When he was a little child he always wanted to pet a deer, and he daydreamed that a deer would let him come close and touch its nose. He knelt and touched the nose; it was softer than pussy willows, and cattails, and still warm as a breath. The bright blood in the nostrils was still wet. He touched the big mule-size ears, and they were still warm. He knew it would not last long; the eyes would begin to cloud and turn glassy green, then gray, sinking back in the skull. The nose would harden, and the ears would get stiff. But for that moment it was so beautiful that he could only stand and feel the presence of the deer; he knew what they said about deer was true.
Rocky was honing his knife; he tested the blade on a thread hanging from the sleeve of his jacket. The sun was settling down in the southwest sky above the twin peaks. It would be dark in an hour or so. Rocky rolled the carcass belly up and spread open the hind legs. When Tayo saw he was getting started, he looked at the eyes again; he took off his jacket and covered the deer’s head.
“Why did you do that?” asked Rocky, motioning at the jacket with the blade of his knife. Long gray hairs were matted into the blood on the blade. Tayo didn’t say anything, because they both knew why. The people said you should do that before you gutted the deer. Out of respect. But Rocky was funny about those things. He was an A-student and all-state in football and track. He had to win; he said he was always going to win. So he listened to his teachers, and he listened to the coach. They were proud of him. They told him, “Nothing can stop you now except one thing: don’t let the people at home hold you back.” Rocky understood what he had to do to win in the white outside world. After their first year at boarding school in Albuquerque, Tayo saw how Rocky deliberately avoided the old-time ways. Old Grandma shook her head at him, but he called it superstition, and he opened his textbooks to show her. But Auntie never scolded him, and she never let Robert or Josiah talk to him either. She wanted him to be a success. She could see what white people wanted in an Indian, and she believed this way was his only chance. She saw it as her only chance too, after all the village gossip about their family. When Rocky was a success, no one would dare to say anything against them any more.
Rocky slit the throat. Blood spilled over the grass and into the dirt; it splashed on his boots. He didn’t believe in drinking the warm blood as some hunters did. Tayo held a hind leg; it was beginning to get stiff. Rocky cut off the musk glands and testicles. He slit the belly open carefully, to avoid spilling the contents of the stomach. The body heat made steam in the cold air. The sun was down, and the twilight chill sucked the last of the deer’s life away—the eyes were dull and sunken; it was gone. Josiah and Robert came then and unloaded their rifles and leaned them against a scrub oak. They went to the deer and lifted the jacket. They knelt down and took pinches of cornmeal from Josiah’s leather pouch. They sprinkled the cornmeal on the nose and fed the deer’s spirit. They had to show their love and respect, their appreciation; otherwise, the deer would be offended, and they would not come to die for them the following year.
Rocky turned away from them and poured water from the canteen over his bloody hands. He was embarrassed at what they did. He knew when they took the deer home, it would be laid out on a Navajo blanket, and Old Grandma would put a string of turquoise around its neck and put silver and turquoise rings around the tips of the antlers. Josiah would prepare a little bowl of cornmeal and place it by the deer’s head so that anyone who went near could leave some on the nose. Rocky tried to tell them that keeping the carcass on the floor in a warm room was bad for the meat. He wanted to hang the deer in the woodshed, where the meat would stay cold and cure properly. But he knew how they were. All the people, even the Catholics who went to mass every Sunday, followed the ritual of the deer. So he didn’t say anything about it, but he avoided the room where they laid the deer.
They marked the place with Tayo’s T-shirt spread across the top of some scrub oaks. It was getting dark when they started hiking back to the truck. Tayo wrapped the liver and heart in the clean cheesecloth Josiah carried with him. An early winter moon was rising in front of them, and a chill wind came with it, penetrating feet and hands. Tayo held the bundle tighter. He felt humbled by the size of the full moon, by the chill wind that swept wide across the foothills of the mountain. They said the deer gave itself to them because it loved them, and he could feel the love as the fading heat of the deer’s body warmed his hands.
Harley slid another bottle of Coors across the table to him and said, “Hey, man, we didn’t come here to stare at the walls. We can do that anytime. We need some music.” He walked over to the juke box. “Something to get us happy right now.” Harley was a little nervous; he remembered the time Tayo went crazy in the bar and almost killed Emo. He remembered how Tayo had sat staring at the wall, not saying anything all afternoon while the rest of them had been laughing and drinking beer and telling Army stories. Harley told the others not to bother him, but they were drunk and they kept after him. Finally, Tayo jumped up and broke a beer bottle against the table; and before they could stop him, he shoved the jagged glass into Emo’s belly.
Tayo smiled and looked over at Harley. “I won’t push any broken bottle into your belly, Harley. Your belly’s too big anyway.”
Harley laughed. “You sure scared us that time, man. Skinny as you are, it took three guys to pull you off him.”
“You know what they say, Harley, ‘Crazy people are extra strong.’”
Harley shook his head; he was serious. “No, Tayo, you weren’t crazy. You were just drunk.”
They all had different explanations for the attack. Emo claimed they never got along, not since grade school when they had rock fights in the school yard; he said Tayo had wanted to get even with him for a long time.
