The Beast (v1.0), page 11
“My mother, Betty Chee,” Johnny said.
“How do you do, Mrs. Chee,” Barry said. “I don’t know if you can understand me, but I am honored that you will receive me here.”
“I speak English some,” Betty Chee said. “You friend of this one”—she pushed Johnny, smiling at him—“you stay with us long time.”
“Thank you very much, Mrs. Chee,” Barry said, setting the suitcase and hamper down. He looked at the wood, the
gray, twisted, tough wood she was hacking at with the dull axe. “If you’ll let me, I’ll chop the wood?” He heard himself sounding silly, and wondered what a guest did in Navajo land, anyway.
“Inside. Be at home,” the woman said, picking up the axe again. She had apparently not understood what Barry meant.
Barry stood in some indecision before the wall of brush. How did one get inside? He heard a snort of muffled laughter at his side, and Johnny pushed him around to the left.
“No, you don’t go crashing through a wall,” he said, pushing Barry around until a large opening presented itself. Inside, the shelter was roomy, floored with smooth, hard-packed sand, and contained a variety of cooking utensils and a tall loom made of straight posts tied together with cord and holding a half-finished rug. In several corners were some rolled-up blankets that must be for sleeping. On a sort of shelf made of poles cleverly entwined with the growing willows were articles of clothing, pots and dishes and sacks of flour and meal. In all, it was, with its roof almost but not quite closed to the deepening blue of the evening, remarkably pleasant, cool and perfect for its use in a land where rainfall was no problem. Barry felt snug inside it, like a bird in a well-built nest. In the center of the floor smouldered a small fire with ashes around it that told of it being used for many days. A cat was asleep in the corner beneath the shelf, completing the domestic scene.
“This is perfect,” Barry said. “A summer house.”
“That’s what we call it,” Johnny said. He sat leaning back against the blanket roll he had taken from the straw suitcase. Outside, the strokes of the axe kept on regularly.
“If this were Western civilization, one of us guys would be out there chopping that wood,” Barry said, feeling genuinely uncomfortable.
“She does the cooking,” Johnny said. “She would be insulted if I told her she was too weak to chop wood anymore.”
“Where are the rest of your family?”
“The kids are probably bringing the sheep in about now,” he said, lying back and tipping his hat over his eyes. “And the menfolks are either coming home from the trading post—not the one we saw,” he added, “or maybe upstream at the sweat lodge getting ready for the ritual tomorrow night.”
“They’re going to have a peyote ceremony, then?” Barry said.
“How about not using that word in this house, okay?” Johnny said without moving. “My mother understands some English, and she’s not in favor of the Church and the way they do things there.”
At that point a man with his hat in his hand bent to come in through the low doorway. His eyes were hard and his mouth turned down in a frown as he looked at Barry. Barry stood up awkwardly, not knowing whether to shake hands first or not. But Johnny had got up at the same time and was smiling at the newcomer, whose face broke its frown as he saw the younger man. There was a brief exchange in Navajo, and the man slapped Johnny on the back several times. He was short-statured, with a gnarled face and a distinct stoop to his walk. He might have been anywhere from forty to seventy, Barry thought. Johnny said some more to the man, and he turned to Barry, this time with a smile and with his hand extended. Barry took the hand, felt the smooth, light handshake of the Indian and said, not knowing if he would be understood, “I’m very pleased to be here and meet you …” He looked at Johnny.
“Oh, yeah, sorry. This is my, uh, maternal uncle, Albert Chee. And this is Barry Golden,” Johnny said, indicating Barry.
There was another exchange and Johnny shook his head, smiling. He talked at some length and then turned to Barry. “Albert was thinking you might be from the agency, one of Collier’s people, and he was about to politely tell you to take your ass out of his house, but I told him what you were doing here and that you had nothing at all to do with the Indian commissioner or even the tribal council.”
“What’s all that about?” Barry said, sitting down again.
