Leslie Silko - Ceremony

He was hungry, and he felt shaky and weak. He hadn’t eaten since Ts’eh had left, and he had vomited all the beer. The warmth from the stone was beginning to fade; his Levi jacket was thin, and he could feel the cold leaking through worn places at the elbows and under the arms. He had seen them now and he was certain; he could go back to tell the people. He was in no condition to confront them. He watched how slowly the moon was rising, and hunched his shoulders against the cold. He would be lucky just to make it home that night.

He looked down at them. If he had not known about their witchery, they might have fooled him. People had been drinking out in the hills on wood-hauling roads and sheep-camp roads since they first bootlegged liquor to Indians. Standing around the fire, passing cheap wine around; Pinkie smashed the empty bottle against the water trough. There were circles of charcoal, tire tracks off side roads and, since the men came back from the war, broken bottle glass all over the reservation. His throat got tight. He might be wrong about them. Harley had helped him last year; he had come and got him moving again. He was exhausted; the fear and the running from that day and from the night before had left him weak. He needed to rest. This ceremony was draining his endurance. He could not feel anything then, not for Josiah or Rocky and not for the woman. Maybe the other Navajos had been right about old Betonie.

Emo and Pinkie kept him there; Pinkie found the tire iron and was pounding the hood of the car again. The sound set his teeth on edge and angered him in a way he had not felt since the day he had stabbed Emo. It was the sound of witchery: smashing through the night, shrill and cold as black metal. It was the empty sound of his nightmares; even the voices he recognized. He covered his ears with both hands and ground his molars together.

The pounding stopped with the scream. He moved forward suddenly, bruising his knees on the rock. The trunk lid was raised and they were standing around it. The screaming was coming from inside the trunk. He pressed his forehead against the rock until he could feel its print on his skin. He turned his head with his ear between the rocks, frantically trying to catch the sound. Harley. He watched them drag him into the light from the coals. Pinkie dropped something into the coals and the fire sprang up; it was Harley’s red-and-white Hawaiian print shirt, but in a moment the fire turned the white print bloody red. Leroy and Emo stripped off his jeans, and Pinkie dropped them into the fire. Harley twisted and rolled on the ground; his hands and feet seemed to be tied. Pinkie dropped his boots into the fire; their soles made thick black smoke, and the light from the fire was temporarily obscured. Harley screamed again, and this time Tayo climbed out from the boulders. He heard laughter and when he looked around the corner of the boulder, his heart went numb in his chest, and he wasn’t aware of his own rapid breathing any more. In the moonlight he could see Harley’s body hanging from the fence, where they had tangled it upright between strands of barbed wire. Harley’s brown skin had gone as pale as the cloudy sandstone in the moonlight, and Tayo could see blood shining on his thighs and his fingertips.

He reached into his hip pocket for the screwdriver. He felt the wooden handle and the sharp edges at the end. Squatting close to the ground, he followed the long shadow cast by the continuous mounds of mining debris. He knew what they were doing; Harley had failed them, and all that had been intended for Tayo had now turned on Harley. There was no way the destroyers could lose: either way they had a victim and a corpse. He was close enough to hear them.

“We told you to watch him. We told you to stay there.”

“We told you. We told you, and now you know what you got for yourself.”

Pinkie held his leg, and Leroy cut the whorl from the bottom of his big toe. Harley screamed hoarsely; the sound trailed off to a groan.

“Scream!” Emo said. “Scream loud so he can hear you.”

The screwdriver was slippery in his hands. It nauseated him to see Harley’s body jerking and twitching in the sagging barbed wire, with hands and knives so greedy for human flesh. He fought back a bitter stomach taste; the sweat was running down from under his arms, following the hollow ridges of his ribs. He had to hug his arms close to his side to hold off the shivering.

They had a paper bag they had emptied of wine bottles. Emo was holding it with the palm of his hand supporting the bottom of the bag because it was soaked with blood and the brown paper was beginning to dissolve around the bleeding chunks of human skin. Emo shifted the bag to his other hand and held the bloody palm up to Harley; but Harley’s eyes were closed, and he did not seem to be conscious of anything Emo said.

“Look at this, you half-breed! White son of a bitch! You can’t hide from this! Look! Your buddy, Harley.”

Emo jumped forward with a bottle of wine; it splashed over the ground at Harley’s feet, and unlike the blood, which clotted in shiny lumps on the sand, the wine soaked in thin and quick.

“Have some, buddy!” Emo said as he shoved the bottle into Harley’s mouth. The glass against the teeth made a brittle grinding sound, and Tayo heard Harley groan. He closed his fingers around the screwdriver and squeezed it until it was part of his hand. He understood that Harley had bargained for it; he realized that Harley knew how it would end if he failed to get the victim he had named. But Tayo could not endure it any longer. He was certain his own sanity would be destroyed if he did not stop them and all the suffering and dying they caused — the people incinerated and exploded, and little children asleep on streets outside Gallup bars. He was not strong enough to stand by and watch any more. He would rather die himself.

He knew he could get to Emo before Pinkie or Leroy could stop him. They were drunk. Emo’s words were thick and slurred. Pinkie had stumbled to his knees beside Leroy, squatting next to the fire.

He visualized the contours of Emo’s skull; the GI haircut exposed thin bone at the temples, bone that would flex slightly before it gave way under the thrust of the steel edge.

The wind came suddenly and fanned the coals into yellow flames; Leroy jumped back and stumbled hard against Pinkie. Pinkie pushed him away and Leroy fell.

“You fucking little queer!” Leroy kicked sand in his face and Pinkie lunged at him. Emo stood close to them; the fat under his chin was wrinkled with his grinning. The fire’s reflection made two flashing yellow eyes on Emo’s glasses. The wind was moving clouds rapidly across the sky, and as they crossed over the moon, darkness and light rolled back and forth like the men wrestling on the ground. The sand their feet kicked loose made a swirling trail in the wind.

The wind made his sweat go cold. This was the time. But his fingers were numb, and he fumbled with the screwdriver as he tried to rub warmth back into his hands. There would be no one to help Emo. But Tayo stayed on his knees in the shadows. Leroy had a knee on Pinkie’s throat, and he could hear raspy choking sounds. Emo was laughing loudly, pointing at the body hanging stiffly, swaying a little in the gusts of wind, then pointing at Leroy kneeling on Pinkie’s throat.

The moon was lost in a cloud bank. He moved back into the boulders. It had been a close call. The witchery had almost ended the story according to its plan; Tayo had almost jammed the screwdriver into Emo’s skull the way the witchery had wanted, savoring the yielding bone and membrane as the steel ruptured the brain. Their deadly ritual for the autumn solstice would have been completed by him. He would have been another victim, a drunk Indian war veteran settling an old feud; and the Army doctors would say that the indications of this end had been there all along, since his release from the mental ward at the Veterans’ Hospital in Los Angeles. The white people would shake their heads, more proud than sad that it took a white man to survive in their world and that these Indians couldn’t seem to make it. At home the people would blame liquor, the Army, and the war, but the blame on the whites would never match the vehemence the people would keep in their own bellies, reserving the greatest bitterness and blame for themselves, for one of themselves they could not save.