Читать книгу Crazy Weather - Charles L. McNichols - Страница 7

THE WILLOW’S shadow on the water was almost gone. The river was higher. It covered South Boy’s chest, and a wavelet lapped over his chin and filled his half-open mouth. South Boy sat up straight, sputtering, angry, surprised to see that the sun rode low over the stark, naked ridge on the Nevada side where Beale’s Trail crossed like a thin white scar.

The river’s voice was louder, still talking—in garbled Mojave.

Then another voice using good, plain Mojave spoke from above and behind, “I saw a dream on your face.”

South Boy choked and looked up quickly to see Havek staring down at him from the willow’s fork. Then he smiled and spat out river water. Here was company. Here was the end of boredom and worry.

“What did you dream?” Havek insisted. His black eyes were intent and his lips parted. He was a big boy, almost six feet tall—nearly “the size of a man,” as the Mojaves say. Being still under the jurisdiction of the government school at the Fort, he wore faded blue jeans and a hickory shirt, and his thick hair was shingled. But being on a vacation at that season of the year his neck was wrapped with perhaps a thousand strands of small blue and white beads, making a very uncomfortable-looking bundle. Across his lap were a six-foot bow and seven hunting arrows, such as any Mojave boy would carry, whether he was in school or not.

South Boy studied for a moment, trying to remember his dream. While it was no matter to him he wanted to oblige Havek, for he knew the great importance Mojaves attached to dreaming; but the dream, when he remembered, seemed such a trivial thing he didn’t want to talk about it. Finally he said: “It was nothing. White people always dream nonsense.”

“No,” said Havek promptly. “Your ghost saw something important. I saw it on your face!” He was leaning far out from the tree, staring almost directly down at South Boy. The flesh on his brown chin quivered so that its two vertical lines of blue tattooing wriggled like little snakes.

“Just dreamed of two hawks, and nothing more,” said South Boy.

Havek came down out of the tree as though a bee had stung him. Standing on the bank, clutching his bow and arrows in his left hand, he wiped the sweat from his face with his right sleeve. “Truly!” he whispered. “He’s told me truly!”

By this time South Boy began to share some of Havek’s excitement. He searched his mind and could not remember anybody ever having told him about the importance of hawk-dreaming. He clambered out of the water and stood dripping on the bank, diffident about showing too much interest for fear Havek might be making game of him. He knew it was a Mojave trick to make a great to-do about some small matter and then break out laughing when the victim began to take it all seriously. Still, Havek wasn’t much of a joker.

South Boy picked up his shirt and overalls and doused them in the river to wash away the dried mud. He got into his clothes, shivering a little. The air was little cooler than when he had come to the river; but a strong gusty wind was blowing, and working the same magic on his wet clothes as it did on the water jar.

Finally he said, “What does a hawk-dream mean?”

Havek spoke out of a deep study. “I’m not certain. Complete knowledge in such matters was not given to me. You are white, so it may mean nothing. We must go ask some old man.”

Well, South Boy decided, he’s certainly in earnest about it. Then he said, “I saw Hook-a-row going down-river this morning. We can trail him. He won’t go far.”

Havek shook his head. “My trail goes north. In the north there’s a very great hota holding a boys’ sing beyond the Fort. Can you go there? It is important.” He spoke in greatest earnest.

“Well,” said South Boy, “that’s better than sitting here like a toad on a lump of mud. Let’s go.”

“But you may not be coming back directly. Fetch something. Be prepared to be gone some days.”

“Good!” said South Boy. “There’ll be four days of this crazy weather and nothing to do. I’ll go home and get my shotgun.” And he started off toward the ranch.

“Leave the gun. Bring a bow,” Havek called after him.

“I broke my bow,” said South Boy.

“Leave the gun, anyway,” said Havek. “It’s too heavy for traveling.”

Thus to escape boredom, with no idea as yet of escaping the horns of his dilemma, South Boy set out on his fateful journey. When he got to the ranch he heard noises that told him the cook was again in the summer kitchen; so he stuck his head inside the screen door and told her he was going visiting and would be gone two or three nights. The cook began thanking the Virgin and the twelve apostles, naming them one by one.

South Boy went to the house and crawled under the back gallery to the hole where the cat had her kittens. From it he took a fishing line with several hooks attached, wrapped around a stick. Then he began to dig in the soft dirt at the bottom of the hole, which was temporarily free of kittens. Three or four inches down he uncovered a bundle carefully wrapped in a greasy rag. He unwrapped the rag and there, well-swathed in axle grease, was a new nickel-plated revolver . . . a weapon that was very dear to him because it was forbidden.