“You know much about the slaughtering of livestock the last few years?”
“Not from the Indian side of it.”
“The U.S. Government decided a couple years ago that our people were overgrazing the land because they had too many sheep and goats, so they pushed the tribal council around until that bunch of half-whites put out an order that everyone’s herd had to be cut ten percent. The big, rich herders who live like whites and have suction in high places lost no animals at all, while the little guys, like my relatives here, lost more than their share.”
“How do you mean, reduced?” Barry said. “I thought they put a limit on the number of animals you could have and then bought up the ones over that limit.”
“If you can call it buying when they give you twenty percent of market value,” Johnny said. He leaned over to Albert, who was sitting now listening with a puzzled expression, and said what must have been a brief resume in Navajo. The older man’s face grew stolid again, and the frown turned his mouth down. He looked at Barry and said a long series of things in his own language, gesturing emphatically at several points. He concluded by spreading his arms wide, his face growing old-looking.
“He’s telling about the burning of the goats,” Johnny said. “Couple years ago I wasn’t here, but Albert saw it. The government bought up more than three thousand goats for about a dollar and a quarter apiece and then took them out into a bit corral and shot them all dead. Bunch of whites with rifles had themselves a time doing it.” He paused while Barry let that sink in. “And then they poured gasoline over the bodies and burned them all up. You can still see the big piles of bones and the ashes of the corral up north of here, right out on the mesa. Lots of our people saw it.”
“Hell of a way to reduce livestock,” Barry said. “But they do that nowadays, and not just with Indian animals. They burn wheat and dump coffee in the ocean to keep up the price. Did they explain that to your people?”
“You can’t explain something like that,” Johnny said, shaking his head. “My people don’t waste the world like that. It’s a sin, maybe the worst sin. And they don’t care about keeping prices up. In fact, most of them can’t imagine what makes the prices go up and down and just take it as part of being herders. But to waste life and meat and hides by burning them like that”—he turned and said something to Albert—“that’s almost like doing it to people.”
Albert nodded his head and said something in Navajo.
“Albert says it’s the white man going finally insane, and he will be doing it to people next thing because there are too many on the range.”
The conversation had distracted Barry, and he didn’t hear the two little girls outside with their mother. Now they all came in, the woman carrying wood to the fire and giving directions to the girls in a soft voice Barry could hardly hear. The girls were dressed like their mother, with fewer pieces of silver on their clothes; but the older one, who might have been twelve, had heavy strings of turquoise around her neck as her mother did. Barry saw, too, that the woman wore several silver bracelets, some with turquoise stones, and that the buttons of her blouse were silver dimes. Supper was a joint effort and consisted of mutton stew with fried bread, which the woman made by slapping the dough between her hands and then frying it in a skillet on a makeshift grill over the fire. Coffee completed the meal, and when they had eaten, Barry was genuinely surprised at how good it had been.
They sat around after the meal feeling torpid, Barry thinking he had eaten too much and made a pig of himself; but then they had kept pushing more at him, and he had simply tried to be polite. Now he felt as if he should hibernate for a week.
Johnny said something brief and, after Albert had answered him, turned to Barry. “Old Man Fisher, or Old Fisherman, I guess would be the correct way to say it, the grandfather, anyway, is visiting with the Begays up the canyon. My mother’s sister’s—ah, well, forget the relationship … a young woman who ran away from her husband’s lodge up north is visiting there also. That’s where the meeting will be held tomorrow night, if everyone gets there.”
When it was quite dark and the mother had washed up the dishes in a tiny pan of heated water and they had drunk the last of the weak coffee, Albert Chee and Johnny and Barry walked along the edge of the stream that meandered through the middle of the valley.
Albert said something, pointing to a tall pinnacle of sandstone standing farther up the valley in almost the center of the streambed.
“He’s telling you about Spider Woman, who lives on top of that rock there,” Johnny said. “She taught the people how to weave rugs and blankets, and now she’s all alone up there in that cleft rock. When I was a kid I remember Old Fisherman scaring me with stories of how she came scaling down at night to pick off unwary kids who wandered around after dark.”
