Gods Without Men (17 page)

One night Jaz came home to find her emptying the kitchen cabinets, throwing cans and packets into the trash. GFCF. Gluten-free, casein-free. Jaz asked if she really thought autism was caused by not eating
organic. She told him to stop patronizing her. If Raj had allergies, a change in diet would at least alleviate some of his gastric symptoms. Jaz sat down at the breakfast bar and held his head in his hands. “Are you really going to put us all through this?” he asked. Never had she despised him so much. Was she really married to a coward, a man so spineless he wouldn’t even fight for his own son?

So the family embarked on a wheat- and dairy-free diet. Already, seafood was banned on the grounds of mercury contamination. Jaz absolutely refused to countenance vegetarianism, claiming that without meat, he’d feel he’d lost his culture altogether. Lisa scoffed. Did he really feel so threatened? They’d already put off the decision to circumcise Raj because of his “cultural sensitivities.” She put sneering air-quotes round the phrase. He began to find excuses to eat out, with clients or people from the bank.

She started researching other remedies. Could injections of an intestinal hormone help Raj with his bowel problems? What about sessions in an oxygen chamber? Increasingly, the particular treatments were less important to her than a stance, a hopeful habit of mind. She read books about self-healing, positive visualization. Former colleagues would sneak proofs to her from the publisher where she used to work, which had an imprint dedicated to New Age thought.

She read these books in a semi-clandestine way, like an Eastern Bloc dissident poring over samizdat copies of Havel or Solzhenitsyn. She derived something vital from them, something fragile she could never share
with Jaz.
Visualize what you want to happen. That’s the first step toward making it come true
. Soon she’d abandoned her old reading altogether, the literary novels with bleak endings, the books about environmentalism or human rights. Those things felt like luxuries now, baubles for people who had no battles of their own. She wasn’t sure she had enough hope for herself, let alone Somalis or street kids or Yanomami Indians.

The midday light poured through the windshield, harsh and white. How long had she been circling the back streets of the little desert town? It could have been hours, days. Sooner or later, she’d have to go back to the motel. It was all lurking in wait for her there. The monstrous trap of her life.

On the other hand, fuck it. She turned onto the highway heading out of town. Dutifully the buildings fell away, leaving her in a basin pocked with Joshua trees at the head of a ribbon of blacktop that led off toward a mountain range. There was little sign of human beings. A hand-painted sign, bleached almost white by the sun, saying
FEAR GOD
, a few trailers and cabins scattered across the desert floor like loose change. She drove on. Soon even these remnants of life disappeared. It was just her, piloting her little craft through the void.

She pulled over and opened the door. A blast of warm air hit her as she stood up, shielding her eyes from the glare. Above her the blue shaded into purples and blacks, the colors of space. The atmosphere was thin, tenuous. She switched off the engine, but something in the car, the air-conditioning or some cooling fan, kept running, a whirring sound like a long slow exhalation of breath. Finally it cut out and there was silence. She took a few steps into the desert. Plastic scraps in the scrub at the roadside. The tracks of some small mammal, a rabbit or a rodent. A few more steps. A few more. Now the car was a long way off, a white gleam in the distance. Up ahead, perhaps a mile or two away, was a peculiar rock formation, three stone towers like fingers pointing up into space. If I were to lie down here, she thought, I would die. I would step out of my body like a dress and float straight up into the blue.

The man was Deighton, but the People called him Skin Peeled Open, on account of his burned face. No one could say why the other white men hated him so. He had money: He paid for stories with new-minted silver dollars. He even had an automobile. Perhaps it was because he was sick. On the nights he slept in the camp, you could hear him coughing. Once Stone Apron couldn’t sleep for the noise of it and got up to fix him rabbit-bush tea. Didn’t help. He sounded like he was going to die.

He was a tall and ragged kind of a man, with an oil-stained coat and a week’s growth of whiskers making his face lopsided, for they grew only on one half of his jaw, the half not smeared with smooth pink scar tissue. When he first came the young boys threw stones, then ran to hide down by the water. The men who turned out to drive him away were amazed to hear him speak. He told how he’d stayed at a camp on the far side of the Colorado and People there had taught him Language. His accent was strange and many times he used women’s words or mistook one thing for another, but finding a white who could speak at all was a wonder. Two-Headed Sheep was another name for him. Freak of nature.

What did he want? He asked after old ones. Who was the wisest? Who knew the songs and could tell him the names of plants? The People were suspicious, but he was persistent and showed money, so they took him first to Thorn Baby, who was strong in English and could remember when mule deer still ran in large herds on the land. The man said Thorn Baby had too much white schooling and that was when they decided he was crazy, the kind of white who would always be trying to turn his own whiteness upside down. They wanted him to leave then, but he
kept hanging around and somehow they got used to him. He gave presents to the children and said “good day” in his comical accent and finally they suggested he talk to Segunda, who loved to gossip so much the young men called her Empty Clay Olla, the kind that makes a hollow noise when you rap it with your fingers. She knew that was her name. They thought she was just a deaf old woman, but she knew. The crazy white man visited her and seemed happy afterward. Everyone agreed: The two of them fitted, like a joint in a socket.

Soon a routine was established. Skin Peeled Open would drive to the camp and spend whole days watching Segunda weave baskets, listening to her talk about the time when the animals were men. He would listen and write in his book, which made some of the People nervous, reminding them as it did of the magic worked in courts and land offices, the kind that always fell out one way.

She grew comfortable in his company. They’d sit together under her ramada, looking out at the stand of palms by the water hole, she cross-legged on a mat, he on the little folding stool he brought with him in a footlocker, along with his bedroll and the cans of corned beef that were a sore temptation to mouths bored with yucca and mesquite meal. The man pretended not to notice when food disappeared from his trunk. He could easily have put a padlock on it, if he’d wanted.

