“Count me out,” he said to Cloud-Being-Born. Then he smiled, trying to mitigate the refusal. “I have two left feet when it comes to dancing,” he added.
“It is not your feet we need,” the old man replied.
George looked at the other men. Their faces were studiedly impassive. But he had an uncomfortable feeling that if he tried to make a break for it, they would stop him.
And where would he go anyway? Where was there, except this ratty, rundown reservation with its odd assortment of people loosely linked by heritage?
Very loosely linked, George thought.
“I'm only half Indian,” he said lamely.
“You need not be Indian at all,” Cloud-Being-Born replied to his surprise. “What we need is not your blood.”
“Nor my feet?”
“Nor your feet.”
“Then what?”
But Cloud-Being-Born said nothing else. The old man seemed to go off somewhere inside himself. Deep within the seams of his wrinkled face, his eyes filmed over. George was dismissed. The store and the other men in it were dismissed.
George stood, shifting from one foot to the other, feeling increasingly uncertain, until Jerry said kindly, “It's okay, he doesn't hear you anymore.”
“Is there going to be another Dance?”
“Looks like it.”
“What kind of Dance? When?”
“He hasn't told us yet. He will, when the time comes.” Jerry seemed as oddly passive as the rest of them, accepting.
George felt a flash of anger. I can't do that, he thought.
But what choice do I have? I bought into this when I came here.
He was annoyed with himself.
He spun on his heel and left the store.
Since there was no place else to go, he headed for his shack. He kept his eyes on the ground, deliberately not looking at whatever might be swimming in the air.
Pollutant particles, he said to himself, trying to believe it.
The door of the shack was open, but the heat collected beneath the tin roof struck him in the face like a blow. He could not go in.
Turning aside, he headed for the only other possible sanctuary, the two rows of barracks. At least they were roofed with asphalt shingles, though in very bad repair. They should be marginally cooler.
As he approached the buildings he heard voices coming from inside. Someone was singing. He stopped for a moment to listen, recognizing Kate's voice.
She had been well named, Kate-Who-Sings-Songs. Her voice was a pure, clear contralto, deep and sweet as well water. She was singing a ballad George did not know, a song of loss and regret.
He opened the door and slipped inside.
Kate was standing in the center of the long room, singing with
her eyes closed. All those who were not gathered in the store, including the children, were sitting in a circle around her.
A row of cots alternating with rusted iron beds ran down one wall. A few broken chairs were pushed against the other. At the end of the room was a single porcelain sink, with a run of rust down its backsplash, below the faucet. In one corner, a faded shower curtain half shielded a seatless toilet.
This is what they gave us to live in, George thought, an old anger rising in him. The people who seized our land and raped it for profit.
For a moment he forgot the other half of his family, the white half. Seeing the destitution of the reservation, he was pure Indian, as he had been pure Irish when he read the histories of colonial atrocities perpetrated on that race.
Kate finished the song she was singing and opened her eyes. She looked directly at him. “Hello,” she said over the heads of the others.
“Hello,” he replied with the same soft-spoken gravity.
She smiled then. “We have music every day,” she explained. “Would you like to join us?”
Bert Brigham, who was seated nearest the door, moved over, beckoning to George to take the place beside him.
They were all sitting on the floor. No one was using the broken chairs.
George sat down. The air in the room was hot and still, but not as bad as it had been in his shack. And at least there was a roof to keep out the sun, though a few relentless rays made their way through the broken shingles and rotten boards beneath to illuminate dust motes dancing in the air.
George wanted to believe they were dust motes.
Someone suggested another song, another one George did not know, and Kate closed her eyes again and sang. George closed his eyes too, losing himself in the listening. Then the song ended and he heard her say, “This next one is for George.”
Her smooth, supple contralto launched into a love song he had heard only once or twice in his life, in Irish pubs in Boston. “My Lagan Love.” A song from Northern Ireland, incredibly difficult to sing. As he listened, George realized Kate must have been a professional singer ⦠Out There.
He would ask her. He wanted to know more about her.
He wanted to know all about her.
But there was no point. They would soon die.
The ballad flowed to its final, ineffably poignant lines:
“⦠and hums in sad, sweet undertone
The song of heart's desire.”
George opened his eyes to find Kate looking at him. For a moment they were quite alone in the room.