Barry sat on a stone while Albert and Johnny walked over by the horses hobbled in the grassy area near the west side of the canyon. He wanted to let them have their own conversation, and he needed time himself to get things straight in his mind. He had taken a few notes, but mostly he was picking up the atmosphere and deciding what the background and setting in the article were going to be like. He had as yet heard nothing about the Native American Church, which was why he was here, supposedly. He leaned back against the rock and looked at the sharp black edges of the canyon overhead. The stars were brilliant, seeming to step out into space over the edge of the canyon and to peer down into this rift in the earth with particular care and brightness. He had never seen them so bright, perhaps because he had never looked at the stars so far from any city lights; here the blackness of the canyon accentuated their light. He wondered where the moon would be. Its transit across the canyon would be brief. In the moonless night, tsay-ih became a cavern whose roof was impossibly alive with stars. In the dense darkness he noticed smells more, the horses over to the left, the fire from the cooked meal as it died down, the wet smell of the little stream and the sand, the smell of his own body sitting against an odor of stone, an invisible stream of odors coming with a gentle wind that moved in the valley. His hearing, too, seemed to intensify. He could hear the girls and the Indian woman quite clearly, although their language was unknown to him. Johnny said that the girls knew English well but that they were shy of strangers, especially Whites, so not to expect much from them. They had said “Thank you” very nicely when he gave them the candy from the trading post, but that was all. He heard the cat give a screech and a rapid modulation of chatter from the woman. A horse was coughing over in the darkness, and another rattled its hobbles. Farther away past the shelter, the sheep were making sleepy sheep noises, little bleats and sighings. Behind it all the stream whispered in low tones, and leaves among the willows spoke a tiny rattling language of their own.
When he rolled up in his blanket that night alongside Johnny in the summer shelter of the Chees, he felt he had never been so comfortable. Listening to the breathing of the people around him, he thought of his family in their big house at home, blessed them with a silent prayer, thought of Renee so that her face, her hands on his shoulders, came back to him vividly. And then he slept
* * *
I wake with suddenness and a tense excitement. I have shifted almost before waking, so eager am I to move as myself in this strangely new place. I note everything with heightened senses: the heaving sonorousness of the breathing humans in the dark shelter, their vibrations surrounding me, rippling in my spatial sense that seems newly alive with colors of its own beyond the visible spectrum. I sniff, and the full range of odors, the Indian scent, the embers of fire, the sheep outside, the food that remains, even the wool in sacks and the dozing dogs outside the shelter have a new significance. It is as if 1 had just wakened from a long hibernation, and, as I drop the blanket and slip out the door, I wonder if this can be true. Have I been asleep7 I quiet the dogs easily and begin a cautious pacing down toward the stream, only to leap aside as an owl flutters by in the dark. I am tense, jumpy as a rabbit, and yet inexplicably and fanatically happy too in this place.
I smell the water and taste its flavor of cliffs and sandbars and willow roots, sip into me the clean taste of this place. And then I flash suddenly into a run, galloping down toward the bend in the canyon, running with joy as I have not done, it seems, since I was a cub, for here in the dark canyon with the moonless night over me, I feel properly myself, my own self again. I race across the flat sandbars, heedless of the wild tracks I am leaving, dash back and forth through the shallow water, splashing it around me gleefully, heading down the canyon where I sense there are no humans, where the walls close in on the valley and the close darkness is mine alone.
A rabbit occupies me for a minute or two, but I let him get away after getting close enough to toss him into the air. He squeals, expecting death, but I laugh under my panting breath and run on, the canyon slipping around me like a familiar street.
