Dreams Beneath Your Feet

by Win Blevins

  “I think the Oregon road,” said Sam. “Here’s why. The best horses in the world are Appaloosas. Riders love the way they look, too. So I have an idea. . . .”

  WHEN EVERYONE WAS sleepy, Flat Dog said, “I guess we’re not in favor with Esperanza right now.”

  “I’m sure she went to her grandparents,” said Julia.

  The fire was faintest embers. Azul, Rojo, and Paloma were sound asleep. Even Hannibal had rolled up earlier. Sam lay down and thought, Things are going to work out after all.

  Twelve

  ESPERANZA NOTICED THE light through her eyelids but didn’t open them. She drew the morning air into her nostrils, truly noticing it for the first time in her life. She felt fresh and frisky, deliciously new. She squirmed with pleasure.

  She could hear the deep, slow breathing of the sleeping Prairie Chicken. She turned and put her head gently on his shoulder and stretched a leg over his. She didn’t want to open her eyes yet. Why look at your old life when you are a leaf in the wind of a new world? She pictured the mist on the river and listened to the faint stir of the cottonwood leaves. Then, slowly, she let her mind run up and down the pictures of all she and Prairie Chicken did with each other during the night, feeling them with fingers of memory as though they were silk.

  The loving, that was a whirlwind. It was strange at first, but fun when she began to catch on. She was eager to try it again—she knew she could fly a lot higher. Prairie Chicken had known just what to do, and she wondered about that . . . Funny, she had intended to be the one who swept him away. That wasn’t how it worked out.

  She chuckled to herself. It felt so good. Her parents and grandparents—they thought they would manage her life! Amazing. Outrageous. And now she could say, “To hell with you. I am in charge.”

  Certain things could be said with punch in English but not in Crow. That one felt good: “To hell with you.”

  ESPERANZA AND PRAIRIE Chicken got their ponies from the herd and rode up into the mountains. The sentries saw them leave together, and it would cause talk, but she didn’t care.

  She wanted to ride to a little lake she knew. She’d only been there once, with her family. She and Prairie Chicken would splash and play in the water and then warm each other up on the sand. Or maybe they would heat each other up first, then jump in the cool water and go back to the fire of their bodies.

  They would spend the day hungry. She couldn’t get food without getting caught. The lake and her feelings were a lot more urgent than hunger.

  Prairie Chicken didn’t say much. She liked a man who would do and not talk. She thought of him again as a bear. Next month he would go on a vision quest, and perhaps the bear would become his spirit animal.

  At the lake they went through the cycle of doing, then splashing in the water, then doing again. Prairie Chicken was fierce and playful by turns, and Esperanza could barely match his passion. She was happy.

  Lounging on the bank in the glow of romance and the exhilaration of her daring, she said, “I want to tell you a story about my mother. She ran off with my American dad just like we’re doing now. Well, they prepared more, took a travel lodge and food to stay for a while. The point is, she ran off with him. A love match, like us.”

  Prairie Chicken looked at her oddly.

  “The main thing is, she did what she wanted, she took the man she wanted.”

  Esperanza mused on it a little. Meadowlark, the mother she’d never known, had also run off to California because she wanted to see the ocean. That was the tale both her fathers told. She reminded herself, though, that it wasn’t the ocean that killed Meadowlark, it was a fever.

  Esperanza turned on one side toward Prairie Chicken. “Life can be short,” she said. “You have to do what you want to do.” She rolled over on top of him. “What I want is you.”

  She began to demonstrate exactly how she wanted him.

  Prairie Chicken said, “I want you, too.”

  After a long while, when they were lounging back again, he gave her a big, dumb smile, tucked a few stray hairs behind her ear, and said, “Porcupine told you, didn’t she, that she and I are getting married?”

  FLAT DOG, HANNIBAL, and Bell Rock went on a hunt for Esperanza. Sam stayed in the lodge and steamed. To calm him down, Julia let him help with the task of making moccasins. She was sewing several pairs for everyone—it would be a long trip.

  Sam didn’t mind doing women’s work. He’d made or repaired moccasins plenty of times.

