Глен Хиршберг - Dancing Men

“I want to eat out here,” I said quickly, and Lucy turned with the hide curtain in her hand.

“Why don’t we go in?” she said, and the note of coaxing in her voice made me nervous. So did the way she glanced over her shoulder into the hogan, as though something in there had spoken.

I stayed where I was, and eventually Lucy shrugged and let the curtain fall and dropped the basket at my feet. From the way she was acting, I thought she might leave me alone out there, but she tat down instead and looked at the sand and the cacti and the stars.

Inside the basket I found warmed canned chili in a tupperware container and fry bread with cinnamon sugar and two cellophane-wrapped broccoli stalks that reminded me of uprooted miniature trees. In my ears, my grandfather’s voice murmured. To drown out the sound more than anything else, I began to eat.

As soon as I was finished, Lucy began to pack up the basket, but she stopped when I spoke. “Please,” I said. “Just talk to me a little.”

She gave me the same look she’d given me all day. As though we’d never even met. “Get some sleep. Tomorrow. well, let’s just say tomorrow’s a big day.”

“For who?”

Lucy pursed her lips, and all at once, inexplicably, she seemed on the verge of tears. “Go to sleep.”

“I’m not sleeping in the hogan,” I told her.

“Suit yourself.”

She was standing, her back to me now. I said, “Just tell me what kind of Way we’re doing.”

“An Enemy Way.”

“What does it do?”

“It’s nothing, Seth. Jesus Christ. It’s silly. Your grandfather thinks it will help him talk. He thinks it will sustain him while he tells you what he needs to tell you. Don’t worry about the goddamn Way. Worry about your grandfather, for once.”

My mouth flew open, and my skin stung as though she’d whipped me. I started to protest, then found I couldn’t, and didn’t want to. All my life, I’d built my grandfather into a figure of fear, a gasping, grotesque monster in a wheelchair. And my father had let me. I started to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t apologize to me.” Lucy walked to the screen door.

“Isn’t it a little late?” I called after her, furious at myself, at my father, at Lucy. Sad for my grandfather. Scared and sad.

One more time, Lucy turned around, and the moonlight poured down the white streaks in her hair like wax through a mold. Soon, I thought, she’d be made of it.

“I mean, to hurt my grandfather’s enemies,” I said. “The Way can’t really do anything to them. Right?”

“His enemies are inside him,” Lucy said, and left me.

For hours, it seemed, I sat in the sand, watching constellations explode out of the blackness like firecrackers. In the ground, I heard night-things stirring. I thought about the tube in my grandfather’s mouth and the unspeakable hurt in his eyes — because that’s what it was, I thought now, not boredom, not hatred — and the enemies inside him. And then, slowly, exhaustion overtook me. The taste of fry bread lingered in my mouth, and the starlight got brighter still. I leaned back on my elbows. And finally, at God knows what hour, I crawled into the hogan, under the tarpaulin-canopy Lucy had made me, and fell asleep.

When I awoke, the Dancing Man was sliding down its wire toward me, and I knew, all at once, where I’d seen eyes like my grandfather’s, and the old fear exploded through me all over again. How had he done it, I wondered? The carving on the wooden man’s face was basic, the features crude. But the eyes were his. They had the same singular, almost oval shape, with identical little notches right near the tear ducts. The same too-heavy lids. Same expression, or lack of any.

I was transfixed, and I stopped breathing. All I could see were those eyes dancing toward me. Halfway down the wire, they seemed to stop momentarily, as though studying me, and I remembered something my dad had told me about wolves. “They’re not trial-and-error animals,” he’d said. “They wait and watch, wait and watch, until they’re sure they know how the thing is done. And then they do it.”

The Dancing Man began to weave again. First to one side, then the other, then back. If it reached the bottom of the wire, I thought — I knew — I would die. Or I would change. That was why Lucy was ignoring me. She had lied to me about what we were doing here. That was the reason they hadn’t let my father stay. Leaping to my feet, I grabbed the Dancing Man around its clunky wooden base, and it came off the table with the faintest little suck, as though I’d yanked a weed out of the ground. I wanted to throw it, but I didn’t dare. Instead, bent double, not looking at my clenched fist, I crab-walked to the entrance of the hogan, brushed back the hide curtain, slammed the Dancing Man down in the sand outside, and flung the curtain closed again. Then I squatted in the shadows, panting. Listening.

I crouched there a long time, watching the bottom of the curtain, expecting to see the Dancing Man slithering beneath it. But the hide stayed motionless, the hogan shadowy but still. I let myself sit back, and eventually I slid into my sleeping bag again. I didn’t expect to sleep anymore, but I did.

The smell of fresh fry bread woke me, and when I opened my eyes Lucy was laying a tray of bread and sausage and juice on a red, woven blanket on the floor of the hogan. My lips tasted sandy, and I could feel grit in my clothes and between my teeth and under my eyelids, as though I’d been buried overnight and dug up again.

“Hurry,” Lucy told me, in the same chilly voice as yesterday.

I threw back the sleeping bag and started to sit up and saw the Dancing Man gliding back along its wire, watching me. My whole body clenched, and I glared at Lucy and shouted, “How did that get back here?” Even as I said it, I realized that wasn’t what I wanted to ask. More than how, I needed to know when. Exactly how long had it been hovering over me without my knowing?

Without raising an eyebrow or even looking in my direction, Lucy shrugged and sat back. “Your grandfather wants you to have it,” she said.

“I don’t want it.”

“Grow up.”

Edging as far from the nightstand as possible, I shed the sleeping bag and sat down on the blanket and ate. Everything tasted sweet and sandy. My skin prickled with the intensifying heat. I still had a piece of fry bread and half a sausage left when I put my plastic fork down and looked at Lucy, who was arranging a new candle, settling the water drum near me, tying her hair back with a red rubber-band.

“Where did it come from?” I asked.

That got Lucy to look at me, at least, and this time, there really were tears in her eyes. “I don’t understand your family,” she said.

I shook my head. “Neither do I.”

“Your grandfather’s been saving that for you, Seth.”

“Since when?”

“Since before you were born. Before your father was born. Before he ever imagined there could be a you.”

This time, when the guilt came for me, it mixed with my fear rather than chasing it away, and I broke out sweating. I thought I might be sick.

“You have to eat. Damn you,” said Lucy.

I picked up my fork and squashed a piece of sausage into the fry bread and put it in my mouth. My stomach convulsed, but it accepted the food.

As soon as I’d finished, Lucy shoved the drum onto my lap. I played while she chanted, and the sides of the hogan seemed to breathe in and out, very slowly. I felt drugged. Then I wondered if I had been. Had they sprinkled something over the bread? Was that the next step? And toward what? Erasing me, I thought, almost chanted. Erasing me, and my hands flew off the drum and Lucy stopped.

“All right,” she said. “That’s probably enough.” Then, to my surprise, she actually reached out and tucked some of my hair behind my ear, touched my face for a second as she took the drum from me. “It’s time for your Journey,” she said.