Nightwing Read Free Page B

ceremony. For the first time in seven years, he wore a leather kilt and moccasins. He had always had stamina. Midway through the race, his moccasins were soaked through with blood. The pain encouraged him. He overtook the local boys at the base of the canyon and sprinted up the narrow trail to win. The Snake Clan was about to award Youngman the prize when they were stopped by a priest of the Fire Clan.
    “This boy is not Hopi. Give the prize to a Hopi. Otherwise, all my clan will leave.” The priest was Abner.
    “I am Hopi and I won,” Youngman protested.
    “You are empty. I see inside you and nothing is there. This prize is only for real people.”
    Humiliated, Youngman returned to Albuquerque, to college. But college was not what he’d expected. In most subjects he was stupefyingly ignorant even for an Indian. Of history, literature, science, or social studies, he knew next to nothing. Worse, he came to the fast dead end of his talent. As long as he painted the desert, however fraudulently, the images came easily. Faced with anything else, even an elementary life class, he revealed himself as a complete incompetent. It was as if he knew a single song with a single variation and otherwise was dumb. But there were a number of ways to take out his frustration. The university had other Indians, mostly Navajos who regarded a Hopi as inferior. Youngman picked fights with Navajo gangs, with white football players, with just about anybody. After a single year of failing grades, he was drafted. After one year in the Army, he was court-martialed and put in the stockade at Leavenworth, where he served the next six years of his life.
    At the age of twenty-seven, Youngman was released and went to Los Angeles. He joined the Mexicans working as Indian extras in films, mixed colors for paint stores, and delivered cars for Hertz. One morning, delivering a rented Continental to Burbank, he was driving through the canyons that segment L.A. into an archipelago of concrete islands. Pulling off the freeway, he left the car to walk into the canyon, which had the color and texture of crumpled brown paper. Sitting still, he watched the shadows slide like cats over the hills. Day cats that leisurely stretched and curled on the warm earth. And still he sat. Towards sunset, thousands of fire-control sprinklers fanned the parched walls of the canyon with water bought and diverted from the rivers of Arizona. Round as marbles, the water rolled through the air and shattered in the last rays of the sun. One drop after another, million after million, exploding unheard against the moans of the freeway. Water that fell as rain in the Rockies, that flowed as the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, heading for the desert but rerouted to a sprinkler system. He laughed until he nearly cried.
    Youngman delivered the car ten hours late, was fired and, the following morning, returned to the reservation, not much better off than when he’d left.
    His first year back he spent relearning how to live. He taught himself again his own first language, which dry holes would yield water to a digging stick, how to mend clothes with a bone needle and to tell the difference between the tracks of a running deer and an unwary one.
    At the end of the year, a pickup truck of old men pulled into his camp.
    “You’re still here,” they said. “We expected you to be gone long ago.”
    “I’m still here.”
    “Are you going to stay?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then we will have to do something about you. You’re a troubled person. Never at rest. We can’t tell you to leave because we know our obligations. So we are going to put you to work. From now on you’re a deputy. You go up to Hotevilla tomorrow and sign up. Maybe, someday, we can get some good out of you.”
    The old chiefs back into their pickup and left.
    That was two years ago. Being deputy consisted largely of disarming drunks and making sure no tourists brought cameras into the pueblos when dances were held,