  “They’ll be able to track her,” said Julia.

  Sam nodded and stitched.

  “You can’t help thinking about when you and Meadowlark did the same thing.”

  “That was my doing alone.”

  “You still think that?”

  Julia and Meadowlark had been friends at Los Angeles Pueblo. At the time, Meadowlark was with child, and Julia was arranging her own elopement with Flat Dog.

  “I feel for Esperanza,” said Sam.

  Julia looked at him across a sole she was cutting from deer hide. “And how about for Prairie Chicken?”

  Sam wanted to muster a smile, but he couldn’t. “It was awful. We had a short honeymoon there in Ruby Hawk Valley. It was lovely. Not just passion. We talked for the first time about her brother getting killed, and . . .

  “The fourth morning I stepped out of the lodge at dawn to get water and looked straight into arrows, lances, and war clubs right close up. Some of her relatives had forced Flat Dog to lead them to us, said they’d let me live if he helped. Took me back to the village with a rope around my neck.

  “After that they never let me see her. Before long I realized I had to get out of the village. It was a long time, weeks, before she and Flat Dog suddenly came riding into rendezvous.”

  “A young girl’s passions rage.” Julia’s had carried her on a flood tide away from her wealthy family and into Flat Dog’s arms.

  “Yeah. Including Esperanza’s, I guess. Are we doing the right thing?”

  “I hope so.” Julia took a moment to finish a moccasin. “I think so.” She looked carefully at her work and then into Sam’s eyes. “The whole world is changing.”

  The door flap lifted, and Esperanza ducked into the lodge.

  Sam and Julia stared at her. The look on her face made them hesitate to speak.

  “I’m ready to go,” said Esperanza. “California. The sooner the better.”

  Without another word she marched around the fire, lay down on her blankets, rolled up, and turned her back to everyone. Julia sat down behind her and put a hand on her shaking shoulders.

  Thirteen

  THIRTY OR FORTY male voices sang, “Iaxuxkekat’e, bacbi’awak, c’wak.”

  Hannibal thought it was magnificent, and he was hardly scared at all.

  The warriors were Kit Foxes, members of a warrior society, and this was their initiation song. “You dear Foxes, I want to die, so I say.”

  These men came to Flat Dog’s lodge on their horses and formed a wall of protection for Sam Morgan, Joins with Buffalo, who was himself a Kit Fox. As were Flat Dog, Gray Hawk, and Bell Rock. The village had other warrior clubs, such as Lump-woods, Big Dogs, and Muddy Hands, but the Kit Foxes were large and influential. They would ride in a throng out of the village, Sam in the middle. It was more than physical protection. It was a statement that anyone who attacked Sam, anyone who violated this brotherhood, would bring on himself the enmity of all the Kit Foxes.

  This was the doing of Flat Dog, Gray Hawk, and Bell Rock. They had needed only to remind the Kit Foxes of the time Sam brought honor to the club and the village by making the sacrifice of the sun dance, and then by counting coups on several of the Headcutter enemies and stealing many of their horses.

  Hannibal looked at Sam’s face. He sang as enthusiastically as any of them. He had loved being a Crow once. Now he was going away from all that, for good. Hannibal could only imagine the churn of conflicting feelings in his friend’s heart.

  They reached the edge of the village,
but everyone kept singing. Gray Hawk rode on one side of Sam, Flat Dog on the other. Tears streamed down Gray Hawk’s face. Tears at the loss of his only daughter to death? Of his son to California? Of his grandchildren? All of those, Hannibal supposed. Hannibal admired him. You are doing the right thing.

  The men rode on slowly, ceremonially.

  Behind them Julia managed the move. She, Esperanza, and Needle took the lodge down. Julia supervised the loading of the family’s belongings and made sure the boys did their share. All except Needle mounted their horses. Julia led the pony drags, and Azul brought his father’s other horses along on a lead.

  By the time she was ready to ride, she hadn’t been able to hear the men’s singing voices for quite a while. She asked herself again if Sam was safe and again answered yes. A mile or two outside the village the Kit Foxes would wait for the rest of the family, and all would ride together and make camp well up the Popo Agie River. That was the plan.

