Ceremony (22 page)

“We’ll give you a cure! We know how, don’t we?” Harley was bouncing on the seat, and he made the whole truck sway on its weak springs. Helen Jean squealed, and the bottle of wine she was holding splashed all over them. Tayo grabbed it and swallowed what was left in the bottle.

“Drink it! Drink it! It’s good for you! You’ll get better! Get this man to the cold Coors hospital! Hurry up!”

Leroy pressed the gas pedal to the floorboard, and the speedometer dial spun around and around before it fluttered at 65. The engine whined with the strain, and the heat-gauge needle was pointing at 212. Tayo could smell hot oil and rubber, but Leroy kept it wide open past Mesita.

Up ahead, he could see where the highway dipped across an arroyo. But Leroy didn’t slow down, and the old truck bounced, and landed hard on the other side of the dip. Their heads hit the roof of the cab, and Harley said this was better than a carnival ride at the Laguna fiesta. Tayo sank down into sensations—the truck vibrating and bouncing down the road, the bodies squeezed around him tight, the smell of perfume and sweat and wine, and the rushing fresh air cooling the sweat. Everything made them laugh, until they were laughing at their own noises and laughter. He didn’t have to remember anything, he didn’t have to feel anything but this; and he wished the truck would never stop moving, that they could ride like that forever.

 

 

 

 

Leroy parked the truck under the elm trees at the Y bar. Wine bottles and beer cans were scattered everywhere, broken and flattened by tires. Leroy turned off the key, but he left it in gear, so when he took his foot off the clutch, the truck lurched forward suddenly. Harley was helping Helen Jean get out, and the sudden lurch threw her against him. They both collapsed on the ground, laughing. The contents of her tooled leather purse with the rose designs had spilled all around her. She picked up her billfold, but they all got down on their hands and knees, crawling around to pick up little brass tubes of lipstick and her mirror and powder puff. Harley grabbed the mirror out of her hand and pranced around one of the elm trees, pretending to be “chickish muggy,” someone who swished around, exercising his back muscles as he walked.

“Hey, Harley!” Tayo yelled. “You can’t fool us any more! We know you are one of those guys! Where’s your lipstick and nail polish?”

Harley took mincing steps and dropped the mirror into Helen’s purse. “I’ll race you to a cold beer!” he said as he took off, running to the door of the bar.

Harley and Leroy raced for the screen door, leaving Tayo behind with Helen Jean. She was giggling to herself, taking big steps and setting her feet down stiffly, as though she weren’t sure the ground would hold her. They stepped over a Navajo sleeping on the shady side of the wooden steps. The juke box was playing a Mexican polka and Harley was dancing around by himself. There were some Mexicans from the section gang drinking beer at a table in the corner and three Navajos slouching on stools at the bar. The Mexicans could see she was drunk, and they were already getting ideas about her.

The way the men looked at her tensed Tayo’s hands into fists. He didn’t feel the fun or the laughter any more. His back was rigid; he sat down stiffly in the chair Leroy pulled out for him. Harley kept Helen Jean between himself and Tayo, and away from Leroy. He should have been worrying about the Mexicans in the corner, not Leroy. But Harley was up again, ordering a round of Coors, feeding quarters into the juke box as he punched the buttons for all the Hank Williams songs.

Helen Jean was smiling coyly at one of the Mexicans. Tayo tried to focus his eyes in the dim light to see which one, but there was a buzzing inside his head that made his eyes lose focus. He swallowed more beer, trying to clear away the dull ache; and he decided then he was too tired to care what she did.

“It wouldn’t have worked anyway,” Harley was saying in a loud voice; “between this beer belly of mine and her big belly, there would have been too much distance!” He laughed and looked at Helen Jean to see if she liked his story. She moved her eyes away quickly from the tall Mexican with long sideburns. She stared down at the table, smiling to herself.

The Mexicans stood up; the tall one put his cap on slowly and pulled it to one side of his head seductively. He watched her steadily; he didn’t care if the Indians noticed. He nodded, and she smiled. Harley had the bottle tilted all the way, nursing the last drops of beer. He was too drunk and too happy to see what was happening. Leroy’s shirttail was coming loose from his jeans, and when he answered Harley he had trouble making the words come out.