They all had explanations; the police, the doctors at the psychiatric ward, even Auntie and old Grandma; they blamed liquor and they blamed the war.
“Reports note that since the Second World War a pattern of drinking and violence, not previously seen before, is emerging among Indian veterans.” But Tayo shook his head when the doctor finished reading the report. “No?” the doctor said in a loud voice.
“It’s more than that. I can feel it. It’s been going on for a long time.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it all around me.”
“Is that why you tried to kill Emo?”
“Emo was asking for it.”
The wind stirred the dust. The people were starving. “She’s angry with us,” the people said. “Maybe because of that Ck’o’yo magic we were fooling with. We better send someone to ask our forgiveness.”
They noticed hummingbird was fat and shiny he had plenty to eat. They asked how come he looked so good.
He said Down below Three worlds below this one everything is green all the plants are growing the flowers are blooming. I go down there and eat.
“You were real lucky, man. Real lucky. You could’ve gone to jail. But they just sent you to the hospital again. If it had been me, I probably still been sitting in jail.” Harley’s words were becoming disjointed and he was accenting the words at the beginning and swallowing the ending sounds until it didn’t sound like English any more. He had another beer and then he was rambling on to himself in Laguna.
Emo rattled the Bull Durham sack. He bounced it in the palm of one hand and then the other; he took another swallow of whiskey. He had to have two or three swallows of whiskey before he’d talk; he took out the little cloth sack when he was ready.
“You know,” he said, slurring the words, “us Indians deserve something better than this goddamn dried-up country around here. Blowing away, every day.” He laughed at the rhyme he made. The other guys laughed too because Emo was mean when he was drinking.
“What we need is what they got. I’ll take San Diego.” He laughed, and they all laughed loudly. He threw the bag up in the air and caught it, confident of his audience. He didn’t see Tayo sitting back in the cor
ner, leaning back in the chair with his eyes closed. He didn’t know that Tayo was clenching all his muscles against their voices; he didn’t know that Tayo was sweating, trying to fight off the nausea that surged at him whenever he heard the rattle in the little bag.
“We fought their war for them.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Yeah, we did.”
“But they’ve got everything. And we don’t got shit, do we? Huh?”
They all shouted “Hell no” loudly, and they drank the beer faster, and Emo raised the bottle, not bothering to pour the whiskey into the little glass any more.
“They took our land, they took everything! So let’s get our hands on white women!” They cheered. Harley and Leroy were grinning and slapping each other on the back. Harley looked over at Tayo, who was reading the label on the beer bottle. (COORS BEER brewed from pure Rocky Mountain spring water. Adolph Coors, Co., Golden, Colorado.) He looked at the picture of the cascading spring on the bottle. He didn’t know of any springs that big anywhere. Did they ever have droughts in Colorado? Maybe Emo was wrong: maybe white people didn’t have everything. Only Indians had droughts. He finished off the beer; Harley was watching him and gave him another one. He couldn’t hear the rattling in the little bag any more, but he could still see Emo playing with it. He was thirsty. Deep down, somewhere behind his belly, near his heart. He drank the beer as if it were the tumbling ice-cold stream in the mountain canyon on the beer label. He kept drinking it, and Harley kept shoving the bottles across the table at him. Attention shifted from Emo to Tayo.
“Hey, look at him!”
“No wonder he doesn’t say nothing. How many does that make?” Harley counted the empty bottles. He said something, but it was difficult for Tayo to hear clearly; their voices sounded dim and far away.
He got up and weaved his way between the chairs and tables to the toilet at the back of the room. The yellow stained walls were at the far end of the long tunnel between him and the world. He reached out across this distance to try to steady himself against the walls. He looked down at the stream of urine; it wasn’t yellow but clear like water. He imagined then that if a man could bring the drought, he could also return the water, out of his own belly, out of his own body. He strained the muscles of his belly and forced it out.
He pushed down on the handle of the toilet, but it didn’t flush; the lid of the toilet tank was leaning against the wall and the floor was covered with dirty water. It was soaking through his boots. The sensation was sudden and terrifying; he could not get out of the room, and he was afraid he would fall into the stinking dirty water and have to crawl through it, like before, with jungle clouds raining down filthy water that smelled ripe with death. He lunged at the door; he landed on his hands and knees in the dark outside the toilet. The dreams did not wait any more for night; they came out anytime.
When he got back to the table he saw that Emo’s glasses were sitting crookedly on his puffy face. Emo watched him walk across the room to the table.
“There he is. He thinks he’s something all right. Because he’s part white. Don’t you, half-breed?” Tayo stopped in front of them. He saw all their faces clustered around Emo’s fat, sweaty head; he thought of dogs standing over something dead, crowded close together. He couldn’t make out Harley or Leroy or Pinkie; all he could see was Emo’s sullen face. He stood there in front of them for a long time until his eyes lost focus. Someone touched his arm.
“Come on, Tayo, sit down with us,” Leroy said. He put his mouth close to Tayo’s ear. “Emo didn’t mean nothing. He’s just drunk, that’s all.”