  She looked at the village where she had lived for more than a decade, where her children had grown up. The boys were excited to be going to rendezvous, as they did every summer, and they wanted to see California. The thought of never seeing their relatives here again, never playing with their friends—Julia knew they didn’t understand, not really.

  She looked around for a last time. Then she clucked, and the family moved out.

  THE ENTIRE PARTY made camp that night at the sinks of the Popo Agie. It was a peculiar place, and Sam liked it. Here the river suddenly dived under the ground, into a limestone cave. After about a quarter mile it rose up again and formed a large, calm pool. The pool reminded Sam, somehow, of the peace and ease he felt when he was waking up slowly and gently, his mind rising from the bottom of sleep to the light.

  This evening Sam sat by the waters. The highest peaks caught the last of the sunlight, a bright edge of rosy gilding on the ridges and summits. This valley was bathed in light blue, which would soon be dark blue, and then black.

  Hannibal sat down next to Sam.

  “Rideo, ergo sum,” said Sam. “If only I could rideo.”

  Hannibal laughed for him.

  “The Kit Foxes have decided to ride on up to the divide with us,” Hannibal said. “I think they just like being on the move better than lounging around camp.”

  Sam watched the light shimmer on the water. A dragonfly drifted sideways. He took a deep breath and let it out. “Hannibal, do you ever miss having a home?”

  “Never thought about it. Wanted to see the world.” Hannibal had roamed far and wide. At John Bill Pickett’s circus, he got a big sample of humanity. Working as a trader, sometimes in the clover and sometimes hungry, he’d walked and ridden from Philadelphia to the Pacific to Mexico City and had lived at a score of places in between.

  “You still like wandering?”

  “I guess.”

  Sam studied the still waters for a long moment. “I think I’m done with it.”

  “Yeah. Maybe we both better think about Flat Dog.”

  Sam looked through the half darkness at his friend’s face.

  “He’s all torn up. His whole life in one village, close relatives, same set of friends, same mountains making the horizons. That time he went to California with you hardly counts. The way he sees it, fate took him there to meet the woman he loves, and he brought her back as quick as he could. Also the sweat lodge, the sacred pipe, the sun dance. And now he’s leaving all that. Permanently. We cross that divide tomorrow, he’s out of the Crow world for good.”

  Sam flinched. “I thought about Esperanza, not a bit about Flat Dog.”

  “And we’ve all had our minds on keeping you alive.”

  “Maybe I better talk to him about it.”

  “Keeping him in mind is enough, I think.”

  Sam noticed that the clouds were collecting close on the peaks. Might be some rain.

  “You don’t think about having a home?”

  “I guess I do.”

  Sam wished he could see his partner’s face better.

  “Woman? Children?”

  “Maybe. There is something about the word ‘home’ feels good.”

  “California would be the only place.”

  “Here’s the truth, though. You have to make a home. Old times, people were given a home and that was it. This New World is different. You have to make a home for Esperanza, for Tomás, for yourself.”

  Home, Sam thought. What I hunt for in my dreams and never find. The nameless.

  Part Two

  Fourteen

  LEI PALUA SAID, “Keep your goddamn hands off of me.” Every word she spoke, except the oath, was in the Hawaiian language.

  She whacked at Delly’s hands. “Boy!” Lei called out.

  “Back off!” Kanaka Boy said sharply to him. Delly leaned away and got to his feet. “Fire’s too damn hot anyway,” he said. He was also Hawaiian, built stout as a whale. Walking away, Delly threw a leer back at Lei, hinting that this wasn’t finished.

  Boy reached for Lei, but she scooted away. They had a deal, but he took little interest in enforcing it. Tonight was the dangerous night, because Boy had told the men they could drink the whiskey to the last drop.

  They had just finished a three-week roundabout, as Boy called it. Boy had set up his own stills—Hawaiians made good booze. They’d gotten a big lot of whiskey brewed up and kegged in their camp. In his usual way, Boy took a dozen or so of his men and rode out among the Indian villages, trading them liquor or, more accurately, trading them drunken orgies.