Not now, George thought. Not now, at the end of the world.
He dropped his eyes, breaking the connection.
Someone else began to sing then, and one of the younger men produced a guitar and played an accompaniment. Kate moved from the center of the room to sit down with the others, though not by George. She listened with apparent keen interest, not looking in his direction again, and he felt a pang of regret.
The music session lasted for an hour or so. There were songs, some of them undeniably what George considered “Indian” music, others speaking of different cultures. Kate sang again after a while, this time a smoky rendition of “Walk on the Wild Side” in the best New Orleans tradition, affirming George's opinion that she had been a professional singer. He could just see her leaning against a piano in a top-dollar jazz club, carrying them away on the magical river of her voice.
By unspoken agreement, the group broke up after Kate's last song and began drifting away. Some of the women busied themselves sweeping the barracks and trying to make a presentable home of a place that could never be presentable. The children, denied the pleasure of playing outdoors, used the broken chairs to create a fort for themselves and began a rowdy game of Cowboys and Indians.
To George's amusement, it seemed they all wanted to be Cowboys.
“No takers for the role of Indian,” he remarked to Kate as she walked past him.
She stopped. “Not exotic enough. Kids never want to be what they are.”
“Did you?” he asked. Then, mildly embarrassed, he added, “We
talked about me but not about you. I don't know anything about you, except that your husband died in New Orleans. Were you singing in a club down there?”
Her eyes twinkled with amusement. “You didn't have to be a genius to figure that out.”
“Did you always want to be a singer?” he persisted.
Kate turned to face him squarely. “No,” she said. “When I was a kid I wanted only one thing: to be rich. To have fancy clothes and more jewelry than any Indian woman ever possessed.
“So I grew up to become the highest-paid call girl in Tulsa.”
George's jaw dropped “Excuse me?” “You heard me. I was the highest-paid call girl in Tulsa.” Kate said the words matter-of-factly, as someone else might say they had been a housewifeâor a meteorologist.
“But ⦠I thought you were a singer ⦠I mean ⦔ George fumbled, wishing he had never opened this particular can of worms. At the end of the world, why bother anyway?
Kate smiled. “I was a singer. Eventually. I made enough money on my back to buy some but not all the things I wanted. But I learned enough to realize I would have to change my life to get them. So I saved enough money to take myself off to Chicago and get a formal education, a bit of polish, so I could snag a rich husband who would give me the rest of the equation. The highest-priced hooker going can't afford to buy herself Rolls-Royces and villas in the Mediterranean.”
“That's what you wanted?” George asked in amazement, gazing at her serene face, her smooth, plain hair, her simple slacks and shirt.
“It's what I thought I wanted. What the magazines and the TV had taught me to want ever since I was a little kid. In Chicago I got married, all right, but not to a millionaire. Like a fool, I fell in love with a saxophone player. Really fell hard, so hard I couldn't bring myself to tell him about my past. Until the day he died, Phil thought I was just a nice girl from the Southwest.
“He was the one who discovered I had a voice. He began calling me Kate-Who-Sings-Songs, using the Indian connection to make something unusual so he could get bookings for me.
“It turned out I was more successful than he was,” she said softly. Sadly. “My career took off, his went downhill. We drifted apart, and then one day I learned he had died of an overdose of designer drugs. Designer drugs,” she repeated with a world of contempt in her voice.
“You can't blame yourself for that,” George said.
“I don't. Honestly. I did for a while, but then I realized everyone is ultimately responsible for themselves. And I had better start being responsible for myself. I cleaned up my act, you might say.
“Just in time to realizeâ” She broke off and shook her head as if she was angry.
“What?” George took hold of her elbow. “To realize what? Tell me.”
Kate looked past him, toward the children. “Just in time to realize it was all too late. I was never going to be able to have ⦠What's wrong with her?” she asked abruptly.
George followed her gaze. The tiny, big-eyed daughter of Mary Ox-and-a-Burro had stopped playing and was standing swaying, rubbing her forehead.
Her face was glazed with sweat.
Kate hurried to the child and crouched down beside her. George followed. “What's wrong, honey?” Kate was asking. “Don't you feel well?”
The little girl whimpered, “Hot. Hot.”
