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"Like a cat?"
"Exactly."
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"I can see doing that," Mitch said agreeably. "No modern medicine, dirt floor,
savage simplicity."
"Leather thong in my teeth," Kaye added. "That's the way Sue's mother gave
birth. Before they had the clinic."
"My father delivered me," Mitch said. "Our truck was stuck in a ditch. Mom
climbed into the back. She never let him forget that."
"She never told me that!" Kaye said with a laugh.
"She calls it 'a difficult delivery,' " Mitch said.
"We're not that far from the old times," Kaye said. She touched her stomach.
"I think you sang her to sleep."
The next morning, when Kaye awoke, her tongue felt thick. She pushed out of
bed, waking Mitch, and walked into the kitchen to get a drink of the flat-
tasting reservation tap water. She could hardly talk. "Mitth," she said.
"What?" he asked.
"Awh we gehhing somhinh?"
"Wha?"
She sat beside him and poked out her tongue. "Ih's aw custy," she said.
"My,hoo,"hesaid.
"Ih's li owah faces," she said.
Only one of the four fathers could talk that afternoon in the clinic side
room. Jack stood by the portable whiteboard and ticked off the days for each
of their wives, then sat and tried to talk sports with the others, but the
meeting broke up early. The clinic's head physician-there were four doctors
working at the clinic, besides the pediatrician-examined them all but had no
diagnosis. There did not seem to be any infection.
The other mothers-to-be had it, too.
Kaye and Sue did their shopping together at the Little Silver Market down the
road from the resort's Biscuit House coffee shop. Others in the market stared
at them but said nothing. There was a lot of grumbling among the casino
workers, but only the old Cayuse woman, Becky, spoke her mind in the trustee
meetings.
Kaye and Sue agreed that Sue was going to deliver first. "I ca't way," Sue
said. "Neither cah Jack."
86
Kumash County, Eastern Washington
Mitch was there again. It began vague, and then clicked into a wicked reality.
All his memories of being Mitch were tidily packed away in that fashion
peculiar to dreams. The last thing he did as Mitch was feel his face, pull at
the thick mask, the mask that sat on new and puffy skin.
Then he was on the ice and rock again. His woman was screaming and crying,
almost doubled up with pain. He ran ahead, then ran back and helped her to her
feet, all the time ululating, his throat sore, his arms and legs bruised from
the beating, the taunting, back on the lake, in the village, and he hated
them, all laughing and hooting, as they swung their sticks and sounded so
ugly.
The young hunter who had pushed a stick into his woman's belly was dead. He
had beaten that one to the ground and made him writhe and moan, then stamped
on his neck, but too late, there was blood and his woman was hurt. The shamans
came into the crowd and tried to push the others away with guttural words,
choppy dark singing words, not at all like the watery light bird noises he
could make now.
He took his woman into their hut and tried to comfort her, but she hurt too
much.
The snow came down. He heard the shouting, the mourning cries, and he knew
their time was up. The family of the dead hunter would be after them. They
would have gone to ask the permission of the old Bull-man. The old Bull-man
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had never liked masked parents or their Flat Face children.
It was the end, the old Bull-man had often murmured; the Flat Faces taking all
the game, driving the people farther into the mountains each year, and now
their own women were betraying them and making more Flat Face children.
He carried his woman out of the hut, crossed the log bridge to the shore,
listening to the cries for vengeance. He heard the Bull-man leading the
charge. The chase began.
He had once used the cave to store food. Game was difficult to find and the
cave was cold, and he had kept rabbit and marmot, acorns and wild grass and
mice there for his woman when he had been on hunting duty. Otherwise she might
not have gotten enough to eat from the village rations. The other women with
their hungry children had refused to care for her as she grew round-bellied.
He had smuggled the small game from the cave into the village at night and fed
her. He loved his woman so much it made him want to yell, or roll on the
ground and moan, and he could not believe she was badly hurt, despite the
blood that soaked her furs.
He carried his woman again, and she looked up at him, pleading in her high and
singing voice, like a river flowing rather than rolling rocks, this new voice
he had, too. They both sounded like children now, not adults.
He had once hidden near a Flat Face hunting camp and watched them sing and
dance around a huge bonfire in the night. Their voices had been high and
watery, like children. Maybe he and his woman were becoming Flat Faces and
would go and live with them when the child was born.
He carried her through the soft and powdery snow, his feet numb Hke logs. She
was quiet for a time, asleep. When she awoke, she cried and tried to curl up
in his arms. In the twilight, as the golden glow filled the snow-misted high
rocky places, he looked down on her and saw that the carefully shaved furry
parts on her temples and cheeks, where the mask did not cover, and all the
rest of her hair, looked dull and matted, lifeless. She smelled like an animal
about to die.
Up over rocky terraces slippery with new snow. Along a snow-covered ridge, and
then down, sliding, tumbling, the woman still in his arms. He got to his feet
again at the bottom, turned to orient himself to the flat walls of the
mountain, and suddenly wondered why this seemed so familiar, like something he
had practiced over and over again with the hunter-trainers in the mountain
goat seasons.
Those had been good times. He thought of those times as he carried his woman
the final distance.
He had used the rabbit atlatl, the smaller throwing-stick, since childhood,
but had never been allowed to carry the elk and bison atlatl until the
itinerant hunter-trainers had come to the village in the year his balls had
ached and he had spewed seed in his sleep.
Then he had gone with his father, who was with the dream people now, and met
the hunter-trainers. They were lone and ugly men, unkempt, scarred, with thick
locks of hair. They had no village, no laws of grooming, but went from place
to place and organized the people when the mountain goats or the deer or the
elk or the bison were ready to share their flesh. Some grumbled that they went
to the Flat Face villages and trained them to hunt in one season, and indeed,
some of the hunter-trainers might have been Flat Faces who covered their
features with matted beard and hair. Who would question them? Not even the
Bull-man. When they came, everyone ate well, and the women scraped the skins
and laughed and ate irritating herbs and drank water all day, and all pissed
together in leather buckets and chewed and soaked the skins. It was forbidden
to hunt the big animals without the hunter-trainers.
He came to the mouth of the cave. His woman whined softly, rhythmically, as he
carried and rolled and pushed her inside. He looked back. The snow was
covering the drops of blood they left behind.
He knew then that they were finished. He hunkered down, his thick shoulders
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barely fitting, and rolled her gently onto a skin he used to cover the meat
while it froze in the cave. He slid and pushed and then pulled her back into
the cave, and went out to get moss and sticks from an overhang where he knew
they would be dry. He hoped she would not die before he came back.
Oh, God, let me wake up, I do not want to see. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]