He washed down some lava-stuffed tamale with strong black coffee and quietly observed, “It was them who decided you weren’t the kind of gal they wanted blessing them the old-timey way, Kinipai. We live in changing times, as Miss Changing Woman warned you long ago. You can’t go back to the Dulce Agency. They drummed you out of your old regiment under a sentence of death. It’s as simple as that.”
She protested, “This food tastes funny. These fine clothes you just bought me are pretty, pretty, but they are not the sort of clothes I am used to wearing, and I feel as if I am wearing my way-chanting mask, even though my face is naked, naked!”
Longarm smiled fondly and said, “Hold that thought until I can hire us a room here in town for La Siesta. I like you naked all over, and there’s no sense pushing on through the heat of the day just to find everyone in bed when we get there.”
She fluttered her lashes and said, “I like to get naked with you, even though you are not a real person. Do you think real people at some other agency would take me in if I went there instead of that rancho my cousin lives on?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “The Mescalero are fixing to get marched over to the Arizona Desert. The Chiricahua are as likely as your own Jicarilla to jump their reserve and give the army an excuse to scratch ‘em off the government dole. I’ve spent enough time with your Navaho cousins to tell you they’re as enthusiastic about hunting witches as the Jicarilla witch-hunters we just saved you from. So I’d say you had the choice betwixt conforming like a new recruit to the mighty strict traditions of strange Na-dene, or to the less strict Mexican ways. I understand from Papist pals that you can get along with a heap of fun as long as you don’t rob the poor box or insult a priest to his face.”
She had to smile at that picture, but insisted, “Hear me, I could never forsake Changing Woman, Rainbow Boy, or Child of the Waters for strange Holy Ones. Why do you white eyes make it so hard for us to go on living the way we were meant to live?”
To which Longarm dryly replied, “Meant to live how, by whom? I’ve told you I’ve had this dumb conversation before. There’s as many ways to live Indian as there is to live white-eyed. Some of your kind may go on living much the same, with trading-post luxuries thrown in. A Woodland Cree trapping furs the way his granddad did has a lot in common with any other fur trapper, save for mayhaps being better at it than some of us.”
He tried some more chili and continued. “The Pueblo farm folks you poor misunderstood Apache used to raid may be better off these days. My kind savvies any halfway sensible-acting cuss with a permanent address and irrigated croplands marked by boundaries anyone of goodwill can agree on. Your Navaho cousins have even managed to switch from raiding to sheepherding with some success. Their blankets, clay pottery, and coin-silver jewelry command fair prices at the trading posts, and it ain’t as if anyone’s asking them to pay rent or taxes as they find newer ways to live like… Indians, I reckon. I know they don’t live like your kind or mine these days.”
She curled her pretty lip and sneered, “Hear me, we real people no longer consider those sheepherding blanket salesmen N’de!”
He said, “That’s all right. The folks we call Navaho call themselves Dend. They think your ways are sort of dumb too. Can’t you see none of the warrior-way nations can go on acting the way they used to? Nobody is pestering the Ojibwa as they go on gathering wild rice the same as ever. It’s the swaggering horse thieves and buffalo hunters the Ojibway themselves named Nadowiesiu or Sioux that you see moping and weeping about the Shining Times they enjoyed at the expense of Ojibwa, Pawnee, and others raising crops instead of hair.”
She sulked. “Hear me, my people never took scalps before your people taught them that trick.”
Longarm snorted. “I know, it says in the Good Book how them Romans scalped Jesus, and everybody knows the English scalped Joan of Arc and anyone else they didn’t like. King Henry scalped at least two wives, and the Spanish Inquisition was scalping folks right and left years after other Spaniards had been exploring on this side of the main ocean. Finish that coffee and wake up, girl. There’s blame enough to go around. I’ll allow some of our boys have been mean as hell if you’ll admit nobody ever named your kind Apache because they came by in a sled giving presents to good little boys and girls.”
To her credit, she seemed to study some on what he’d just said as they finished their plates and he ordered more coffee and some tuna pie. You made tuna pie with candied cactus fruit, not fish. Kinipai said she liked tuna pie, and allowed that at least some of her own kind had been a tad unreasonable of late. He asked her again if she thought the Jicarilla would jump the reserve or go quietly when the time came for them to move down to that Tularosa Agency.
She shrugged the brown shoulders partly exposed by her new Mexican blouse and said, “I hope those fools who wanted to kill me fight the blue sleeves. It will serve them right to be butchered by the medicine guns some say the blue sleeves have now. Have you heard about those medicine guns that piss bullets forever in a steady stream?”
Longarm nodded. “We call ‘em Gatling guns. Custer was offered a battery of Gatlings to back his brag back in the summer of ‘76, but he was in too much of a hurry, or too proud. General Sherman will doubtless send mountain artillery into your Jicarilla mountain strongholds too, if push comes to shove. So if I was one of your chiefs I reckon I’d go along with old General Sherman.”
She sighed. “That was why I was trying to chant another Night Way when they stopped me. The blue sleeves are too strong for us to fight. Victorio and those others who came out this summer are all going to be killed without gaining anything, anything. General Sherman is the one who said the only good Indian was a dead Indian, right?”
Longarm said, “That was General Sheridan. But you won’t find him and old Billy Sherman in too much disagreement if he finds himself fighting extra Apache this summer. Finish your pie and let’s go find us a place to resume our own hostilities, you good little Indian!”
CHAPTER 7
They made it to El Rancho Alvera by suppertime. It was just as well Kinipai had tasted more interesting Mexican food. For the tortillas and refritos whipped up by her former Jicarilla kinswoman had hardly any taste at all.
Despite the half-ass Mexican ways of their hefty older hostess, she greeted them both like long-lost Jicarilla kin, and the two gals babbled like brooks at high water in the melodious but odd lingo they’d been raised to speak.
Other Indians had assured Longarm nobody who hadn’t been raised Na-dene would ever speak the language past the baby-talk level. Almost all the tongues spoken by the rest of the folks on the North American continent followed an entirely contrary grammar and general view of the world. So it was not surprising how much a keen observer could follow while, say, two Dutchmen, Greeks, or Shoshoni were talking. For most folks spoke with similar facial expressions and hand gestures that helped if you could pick out one word in a dozen.
Na-dene wasn’t built that way. To begin with, as Kinipai had attempted to explain, a slight change of sound could turn a changing woman into a white-painted woman. And they did that with all their words, turning one thing into another with, say, an m instead of an n, or even worse, by using more than one word to describe what a white man, or most other Indians, would consider the same blamed thing. So just as you learned to call a coyote ma’i, some fool Na-dene gal would giggle and tell you you should have said “atse hacke,” and if you protested that that came out more like “first warrior” than “coyote,” she’d look at you as if you’d just wet your jeans, and insist that everyone knew it meant coyote also.