Kate put her hand on the child's forehead and frowned. “Too hot. That feels like fever.”
“I have some aspirin,” George volunteered, but Kate was not listening. She gathered the child into her arms and called out to the room at large, “Does anyone know where Two Fingers is?”
“In the store,” George said. “At least, he was.”
Kate gave a brisk nod and headed for the door. Mary Ox-and-a-Burro bustled across the room to join her. “What's wrong with my baby?”
“I don't know,” Kate said. “I think she has a fever.”
Mary gasped. “Not ⦠?”
“I don't know,” Kate said. “Don't start worrying before anything happens. We'll take her to Two Fingers.”
“Is he a doctor?” George wanted to know.
“Better than that,” said Kate. “He's a healer. It's his gift.”
“How can a healer be better than a real doctor?” George wanted to know. He was having to trot to keep up with Kate who, with Mary at her shoulder, was sprinting across the open ground toward the store. But Kate did not answer him. All her attention was focused on the child, who was now very flushed.
Fortunately, Two Fingers was still in the store with Harry and the others. The two women took the child straight to him. “She's sick,” Kate said, holding out the little girl.
But Two Fingers did not take her into his arms. Instead he gestured to Kate to put her on the floor. Kate and Mary sank down together, almost as one, with the child between them.
From his stool, Cloud-Being-Born watched.
Two Fingers held the palms of his deformed hands above the little girl's head, moving them slowly back and forth, as if he was smoothing a blanket. His face assumed a remote, listening expression.
The rest of the community came flooding in the door, talking
worriedly among themselves. When they saw what Two Fingers was doing they fell silent and ranged around the walls, watching.
Two Fingers began to chant. The sound was eerie, hackleraising, an echo from another time. The repetitive syllables sounded like gibberish, but he repeated them insistently, with rising and falling volume making a sort of music.
“You,” said a voice behind George. “You, Burningfeather. No tobacco?”
George turned. Cloud-Being-Born was sitting right behind him.
“No, I'm sorry. I didn't bring any.”
“Too bad,” the old man said wistfully. “Tobacco draws evil spirits. Evil spirits like tobacco. Circle of tobacco would draw illness out of child.”
Two Fingers continued to chant. His outstretched hands never touched the child. He reached out with one foot, however, and nudged the two women, urging them to move away from her. Kate complied at once but the girl's mother had to be nudged a second time.
When space was cleared around the child Two Fingers began to move in a circle around her, keeping his palms downward a precise distance above her head. As he circled he sometimes bent forward, sometimes straightened up, but he never lost the rhythm of the chant nor varied the distance of his hands from her head.
George was painfully reminded of the people he had seen contract disease and die. It often began like this, with a sudden fever. The deadly viruses announced their presence like a rattlesnake rattling, but they had already struck, and there was no antidote.
If the child's illness was the precursor of one of the viral diseases invading the reservation at last, the slim hope of some genetic immunity would die with her; with the rest of them.
I don't suppose it matters, George told himself. The whole planet's sick, it won't support us anymore anyway.
Then, as he watched with hopelessness spreading through him, he saw the flush fade from the child's face.
She smiled up at Two Fingers.
“You and you and you,” Cloud-Being-Born said, stabbing the air with his fingers as he pointed at three of the men, “go build a medicine wheel. Quickly.”
The three ran from the store.
Two Fingers kept on dancing and chanting.
The little girl sighed, curled herself into a ball on the floor, pillowed her cheek on her arm, and slept. To keep his hands the same distance from her head Two Fingers had to circle her in a crouch, but he never lost his rhythm.
The three men soon returned. “It's ready.”
Two Fingers picked up the sleeping girl and carried her outside gently, so as not to awaken her. The rest of them followed. Even Cloud-Being-Born arose from his stool and paced after them, to George's astonishment. He had not imagined such an old man walking. Yet he not only walked, he walked with a relatively straight back, like a much younger person.
On the baked earth in front of the store was a circular arrangement of stones, resembling a wheel with spokes and a hub. Hastily assembled, it consisted of no more than the absolute minimum number of small rocks and pebbles to give the shape required, yet Georgie counted a full twenty-eight spokes. Out of curiosity, he took the compass that was hooked to his belt and checked the alignment. As he had somehow known, one pair of spokes was perfectly aligned east-west, and another north-south. Perfectly. Yet none of the three men who had made the wheel was carrying a compass.
