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After praising her cooking and thanking her for the food, he closed his eyes, images of ghosts merging with Pela’s songs to Tana and fading memories of school numbers. Before he drifted off, he opened his eyes barely to slits, his gaze drifting to the fire. Shimmering beyond the reflective stone plate were two transparent figures standing there, watching him. Then they seemed to dissolve into the night. Gordon closed his eyes.
The old ones in the Diné believed in ghosts. Even the Christians in the pueblo carried the fear. Gordon remembered telling Phil Andreakos that snipers cannot afford to believe in ghosts. With the body count his unit was racking up, they’d have to issue spectral hotels to house all the ghosts generated. Simpler not to believe in them. “But,” Gordon’s spotter had observed, “not believing in ghosts won’t get rid of the ones that are real.”
It was a put-on. Phil used to kid the other troops in the unit about him and Gordon taking scalps on the battlefield, hanging them on their lodge pole, absorbing their mystical powers. They didn’t even have a lodge, much less a lodge pole, but Andreakos loved putting on the replacements. Phil once found a dead horse outside Ahvaz and cut off its black tail and mane. He’d dangle little clumps of hair bound with rawhide from the tree outside their tent, wear them from his battle dress, and give them as little gifts with a deadpan stare saying, “The Great Spirit grant you this warrior’s strength.” Then Phil would hold his hands out, embrace the skies with his dark-eyed gaze, and chant gibberish. Ha te, makka me te hey, ya ya and so on. The recipients of these gifts would sometimes ask Gordon about it and he would always give them the same response: an Iron Eyes stare from an expressionless face. He’d nod once and say, “Andreakos really know how to sharpen knife.”
A French reporter got wind of it somehow and the international news media went into multiple orgasms about US troops scalping dead Arab and Iranian soldiers, selling the scalps as souvenirs. Then a lone sensible reporter had a belated DNA done on one of the “scalps” and it turned out to be one hundred percent Arab all right—Arabian horse. The company CO called Gordon and Andreakos in, but as soon as the captain clapped eyes on the pair he burst out laughing. They gifted the captain with a prime scalp for his lodge pole.
Ha te, makka me te hey, ya ya.
Gordon felt the smile on his face. The memory of the Long Island Macedonian was alive in Gordon’s memory. Ghost enough. He opened his eyes again and glanced at the fire. The shimmering images had seemed to emerge from some other plane of existence. He wondered if they were hallucinations from being whacked in the head. Perhaps they were leftovers from his brush with that other dimension. Maybe they were indeed the wandering spirits of the dead—
The images emerged from behind a rippling curtain of existence, the light waves passing through them distorted. The two figures seemed to turn toward each other for a moment, then face him again. Gordon closed his eyes. Real or not, he needed to rest. As he allowed the sleep to take him, he smiled and whispered the Chant of Fulla Bull he had once learned from that great warrior and U.S. Army shaman, Scalper of Dead Horse:
Ha te, makka me te hey, ya ya...
The next morning all his hallucinations and mental wanderings had left him, along with his headache. He gingerly poked at his head wound, tried to make the headache come, but it was gone. For the first time, Gordon felt he was mending. He told Pela he wanted to walk, to see, to talk, to eat. She rolled a few food items in a skin, placed it in Gordon’s pack, slung the pack over her shoulder, then took his hand and slowly led him through their camp to a trail through a dense growth of cedars. He found walking the trail difficult, his headache returning and spiking in intensity after a few stumbles. After awhile the crisp clean air in his lungs, the stretch of his muscles, and the change of scenery diminished his headache to tolerable levels. As he had been trained to do, he cleared the cobwebs of his past and the speculations concerning the future from his mind and concentrated on his surroundings. Hosteen Ahiga and the instructors at sniper school agreed on at least one thing: Now is when everything happens. Twice he saw Coyote watching him from the shadows. Once he saw a beam of sunlight distorted by something invisible passing before it.
On the other side of the wood was a clearing that opened onto a bluff overlooking the southern range of hills, most of them more than fifty percent cleared for agriculture, the fields connected by narrow paths—no wheel tracks; no houses or huts. The farmers and their families lived in the village, Gordon presumed. On the horizon, towering majestically above the misty white plateaus, rose the mountain—Black Mountain to Pela’s people, none of whom had ever seen the mountain black. “Old-old ones, tell old-old stories,” Pela said to him. “Long before snows, Ekav make mountain from fire. Mountain cool black. Black Mountain. Then snows come.” She grinned widely as she showed Gordon a log upon which he could sit and rest. “Now mountain white,” she said, pointing at the vertical faces. “Cliffs black.” Gordon looked back at the peak and seated himself on the log.
The morning sun sparkled from several of the glaciers busily carving cirques in the old volcano’s flanks. Pela sat next to Gordon and unwrapped their food. Dried fruit, nuts, a bit of jerked venison. She held her hand out toward the sun. “Ekav kiss high flat lands,” said Pela, lowering her hand. “Ekav’s kiss bring Yomi Black Mountain Mother up from flat land in fire. Mountain Mother touch sky waters and birth Avina, spirit of river; Ekav touch ground and birth Kaag, spirit of land and growing. Davimo, god of day sky, touch Mountain Mother and birth Walking Man and Walking Woman. Walking Man and Walking Woman come down from mountain and begin Black Mountain Clan. All clans come from Black Mountain. Pela Black Mountain.” She looked up into Gordon’s eyes, a question on her face. Credentials time.
“Gordon born to Coyote Pass People,” he said, noticing as he did so a slight mist of confusion cross Pela’s eyes. He hadn’t their word for coyote. Maybe there weren’t any coyotes here and in her time. “Dog with shadow tail.”
Pela took on the English word, Coyote.
“Born to Coyote Pass People; born for Bear Enemies Clan,” he said.
“From where?” she asked with a confused frown.
He raised his right arm and pointed toward the west. “Very far away.”
“How long?” she asked.
Her people had horses. Land distances were measured in days riding a horse. How many days would it take to get to the New Meeting House steps in Jemez Pueblo a hundred and thirty-nine thousand years in the future riding a horse? “Too long to go back,” he said.
Too long to go back, he repeated to himself as weakness seemed to fill his body. “Tired,” he said to Pela. She wrapped their remaining food and they returned to camp.
After a sleep in which dreams brought him back to Bear Rock and his mother angrily dressed down Glittering Man for the sun’s repeated failure to scour evil from the world, Gordon awakened to Pela’s quiet singing. It was a story song about a young girl who wanted to become a flower and a flower who wanted to become a girl. It was a Trickster tale Iron Eyes had told him back in the pueblo. Instead of a young girl, Iron Eyes’s tale was a young boy and instead of a flower it was a jaybird. The Trickster’s lesson was the same: Walk in beauty, the path of beauty to be found not in feathers or petals but within. Gordon was wondering what Hosteen Ahiga would make of this land, this woman, and this situation when the light beyond the fire shimmered and distorted. Two figures, he was certain.