Tayo sat down. He knew Emo meant what he said; Emo had hated him since the time they had been in grade school together, and the only reason for this hate was that Tayo was part white. But Tayo was used to it by now. Since he could remember, he had known Auntie’s shame for what his mother had done, and Auntie’s shame for him. He remembered how the white men who were building the new highway through Laguna had pointed at him. They had elbowed each other and winked. He never forgot that, and finally, years later, he understood what it was about white men and Indian women: the disgrace of Indian women who went with them. And during the war Tayo learned about white women and Indian men.
We went into this bar on 4th Ave., see,
me and O’Shay, this crazy Irishman.
We had a few drinks, then I saw
these two white women
sitting all alone.
One was kind of fat
She had dark hair.
But this other one, man,
She had big tits and
real blond hair.
I said to him
“Hey buddy, that’s the one I want.
Over there.”
He said, “Go get ’em, Chief.”
He was my best drinking buddy, that guy
He’d watch me
see how good I’d score with each one.
“I’m Italian tonight.”
“Oh a Wop!” He laughed
and hollered so loud
both of those girls were watching us then.
I smiled at
both of them, see, so they’d
both think I was friendly.
But I gave my “special look”
to the blonde. So she’d know, see.
That’s how I’d do it.
Then I went up to the bar and
I told the bartender I wanted
two more of whatever the ladies over there was
drinking, and I went over.
They took the
drinks and the fat one asked me
to sit down.
I sat down close to the blonde
and told them my name.
I used Mattuci’s name that night—this Wop
in our unit.
The fat girl had a car. I sat in the middle, grabbing titties with both hands all the way to Long Beach. Next day my buddy was dying to know. He kept asking all morning “Well? Well?” I told him “Well, I scored all right.” “Which one, which one?” “Not one,” I said “Both of them!” “Well, I’ll be goddamned!” he said “all in the same bed?” “Yes, sir, this In’di’n was grabbin’ white pussy all night!” “Shit, Chief, that’s some reputation you’re making for Mattuci!” “Goddamn,” I said “Maybe next time I’ll send him a bill!”
Pinkie was holding his belly, laughing so hard. Leroy and Harley were slapping each other on the backs, laughing real loud.
“Hey, Emo, that’s a good one!”
“Hey, tell the one about the time that guy told on you.”
“Which guy?”
“When you were balling that little redhead and what’s his name—the Irishman? . . .”
“Yeah, he knocked on the door. You know, the Irishman knocked on the door and yelled, ‘Hey, Geronimo!’”
“Oh. Yeah. That time.” Emo’s forehead was covered with little balls of sweat. He wiped them off with the back of his hand. He was looking at Tayo.
“Come on, Emo, tell it.”
“I don’t feel like it.” The corners of his mouth looked sullen.
“It’s so damn funny! That white guy yells, ‘Hey, Geronimo!’ and the white woman hears him and says, ‘Who’s that?’ He says, ‘A drunk Irishman.’ She says, ‘No, who’s that Geronimo?’ You have a titty in your mouth so you don’t answer. She says, ‘That’s an Indian, isn’t it?’ She yells back at him, ‘This guy’s an Indian?’ He says, ‘Yeah—his name is Geronimo.’ She starts screaming and faints.”
“Passed out.”
“Well, anyway, she fainted or passed out.” Leroy and Pinkie finished the story and went for more beer. There was something about the story Emo didn’t like. Tayo was watching him; he didn’t turn his eyes away when Emo looked back at him. They sat staring at each other across the big round table. Tayo remembered fighting tomcats then, the frozen pose, arched bodies coiled, only the tails twitching with their anger, until one or the other made a move and they went rolling a
round in the dirt.
“You don’t like my stories, do you? Not good enough for you, huh? You think you’re hot shit, like your cousin. Big football star. Big hero.” Emo pointed a finger at the empties in front of Tayo. “One thing you can do is drink like an Indian, can’t you? Maybe you aren’t no better than the rest of us, huh?”
Tayo thought of Rocky then, and he was proud that Emo was so envious. The beer kept him loose inside. Emo’s words never touched him. The beer stroked a place deep under his heart and put all the feeling to sleep.
Then Emo took out the little bag again. He fumbled with the yellow pull-strings and opened it. He poured the human teeth out on the table. He looked over at Tayo and laughed out loud. He pushed them into circles and rows like unstrung beads; he scooped them into his hand and shook them like dice. They were his war souvenirs, the teeth he had knocked out of the corpse of a Japanese soldier. The night progressed according to that ritual: from cursing the barren dry land the white man had left them, to talking about San Diego and the cities where the white women were still waiting for them to come back to give them another taste of what white women never got enough of. But in the end, they always came around to it.
“We were the best. U.S. Army. We butchered every Jap we found. No Jap bastard was fit to take prisoner. We had all kinds of ways to get information out of them before they died. Cut off this, cut off these.” Emo was grinning and hunched over, staring at the teeth.
“Make them talk fast, die slow.” He laughed. Pinkie and Harley laughed with him, at his joke. Leroy came over for more money; Tayo threw him a twenty dollar bill. He was getting tense. He needed more beer to keep him loose inside and to make his stomach feel better. He swallowed some more. Every word Emo said pulled the knot in his belly tighter.