At George's shoulder, Harry Delahunt said, “Twenty-eight spokes for the days of the lunar month. We don't count the day when the moon is dark.”
Carrying the little girl, Two Fingers stepped into the first wedge between the spokes, did an intricate little shuffle of his feet, stepped into the next wedge, and so on around the circle, still chanting. As he stepped over each spoke he lifted the child toward the sky, then lowered her to a comfortable carrying position again.
As he danced, the women, but not the men, stepped into the circle and followed him around the wheel. The men took up the chant, but the women repeated Two Finger's steps between the spokes.
“So women do dance,” George muttered under his breath.
Harry Delahunt glanced at him. “Men do one thing, women do something else. Not the same thing at the same time, that'd be a waste of energy.”
When the circle was completed and the last woman stepped outside the wheel, Two Fingers put the child back in her mother's arms.
George could not help himself. He stepped forward and touched the little girl's forehead.
It was no hotter than his own, and absolutely dry.
The people drifted away, most of them seeking the shade of the store. When Kate turned toward the barracks, however, George hurried after her and caught her by the arm.
“Is that child actually cured?”
“We hope so,” she replied with equanimity.
“What is it? Laying on of hands, something like that?”
“Two Fingers is a healer, as I told you. A medicine man. More than that, he's a Sioux. The Sioux are best at using the medicine wheel.”
“And Cloud-Being-Born, what is he? The chief?”
Kate paused and looked up at him, frowning slightly. “No. He's a, a sort of a medicine man too. But more than that. He's a ⦠a ⦠a shaman,” she said, hitting on the word with relief.
“You mean a sorcerer?”
“A shaman,” Kate reiterated firmly. “That's what aboriginal people called them, isn't it? Their holy men? “People who could use earth magic and sky magic?”
“I don't know, I suppose so. I'm just a meteorologist. You'd have to have an anthropologist to explain all that.”
“I don't have to have any of your modern scientists at all,” Kate corrected him. “I have ⦠we have ⦠this.” She extended her hands as if to indicate the reservation and everything it contained.
Sunbaked soil, dying trees, dilapidated buildings. Two Fingers. Cloud-Being-Born. And what else?
“What do you mean by âthis'?” George demanded to know.
Kate began walking again, hurrying toward the shelter of the barracks. The sun beat down on them like a fist. George kept step with her, subconsciously aware of the flex and swing of her legs in the cheap cotton slacks she wore.
She did not answer him until they were inside the building. Then, with a sigh of relief, she pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket and mopped her face and throat. When she handed it to him
for the same purpose George noticed it was a handkerchief made of cotton, rather than a tissue of pulped paper.
“Now tell me,” he said as he gave the damp cloth back to her. “Just what were you talking about out there?”
She sat down on the edge of a cot and looked up at him. “The people Cloud-Being-Born has gathered here are a very special group, George. No one told me that, it's just something I've observed for myself since I've been here. Each of us has a gift. No two have the same gift. Two Fingers is a healer, for example. I sing. Sandy is a Navajo and, though you'd never guess it to look at him, an exceptional artist. Mary is a water diviner. Don't smile; she can really find water anywhere. Each of us can do something. Cloud-Being-Born organizes us into various groups to achieve various results. You saw a Healing Dance just now. When we planted the vegetables we did a different Dance. And it worked. They came up.”
“Vegetables do that. They come up.”
“Do they? Are you so sure? The average temperature here is a lot hotter than it used to be just a few years ago. That's changed the growth habits of every plant. Just look at the trees, they're dying. But our vegetables are thriving.”
“You give them a lot of tender loving care.”
“We give them more than that, George. There's no way they should be alive under that sun out there. Nothing else is, even the mesquite trees are dying.”
“Yeah. Well.” George scratched his head, trying to think of some explanation his scientific mind could accept.
“Do you know of anyone else who can do what we're doing here?” Kate challenged.
“No,” he said ruefully. “The radical change in the planetary climate was one of our biggest worries, for a while, because of crop failure on an international scale. We were predicting worldwide famine. But before that actually became a problem, it was overcome by even bigger problems. I doubt if anyone out there is obsessing about worldwide famine anymore.