Red Earth and Pouring Rain (80 page)

“No,” I said, but I reached out anyway and took the cigar. He passed me a lighter, and after a while I got the thing lit and
we watched the glow on each other’s faces.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Pleasure. Glad you played.”

“Yes.”

“You know,” he said, “I was born in India.”

“Really? Where?”

“Lucknow. We left when I was very young, maybe five or six. I don’t remember very much.”

“Yes.”

“But I remember a little.”

So we stood out there for a long time and smoked, and our cigars kept going out so we passed each other the lighter, it was
very quiet but for the crickets and far away, the birds, the wind smelled sweetly of some flower I didn’t know, and the moon
came up suddenly and covered the field in a silver light.

Later that night Amanda and I drove into the city and we found Tom and Kyrie, and with them White Eagle, they were sitting
side by side on lawn chairs in front of the Hokaido, in the rock garden, drinking beer out of cans. Amanda had been quiet
and dazed, she had shuddered at the darkness when we had come out of the clubhouse, saying, “But it was just light!” but now
she sat cross-legged on the rocks and popped open a beer and started to look less dislocated.

“We were going to go to NASA,” Tom said. “We were thinking about it.”

“Why NASA?” I said.

“Shuttle takeoff tonight,” Kyrie said. “We wanted to see it.”

“There are no takeoffs from Houston,” Amanda said.

“It’s a party,” Kyrie said. “They’re launching tonight from Cape Canaveral, and so there’s a party out near NASA.” She held
up an orange piece of paper with a hand-drawn map on it. “When they launch the real shuttle, everyone at the party will shoot
off their own rockets. Sort of in sync, see?”

I didn’t really see. I shrugged.

“You don’t want to go see the rockets?” Amanda said. Her hair was tousled from the couch, and she looked about ten years old.

“It’s something everybody should see once,” White Eagle said.

“Really?” I was sick at having to think of him as White Eagle, I mean his name was really Bob or Ted or something like that.
“You think so?”

“Really,” he said, sipping from his can and quite unaffected by my sarcasm.

Finally I had to go, they all seemed intent on it and my other choice was to sit at the Hokaido alone, and I wasn’t interested
in the damn shuttle or rockets but I couldn’t face that, so we got into the car, five of us, and we went to NASA. After we
got off the freeway we circled around in the dark, stopping at all-night convenience stores, until
finally we found a field with other cars scattered about and a lot of people gathered in little circles. They were all working
on rockets. There were kegs of beer here and there, but basically everyone had a rocket. Some of them had the little fizzy
kind, firecrackers, others had actual working models with decals and everything, there was one group that had a big shiny
shuttle that looked about six feet long. We got out, and I walked out into the field to a fence, and Tom followed me, and
we stood side by side and pissed, and he said, “How are you?”

“Feeling pretty weird. And you?” I said.

“Good.”

“Good? What’s going on?”

“With Kyrie?” He smiled. “Nothing. I mean I don’t know. I mean it’s good.”

“Are you ready to go back?”

“To school? No. Are you?”

“I think so.”

“Too bad we didn’t find heaven.”

“Maybe we did.”

“Yeah? Where?”

I shook my head and we walked back to the car. I couldn’t have explained it to him but I felt like something was over. We
sat on the hood of the car and after a while Kyrie and Tom and Amanda wandered off into the darkness, holding hands all of
them, they said they were going to look around. As they walked away I called, “Amanda, we won.”

“Won what?”

“The game.”

“Oh,” she said over her shoulder. “That’s good.”

There was a radio somewhere, a news-reader’s voice in the distance. The whole day was in my bones now, and my arm was aching
in sweeps from the collarbone, and I waved them away and lay back on the hood. I knew it was too late to sleep but it felt
nice to be looking up at the sky, which was sheets of cloud spilling across the moon.

“What kind of game was it?”

I started, and nearly slid off the car. It was White Eagle, and he was sitting in the driver’s seat, his head out of the window.

“Cricket,” I said.

“Ah.”

“Listen, what is your name really?” He just looked at me, his hands on the steering wheel. “I’m going to call you Ed,” I said
finally, and I lay back and wriggled around until I found comfort. The metal felt good on my back. After a while he began
to talk, and I didn’t really want to listen but I was too settled to move, and it was sort of nice, to hear a voice telling
a story above my head.

