The Night the White Deer Died (6 page)

Since then everything had been fine, at least between Janet and her mother.

She stopped again. She was at the edge of the downtown section of Tres Pinos and wasn’t sure where to look for Billy.

Either in the plaza or at the back door of Corky’s liquor store, she thought, and then felt bad because it was an unkind thing to think. It was only midmorning and still too early for Billy to be drunk. But even so, knowing that, she moved in the direction of Corky’s liquor store, and when she got there and nobody was
at the front, she went to the back, and there was Billy, sitting on the ground by the back door with a bottle in a paper sack. And knowing it was wrong,
knowing
with every fiber in her body that it was wrong, she went over and sat down beside him in the dirt and leaned against the wall.

7

Billy said nothing. Indeed for the longest time she wasn’t sure he even knew she was there. The two of them sat in the sun leaning against the warm adobe, and a fly moved around them, with a light buzzing as it moved to the back door of the liquor store and returned over them, and the dog that had been following Janet now came up and nuzzled her fingers, which she had draped over one of her knees.

“You have a dog.” Billy’s voice was only slightly slurred. “I didn’t know you had a dog.”

“No. It just followed me.” Janet petted the dog on the side of its muzzle; it was soft and damp. Pleasant. “It’s just an old dog.…”

“Why are you here?” The sack rose, and she heard the gurgle of wine; one, two, and then three swallows. Then the sack lowered. “Why did you come and find me and sit next to me here in the back of Corky’s? You better leave. Maybe you better leave now before the others come to sit and drink in the sun.”

He stopped, and Janet shrugged. “I came to thank you for the kachina. I found … I mean my mother found it this morning by the gate when she went out for milk. I just wanted to thank you for leaving it.”

“How do you know it was me?” He snorted. “It could have been anybody.…”

“But it was you, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “Yes. But you could not know that—it was a lucky guess.”

“And you left it because you felt sorry about leaving me at the gate of the pueblo yesterday.”

She knew she shouldn’t have said it the moment it slipped out; she could feel him tighten against the wall.

He fell back into silence, took another swallow of wine, and she sensed that she’d hit his pride somehow. She relaxed back against the wall, put her hand on the dog’s head, closed her eyes, and copied his silence for three or four minutes. Then she coughed lightly. “It was a good present, a good kachina.”

For a time he said nothing, then he let out a bitter little laugh that seemed to cut through the heat. “It was nothing—just a toy. I won it in a poker game from a Hopi when we were both drunk, and it’s only a doll for tourists.”

“Still.” She made a vow not to let him anger her. “Still, it is a nice thing to give me, and I thank you for it.”

“Someday I will take it back, and then I will be an
Indi’n giver.” He laughed, and this time there was scorn in it, scorn, and more of the wine was beginning to show through.

“Don’t—don’t do that.” She reached out but stopped before her hand touched him; looked over at him, saw that his eyes were closed and that his head was starting to lean forward. “Don’t make stupid jokes like that or put yourself down.”

“Ahh, what do you know?” He coughed, took another swallow of wine, and now the bottle was empty, and he threw it into some low bushes off to the side of the liquor store. It landed with a crash of broken glass on all the other broken bottles in the bush, and he opened one eye to stare at her. “You got a dollar? I’m really hurtin’ for some wine.”

She shook her head. “Why don’t you come home with me, and I’ll cook something and you can drink some coffee?”

“Tscha! Why don’t
you
come home with
me
, and we’ll drink some wine, and I’ll tell you all about what it’s like … what it’s like … what it’s like.…”

He wound down like a tired phonograph, wound down and sat staring at the dirt between his legs. She noticed for the first time that his blanket was clean and new and that his braids were freshly done where they hung down the sides of his face and that he was wearing clean jeans and a new shirt. He was all fresh and new, and it hurt her to realize that he’d dressed new and cleaned up to see her that morning when he
came with the kachina and then changed his mind and not waited but left the doll.

“Hey-
uh
, hi-
uh
, hopa-
hi
, hey-
uh
.” He sang under his breath, an almost guttural chant. She couldn’t understand the words but the sound was of the earth and pretty in a blunt way, and she made up her mind that she was going to get him home and fed and sobered whether he wanted to or not and whether he liked her or not.

“Come on.” She stood up and reached down for his hand and pulled him—she was shocked to feel how light he really was—to his feet. “Come on, let’s walk.”

