Leslie Silko - Ceremony

“You know what they say, Harley, ‘Crazy people are extra strong.’”

Harley shook his head; he was serious. “No, Tayo, you weren’t crazy. You were just drunk.”

They all had different explanations for the attack. Emo claimed they never got along, not since grade school when they had rock fights in the school yard; he said Tayo had wanted to get even with him for a long time.

They all had explanations; the police, the doctors at the psychiatric ward, even Auntie and old Grandma; they blamed liquor and they blamed the war.

“Reports note that since the Second World War a pattern of drinking and violence, not previously seen before, is emerging among Indian veterans.” But Tayo shook his head when the doctor finished reading the report. “No?” the doctor said in a loud voice.

“It’s more than that. I can feel it. It’s been going on for a long time.”

“What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it all around me.”

“Is that why you tried to kill Emo?”

“Emo was asking for it.”

The wind stirred the dust. The people were starving. “She’s angry with us,” the people said. “Maybe because of that Ck’o’yo magic we were fooling with. We better send someone to ask our forgiveness.”

They noticed hummingbird was fat and shiny he had plenty to eat. They asked how come he looked so good.

He said Down below Three worlds below this one everything is green all the plants are growing the flowers are blooming. I go down there and eat.

“You were real lucky, man. Real lucky. You could’ve gone to jail. But they just sent you to the hospital again. If it had been me, I probably still been sitting in jail.” Harley’s words were becoming disjointed and he was accenting the words at the beginning and swallowing the ending sounds until it didn’t sound like English any more. He had another beer and then he was rambling on to himself in Laguna.

Emo rattled the Bull Durham sack. He bounced it in the palm of one hand and then the other; he took another swallow of whiskey. He had to have two or three swallows of whiskey before he’d talk; he took out the little cloth sack when he was ready.

“You know,” he said, slurring the words, “us Indians deserve something better than this goddamn dried-up country around here. Blowing away, every day.” He laughed at the rhyme he made. The other guys laughed too because Emo was mean when he was drinking.

“What we need is what they got. I’ll take San Diego.” He laughed, and they all laughed loudly. He threw the bag up in the air and caught it, confident of his audience. He didn’t see Tayo sitting back in the corner, leaning back in the chair with his eyes closed. He didn’t know that Tayo was clenching all his muscles against their voices; he didn’t know that Tayo was sweating, trying to fight off the nausea that surged at him whenever he heard the rattle in the little bag.

“We fought their war for them.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Yeah, we did.”

“But they’ve got everything . And we don’t got shit, do we? Huh?”

They all shouted “Hell no” loudly, and they drank the beer faster, and Emo raised the bottle, not bothering to pour the whiskey into the little glass any more.

“They took our land, they took everything! So let’s get our hands on white women!” They cheered. Harley and Leroy were grinning and slapping each other on the back. Harley looked over at Tayo, who was reading the label on the beer bottle. (COORS BEER brewed from pure Rocky Mountain spring water. Adolph Coors, Co., Golden, Colorado.) He looked at the picture of the cascading spring on the bottle. He didn’t know of any springs that big anywhere. Did they ever have droughts in Colorado? Maybe Emo was wrong: maybe white people didn’t have everything. Only Indians had droughts. He finished off the beer; Harley was watching him and gave him another one. He couldn’t hear the rattling in the little bag any more, but he could still see Emo playing with it. He was thirsty. Deep down, somewhere behind his belly, near his heart. He drank the beer as if it were the tumbling ice-cold stream in the mountain canyon on the beer label. He kept drinking it, and Harley kept shoving the bottles across the table at him. Attention shifted from Emo to Tayo.

“Hey, look at him!”

“No wonder he doesn’t say nothing. How many does that make?” Harley counted the empty bottles. He said something, but it was difficult for Tayo to hear clearly; their voices sounded dim and far away.

He got up and weaved his way between the chairs and tables to the toilet at the back of the room. The yellow stained walls were at the far end of the long tunnel between him and the world. He reached out across this distance to try to steady himself against the walls. He looked down at the stream of urine; it wasn’t yellow but clear like water. He imagined then that if a man could bring the drought, he could also return the water, out of his own belly, out of his own body. He strained the muscles of his belly and forced it out.

He pushed down on the handle of the toilet, but it didn’t flush; the lid of the toilet tank was leaning against the wall and the floor was covered with dirty water. It was soaking through his boots. The sensation was sudden and terrifying; he could not get out of the room, and he was afraid he would fall into the stinking dirty water and have to crawl through it, like before, with jungle clouds raining down filthy water that smelled ripe with death. He lunged at the door; he landed on his hands and knees in the dark outside the toilet. The dreams did not wait any more for night; they came out anytime.

When he got back to the table he saw that Emo’s glasses were sitting crookedly on his puffy face. Emo watched him walk across the room to the table.

“There he is. He thinks he’s something all right. Because he’s part white. Don’t you, half-breed?” Tayo stopped in front of them. He saw all their faces clustered around Emo’s fat, sweaty head; he thought of dogs standing over something dead, crowded close together. He couldn’t make out Harley or Leroy or Pinkie; all he could see was Emo’s sullen face. He stood there in front of them for a long time until his eyes lost focus. Someone touched his arm.

“Come on, Tayo, sit down with us,” Leroy said. He put his mouth close to Tayo’s ear. “Emo didn’t mean nothing. He’s just drunk, that’s all.”

Tayo sat down. He knew Emo meant what he said; Emo had hated him since the time they had been in grade school together, and the only reason for this hate was that Tayo was part white. But Tayo was used to it by now. Since he could remember, he had known Auntie’s shame for what his mother had done, and Auntie’s shame for him. He remembered how the white men who were building the new highway through Laguna had pointed at him. They had elbowed each other and winked. He never forgot that, and finally, years later, he understood what it was about white men and Indian women: the disgrace of Indian women who went with them. And during the war Tayo learned about white women and Indian men.

We went into this bar on 4th Ave., see,

me and O’Shay, this crazy Irishman.

We had a few drinks, then I saw

these two white women

sitting all alone.

One was kind of fat

She had dark hair.

But this other one, man,

She had big tits and

real blond hair.

I said to him

“Hey buddy, that’s the one I want.

Over there.”

He said, “Go get ’em, Chief.”

He was my best drinking buddy, that guy

He’d watch me

see how good I’d score with each one.

“I’m Italian tonight.”

“Oh a Wop!” He laughed

and hollered so loud