“Okay,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing, just okay. I understand.”
He smiled at me sideways. “You think it sounds voodoo?”
“All right, I’m narrow-minded. It sounds kind of voodoo.”
We both paid attention to the dancers for a while. I needed to keep a little distance from Loyd.
“Anglos put little dolls of Santa Claus around their houses at Christmas,” Loyd said without looking at me.
“Yeah, but it’s just a little doll.”
“And does it have a wife?”
“Yes,” I conceded. “A wife and elves. And they live at the North Pole.”
“And sometimes one guy will dress up like Santa Claus. And everybody acts a certain way when he comes around. All happy and generous.”
I’d never been put in a position to defend Santa Claus. I’d never even believed in Santa Claus. “That’s just because he stands for the spirit of Christmas,” I said.
“Exactly.” Loyd seemed very pleased with himself.
One of the hunters had drawn his bow and shot an invisible arrow into a deer. It gave an anguished shiver, and then the other hunters lifted its limp carcass onto their shoulders.
“I’ve seen Jesus kachinas too,” Loyd said. “I’ve seen them hanging all over people’s houses in Grace.”
Now there was a thought to ponder.
Koshari must also have been the spirit of nuisance, or a good belly laugh. The other deer dancers still followed the maiden, ignoring the hunters and their own fallen brother, but Koshari clowned and cut between them, getting in their way and generally interfering with their solemnity. But when one of the youngest dancers lost his antlers, Koshari picked up the headdress and carefully reattached it by its buckskin laces. The boy kept dancing, eyes front, paying no attention to the hobgoblin who was putting his costume back together.
At some later point, I noticed, Koshari had acquired a new-looking straw cowboy hat, which he cocked ridiculously on one of his horns. I had a feeling it wasn’t the Navajo he was aping here. He walked duck-footed with a John Wayne swagger and was using a length of two-by-four as a gun. He knelt and fired repeatedly at the dancing deer, grandly falling over backward each time. Later he stalked them, trailing his gun in the snow and tripping over it with admirably practiced body comedy.
The deer eventually retreated to the cliff, and the plaza filled with two lines of new dancers-a row of black-clad women and a row of men in white kilts-whose bodies beat a loud rhythm as they walked. Their chests were crisscrossed with lines of seashell bells. The two rows of dancers faced one another and stamped their feet, shaking the bells, crowding the air above the plaza with a loud, hollow clicking like summer insects. The men wore crowns of eagle feathers and the women wore spectacular wooden headdresses painted with stylized clouds and slanting blue lines of rain and green blades of corn. This was the corn dance, officially a summer prayer but danced at every important occasion, Loyd said, because you couldn’t pray it often enough.
“Most of the dances have to do with rain,” he said. “Here, that’s what everything hangs on.”
Santa Claus kachinas and the beauty of the spectacle notwithstanding, I still felt outside of it. “So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they’ll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.” Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so.
I thought I might finally have offended Loyd past the point of no return, like stealing the lobster from frozen foods that time, to get myself fired. But Loyd was just thinking. After a minute he said, “No, it’s not like that. It’s not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to cause them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.”
“In balance.”
“Really, it’s like the spirits have made a deal with us.”
“And what is the deal?” I asked.
“We’re on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we’re saying: We know how nice you’re being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, and we’ll try to be good guests.”
“Like a note you’d send somebody after you stayed in their house?”
“Exactly like that. ‘Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn’t your favorite one.’”
I laughed because I understood “in balance.” I would have called it “keeping the peace,” or maybe “remembering your place,” but I liked it. “It’s a good idea,” I said. “Especially since we’re still here sleeping on God’s couch. We’re permanent houseguests.”
“Yep, we are. Better remember how to put everything back how we found it.”
It was a new angle on religion, for me. I felt a little embarrassed for my blunt interrogation. And the more I thought about it, even more embarrassed for my bluntly utilitarian culture. “The way they tell it to us Anglos, God put the earth here for us to use, westward-ho. Like a special little playground.”
Loyd said, “Well, that explains a lot.”
It explained a hell of a lot. I said quietly, because the dancers’ bells were quieting down, “But where do you go when you’ve pissed in every corner of your playground?” I looked down at Koshari, who had ditched his cowboy hat and gun and seemed to be negotiating with Jack.
I remembered Loyd one time saying he’d die for the land. And I’d thought he meant patriotism. I’d had no idea. I wondered what he saw when he looked at the Black Mountain mine: the pile of dead tailings, a mountain cannibalizing its own guts and soon to destroy the living trees and home lives of Grace. It was such an American story, it was hardly even interesting. After showing me his secret hot springs, Loyd had told me the Jemez Mountains were being mined savagely for pumice, the odd Styrofoam-like gravel I’d thrown into the air in handfuls. Pumice was required for the manufacture of so-called distressed denim jeans.
To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
Our Koshari friend had somehow bought off Jack and taken away the ladder that was Loyd’s and my only way down. He was standing down there clowning now, pantomiming a smooching couple and talking at great length, playing to the crowd, which was laughing. At one point they all applauded. Loyd was plainly embarrassed.
“What’s he saying?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you in a minute.”
When Koshari had gone to another part of the plaza and people had stopped staring, I pressed Loyd again.
“He said now we’ll have to stay up here together a long time.”
“He talked for five minutes, Loyd. I know he said more than that.”
“Yeah. He said by the time the snow melts, we’ll…Basically he said in the spring there’d have to be a wedding.”
I made a face. “And people liked that idea? Of you marrying me? They were clapping.”
“You’re not…”
He stopped, because a kind man in the crowd had come over to replace our ladder.
“You’re not the Ugly Duck, you know,” Loyd said, once the man had gone.
“They don’t even know me. I’m an outsider.”
“I’m an outsider too,” he said. “They probably know my mother likes you.”
“How would they know that?”
“Word gets around.”
“I mean, how does she know that? I can’t even talk to her.”
“Do you like her?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“How do you know?”
“I like her hugs. She makes good bread.”