By this time the wine had genuinely come to the bottom, and he was thoroughly, almost professionally drunk; he could walk, but only just, and he made no objection at all to any of her demands. He stood when she pulled, walked in the direction she tugged—though
stumbled
might be a better word than
walked
—and indeed it seemed to Janet that he didn’t really know he was up and moving, or that she was there beside him.

“Hey-
uh
, hi-
uh
 …” As they moved away from the liquor store—Billy, Janet, and the dog—he burst once more into singing, and after they’d gone a hundred yards down the dusty street, he stopped and shook her hand away and sang a complete song with his hands raised to the heavens while she stood off to the side looking at him, thinking he looked like some picture she might have seen of an Indian singing to his
gods before a hunt. And when he was done singing, she took his arm once again and led him down the street.

“What was that song?” she asked, after they’d gone another hundred yards. And when he didn’t answer, she repeated the question, but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer and chose instead to reach with his free hand up and touch her hair.

“Pretty hair.” His voice was a slur. “You have pretty hair—wrong color, but pretty.”

“Thank you.” She pulled his hand down and led him once more down the street, and in this manner she finally got him to her house, where he came inside easily enough. She put him in a kitchen chair while she took a bowl of leftovers back out to the dog, which had not wanted to come into the house.

When Janet returned, she found her mother standing in the entryway of the kitchen. She’d been in the studio when Billy and Janet came in, and she now turned to Janet.

“Out.” Her voice was brittle. “I mean out. Period.”

“Mother.”

“No.”

“Mother. He brought the kachina this morning, and he
needs
help. Please.”

Janet’s mother studied the figure of Billy slumped on the kitchen table. “He needs help, I’ll give you that.”

“Well.”

“I’d rather not, Janet.”

“Just some food and coffee.”

“Well—all right. Just a meal. Then out, period.”

“Also, Mother …” Janet tried to make her voice soft.

“What?”

“Outside, in the courtyard. There’s a dog, just a small dog, and it followed me uptown to get Billy and back, and I fed it.”

“And to think it was luck that brought me a daughter. I could have had a son.” But she smiled, if tightly, and Janet knew she’d won and turned to the task of cooking a meal for Billy. She was well into scrambling eggs and brewing fresh coffee when Billy sat up suddenly and began singing again, the same song he’d stopped to sing in the road with his arms raised. And when he finished this time, he flopped his head on his arms on the kitchen table and was out, gone and under, and Janet was faced with the unpleasant prospect of either force-feeding an unconscious man or eating half a dozen scrambled eggs herself.

Then she remembered the new dog, which she still hadn’t named, and carried the eggs and bacon outside, and the dog ate them ravenously.

After that Janet went back into the kitchen, where Billy was still passed out, and sat across the table and waited, with the coffee on the stove and hot, waited for Billy to sleep it off so that she could feed him and talk to him some more. And it was while she was
waiting that she began to wonder if Billy had ever shot a deer by a pond with a bow and arrow, and it wasn’t too long after that, with Billy mushed head-down on the table, that she caught herself wondering what Billy had looked like when he was a young brave.

And that seemed harmless enough, that thinking, but it quickened her, and that she couldn’t understand and wasn’t sure she wanted to understand, sitting in her kitchen with an old drunk who had passed out on her kitchen table.

8

Billy sang the words in English, though his voice still had the wild singsong lilt that made it sound as if coming from the earth, from all the earth places.

When he’d finished the song, he took another drink of coffee and sat straight in the chair, looking dead ahead as the coffee went down and did its magic work.

He’d been passed out for nearly two hours—two hours while Janet sat and read and the sound of her mother sculpting rock hovered continually in the background; and it did not seem strange to Janet to be
sitting reading a book waiting for an Indian to regain consciousness on her kitchen table.

She’d been in the kitchen when he came out of it. And it had happened just that fast; suddenly he raised his head, straight and level, and coughed a bit and blinked.

“How long was I out?” He’d asked the question without looking at her, without acknowledging her presence really.

“Two hours. You were … asleep for two hours. Maybe a little more.”

Then he’d suddenly burst into song, or rambling poetry, or whatever it was—it was somehow more than music, all about the clouds and black skirts and soaring. And he’d done it in English so that she could understand, and when he’d finished singing and put the empty cup down, she refilled it and put the pot back on the stove and sat down at the table.