“I’m not a dancer,” he said, taking a step toward the fire, “but I can try.”
The girl smiled at the ground.
“You need to give her a little money,” Keith said.
This bewildered Russ. But the girl, too, seemed confused. Her smile, in the firelight, was edged with disappointment. Not wanting to offend her, he took a greenback from his wallet. She snatched it and hid it in her skirt.
He had no idea what to do, but he joined the circle and stepped as well as he could, following the girl, who did know what to do. The slimness of her legs and the shimmy of her hips brought out the queasiness in him. But now, in the flickering orange light, amid the beating of the drum and the chanting of female voices, he understood that the queasiness had nothing to do with pity or revulsion. It was heart-quickening excitement. Beneath the girl’s shawl and skirt was a body that a man could want; that Russ himself could want. A suspense that had hitherto existed only in disturbing dreams, dreams that ballooned into apocalyp tic heat and ruptured in the soiling of his pajamas, had invaded the world he was awake in. What made the dreams so disturbing was how painless it was, how ecstatically pleasurable, to be consumed in flame.
The girl’s interest in him seemed to have expired when he gave her money. After a politely long interval, he stepped out of the circle and retreated into the dark. As soon as the girl noticed, she ran over to him. Her expression was now closer to angry.
“Keep dancing or give her money,” someone, not Keith, called to him.
He couldn’t imagine what money had to do with healing a soldier’s psychic wounds, but he fumbled with his wallet and gave her another greenback. Satisfied, she left him alone.
He awoke in the morning, on the ground beside Keith’s truck, still excited, still prickling with his new awareness, and daunted by the prospect of further immersion. Feeling the need for a walking cure, he told Keith he was going back to the ranch and would wait for him there.
“Take a horse,” Keith said. “You could die in the sun.”
“I’d rather walk.”
The walk was brutal, seven hours under a sun ever hotter and whiter. Keith had given him a skin of water and some bread wrapped in a rag, and he’d exhausted both before he reached the turnoff at the chapter house. By then, in the white heat, the road had ceased to be a line leading rationally from an origin to a destination. It had become, in his mind, the defining engenderer of everything that wasn’t road—stony slopes boiling with grasshoppers, stands of conifers made blacker by the blazing light, seemingly proximate rock formations whose respective positions his progress refused to alter. Either his ears or the air rang so loudly that he couldn’t hear his footsteps. He mistook a hovering falcon for an angel, and then he saw that the falcon was an angel, unaffiliated with the God he’d always known; that Christ had no dominion on the mesa.
By the time he reached the ranch, he’d walked his way out of all certainty, and the cure hadn’t worked. The very thing he’d been fleeing awaited him in Keith’s little house. The spirit of the girl he’d danced with had preceded him, outrun him, to the bedroom. Parched and sunburned though he was, he lay down and opened his pants to see if the dreamed apocalypse could be achieved while he was awake. He discovered that, with a bit of chafing, it very quickly could. The pleasure that tore through him was the more glorious for being waking, and there wasn’t any punishment; he wasn’t struck blind. He wasn’t even ashamed of the splatter. No one could see him, not even God. For the rest of his life, he associated the mesa with the discovery of secret pleasure and permission.
When Keith came back with his family, two days later, he put Russ to work on the ranch. To the farming skills Russ already had he added new ones. He learned how to lasso a calf, how to catch a horse on a range without fences, how to compel a cow to walk backward in a narrow gully. He experienced the misery of sheep dip for all concerned, both the sheep and anyone who touched the vile liquid. Keith’s brother-in-law castrated a stallion and threw a bloody testicle at Russ, and Russ threw it back at him. He and Keith rode far up the canyon and camped beneath a milky host of stars, saw the silent silhouettes of gliding owls, heard spirits whistling in rock crevices, ate roasted pinyon nuts. When his worst fear was realized, in the form of a scorpion sting on his ankle, he learned that it merely hurt like the dickens.
The longer he stayed with the Diné, the more resemblance he saw with his own community in Indiana. The Diné, too, preferred to live apart and seek harmony, and their women were like his mother—sturdy and patient, permitted to own land. In the stories kept alive by medicine men, the original divine mother, Changing Woman, who was named for her seasons, had partnered with the Sun and given birth to twin sons. Like Russ’s mother, Changing Woman was associated with the fruit of the land. She’d raised the sons and instilled them with practical wisdom, while the solar father, though necessary for creating life, remained aloof. And just as Mennonites recalled their martyrs, so the Diné sang of their Long Walk to the prison camp in the 1860s, the years of disease and hunger inflicted on them there. The Diné, too, defined themselves by persecution, and their country, close to nothing, welcoming to no one, a desert, was even godlier than Indiana. It was in the desert, after all, that the Israelites had received the Word of God, the one God of all mankind, and that Jesus, while summoning clarity for his ministry, had prayed for forty days and forty nights.