Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

Jazz was liberation. Joe had always been a counter puncher and that's what bebop was all about, hooking off the jab. Charlie Parker claimed to be part Cherokee or Cree. Any dressing room of black musicians was full of would-be Indians. Those were Joe's Indians.

He saw Ben and his friend approaching the jeep. Ben's companion was in dirty coveralls, braids, and the white cotton blanket of a Taos elder, but he wasn't old, just blind, his eyes sunken and shut. Trachoma, Joe thought. Until sulpha, trachoma had been common in the pueblos. No one caught it now, except the sort of fanatic who wouldn't use Anglo medicine.

"Spring's coming, Uncle," Joe said.

"Spring's coming very nicely now." Ben scowled and introduced his friend. His name was Roberto.

The three men spoke Tewa. Tewa was the language of a number of the Rio Grande pueblos and it was expressive in describing the beauty of the clouds, rain, water, corn. Tewa was also the language of a people who had wandered through the wilderness arguing. No pueblo existed for long without splitting into two parts that despised or, at least, suspected each other. So, Tewa was rich in phrases and intonations of derision and scorn.

"Still cold in Taos?"

"A little cooler." Roberto's voice was quizzical, as if he were picking up a new object with it. "You come up to Taos much?"

Taos thought it was the top of the world, maybe one step below the Hopi, but very close to heaven. It occurred to Joe that what he didn't need at the start of the day was a religious nut; what he needed was a coffee or a cold beer.

"Not since the war started, actually. Always mean to. Uncle, I never got a chance to thank you. December, you stumbled into a hunting party. You must have been out trapping in the snow. You came through at the right time."

"Thank Roberto, not me. Wasn't my idea."

"Ben said the other hunter was hunting you," Roberto said.

Joe remembered that the two men coming out of the woods into the light of the dawn were connected by a rope or a thong. Ben and a blind man.

"Then, thank you," Joe told Roberto.

"He was hunting you?" Roberto asked. "He was crazy."

"He was an officer. Smoke?" Joe felt for his cigarettes. His pocket was empty.

"Have one of mine." Roberto took a thick, hand-rolled cigarette and stuck it into empty space.

"Thanks." Joe reached. The things always tasted like dung, he thought. Roberto put one in his own mouth and Joe lit his, then his own. "That's some smoke." Joe coughed.

"From Taos."

Roberto held on to the side of the jeep. He had a long Spanish nose. His hands looked surprisingly strong, the nails caked yellow. So that was how he got by; mixing adobe by hand. It was something a blind man could do. Roberto wouldn't be able to make much adobe, but what he did make would be fine stuff.

"We know what you're doing up on the Hill and we want you to stop it," Ben said.

Neither Joe nor Roberto paid attention to him.

"I met your mother once," Roberto said.

"Yeah?"

"I guess you were in New York. She was a clan mother, wasn't she? Winter Clan?"

"You're a Winter Clan?"

"Summer."

"She was winter." For Christ's sake, everyone on this side of the pueblo was Winter Clan. Then he remembered Roberto was blind. "This is mostly Winter Clan here."

"We want you and the Army to stop it," Ben said.

"Well, Ben," Joe said, "I doubt very much you know what's going on up on the Hill, but if you want to stop it, you tell a general, you don't tell a sergeant."

"Your mother made great pots," Roberto said. "She had that special clay."

"Yeah, the white clay."

"You were the only one besides her who knew where she got it, she said," Roberto told Joe.

"Her and Sophie."

"You're making poison," Ben said.

"Ben," Joe asked as softly as he could, "Remember Pearl Harbor? Bataan?"

"You play the piano, she said," Roberto told Joe. "And I met your brother Rudy."

"I am telling you now to stop it."

Joe was trying to control his temper.

"You really ought to take your case to Roosevelt, Ben. Or maybe to the boys from Santiago who are out fighting right now. Or to their mothers."

Ben spat in front of the jeep.

"Talking to you puts me in mind of the worm. The worm has no ears and no balls."

"Well, Ben, your contribution to the war effort, sitting and farting and sorting feathers, is known and appreciated by all."

"It's been a good visit," Roberto told Joe. With his walking stick he hit Ben on the shin to locate him.

"Any time," Joe said.

Ben acted like there was a whole lot of conversation yet to be had, but Roberto gripped the old man firmly by the arm and, blind or not, led Ben across the road to Ben's yard.

Crazy. First Harvey, then Ben Reyes.

"I'll give you a dollar for each one," Mrs Quist stood in the doorway and brushed dust off her white suit.

She'd been coming from southern California to Santiago as long as Joe could remember. Once she'd been a visible woman, a little more tanned each year. Now she was wrapped up like an ambulatory burn case. Her voice was nasal, as if it were burned. Joe followed her into the house.

Five pieces were lined up on the table. A polychrome pot with a plumed serpent chasing itself so closely there was no leaving from tail to jaw. A plate as black and shiny as coal but perfectly round and decorated with a ring of a hundred finely-drawn feathers. A brown pot grooved like an acorn squash and as smooth as polished stone. A tall wedding pot with elegant, twin necks. A little black seed bowl, round as a ball, with a small hole.

"This house is a mess. If Dolores saw it…" Mrs Quist sighed from aggravation and waved away the dust.

"A dollar each?"

"I'll lose money. If you take in the expense of my travel, the ration cards for gasoline, hotel, food, closing down the shop, there's no way I'll see a profit. I've been sick, you know."

"You did say a dollar."

Mrs Quist carefully put the squash pot into a box padded with newspaper and wood shavings.

"I can't sell them in Santa Fe. There aren't any tourists, just soldiers. Soldiers buy postcards, not pots. Probably, by the time I get back to Los Angeles, half of these pots will be broken, so I'm paying five dollars for two or three pots."

She wrapped the plate and dropped it gently into the bottom of another box, then wrapped the polychrome pot and set it on top of the plate.

"I may not be able to sell any of these. The war changed everything. People are coming back from France and Italy, they've been all over the world now. They're going to want fine art, going to want to collect paintings, Picassos, Monets, not Indian pots."

"That sounds tough."

"That's the way of the world, Joe."

He couldn't see her eyes through her dark glasses. Her mouth was a lipsticked oval. He'd grown up with the annual visits of Mrs Quist, with her annual lament. He couldn't remember when there'd been a good year for selling pots.

"Most traders are only working on consignment now, in fact." She packed the tall wedding pot with special care. "They wouldn't give you any money at all and then you'd have nothing."

"Nothing instead of five dollars?"

Mrs Quist packed the bowl last, and then she laid and smoothed a dollar note on the table where each piece had stood.

"There."

The notes crinkled. One slowly spun.

"Aren't you going to pick them up?"

"Later."

The breeze was nothing more than warm air drifting into a cool adobe house. The spinning dollar drifted to the table's edge.

"Well, it's your money, you do what you want with it."

"Oh, I'm only doing what Dolores would have done if she were here, Mrs Quist. She would have listened to everything you said and she would have taken a dollar a pot. You're going to make $20, $25 apiece? You've always made that kind of money out of Dolores. She always knew, I used to tell her, but she was too embarrassed for you to say anything. She was embarrassed for your greed. But she said you could have the pots, so you can. Except this one." Joe removed the seed bowl from the box. "Now, that's your dollar bill on the floor and you can pick it up if you want." Joe hadn't meant to frighten her, but Mrs Quist stepped back as if he were going to hit her. "No? Then let me help you go."