He complimented Segunda on her baskets. Who had taught her to weave? What materials did she use? How many different styles did she know? He watched her cut willow and grind yucca root and devil’s claw into dyes. He made her feel proud of her baskets—most people had no use for them now that they could buy basins and pails from the general store—so she let him follow her to the ditch to watch how she soaked the yucca fiber in guano. Above all, he wanted to know if there were any old stories about basket weaving. Of course there were, and when she got tired of his pestering, she told them. She told of the basket that Ocean Woman used to scoop up the sun, and the basket Coyote used to bring the People back from the west, carrying it on his back like a water spider with its sac of eggs. She told other stories, such as the one about the time Dog and Coyote went their separate ways, Dog to the camp
and Coyote to walk around. She told about the time when Coyote and his brother Wolf lived on Snow-Having and hunted bighorn sheep.

Then came a day when he wanted her to say disgusting words. She was upset and would not speak to him. After that, she began to pick up her basketry and hide when she heard the sound of his machine coming toward the camp. She complained about it to her nephew. Little Bird sat the man down and explained, very slowly, as you would to a child, that it was forbidden to speak the names of the dead. The man took out his little book. Interesting, he said. So does the name die with the person? His speech made no kind of sense. If a name had died, there’d be no need to forbid people to use it.

Little Bird told him he wasn’t welcome anymore. The man didn’t understand. Little Bird just couldn’t get him to see, not after he’d written so much down in his book. That was typical of them. He even asked to speak to Segunda. Little Bird blushed, and pretended not to know such a person.

Then the man did a strange thing. He sent his woman. She was young and pretty, which made the People laugh because he was such a stringy old thing. Under her big straw hat, her face was as white as salt. With her dusty skirts and her patched shirtwaist she cut a sorry sight. She had no jewelry, not so much as a string of beads, and when she sat down on the earth you could see the holes in her shoes. Then the People knew she was not rich, though the man Deighton drove an automobile. They said to one another: There must be trouble between them.

Salt-Face Woman tried to talk, but no one could understand. Then she spoke English to Thorn Baby and Charcoal Standing and those two told the People that her husband had sent her to the camp to be his mouth and ears. The other women felt sorry for her. They helped her build a shelter; Skin Peeled Open had already left and gone back to town.

One evening she came and sat down beside Segunda at the fire. Thorn Baby was embarrassed at having to repeat her words in Language. She was talking about dust. She was asking for the names of the dead. Segunda covered her ears. She was afraid. These people had death all over them. They were covered in death, like a hide. Segunda ran away.
Thorn Baby came to find her in the arroyo to say that the woman had promised not to bother her again.

Salt-Face Woman stayed for a long time. After a while it seemed like she accepted the way of things. She was certainly a quicker study than her husband. Her voice grew louder. Segunda could understand some of what she said. But she made her afraid. Segunda didn’t want to talk anymore. Salt-Face Woman had struck her dumb. Everyone remarked on it. Empty Clay Olla not talking? What could be the matter?

When a person is dead, it is right for them to go into silence. You should never call them back. Trouble for them and trouble for you. It was possible the woman wasn’t human. She could have been wearing someone’s skin.

Then into camp came Mockingbird Runner, who’d been away working as a hand for one of the cattlemen. Ever since the time when the whites fought their war for the water holes, they’d hired People to watch over certain places. Mockingbird Runner carried a rifle and wore fancy boots, but he was also an owner of the Bighorn Sheep Song and People said he got his name because he knew how to run in the old way. His grandfather was a famous doctor who had a bat familiar that protected him from the cold. Though he was young, Mockingbird Runner had power. When he heard about Salt-Face Woman he went to take a look at her. The next thing Segunda knew, they were sitting together under a ramada and the little thing was writing in her book.

Segunda sidled closer, to listen to what they were saying. Mockingbird Runner was telling her a story of the time when Coyote was living with his brother Wolf at Snow-Having. They went to war with the Bear People and Wolf was killed. The Bear People took his scalp and Coyote snuck into the camp with his penis, the two of them disguised in the skins of old Bear women who’d been out gathering mesquite branches for the fire.

Mockingbird Runner was telling this story and the woman was writing it down. Of course he didn’t use the word
penis
. He called it Coyote’s
tail
.

Willie Prince, said the woman. That is only your English name.

Soon after that the man Deighton came back and took his woman
away. Segunda felt happy, but all the same she talked to Little Bird about moving to another camp. There were many places they could go. People were down in Imperial Valley, and on the riverbank up near Adobe Hanging Like Tears. There would be trouble at Kairo, she was sure. The snakes were listening. They should go somewhere else. Little Bird had work driving mules at one of the silver mines in the mountains. He had to go back to that place. He said she could go to another camp if she liked. He would follow her later. But she was an old woman. It was hard to bestir herself to make a long journey on her own.

Then Deighton brought his wife back again. He left her with a box of canned food and drove away. Before he left, he raised his voice to her, saying she was wasteful and a poor worker. Salt-Face Woman hid in her shelter, where she thought no one would see her cry. That evening Mockingbird Runner sat beside her, telling her words. The names of animals and rocks and stars. The types of rain. Rain that slashes at the skin. Spring rain, as fine as palmita seeds.

Willie Prince, said the woman. That is only your English name. What is your real name?

Segunda had warned Mockingbird Runner about such questions. He laughed and told her she was a foolish old clay olla, with a few grains rattling around inside. That one was reckless. He didn’t care if the snakes were awake. He didn’t care about telling stories to a spirit. Segunda saw him show Salt-Face Woman the scars on his back from the mission school. She heard him sing one of the songs they taught him there. When the woman asked a third time, Mockingbird Runner told her his true name.