;When Imanito and Howard returned with water, Lovecraft posed the question once again, and Howard answered rather arrogantly, happy, it seemed, to play professor to his friend for once. “You gotta keep the water circulatin’, HP. If you shut the engine off and pour cold water into the radiator, it all hits the engine in one jolt and it could make the cylinders crack from the sudden temperature change. You pour a little at a time and it cools down slower and safer.”
“Remarkable,” said Lovecraft. “One would never expect that a backwoods pulp writer could so concisely explain the thermodynamics of an internal combustion engine.”
“When the radiator stopped steaming and the chugging of the Chevy sounded oddly contentented, Howard shut the engine off. “Now we gotta fix this hose,” he declared. ““Where are we gonna get a hose out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“I have such a hose for you,” said Imanito. “But I know you are all hungry from your ordeal, so please eat first.”
“And you wouldn’t happen to have a tool box handy, would ya?”
“I have also kept the tools you will need to fix the hose.”
“You don’t say. I’m likin’ you more every minute, old man.”
As they entered Imanito’s home, Glory paused to give the old man something small in a packet, and he said a gracious thanks. They retired into the hogan, where they sat on low stools around the fire. The interior of Imanito’s home was dim in the unsteady light of the fire, and not much was fully visible, but there were tantalizing glimpses of a vast array of traditional artifacts and modern junk. Howard was especially struck by the poster of the shapely young diving woman in the red swimsuit advertising Jantzen swimwear. In the flickering firelight, she seemed to be swimming through warm ripples of water.
Lovecraft found his stomach immediately rumbling, and he fixated his gleaming eyes on the pot of stew on the flame, the source of the delicious, hearty aroma that filled the hogan.
“It would be improper to perform a ritual on a full stomach, but you are not of my people, and therefore you need not be bound to our ways.” Imanito ladled out bowls of the thick stew and served it in stoneware bowls with hunks of puffy fry bread.
The travelers hadn’t realized how hungry they were; they ate ravenously, stopping only to let Imanito refill their empty bowls.
“This is delicious,” said Howard. “What is it?”
“It is made from corn and lamb,” said Imanito.
“What do ya call it in Hopi?”
“Nokquivi,” said Imanito.
“Knock-quee-vee,” Howard repeated. “Mighty satisfyin’.”
“Now,” said Imanito, “I will tell you why you are here.”
“Well, give it your best shot,” Howard replied, slouching forward on his stool with his elbows propped on his knees.
“Many years ago when I was still a boy, I was told a story by my father, who was a medicine man. At that time it was just a story to me, because it did not fit with the sacred stories he told. I thought that it might be something he had made up just for me to entertain me because I was just a boy and found the ways of the healer difficult.” Imanito passed around a pack of cigarettes as he spoke, and Howard and Glory each took one. The old man produced a small pipe, which he filled from a pouch of tobacco. “This is the story he told me,” he said. “A long time from now, in the future, when you are an old man older than me, you are visited by three travelers who are of the white people. They are riding in the belly of a black horse made of iron. It is” a horse without legs, and it rolls like a cart which is drawn by horses. On its head sits a hummingbird woman, who protects it from afar. It is in the desert, and many animals have come to eat it, but they cannot eat it because its flesh is iron and they themselves are asleep in a sleep made for them by an evil sorcerer.
“The three travelers are tired and hungry and scared. Their horse has eyes that light up the darkness, but it cannot find its way because it is thirsty. Its intestines are leaking, for they have been bitten by a snake, and its water has fallen to the thirsty earth. The horse growls like a mountain lion. It breathes hot steam like the bowels of the earth. Inside it, the three travelers grow hot and afraid. ”
“These are the three travelers: the black-hatted bear man, the pale fish man, the red horse woman. The two men are tellers of tales and keepers of secrets they themselves do not know. The woman is a mother, who is not a mother, who wishes to visit a mother. Her hair is the color of fire and her death is cold and clear as the air. The death of the black-hatted bear man is the color of caked clay; it is hot and full of thunder and the smell of sulfur that fills the belly of his black horse. The death of the pale fish man is quiet and white, and it is like the pain that a boy feels in his side when he has run too fast and too hard and he pants like a fish that has been taken from the river.” Imanito paused. “These were all riddles, as you can see. It was a good story whose meaning I did not know truly until tonight.”
“I don’t like the sound of all that death,” said Howard. “You tellin’ us you brought us here to fortune-tell how we’re gonna die?”
“No. That is only part of the story. My father’s instructions were different.”
“You wanna hear more of this mumbo jumbo, HP?”
“I find it rich and fascinating,” said Lovecraft. “Please continue, Mr. Imanito. But we haven’t all night, so perhaps you should summarize the gist of things.”
“My father told me that I must go out into the desert on a certain night to help the three of you. He said I had to wake up the sleeping animals, and he gave me the song that would do it. He said I should bring you back to my home and feed you and give you a new piece of intestine for your horse. And I was to tell you how to go to the place where shadows bend, for that was the place of his first battle, and the pale fish man carried a thing that must be buried there to keep the world safe until the time of the gourd of ashes.” Imanito stopped again. “Now I must tell you what you must do, but the woman cannot see the things I must show you.”
“Why not?” said Howard.
Glory was momentarily flattered and pleased that he would want to include her, but then Imanito stated that the knowledge was for men only, that women’s eyes would pollute it, and that seemed more than satisfactory as an answer.
“What’ll we do about her then?” Howard asked. “Can’t exactly put her out in the car now, can we?”
“Not to worry,” said Imanito. “I have prepared a place for her.” He indicated a corner, or rather, an area in the round interior that he had set off behind a partition of hanging blankets. “Red horse woman may rest in there where I have prepared blankets.”
“I’m dead tired anyway,” said Glory, unable to mask the disappointment in her voice. “What are you going to show them, anyway? A sand painting? I’ve seen those before.”
“Yes,” said Imanito. “There are instructions I must show them. It would not do to have them seenby your eyes.”
“All right. Good night, fellas.” She parted the hanging blankets and entered a dark enclave surrounded by stacks of junk. When she let the blankets fall back into place, a little light from the fire still managed to shine in underneath, between the blankets and the floor.
Imanito had laid out a couple of clean horse blankets and a thinner one, an army blanket, for her. While the others muttered on the other side of the partition, Glory lay back in the soft bedding and relaxed. She looked around as her eyes adjusted to the dark and was amazed by the junk the old shaman had collected over the years. There were stacks and stacks of popular magazines piled from the dirt floor to the roof; she recognized some of the stray volumes of Life and even an issue of Weird Tales, with its usual cover depicting a scantily clad woman in dire terror. At one side of the small enclave were open wooden boxes stacked with mason jars whose contents were either mysterious or absurd-unidentifiable colored pastes or tiny toy cars; there was a Frigidaire with its door permanently open, filled with books and crinkled contour maps of the U.S. Geological Survey; a scattering of postcards-used ones-from odd parts of the world; dried herbs and flowers hung from the rafters; several dozen identical black men’s shoes-all for the right foot-were stacked in a corner; and there was an open box just next to her filled with fabric and rug scraps, old wooden Christmas ornaments, part of a Confederate flag, and a teddy bear with one eye. It was as if Imanito had worked at a post office and kept random parcels for himself; his hogan was like a personal dead-letter office accumulating a mass of things that were truly odds and ends. Glory pulled her blanket more snugly over her shoulder and, with the dim images still in her mind, she was asleep before she realized it.