There is a coyote, too; I throw a quick thought at him as I give chase, but he does not answer. He must not be like that other one, but only a dumb animal. Him, too, I allow to escape, but not before making him try to climb a sheer rock wall. It is so funny that I roll on my back laughing and waving my legs in the air. I find a whispering willow and lie down to savor the night, getting back my breath. It feels so new and different here. My fur prickles as if a cold breeze had hit me, although the night is warm. I feel that someone is studying me, watching me, and I lie perfectly still, reaching out on all sides with my spatial sense. Nothing is there, right up to the solid rock walls on each side, which are, at this point, no more than a hundred yards apart. I sense the small animals of the desert, nothing else. The prickling remains, not unpleasant but like a warning sign that I cannot read. 1 lie under the tree for some time, listening. The nearby animals resume their night hunts as I still my breathing to hear better. A mouse begins improving his burrow not ten feet from me, and I sense a tarantula racing along after something, a dark, hairy shadow that appears and disappears in the rocks, and a bird over my head mumbles in his sleep. It must be only my excitement at this place. I relax and rise to walk on down the valley.
A mile further, as the valley widens again and I am walking close to the right side in the deepest shadow of the wall, I feel a tension building up in my body. It is not localized to spatial sense or hearing, or even feeling, but makes me uncertain. I stop, sensing around as I did before. But this time the feeling is different: danger. There is nothing dangerous in the life around me, but, rather, there seems to be an incipience, a possibility of danger, perhaps not even a real thing. I advance one step at a time, the vague feeling becoming more strong until I must stop to assess what it is. My fur is erect, my hackles up as if with fear and I feel a quivering in my legs. My senses tell me nothing except that there is a break in the canyon wall ahead, one of the old ruins of the pre-Navajo people who lived here hundreds of years ago.
I take another step forward. A blind terror seizes me, so that I cannot take another step, can hardly organize my mind to step back out of that zone of fear. I struggle in my mind to recall that feeling, and it comes back from more than a year ago. My fight with the farm woman, Aunt Cat, the mother of Barry’s wife, involved the same feeling. It was the amulet she carried and lost in that brief grappling with the guard when she was trying to kill me. I remember waiting for her in the dark trees as she stalked forward, shotgun at the ready, confident that I could make her put the gun down. Then, as she got closer, the terrible fear that made my muscles let go, made my very flesh rebel against my mind and lie down in abject terror before her. The amulet had that power—whatever it came from, whatever it signified to me—and now I feel it here. But the fear is coupled with a perverse need to step forward into that terror, to give in to what is most awful, like giving in to my own death.
I back up another step on the dark sand, hearing it crunch beneath my feet, hearing the night wind forcing the leaves of the willow into speech, filling the night with unintelligible words, tree words. Is there another sound also, a speaking as of people far away, barely heard, speaking in a different language, but so low that I think it is not sound at all but the blood tumbling through my own veins? I step forward again, hearing the sand grains crunch. The terror builds around my heart like a grasping claw that threatens to squeeze but does not yet do it. I cannot help taking another step. The claw grips my heart, and I know that if I step forward again I will die.
But now the sound, the rasping undercurrent of vibration that was so faint, is growing more distinct, and it might be voices. I might recognize the words if only I could go closer. I will take one more step, only one. I step. Sounds intensify: sand crunches, wind howls in the willow leaves, water crashes across rocks behind me, a snake thunders along in the grass, and the sound of voices rises to a chorus of raging, a tumult of imprecations that assault me from every side so that I must take time to pull my consciousness together to think which way is back, so distorted is time and space in that agony of sounds. My heart seems to have stopped in midbeat, my breathing suspended as if I had been turned to stone. I try to scream and have no voice, but my mind pulls the muscles of my legs in a final attempt to go back; I fall back, out of range of that force. I am lying on the sand, twisted around, trying to crawl away. I crawl, the sounds becoming less painful, the voices vanishing, becoming the willow leaves again, the quiet lapping of water, the susurration of wind in grass. I take a sharp breath and howl like a cat on fire, like a bear leaping from a cliff, shaking with the nearness of death.