Six months ago he had sent his life’s savings to a Chicago mail-order house and in due course this treasure had been sent to him. No one knew about it, not even Havek. He broke the gun to see that it was loaded, a needless procedure because he knew he hadn’t used the last six cartridges he had left in the cylinder a couple of weeks before. He snapped it shut, tucked it under his belt inside his shirt, and backed out into the yard.

Almost as an afterthought he went into the kitchen, took one small box of soda crackers from a shelf and three or four handfuls of black, salty strips of jerky from the meat bin. One of these he crammed into his mouth, sucking gratefully at the salt which his body craved after much sweating.

Thus with a fishline, a box of crackers, a half pound of jerky, an old broken pocketknife, a little water-tight case full of sulphur matches (two items he was never without), and a belly-gun (the latter only a sort of talisman) South Boy felt himself equipped to go anywhere the Colorado flowed.

His clothes were dry now, so that he found the return trip to the river very hot; but he was buoyed up by the prospect of spending the night at the “sing,” and by the tantalizing mystery of the hawk-dreaming.

Why was Havek so excited about it?

There was more excitement when he got to the river. He went down into the water to his knees, stooped to drink his fill, slopped water over his head till his half-long hair was dripping-wet, and climbed the bank.

There stood Havek, leaning on his long bow. The seven hunting arrows were thrust into the back of his belt, and in his right hand he held a three-foot willow rod a little thicker than a man’s thumb. Bound to this were four carefully fletched arrows. Unlike the hunting arrows, unlike any ordinary Mojave arrows, these had iron points—small, longish, triangular, and quite sharp.

“Apache arrows!” cried South Boy. He had never seen the like twice in his life.

“There’s a war,” said Havek.

“You go making war with those arrows and the agency police will jug you!” South Boy warned.

“Far,” said Havek, jerking his chin toward the north. “Faraway war!”

Then South Boy remembered he had twice heard mention of Piutes that day and he opened his mouth to ask Havek for talk, but Havek was already trotting away along the river bank.

The sun was very low. The trees made much shade. Even when they had turned inland and had passed through the willows and the cottonwoods and were shuffling through the gourd vines in the wide spaces between the mesquite trees, there was still shade. And the wind continued to blow, making the heat bearable. They traveled at a little trot, like roaming dogs.

Suddenly South Boy found himself very content and very comfortable. There was meat and water in his belly and there was salt in his mouth, for he was chewing another strip of jerky. The thoughts that came from the back of his head to worry him were gone entirely. He was a different person. He was his old self. He cared nothing for the future at all—not even for the answer to such tantalizing questions as “Why Apache arrows?” and “What means a hawk-dream?” He just felt good.

He began chuckling to himself as he jogged along. Havek heard him and turned around, saw him chewing and reached back his hand. South Boy reached into his shirt and brought out a great handful of jerky which he thrust into Havek’s hand.

When the rim of the sun sat down on the white scar where Beale’s Trail crossed the ridge of the Dead Mountains over in Nevada, they came to a place called Ahavelpah where the river bottom ended at the mesa’s cliff. Nobody lived there. There had been a rancheria there at one time, but someone had died and been cremated there, and his house and goods burned, of course; so it was a ghost place and would remain so for a generation—just a damp swale near the foot of the dun cliff where three big cottonwoods grew by a water hole.

At the third cottonwood, Havek said, “Wait here,” and he climbed the face of the cliff and under the low branches of a mesquite that clung to it ten feet up. Directly, he came sliding down the gravelly face of the mesa carrying a five-pound salt bag bulging full.

“Traveler’s rations,” he said, stuffing the bag into his shirt.

Then South Boy knew for certain Havek was intending to travel far, for no one would bother carrying a bag of parched corn and pumpkin seeds if he were only going as far as the northern valley, just above the Fort.

This he thought little of at the time. He was more impressed with the fact that Havek had disclosed the location of his secret cache. That was usually concealed from one’s closest friend, for it was a great honor to keep something cleverly concealed. South Boy hugged the gun against his belly and laughed to himself. He would show that to Havek some time and tell him triumphantly, “All this time I was traveling with you and you didn’t know I had it.”

That would be a triumph indeed. Almost a Great Thing.

They were jogging along at the foot of the cliff over ground made hard by the black alkali. Havek began to sing:

“Name-traveling, I travel,

Name-finding, a new name.”

So he goes traveling with Apache arrows, thought South Boy. Well . . .