“Listen,” he said. “I tell the story of Coyote and Wolf, who lived a long time ago in a valley. The valley was full of game,
and Wolf lived happily, and Coyote too, around the edges. Then one day Coyote saw a wagon coming into the valley, drawn by
huge horses, and he hid and watched them. There was a family of humans in the wagon, and they camped in the bottom of the
valley, near a stream, and the next day they began to cut trees. They cleared a meadow and they built a house. Wolf came down
from the ridges right to the edge of the meadow, and he stood watching them, and one of the men raised a rifle, and Wolf faced
him, unafraid, and then the man laughed and dropped his barrel. Wolf turned and went back to the timberline, and as he went
he saw Coyote hiding behind a rock, and he sneered, showing his fearsome curved teeth. So Wolf and Coyote lived in the valley,
and Wolf hunted everywhere except down at the bottom of the valley, but then it seemed that the game became scarce, and Wolf
had to go hungry for long weeks. Sometimes he saw people in the forest, and seeing him they would stop, and then slowly they
would retreat. Meanwhile Coyote stole chickens from the settlement, and he rooted around in their garbage, and they came out
of the houses and shouted at him, often they fired at him with shotguns, once a bullet cut open his left flank in a long thin
line, but he scrambled away and lived. Now one day Wolf chased a deer, it was an old, scrawny buck, and Wolf chased him down
from the side of the mountain, and the deer fled into the town, a town it was now, with roads and poles and lights, and Wolf
went right after him, and the deer was running down the middle of a street when he was hit by a machine, a fast-moving machine,
and the deer tumbled over and came down dead. Some people got out of the machine, and Wolf looked at them, and they looked
at him, but he was hungry, and he was angry, so he ran forward for his deer, he had been stalking it all afternoon, and there
was a bang, and the first shot took off his right foot, and he howled and kept going, smearing the street with his blood,
and the second shot dropped
him short. The people gathered about the body, and poked it with the gun, and Coyote saw all this, because he was inside a
dumpster down the street with his nose barely out of the trash. So he sneaked away, and somebody skinned Wolf, and somebody
else got the deer, and the next night Coyote took a little of the deer, he broke into a shed and tore off a leg, and the dogs
chased him but he got away. Coyote lived long and grew old, he survived poison, and bullets, and gas, and disease, and one
winter he was down in the town again, and he saw something that made him laugh, he rolled over and over in the snow and laughed,
because at the middle of the town, near the river, the people had put up a statue of Wolf, and it showed him snarling, with
one leg raised, very proud and wild and free.”

There was something about his voice, not the sense of it but the texture, I wasn’t listening to him at all, but there was
something about lying down and having my eyes closed and a story in the air that made me small again, I was smelling a gobar
fire, the smell of the cow-dung fresh and pure, a delicious wind taking the heat from my skin as we slept in the veranda on
a hot summer night, the rustling of the grass, the cool smell of the water, and a hand on my forehead. I jerked up, pushed
myself away from the car, and stumbled off, walking quickly, trying to get the image of my grandfather out of my head. He
was dead, and it seemed like a long time since I had thought of him, since the phone call that had brought me news of his
death, it seemed like centuries, but now his memory hurt in my chest, he was a thin man, a practitioner of a medicine I thought
useless, little homeopathic pills that were nothing but sweetness, I had grown up to think him ineffectual. I was walking
in darkness now but it seemed to me that I was walking into his house: you went down the narrow paved lane, dusty and dirty,
and through a little gate inset into the huge gate, into a garden, a scattering of trees and bushes really, no order, cows
chewing placidly in the manger, and you went into the house, past the little sitting room with its ancient furniture and shelves
of knickknacks, into the inner veranda, which always smelled of food, and then into the large room with chatais on the floor
where we all eat, and there is a cabinet full of old books and vials of medicine, and on the wall, you see two photographs,
one is my grandfather, very young, the frame on the picture is cracked and the glass seems to have yellowed with age, but
you can see him smiling, he
is wearing white trousers, a blue blazer, a straw boater tilted forward over his eyes, he has one hand in his pocket and the
other holds forward a ball, the seams clearly visible, and to the right of this photograph is another one, taken thirty-odd
years later, his son sits with a group of young men, to your eyes they all look innocent to a degree that is almost pathetic,
they are all debonair and confident, there are silver cups and shields strewn before them, and the legend on top of the picture
informs you that this is the B.H.U. College of Humanities Cricket Team, 1947.

