Death Chants (4 page)

But she interrupted
him. "I slept with a bonepicker. With the night guardian who dances the bone dance in the sacred
burying grounds of our people."

"You didn't do it."
He waved his hands, as though shaking something away, but his voice was broken like a traveling
wind.

"But I did." The
old woman held on to the lie, sensing its power. "A long long time ago. And why shouldn't I? Is
the world of spirits for men only? A woman can live at night as well as a man."

"NO! NO! It cannot
be!" said the old man.

"It was a night
when you were with some other woman, witch, or humankind, I did not know or care, and I was
alone. It was a time of season change when the whole world is restless. Not like now, not like
the burnt ashes of unchanging summer. It was night, and the stars seemed to fall in my hair and
the windows were open to the wind and sky and he who waited for me . . ."

"When?" raged the
old man, not believing but yet . . . "When?"

"It seems like only
a few nights ago. Like last night and every night. I heard the birds dancing night love in the
trees. I saw people passing on the distant road and every voice and sound, birds and unknown
travelers, seemed to whisper, 'Why are you alone?' "

"You lie!" insisted
the old man.

"I felt that if I
stayed a moment longer by myself my heart would tear itself out of my breast. I put on my best
dress, the one trimmed with porcupine quill and elk teeth. I wore my white buckskin leggings.
Yes, and I went into the night and sought him out."

"No one would touch
you!" screamed the old man. "Who would dare my wrath, my great killing powers!"

"Yes." And now she
had to smile at her own cleverness. "Your power was great and all men feared you. All living men.
But the dead fear nothing."

"Who? Who was it?"
he demanded to know.

"The night walker.
The nameless one," she said. "He was young and old and ugly and handsome. He was all things and
nothing. And he was strong and quick in the dark and he waited for me."

"LIES!"

"He undressed me
beneath the burial rack of my father's father. His hands were like ice on a frozen man's dead
face, but they burned me just the same." The old woman untied her long braid, slowly unknotting
the one long clump of gray hair. Care­fully, like a young girl who flirted, she did not look at
him.

"He never spoke but
he caught hold of me in the dark and, in his strange embrace, I forgot you."

"You are lying," he
said, as if trying to convince himself. "You made it all up."

Slowly he rose to
his feet. He stood in front of her. She saw his wrinkled face and his white hair and the look in
his eyes. He looked like a traveler from a far place, like someone she did not want to
meet.

"He would not have
had you," insisted the old man. "I know
their ways and you had nothing he would have wanted, not power, not beauty."

"Oh, but he did."
She watched his face now and the desire burned in her to put her mark upon him and she felt a
sudden strength. "But I did not know that you cared. Now you must know how I felt each night you
were gone."

In the telling, it
became real even to her, this imaginary night of long ago.

"I still say you
lie." But he was uncertain. "And even if you found him, even if you had night-seeing eyes to see
the spirit being, he wouldn't have wanted you! They have eyes only for great power or great
beauty."

"But I was
beautiful that night," she said.

"You were always
ugly," he insisted, in his old unkind way.

"To you, perhaps,"
said the old woman. "But I knew how to make myself pretty for him. His eyes and hands told me a
thou­sand times that I was beautiful."

"You are out of
your mind. Approaching death, that terrible bird I see on your shoulder, hungry and shriveled,
has driven you crazy," said the old man, casting about for something, for some kind of
explanation, for it was never her way to lie. Never. He considered this, wanting to convince
himself that what he had said was true before he believed her completely, but there was no
madness in her manner or speech. The old man shud­dered as if something had passed by, casting a
dark shadow over him.

"You were drunk.
You dreamed it. It did not happen, you only think it happened," he said.

She shook her head.
"One night, if it had only been one night, then yes, I could have been drunk. One night even that
I could have dreamed. But it was many nights, a hundred, a thousand, how many I do not know, for
we were both hungry in the dark. Like that, drunk or dreaming, it is only possible that it
hap­pened."

And then for the
first time in a life without tears, the old man wept.

She was silent, not
looking at him.

He felt something
breaking inside himself, shattering into
anguished fragments. Dreams rose and died and memories of nights long ago were like
spears through his heart.

In a few words, a
lifetime of mastery, of dancing unaffected above the shallow things of everyone else's life, was
shattered. Like an eagle with an arrow through its wings, he fell from the sky, and her earth,
which had never been his, came rushing up to meet him.

Now he did not know
who he was anymore.

She said nothing,
continued only to not look at him. He touched her arm with one trembling hand but she seemed not
to notice.

"What are you
thinking about? Do you hear what I say? An­swer me!" he cried, because for the first time he felt
he did not know what was in her mind. "What are you thinking about?"

"About him," she
said, and the lie was bigger and easier on her tongue. "And I shall think of him until the end.
He was all I had."

The old man reeled
back as if struck.

"You make it up.
You want to frighten me!"

"Why should I
frighten you? You have seen too many dark things to take fright at anything an old woman could
say." Her voice was serene, unconcerned. "We both did what we wanted to do."

"You were mine!
Mine!" said the old man and the tears fell with each word.

"Once . . . but not
only yours," she said.

Death came into the
old man, creeping outward from the heart. He had time for only a few words.

"You've ruined
me."

He slipped to the
floor, no longer able to stand up.