It was likewise unusual for a Mojave boy to go traveling to find himself a man’s name before he was through school, that is if he went to school. Havek was setting out a year or two early. Havek hated his boy’s name, which was really a baby name. Because it was a joke name, it had stayed with him in his youth. It was such a good joke name that he was called Havek even by people who habitually spoke English and should have called him by his government name, which was Rutherford Hayes.

The joke was Havek’s mother’s. She was a huge woman, always laughing. When she carried Havek, she grew so large she thought she was going to have twins. When Havek came alone, she laughed and laughed, and called him Havek, which means simply “Two.”

Soon they came to a wide mouth of a wash, and Havek turned up the sandy bed of the arroyo that came out of it. He slowed his pace down to a walk, for the bed was sand and the going was heavy.

South Boy stopped once to look back over his shoulder. The sun was gone, and the west was as red as a shirt of China silk. A lovely thing to see.

This, he told himself, I’ll remember a long time. This is the night I was happy, after a bad day.

He thought of something he heard an old man say: “The white man’s forehead is wrinkled because he is always asking, ‘Will tomorrow be bad?’ He never has time to smile because it is very good right now.”

It is very good right now, thought South Boy. I’ll let tomorrow be.

Up ahead Havek trudged on past a paloverde tree, green of trunk, branch, and stem, and very beautiful against the white sand of the wash. He was going slower because the sand pulled at his heels. He passed the first greasewood bush—a dozen gray-green stems springing out of a common center and tipped with twigs bearing tiny, crinkly, greasy-green leaves.

On past was one smoke tree with a ghostly crown of innumerable gray, leafless twigs, and when Havek reached the smoke tree, the first bat of the evening came circling over his head. Havek immediately swallowed the meat he was chewing on and began to sing:

“Over our house

The night bat

Rising, flies . . .”

That was the first song in the long dream-singing called “The Ravens.”

Now there is something to think about, said South Boy to himself. This business of dream-singing.

About two years before, Havek had begun singing “The Ravens.” When South Boy asked him how he learned it Havek said: “I dreamed it. It was given to me, just so, because my shadow stood outside the Sacred House and heard the Ravens singing. I was unborn, but I was there. So now I have dreamed what I heard and saw.”

That’s tougher to understand than Christian Instruction, thought South Boy. It didn’t seem likely to him that anybody could go to sleep and dream two hundred songs in their proper meter and rhythm, not to mention complicated melody and long meandering story—for the songs only gave outline and emphasis to the tale.

“How can he dream all that when it takes him two nights to sing and tell all of it?”

In camp Havek would intersperse his tale between his songs. Now he just sang. About two semi-embodied spirits who woke up in the Sacred House. They heard bats squeaking overhead, so they sang about bats. Then, being children, they reached for their toys. So Havek sang:

“We reach,

And there is a rattle

In each hand . . .”

So sang the spirits as they danced towards the door of the Sacred House, and so Havek sang as he trudged up the arroyo to the mesa top—about rattles and cane buzzers, and what the world would look like when it was completed.

When they reached the door, the Ravens looked out across the valley of the Colorado where the Mojaves, yet to be created, were going to live. They saw something out of the future: the dust of a war party returning from a successful raid to the east, over in the Apache country. Painted men, mallet-headed clubs dangling from their wrists by leather thongs, bound slaves, the whole skin of a man’s head waving like a flag atop a tall pole, the dance of triumph and the smoking of those made unclean by blood and death.

Havek sang on as he came out of the wash and turned due north across the flat top of the mesa where traveling was good over a matrix of fine firm gravel. He broke into a trot. Up here the little greasewood bushes grew in even spacings, twelve yards apart and no more than three feet high. Nothing else grew here but an occasional cholla cactus.

South Boy was saying to himself: “His grandfather sang ‘The Ravens.’ Havek may have dreamed it, but I’ll bet he learned it from the old man first.”

The moon came up over Arizona mountains, fifteen miles across the mesa—very red, very large, very bright. The little greasewoods cast long, pale, spindling shadows towards the now distant river. The breeze began blowing stronger. It was still hot, but the breeze made it pleasant.

Havek’s song grew a little monotonous. The Raven brothers went name-traveling after they left the Sacred House. Havek’s song became an unending recital of the names of mountains, canyons, springs, and streams that they saw as they wandered west to the San Bernardino Mountains where they looked upon the distant sea, then south and east to the mouth of the Colorado and east and north through Pima and Apache country.

An easy way to get your geography, if you could dream all that. Suppose I could go to sleep and dream the whole of Tarr and McMurry’s . . . South Boy was thinking when he saw the lights of Fort Mojave over to the left, where the mesa pushed a projecting peninsula right down to the river.

