Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

In the middle of the mesa were ruins, a worn grid of stone walls about knee-high. The stones were volcanic ash. Adobe had long since washed away, along with any sense of what was storeroom, what was quarters. All a puzzle now, Joe thought. White nuggets in the stones were timber cinders a million years old. He picked one out and it turned to talcum between his fingers.

The only excavation on the mesa had been performed by animals. Between the walls were gopher mounds of soft earth, richly mixed with shards of pottery that were black, white, reddish brown, and bits of obsidian strewn like jewellery.

Joe sat down for a smoke next to a kiva completely filled in by a gooseberry bush, its boughs as dark as a cherry tree's. The sun dropped over the far side of the Jemez, turning clouds red, rung by rung.

"Hello, Joe." Roberto and Ben Reyes stepped out of the cedars. The men were in blankets and braids.

"Brought you some cigarettes."

"How did you know we were here?" Ben asked.

"The clay. Sophie was seeing you and she was getting her clay. This is the place."

"I knew you would come," Roberto said.

"I came because they're finding your wands on the Hill."

"What kind of cigarettes?" Ben asked.

"At fires on the Hill. Luckies." Joe handed the packet to Ben, who tapped one out suspiciously.

"How'd you know they were mine?" Roberto squatted by Joe.

"Mica in the paint. Typical Taos horseshit."

"Yes." Roberto grinned. Roberto had such a long nose and his hair was so brown, he had to have some French trader or horny Mormon in his background, Joe thought.

"I like Chesterfields." Ben put two in his pocket, one in his mouth and gave the packet back.

"You're welcome. You're a real frightening pair of desperadoes." Joe gave Ben the lighter. "You're supposed to be hiding, not getting into more trouble. Fires are serious business to those people."

"He thinks we're causing the lightning?" Ben lit his cigarette.

"Who?" Joe took the lighter back.

"The doctor?"

"Oppenheimer? He sees that he's supposed to think that."

"That's smart enough." Roberto held up two fingers for a smoke.

"I don't know whether to laugh or cry." Joe lit cigarettes for Roberto and himself. "You said you were going to escape, not take on the US Army. I'm warning you. Right now, you're hiding from the Indian Service. That's one thing. The Army will send a Captain Augustino. Augustino will find you. And Augustino will find out who's been helping you on the Hill, planting a wand every time they see a fire."

"You think that's the way we do it? First the lightning, then the wand?" Roberto asked.

"That would be my first guess."

"They sent you?" Ben asked.

"Nobody sent me. I'm supposed to be on the post right now."

"But they notice the lightning," Roberto asked.

"Yeah."

"Then we're doing a good job." Roberto let out a long, plumed exhale. "Good cigarette."

As the valley went dark, a full moon rose from the Sangres. They made camp on the eastern tip of the mesa, where ancient raincatches rose in worn steps. Ben built a fire in a crack of the rock, using stones to prop cedar twigs and bark. Joe started the bark with his lighter. The fire caught quickly and had the advantage for fugitives of being impossible to see from a distance, but they had to keep feeding it because they were burning no more than tinder. Ben made a stew of chilli and jerky in a can. Looking over the Rio Grande, they could make out lamplights in Santiago and Esperanza, even the village of Truchas high in the Sangres, and the bright, pollenish haze of

Santa Fe at the tail of the Sangres range. Los Alamos they couldn't see at all. They cupped the glow of their cigarettes and waited for the stew to boil.

"I'll get you a pair of Greyhound tickets to Tucson. You don't like Tucson? How about Los Angeles? The two of you haven't lived until you've seen the Pacific Ocean. What have you got against the Hill, anyway?"

"What they're doing there," Ben said. "You don't know what they're doing there. It's a secret. It's the biggest damn secret of the war."

"I had a dream they were making a gourd filled with ashes," Roberto said.

"A gourd of ashes?"

"I had the dream in Taos. Two Hopi men had the same dream, two elders. A woman in Acoma had the dream."

"Four dreams." Joe nodded, as if the conversation were sane. Ben went on stirring the can, listening. Roberto tilted his head up. "Each time, they take the gourd to the top of a long ladder and break it open. The poison ashes that fall cover the earth."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

"Then let me set your mind at ease. I've seen what they're making. It's not a gourd of ashes. Let me get you those bus tickets."

"There's more."

"I was afraid of that."

"In my dream there was a giant."

"How about train tickets?"

"As soon as I met you, I knew the giant was you."

"Roberto." Joe controlled himself. "Roberto, you're a nice guy, bright, and I'm sure you're sincere. But you're playing medicine man in the middle of a war. Out in the real world, soldiers are dying, cities are burning, women are raped. What they're trying to do on the Hill is end the war. If you and Ben insist on being buckskin loonies, okay, just don't include me.

"Hot!" Ben shoved a tin plate of stew at Joe.

"But the ashes will poison the clouds and the water and the ground and everything that lives on it. All the dreams are the same about that," Roberto said.

"Sounds like scientific proof." There were no forks. Joe picked up steaming, gray-green strips of beef with his fingers.

"They will erect a great ladder in the sky. Then, in my dream, a giant climbs the ladder."

"Not bad," Joe told Ben. "Starving helps. Just in your dreams?" he added to Roberto.

"It's not that I dream better, it's that I can concentrate on dreams. Being blind helps. To me there's not the same difference between day and night, awake and asleep. One leads to the other."

"Dreams and reality?"

"Two sides of the same thing. Don't you agree?"

"I would have said the major difference in the world right now is not being awake or being asleep, but being alive or being dead. And one doesn't lead to the other like a hand to a glove. More like a stump to a glove." Joe put down his plate. "So, don't dream about a giant on a ladder. Dream about Japan. Dream yourself a hundred thousand dead men bobbing in the water. Dream red beaches, banzai charges, kamikazes, paper cities and B-29s. Put a meter on your dream. One million dead, two million, three. See, I don't mind you dreaming; I just mind easy dreams."

Well, I'm a bad guest, Joe thought. A pall had fallen over the dinner party. Ben looked like he was choking. Either he was choking or he was angry.

"I have to catch a cutting in Santiago." Joe rose to his feet. "That was your last warning. Good luck."

Roberto lifted his sunken eyes.

"All the same, you were in my dream," he said.

Joe rode back on a moonlit ridge between canyons. Around him was a seascape of ridges, a foam-brightness on the rocks and junipers. There was so much beauty at night that no one saw. He still heard himself speaking, and Oppy's words coming out— invasion casualties, kamikazes. It was the way he felt, but the words sounded like a formula. To give Roberto credit, he really didn't talk about the war at all. He just cared about his precious pueblos and the rest of the world could go to hell. In return, Oppy appreciated Indians, as people from a time warp. Sophie was right, Joe thought, he didn't seem to have his own words. Music, maybe, but not the kind of words and formulas that announced and explained actions. As if there were no words for where he was, which was in between. In a no-world, on a high ridge, in the sweet light of the moon.