It was an enticing idea but, so far, not one that had caught on.
Although reservation casinos were almost universally successful, he was consistently surprised by the hostility they generated among politicians and the media. The idea that Indians were actually making money and succeeding on their own seemed to really tick them off. Even the so-called activists who were always raising money for reservation doctors and social services were unhappy about casinos.
Of course, he knew, they were supposed to be all noble and natural because they were what white America now called “Native Americans.” That meant that their job was to live in hogans and tepees and look picturesque for the tourists driving by in their BMWs. They were not supposed to want anything better or more modern for themselves. They weren’t supposed to run casinos but were supposed to squat in the dirt in native attire grinding corn in metates. They were supposed to live up to their media image, to be one with the land or some such bullshit and if they were to succumb to commercialization, it was preferred that the method be crouching on blankets by the side of the road and selling turquoise jewelry.
That whole aspect of contemporary American culture made him sick. The obsession with appearances. It was okay to build roads through sacred land but not to drop a McDonald’s wrapper on the road. Hell, give him a whole sandstorm’s worth of windblown trash in the desert rather than new development. Did people really believe that a beer bottle left on the ground by a camper was more harmful to the environment than a new subdivision?
It was this focus on neatness and cleanliness and a false antiseptic order that bothered him so. Nature was not clean, nature was not orderly. It was not like a suburban lawn, with everything carefully arranged and perfectly placed, and if these well-meaning people were really interested in nature they would abandon their cosmetic attempts to prettify its appearance and concern themselves with substantive issues.
He himself didn’t even like nature.
Give him a nice new casino any day.
He imagined himself walking through an air-conditioned lobby, dressed in a suit and tie, nodding familiarly to the high rollers. Around him were video slots, computerized blackjack, wall-to-wall carpeting, and piped-in music. It was a new world, a different world, and one that he would be more than happy to join.
But for now, this was home.
Jesse looked around the yard at the statues. Winged Victory, sandwiched between two anonymous Roman-style pedestal busts, stared back at him from a slightly raised section of ground to the left of the kilns. A trio of Michelangelo’s Davids looked coyly toward a pair of Venus de Milos. He started walking slowly through the yard. He stretched out his hands, let his fingers slide over the smooth figures as he passed by. The statuary reminded him of a junkyard. There were the same crowded narrow aisles, only the objects flanking the dirt paths were new cement and plaster rather than wrecked metal.
He liked the cool feel of the statues against his skin, liked the feel of the hot sun on his face. He had walked this walk so many times that he could do it blindfolded. He knew where everything was, and he remembered that last year when he’d actually sold a major piece to one of the Copper Days tourists it had thrown him off for a while. The yard had not seemed the same, and he’d found that he missed the sold statue.
Missed it?
Yes, he had, and he realized for the first time that, despite his initial resistance, he would miss this entire place if he had to give it up. He would honestly regret losing the statuary, would be sad having to say good-bye to all this. It had grown on him, incrementally, become a part of him over the years and, as much as he hated to admit it, it was now his home.
He reached the chain-link fence and turned around.
At the far end of the aisle, Winged Victory was staring at him.
He frowned. That wasn’t possible. The large statue had always faced the sales office. Hell, he’d just walked past it and it had been facing the opposite direction.
But now it was facing him.
He looked around, scanned some of the nearby figures. Hadn’t that one’s head been facing another direction? Hadn’t that one’s arm been positioned differently?
Chills spread over his skin, down his body. He turned to his right and saw that several of the statues appeared to have moved. The sun was still hot, but he felt suddenly cold.
There was something going on here.
Na-ta-whay, he thought.
Uninvited guests.
The idea frightened him. They were indeed living on desecrated land, and though he didn’t like to think about that kind of stuff, he believed it, and he knew in his heart of hearts that there had been and would continue to be things going on in this area that were unexplainable, that were part of the Other World, not this world.
Why was he being picked on, though?
He didn’t know, but it was clear both to him and to a lot of other people that things were escalating, that things were out of balance, that something had happened to change the status of coexistence in McGuane. He didn’t know what it was or where it was going, but he knew that it now involved him, and he didn’t like that at all.
It frightened him.
He thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, and he whirled left to see what it was, but all was still. He could not remember if the statue he was staring at had been posed differently or had always been this way.
Na-ta-whay.
He looked down that long, long aisle toward the sales office, thought for a moment, then climbed the chain-link fence, hopped over, and walked around the outside of the yard and back to the front.
Nine
1
In her dream, Agafia was walking through the Molokan cemetery toward the edge of the cliff. It was a cold day with a dark monsoon sky, and only occasional indistinct flashes of lightning illuminated the otherwise gloom-shrouded ridgetop.
She did not know why she was walking toward the cliff, but she was striding with purpose. She desperately wanted to see what lay over the edge, at the bottom of the mine—even though she knew that whatever was down there was evil and would destroy her.
There were no other thoughts in her mind, only that simple, instinctive desire to look into the pit, and she pressed forward with the single-mindedness of the obsessed.
She walked over her husband’s grave.
Walked over Jim’s.
The ground beneath her feet suddenly shifted, and in the second’s worth of illumination provided by a flash of double lightning, she saw a hand emerging from the rocky soil. She managed to avoid it, but another one grabbed her right ankle and held tight, cold fingers digging into the skin of her leg with death-grown nails. She kicked at it, stomped down as hard as she could, and got away, but in another flash of lightning she saw that hands were coming up everywhere.
She was still walking, making a beeline for the cliff, but she glanced quickly around and saw that there were no hands coming up from either Jim’s or her husband’s graves. The ground above their burial plots remained completely undisturbed.
That energized her for some reason, and she increased her speed, lifting her legs high and stomping her feet down hard in order to crush any hands that might be trying to grab her.