The Fort looked like a city to South Boy, with its dozen big buildings, two of them monsters—two stories high. There were very few lights tonight. He had seen it one night last winter, when school was in session—lights blazing from every window. A stupendous sight. Breath-taking. Counting the Indian children there were three hundred people in those buildings! Even now when there was only maintenance staff and a half-dozen lighted windows, the sight of the Fort was thrilling enough to make him forget the glory of the night and his haphazard speculations on dream singing.

A little farther north was a row of three lights close together—the trader’s store. From there came the faint screech of a phonograph playing that new song “Redwing.” He was too far away to see, but he knew the phonograph would be on a cracker box just outside the door. Young Mojaves would be perched in a long row on the hitching rail; old people, sitting on the ground; a white man or two from the Fort; maybe even a white lady sitting in the trader’s rocking chair.

Havek stopped singing to listen. South Boy wished he would turn aside, but he went trotting on.

Suddenly the phonograph was drowned out by a chorus of strong voices.

“Oh the moon shines bright on pretty Redwing,

The breezes sighing, the night bird crying,

For far beneath his star her brave is sleeping,

While Redwing’s weeping

Her heart away.”

Havek threw back his head and joined in with the distant singers. Nothing could be more different from the Raven singing than this tin-pan-alley product. But Havek proved the saying, “A Mojave can sing anything.”

South Boy just listened with throbbing pleasure and a little melancholy, partly because of the sad plight of Redwing and partly because he had long since learned he could not sing.

The song faded, the lights grew dim and mingled with the lower stars. Before long they came to the place where the mesa dropped off again. Below them the mesquite floor stretched north as far as their eyes could see. Here and there were barren, alkali-encrusted playas that shone pale silver in the moonlight. A narrow, snaky lagoon began a mile away and wiggled off into the distance, its gray water showing a darker silver. There was a faint flicker of fire at the near end of it.

By that fire the hota would be holding the sing.

Havek stopped and leaned on his bow. South Boy stopped and looked at him expectantly.

Havek spat into the dark shadow that fringed the foot of the cliff.

“Nebethee’s down there, if he came up-river tonight.”

“Uh-huh,” said South Boy, speculatively. He walked to the very edge of the cliff and spat reflectively into the void, peering into the depth of the shadow, not anxiously, but with a certain sharp interest.

“Nebethee caught Pahto-shali-la and ate him, bones and all, and Pahto-shali-la was a full-sized man and a good fighter.”

South Boy could have given Havek an argument on that. White people maintained that the Mojave got drunk and fell into the river at flood time. But South Boy’s mind was too busy for arguments. He was swiftly reviewing the Mormonhater’s ideas on the cannibalistic monster that the white people called the “Mojaves’ devil.”

“Are you afraid to go down here?” asked Havek.

South Boy shook his head. The time had been when he would have cringed with terror at the mention of Nebethee’s name. When he was very small a big Indian girl had taken him to the brink of an old well and made him look down into the dark at their mingled reflections on the water. “Nebethee!” she said. “He will eat you!” That had scared him into a fit.

He was still too young to know better than to take tales of Indian doings to his mother—so he ran bellowing to her and had his first impression of Nebethee pretty well shaken out of him. Nebethee was just heathen nonsense. It was wicked to be afraid of him, because he was a heathen lie. By way of comfort he received the first of several lectures on the real or Presbyterian devil. A very different creature, indeed. South Boy had since acquired a shadowy, uneasy understanding of a complex of white or Christian devils that had overshadowed Nebethee completely.

But all that was by the way. About two years ago he had discovered by chance that in the dark of the moon the Mormonhater was doing some very mysterious hunting in the darkest places, and a good deal of it was around the big rock in the river below Needles that the Mojaves called “Nebethee’s house.” It took a year of chance, infrequent visits with the old trapper to wheedle the reason out of him.

The Mormonhater had many years ago seen a stuffed gorilla in a dime museum in San Francisco, so badly moth-eaten that it was about to fall apart. The proprietor was very sad about its condition. He said he’d give a hundred dollars for a fresh one.

The Mormonhater returned to his boat, his dogs and his trap lines, and in due course he began to give ear to the Mojave stories and descriptions of Nebethee. Then all at once it came to him! Nebethee was nothing else than a great, nocturnal ape. He wrote to the keeper of the dime museum and asked him how much he’d give for such a creature—hide and carcass.

He got a letter back—he even let South Boy read it. There in black and white was the offer of one million dollars for any gorilla shot in the Colorado River valley, plus an invitation for the Mormonhater to head a parade along the whole length of Market Street in an open carriage with the mayor of the city on one side of him, the carcass of the beast on the other.

