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the ride.
"This is Roger Duroc, Ottokar," said Russell. "He's not with the government."
"How do you do, Mr Duroc." Dr Proctor knew the Frenchman by reputation.
"Pardon me," he corrected himself, "Monsieur Duroc."
Duroc nodded. "Very well thank you, Dr Proctor."
"Good. And how are you going to get me out of this place?"
There was a pause...
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V
Hawk-That-Settles had been waiting for the One-Eyed White Girl all his life.
And here she was.
Looking across the abandoned chapel at Jesse, he wondered yet again. Was this
really the one? She was jumping up her ladder two steps at a time, like a good
little mystic, but there was still a core of confusion to her. This messiah
was spending too much time in the desert. The years for wandering and
contemplation were up, and it was time for the miracles.
Also, far from Two-Dogs-Dying, he had doubts about himself. Perhaps he was
fated to be just another Whisky Navaho, and all this medicine was dangerous
tampering with forces beyond him.
She sat quietly, her one eye closed. He knew she saw him through the machine
behind her patch. Her supple body was shot through with machinery. He could
feel the lumps under her skin and muscle as they made love, and had to remind
himself these were not cancers or tumours but the benefits of the white man's
science. She could sit for whole periods, days sometimes, not moving, not
speaking. Part of that was the meditation necessary for her education. But
part of it was something else, something that she called her Frankenstein's
Daughter trances.
Sometimes, as she clung to him in the nights, he was reminded of the other
white girls, the rich liberals who had come to the Reservations and dressed up
like Pocahontas, who had been passed from buck to buck, who had been the stuff
of jokes at the councils of the Sons of Geronimo. They were all looking for
something from the red man, something Hawk knew he didn't have. There was a
crocodile egg inside Jesse, growing as their dead baby had grown, but the
shell was still just a white girl. A one-eyed white girl.
Of course, most white girls could not break a wrestler's back or crush stone
to dust with their naked hands. But strength of the body was not enough for
Jesse, she would need all the strength of her spirit if she were who she
seemed to be.
She was getting stronger inside. Sometimes, Hawk was frightened by her
strength. He knew something of her past, knew she had been swept away by a
stream of blood. One night, without being asked, she had told him about her
father, about what he had done to her, and about how he had died. Hawk had
heard many bad stories, but this scared him as no other had done. It was not
so much the horrors she recounted that got through to him as the manner of her
telling, as if these things had happened to someone else, a character in a
film or a teevee soap. She claimed to have no scars any more, but Hawk thought
Jesse was all scar tissue.
When she slept, her thumb crept babylike to her mouth, and he thought he
could see her as she might have been had she not been born in a bad place, at
a bad time to a bad father. Just another white girl. No better and no worse
than the rest.
He left her, and wandered through the sand-carpeted corridors of the
monastery. He heard the echoes of the prayers of the long-dead monks. They had
come here to convert his forefathers to their faith, but had perished. Their
faith was still here, though. Their meditations had created a channel to the
spirit world that was still open. They had come to teach the Indians a lesson
his people had already known for a thousand years. But he could not hate the
Jesuits. They brought Bibles and statues of the Blessed Virgin with them from
the Old World, not Springfield rifles and smallpox.
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He looked up at an eroded statue of Jesus on the cross, its face ground away
like the figurehead of a ship that had been through too many typhoons. He
bowed his head to the carpenter; a powerful manitou was to be revered, were he
born in a tribal hogan or a Judean stable.
His child by Jesse would have been a son. He would have named it himself, in
the old way, as he had been named, by taking the first thing the child looked
upon. Here, that meant he could not have much of a name: Stone-Wall-Standing
perhaps, or Sand-That-Stretches-to-the-Sky. Back on the Reservation, he had
known Navaho children called Three-Cars-Bumper-to-Bumper,
Broken-Telephone-Booth and Maniak-Corpse-Rotting. His father, Two-Dogs-Dying,
had not been fortunate in his naming, and had determined his son should not
suffer. Hawk's mother told him that Two-Dogs was the only one of the tribe who
had seen the hawk for whom he was named, but that the others had gone along
with him.
The pregnancy had been a part of Jesse's education that he had not understood
until its messy, bloody conclusion. He resented the spirits who would give him
a son and then take the child away before its birth, just to teach a one-eyed
white girl a lesson. His father had never explained, had never understood,
that Hawk's part in the story was merely as an attendant upon the creation of
the crocodile girl. Her feelings mattered, his were as feathers in the wind. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]