  Lei hated the roundabouts. The Indians gave Boy almost anything he wanted for the whiskey and went on a binge. It was sickening. Men and women alike swilled until they were staggering and stupid. Before the men passed out, they managed to mount wives other than their own. If a woman resisted, and that was uncommon, she usually got raped. Lei had seen a man rape his own daughter, who shrieked the whole time. She had seen one brother kill another.

  Boy and his men usually did what they called joining in the fun. Lei stayed sober, and scared.

  She had to go with Boy on these roundabouts because of their deal. In the home camp sex was what Boy liked to call deuces wild—any man took any willing woman at any time, and they reveled in the debauchery. Any man included her husband.

  Lei hadn’t known what she was getting into when she ran away with Kanaka Boy. At first she’d been horrified. Then she’d spent a week weeping. Boy didn’t ask what was wrong, didn’t offer any consolation, but just let her work it out for herself. After she cried herself out, she demanded a deal. She would ignore what everyone else did on one condition—that Boy would protect her from the other men. She would belong to her husband and him only.

  Boy had kept the bargain. But if she stayed behind on a roundabout, she knew what the men left to watch the camp would do.

  She stood, stomped over to the bedroll she shared with Boy, and lay down. After a moment’s thought she rose and pulled the blankets closer to where Boy sat, playing the odds.

  Lei Palua hated her life and could barely believe she’d been drawn into it. Two summers ago, rebellious against her mother, she let Kanaka Boy romance her at Fort Walla Walla until she was giddy with love. Then she ran off with him. He was a big man with a powerful body and stone-strong Hawaiian face, and he was crazy about her. She thought she was homely—much too skinny, and with an odd hairline. At the roots of her hair, here and there, her black hair was spoiled by white streaks. Lei thought these streaks were awful, but Kanaka Boy said they were gorgeous. Because of them, when he was in a loving mood, he called her Magpie, after the beautiful black bird with white wingtips that they both loved. She liked being admired.

  He also had big plans. Boy didn’t see why the Kanakas should work for the white bosses anymore. The Kanakas could do just as well as the Brits trading with the Indians, or better—most of the Hawaiians were half Indian.

  Lei was fed up with the Hudson’s Bay Company bosses, too. She’d seen her father worked to death, and her mother wo
uld never escape the kitchen where she slaved over woodstoves for the Brit mucky-mucks. Anyone who wanted to stand up to them was all right with Lei. A fellow who wanted to stand up to them and was handsome and told her he loved her—that was irresistible.

  The way to change things, Boy said, was to gather up a bunch of daring men like himself, set up a camp where they’d be hard to find, and make plenty of liquor. “You understand what the foundation of the Indian trade is?” he told Lei. He spoke a botched version of fancy English, which he’d patterned after the Brit bosses’ way of talking. “Liquor. Liquor is the secret. And we will have plenty.”

  So she rode off with him, a new wife. When she saw the remote camp he’d chosen, it made her sick at her stomach. The spot was on the Owyhee River—named after the murder of three Hawaiians there by Indians—in a landscape Lei had never imagined. It was bleak, a parched desert in three directions. To the east the Owyhee Mountains cut them off from the Snake River, which was a normal world with timbered bottoms and two Hudson’s Bay forts. South, west, and north stretched the desert, severe, forbidding, ominous. In those directions water was scarcer than virtue was in this camp. What little water you could find was alkali and ravaged your bowels. Only a few, widely scattered Digger Indians were able to survive in that country, and they were too poor even to afford clothing. This desert was death.

  For the first week she thought obsessively of her home islands. Though she’d never seen them, her grandparents had told her they were the lushest islands in the world, green leaves and tall trees everywhere, flowers so abundant the air itself intoxicated you with its scent. She longed for the coastal country of Oregon, where she lived sometimes with her grandparents, not as sweetly warm as her country of origin but abundantly fertile. If you didn’t plant a garden, the Hawaiians said, the grass and weeds would run you out of the country.

  And she grieved because she found out about Boy. He made love her to every night, wild, wonderful, animal love. And he rutted, openly, with any other woman he pleased.