The Mormonhater had fished his Bible out of his cartridge bag and made South Boy swear, with his right hand on the Book that he’d never tell anyone.

South Boy went home and carefully read everything that the Advanced Geography had to say about the great apes, and studied the very inadequate picture shown in it.

He hadn’t promised not to hunt the creature himself.

However, Nebethee-hunting had proven very poor around the ranch. Up here, down in that shadow, might be his golden opportunity.

A million dollars . . . that was all the money in the world. He’d give the Mormonhater half. He’d even let the Mormonhater share the carriage with him and the mayor and the late Nebethee.

Of course the geography said that gorillas were only found in Africa, and that they were herbivorous. But the geography said nothing at all about Mojaves or the Colorado River valley. It showed complete ignorance about this part of the world.

So South Boy stared eagerly into the cliff’s shadow and started off in a trot along its rim, looking for a place to descend. While the idea of crowds of strange people gave him shudders under most conditions, the thought of that crowd along Market Street in San Francisco made him feel good. Maybe it was because they would be cheering him. That’s what the Mormonhater said: “They’ll be yelling their heads off!”

Not far away he found a slide: a place where the smaller boys from the Fort came on Saturdays to slide down the steep, gravelly face of the mesa on boards—the equivalent of tobag-ganing in a snowless country. He could go down there without getting his pants full of prickly pear and cholla.

So he paused at the top of the slide and called to Havek: “Tell me, have I heard truly? Does Nebethee look like a big, thick, hairy man that’s hunchbacked and stooped over?”

“Truly! Truly!” said Havek, his breath whistling in his excitement.

A million dollars and a parade! thought South Boy as he disappeared into the black on a minor avalanche of gravel.

His hand was inside his shirt, gripping the butt of his shortgun. He had a feeling he’d be better satisfied if he had a weapon of heavier caliber—one that he’d tried out on something more than tin cans at very short range. Still, this would be close-range work. He’d let Nebethee come twice arm-length and he’d put six bullets into his belly. After all, an ape was just a big, tough, hairy man. All the experts agreed—and there was hardly a man in the Valley but was at least a theoretical expert on homicide—that a bullet in the belly was the sure way of stopping a real tough man. The Foreman said (and it was well known he was more than a theoretical expert), “A bullet in the belly button beats two through the head.”

The gravel stopped rolling under the seat of South Boy’s pants and his feet hit soft dirt and hit running. He ran only as far as the first mesquite and there he crouched, his back protected by the thorny tree. He found he could see surprisingly well. There was nothing but low soap-weeds for yards around him. No hiding place for anything bigger than a rabbit. His heart beat hard, his imagination sent false, fleeting images to his eyes, but as a veteran of many a night hunt he knew he saw nothing real.

His heart eased and sank in slow, leaden disappointment.

He might have been there two minutes when he heard Havek’s yell. The yell of a warrior who goes to look into the face of death. Havek was coming down the gravel slide, invisible, but audible.

Havek came running across the flat, a swiftly moving blackness in a world less black. Nothing else moved. South Boy, hope fading, got up and trotted after him, still crouching low, his hand on his belly-gun. Havek was out in the moonlight, and he stopped in a small white playa.

“South Boy!” he called anxiously. “South Boy!”

South Boy came walking out of the shadows, slowly. Somehow he’d been so sure of a million dollars and glory a minute ago. Now he had a sickening feeling.

That Mormonhater was crazy! Everyone said so. South Boy didn’t want to believe it. The Mormonhater was his friend. But if Nebethee were an ape, there would have to be more than one. Apes have to breed and die like other creatures. Why hadn’t he thought of that before working his hopes up so high?

He came up to where Havek stood, and walked by him in glum silence.

Havek was staring at him, his mouth open, the whites of his eyes showing. “Truly,” he muttered. “Truly. A hawk-dreamer. His hands empty. He went down into Death’s face. He walked slowly away. Truly—truly—truly—a Great Thing.”

South Boy heard him and felt low and cheap. Havek thought he had done a brave thing. Instead he’d just made a fool of himself, believing a crazy man’s story. He could not explain because he had promised the Mormonhater. And how could he explain a thing like that to an Indian, anyway?

So he walked in silence, which was exactly what a Mojave would have done after an act of great courage. Havek followed him, murmuring delightedly; and South Boy felt all the more like a cheat, and his heart was lower than a snake’s belly.

The trouble is, he was thinking, I act Indian one time and white another time and I get all mixed. He tried to think that idea out to make it more coherent, but he couldn’t.