"Now I am afraid of
death! Afraid! Always I thought I under­stood the living. That I saw into their hearts and knew
all that was to be known. But now, I know I have never known you, never known the secrets of your
heart! I never had mastery over you. Never! Never mastery over you who I thought to be life
itself. And now I am ruined. Ruined! For if I could not conquer life, then death will certainly
destroy me!"

He looked up into
her eyes and saw the answer.

"Yes," she said,
and it was the most terrible word he had ever heard in his life, and it was the last
word.

She watched in the
comfortable dark, waiting to die beside him as soon she must, and felt young, almost reborn. She
was like a woman newly in love, in that first all-consuming love that is sweetest of
all.

He was hers now. He
died belonging to her and to no one else, not to himself, or to the spirits of the far
country.

She waited for
death happily now, for the heart of woman is only happy when it owns all it has
conquered.

And her magic had
been so strong that she had conquered the world.
 

Two old men sat
side by side in rocking chairs like two tame birds perched on the lid of a coffin.

One was white, the
other was Indian.

John Forbes had a
beard.

He was the white
one.

He coughed a lot,
dressed forty years behind the fashions and chain-smoked cigarettes with slot-machine
motions.

Red Horse was in
the other chair. He was dressed in old jeans, a bright blue shirt good enough to steal and a pair
of old cowboy boots even a dead man wouldn't want to wear.

He had an old
corncob pipe stuck in his mouth and his thick gray hair was tied none too neatly in
braids.

Jack Forbes inhaled
deeply on his cigarette and coughed so hard he blew cigarette ashes all over his shirt. Despite
the years that had marked his face, there was still a great deal of strength to be seen there. He
had the air about him of a man who had met life headlong and unflinchingly. He had the look of a
man accus­tomed to being in command.

Red Horse noticed
the cough. "Man your age, ought to have learned how to smoke by now."

Jack Forbes stopped
coughing and looked over at Red Horse. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth before he
spoke.

"I made you a star.
You should be happy."

"I wanted to be a
planet," said the old Indian calmly.

"You can pretend
against it but you had it all. My films made you larger than life."

Red Horse lit his
pipe, puffed on it contentedly.

"I was not larger
than life, just thicker above the neck," said Red Horse. "I made faces for a living. You call it
acting. Running twenty miles a day in front of a camera to hit somebody over the
head with a rubber tomahawk is not a serious
way to go through life."

"There you go,
poor-mouthing everything. You're just angry at me because you couldn't handle the success," said
Forbes.

Red Horse shrugged.
"I didn't know I had any. After all, I was in your movies."

"You had your name
up in lights. If that's not success, I don't know what is."

"You're right. You
don't know what is. The kind of success you are talking about tastes like your foot feels when it
falls asleep. It is crawling on your hands and knees at two hundred miles an hour."

"You had success,"
insisted John Forbes. "You just were too Indian to capitalize on it. I see you haven't
changed.

"You can say what
you want about being in my films but I filmed what I knew. I don't regret it. In the old West,
men were men."

"And they smelled
like horses," added Red Horse, trying to be accurate.

Forbes stared off
into the distance, seeing something unseen. "Remember the first film I directed you
in?"

Forbes smiled at
the memory, turning to look at Red Horse.
"Return of the Apache Devil.
It was a two-reeler
made for the old Republic studios. Made the whole damn thing in three days. It made money hand
over fist."

"How could I
remember that far back? When you've fallen off one horse, you've fallen off them all," said Red
Horse.

Forbes went on,
"Republic thought I was a genius. Two reels in three days and a first-time director to boot.
Hell, if they'd only known. I was in Mexico two days before and DRANK the water!" He tugged
uncomfortably at his pants. "I went fast because I HAD to go fast. I had the one-shot trots.
Should have bottled that stuff and sold it to producers with directors behind
sched­ule."

Red Horse nodded.
"We shot more film when you were on the toilet. That's why we finished the film so damn
quick."

Forbes was
indignant. "That's a goddamn lie!"

Red Horse remained
calm. "Indians never tell lies. They just don't tell the truth."

Forbes tapped his
chest with his finger.

"I directed ever'
damn foot of that film."

"Same method in
toilet. When you find something that works, I say use it every chance you get."

Forbes scowled at
Red Horse and then bent over and opened a paper bag at his feet. Red Horse watched with obvious
interest as Forbes took out two cans of beer. Forbes glanced at Red Horse to see if he wanted
one. Red Horse nodded yes with evident eagerness and Forbes opened both cans.

Red Horse started
to reach for the beer but a thought sud­denly occurred to Forbes and he just missed handing the
can of beer to Red Horse. Forbes took an absentminded sip out of the can of beer meant for Red
Horse.

"Tell me, Red
Horse, why did you ever come to Hollywood in the first place?"

Red Horse stared at
the can of beer with fascination as he answered. "I was dreaming. I hoped to penetrate a house of
knowledge which I believed lay beneath the sea. When I re­turned to the land of men, I wanted the
spirits of this great knowledge to make my people walk in beauty."

Forbes was
incredulous. "You came to Hollywood for that?"

Red Horse shrugged,
withdrawing the hand that had reached out for the beer. "Well actually, I went out there to get a
job falling off horses in cowboy and Indian movies, but when I got there"—he winked at
Forbes—"Italians already had all the jobs."

Forbes took a long
pull on the beer that he had intended for Red Horse.