Helen Jean reached down by her feet for her purse. She hesitated and looked at Tayo. She giggled and said, “I have to go pee”; he nodded and finished off the beer. Harley and Leroy never even saw her go.

 

 

 

She had been thinking about it that morning when they left Gallup. Something had reminded her; maybe it was the people in the bar talking about the Gallup Ceremonial coming in two weeks. She had left Towac about then, August, one year ago. Left the reservation for good to find a job. She hadn’t thought about it until then. Maybe it was because she was with these reservation Indians, out drinking with them and dancing in Gallup with all the other reservation Indians. Maybe someone had even talked about Towac.

She took the money she had saved—money the missionary lady paid her for cooking—and she stopped by Emma’s to tell them good-bye. But the padlock was hooked through the hasp on the door, and it was locked, which meant Emma would be gone all day. Maybe to Cortez. So she left without seeing her little sisters, because she planned to come back on the bus, every weekend, to visit, and to bring money to help them out.

These Laguna guys were about the worst she’d run into, especially that guy they picked up walking along the highway; he acted funny. Too quiet, and not very friendly. She wanted to get away from them. They weren’t mean like the two Oklahoma guys who beat her up one afternoon in a parked car behind the El Fidel. Pawnees, they said. Normandy. Omaha Beach. They beat her up—took turns holding and hitting her. They yelled at her because they both wanted her; they had been buddies all through the war together, and she was trying to split them up, they said. These Lagunas wouldn’t beat her up, except she didn’t know for sure about the quiet one. But Harley and Leroy, they were okay. She just didn’t want to be driving around, way out in the sticks, with these reservation guys, even if they were war vets.

It was just a feeling she’d had since that morning. Thinking about Ceremonial time coming again. She hadn’t sent any letters to Emma or the girls. She meant to do it; she had even written letters, in the evenings, on Stephanie’s pink stationery at the little table in the kitchen they all shared. But she saved the letters in unsealed envelopes, waiting for a couple of dollar bills to send along.

It didn’t work out. Her roommates were nice, but they had to have rent money, and she had to buy her share of the food. All day one Saturday the girls gave each other curly permanent waves and plucked out their eyebrows, penciling a thin arc over each eye. Monday she borrowed Elaine’s blue dress, and she went down to the Kimo theater to apply for the job they advertised in the theater window. The man told her to wait in the lobby. It smelled like cold popcorn and burned-out cigarettes. She was too shy to ask him what the job was, or to tell him she knew how to type. She looked at the doors marked PRIVATE and OFFICE and tried to imagine what the desks looked like and what kind of typewriter they had. He didn’t smile or look at her directly. “You can start today,” he said, “but you might want to change your clothes.” She stood in front of him, afraid to ask what was wrong with her clothes. He turned and motioned for her to follow. At the end of the corridor he pulled open a door, and she saw a push broom, and a scrub bucket. “Oh,” she said. She always smiled when she was embarrassed. “How much do you pay?” “Seventy-five cents an hour,” he said, walking away.

These Laguna guys were fun all right. And they sure spent their money. She didn’t even know if there would be any money left when she asked them to help her out a little. Her roommates got tired of helping her out. They thought she was a secretary; they kept asking her what she did with all her money. She lied; she said she had to send it back home to Emma and the girls. She got dressed every day and left for work when they did. She changed her clothes in the ladies’ lounge. But it wasn’t working out. The man at the theater waited for her now; he watched her go down to the ladies’ lounge. She wasn’t surprised the day she heard the door open and close and she saw his brown shoes under the door of the toilet stall.