I sat down in the grass, and I wept for my grandfather, for his death and missing him. I sat for a long time and thought about
him.

“There you are.” Amanda came running up and sat down in my lap. “I was looking for you.”

“I was thinking about my grandfather. And Kate and a guy called Katiyar. He was my school captain and my cricket captain.”

She felt my face and then kissed my eyes, and held to me very tight. After a while we got up and started to walk back, she
a little behind me, and suddenly she put her arms over my shoulders and hopped up, piggyback, and I carried her for a bit
while she giggled into my neck. I was laughing.

“Now your turn,” she said. And so she carried me for a while, she was strong, and we were laughing so much we both collapsed
to the ground, but we carried each other all over that field. She was singing something into my ear when we went over a grassy
rise, and then she said, “Oops.” On the other side of the rise, in a little hollow, I could see Tom and Kyrie, their two heads
gleaming in the moonlight close together, they were making love, and so I turned. As I turned there was a cheer, and then
a succession of pops, rumblings, all melting into a roar, and then a hundred trails streaked into the sky, slivers of light
throwing themselves up, unstoppable and prodigious flight, the sky turned to fire as they went keenly up, so bright I turned
my face away, and below us I saw silhouetted the car, its elegant shape, and White Eagle sitting cross-legged, still as a
rock, on its roof.

Amanda and I left for California the next day. Tom said he was going to stay behind, and I wanted to argue but I suppose I
could see why, so I said nothing. We all waited in a coffee shop while Amanda drove home
to say good-bye to her parents, and when she asked me if I would come with her I said I had better not. So we drank coffee,
and Kyrie fed coins into the jukebox, and W. E., that was what I was calling him now, he shuffled over to the counter and
brought back a battered chessboard.

“Do you play?” he said.

“I’ll thrash you, W. E.,” I said, and so we laid out the pieces, and there was a white bishop missing so I looked around and
finally put a shiny quarter on the black square. I led off, but by the time Amanda was back he had me down three games to
nothing. After all that he didn’t even smile, just looked old, and then we saw the Jaguar pull in, so we went outside. There
didn’t seem to be anything much to say, so we shook hands, all of us, and Kyrie hugged Amanda and me.

“Call me,” I said to Tom.

“I will.”

We pulled away quickly and seemed to be on a freeway instantly. He never called, so I have no idea where they are now, or
whether they are all together or what. I imagine them in a dusty rental car, red or black, driving across a Texas plain, and
Elvis quavering “Heartbreak Hotel,” and then they’re gone. Amanda and I, we seemed to be back at Pomona almost instantly,
it was too quick, and I felt tired almost all the time, walking around the campus. But anyway nobody seemed to have noticed
that we had been gone, and I got back into classes and all the rest of it, and the months passed quickly and I graduated.
I was with Amanda almost all the time, but we had never talked about what we would do after I was finished, I didn’t know
either, but on the day that I gave my last exam I looked up and saw the clouds on a distant mountain and knew I wanted to
go home. I told Amanda this, and she nodded, looked down. Do you want to come with me? I said. She nodded, still looking down,
with her hands behind her back, but when I hugged her she clung to me tightly and trembled.

So I told the college to mail my degree to me, I printed out my father’s address in block letters on a card, and we flew out
two days before graduation. My mother, I knew, would want a picture of me in a cap and gown, holding my anthropology degree
across my chest, but the idea of it annoyed me and I got us on the first flight that had seats. Amanda seemed happy, she skipped
around the airport and brought me a chocolate
ice cream bar that we shared, and with chocolate smeared around her lips we kissed, and she said, “I’m so happy we’re getting
out of here,” with a sweep of the arm that took in the whole airport and the sky outside. On the plane she put her head on
my shoulder, held my arm with both hands and closed her eyes.