wine is very heady at 7,000 feet, and I was woozy on the way home. I scraped some old snow off a wall and rubbed my face with it, and chewed on it, and then pulled off a piñon twig and gnawed on the needles, hoping it would act like coffee beans for alcohol breath. I could have saved myself the trouble; Mother and Jimbob were asleep when I came in, and all night I tasted turpentine.

In December it began to snow in earnest and the novelty slowly wore off. There would be an almost-warm day, with low impenetrable clouds, and in the night it would snow, and all the next day. East of the town, beyond the cordillera, the wind would blow blizzards and ranchers would find their cattle frozen, still standing huddled against a fence. But the mountains protected Sagrado from the winds, and the snow fell straight down. After a snow the sky would turn a thin blue, and an Alaskan cold would move in to stay for a week.

Jimbob Buel finally arose from his sickbed and returned to moping around the house and playing bridge with my mother's summer friends. She always referred to them as "the girls," and would say, "Joshua, please don't go downtown quite yet. The girls are coming and I'll need your help."

The girls arrived on Saturdays at noon. None was under sixty, and I was required to help them from their automobiles and hold them upright while they groped for their canes or crutches. One even carried a staff, a slim black pole six feet long with a gold top. The girls hobbled and limped into the house and lowered themselves carefully into chairs and made deep rumbling noises in their bellies. The six girls, with my mother and Jimbob, made up two tables for bridge. When each of the ancient liners was berthed, I would leave and walk somewhere: to Romeo's, to Steenie's, to Rumpp's, to the movies, sometimes to Chango's house for coffee with his parents, who had begun to call me
primito,
or little cousin. Occasionally I took hikes through the snowy foothills with Marcia, who felt that walking kept her hips from getting too wide. "There's nothing I can do with the basic structure of the pelvic girdle," she would say, "but the flab is definitely unnecessary. Race you up the next hill; last one to the top is a
gallina."

With no formal word from Dad, Amadeo and Excilda remained in Río Conejo, using up the stored beans and the hanging venison for the children. I saw Amadeo in Sagrado one morning; he'd come into town to trade some of his illegal deer meat for flour, corn meal and sugar. It was something that went on all the time in winter, he told me, and the game wardens looked the other way if it was a question of survival, which it often was. He said that Victoria returned to school in Yunque, and had stopped feeling so noble. "My family's always been hard working," he said, "but thick in the head. Victoria's the first real smart one in a long time, and I don't want her to end up as a waitress in the Del Norte Café. You hear anything from Mr. Arnold yet?"

I said no, not a word, but that mail delivery was probably slow wherever he was. There was a picture in my mind, probably not accurate, about how the Navy got letters delivered: Somebody flew over the ship in a light plane and dropped a bag of mail on the deck. If it missed the ship, tough.

The cooking at home was terrible, and nobody seemed to mind but me. Jimbob tucked it away three times a day and just beamed at my mother, and said things like, "Miss Ann, this is surely the sort of nectar they dine on in Olympus." She'd discovered a commodity, one of the atrocities of war, consisting of pieces of ground-up cat mixed with oatmeal and pressed into the shape of a brick. You could fry it or bake it or boil it or eat it raw and it always tasted the same, like a deck shoe. Then she got very fancy and began slicing bananas over everything, sometimes heating them first in a sort of sweet cream sauce. When the spirit was on her, she'd put the creamed bananas over the brick, and wouldn't we have a feast!

I made a special trip to the El Chivo Bookstore and bought something the woman recommended by Fannie Farmer. It was to be a Christmas present for my mother, but I gave it to her early.
"Boston
Cooking School?" she said. "What do Yankees know about food?" Then she showed up old Fannie Farmer by cooking a real old time Italian dinner, letting the spaghetti boil for a couple of hours ("Long cooking brings out the flavor of spaghetti") until it turned into a gray lump with bubbles in it Jimbob thought it was simply scrumptious, and said so.

I stayed away from home as much as possible, going there only to sleep and steal wine for Romeo. He told me the Châteauneuf-du-Pape and the Nuits-Saint-Georges were too rare and expensive, and suggested I pilfer only Beaujolais and Bardolino. "It's a fine point, I admit," he said, "but an important one. I'm going to have to face your father some time, and I don't want my guilt to lie too heavily."