These Indians who fought in the war were full of stories about all the places they’d seen. San Diego, Oakland, Germany, the Philippines. The first few times she heard them talk, she believed everything. That was right after she got to town, and the girls took her out one weekend. She had walked around, staring up at the tall buildings, and all the big neon signs on Central Avenue. Every time she rode an elevator then, she thought of the old people at home, who shook their heads at the mention of elevators and tall buildings or juke boxes that could play a hundred different records. The old Utes said it was a lie; there were no such things. But she saw it every day, and for a long time when she saw these things, she felt embarrassed for the old people at home, who did not believe in these things. So she was careful not to make the same kind of mistake herself; and she believed all the stories the guys told. They had ribbons and medals they carried in their wallets; and if the U.S. Government decorated them, they must be okay.

She knew where to find them—which downtown bars they liked. She knew the veterans’ disability checks came out around the first of the month. She learned these things after she quit her job at the Kimo. She walked by the El Fidel, that day she quit, and she could hear them laughing and whooping it up inside, so she knew they were Indians. That day she went in only to ask for a loan, because the girls were getting behind with the rent. The guys told her to sit down. She asked for a Coke, and they told the bartender to put rum in it.

“How do you like that!” they said, laughing and patting each other on the back. “Nothing like this at Towac, huh?”

She sat with them all afternoon. It was dim in there, and cool because they had a table near the fan. In July the streets and sidewalks were too hot to touch. She looked for work, but every day when it started to get hot, she walked past the El Fidel to see who was there. They were happy to see her; they introduced her to their other buddies. Late in the afternoon, when she got up to leave, she would ask someone to help her out a little. By then they would be feeling pretty good. Someone always helped her out with five or maybe ten dollars. “We used to do this every night during the war,” one of them told her. “In San Diego one time, we bought the whole bar—all the soldiers and their girls—a round of drinks. That bartender shook his head; he told us, ‘I know it’s you Indians, without even looking. No one ever did that until the Indian soldiers came around.’”

They told her other stories too. Later on, when they started looking at her and sitting closer to her. The sergeant from Isleta still wore his khaki shirt with the stripes on the arm. As he reached over to pour her more beer, he rubbed his shaky arm against her side to feel the swell of her breast. She wasn’t surprised then either. She knew if they helped her out, they would get friendly with her too. He had already told her a story about blowing up a bunker full of Japs. The story ended with him pulling out his wallet to show her a little bronze star on a blue ribbon. “Another thing was the women. The white women in California. Boy! You never saw anything like it! They couldn’t get enough of us, huh?” “No!” all the others at the table would shout. “See,” the sergeant said, looking a little crookedly at her, “I’ll tell you about this one who was in love with me.” He nodded deliberately. “Yeah, she was. I told her I was already married back home, but she didn’t care. Boy, you shoulda seen her blond hair! She had it all curled. And she was built like this up front.” He held his brown hands out in front of his chest and grinned at the others. He turned back to her and breathed heavily into her ear. “Hey, let’s go someplace where I can tell you about it.”

But she didn’t want to go with him. “Tell me here,” she said, “I want to finish my drink.”

“Her name was Doreen. She only needed the money because her mother was a cripple. She wasn’t like the others. She went with me because she loved me. I could still have her if I went back to California.”

One of the guys at the table, an Apache, yelled at the Isleta sergeant. “She told that to all the guys. Doreen. That’s what she called herself. Sure she liked Indians! Because they were dumb guys like you!”

The Apache had been watching Helen Jean; he had been watching the Isleta rub up against her. The Isleta grabbed her arm. “Let’s go,” he said. She didn’t move. The Apache jumped up, ready to fight.

“She doesn’t want to go with you,” the Apache said.

The Isleta turned to her; his eyes were pinched with rage. “You bitch! You think you’re better than a white woman?” He slapped her across the face. Her teeth cut her tongue and the inside of her mouth. Tears ran down her face. The Apache grabbed him, and they started pushing at each other, in a staggering circle on the dance floor. The other guys were cheering for a fight. They forgot about her.

She knew all the stories, about white women in San Diego and Oakland and L.A. Always blond or redhead, nice girls with sick or crippled parents at home. It didn’t make any difference to her. They drank until they couldn’t walk without holding on to her. She asked them for money then, money to send back to Emma at Towac: for the little girls. Then they stumbled up the steps to the Hudson Hotel. If she took long enough in the toilet, they usually passed out on the bed.