People of the Sky

by Clare Bell

  Kesbe shoved her toes down on the brakes and heard a tire explode with a sharp report. In an instant, the careening aircraft had turned itself into a maniac merry-go-round. The spinning force threw her against the side panel.

  Pinned by the effects of centrifugal acceleration, she could only make futile grabs for the swinging control wheel while dreading the sudden drop that meant a plunge over the cliff. She lashed up with one foot in an attempt to kick open the overhead escape hatch, but only succeeded in putting her boot through the side window.

  The noise grew louder, the punishing force more relentless until…

  It stopped.

  Kesbe lay limply across the two seats in the creaking aircraft, watching eddies of fog and dust whirl past the windshield She wondered if she had somehow taken a shortcut through hell to heaven. She decided she hadn’t. Her boot was sticking awkwardly out the broken side window and the control pedestal edge poked painfully into the back of her spine. She could feel the plane still rocking beneath her. A droning sound and vibration penetrated her daze, making her aware that the engines were still alive even though her flailing hand had knocked the throttles to idle.

  She pulled her boot from the window, picking pieces of glass from her flight suit. Slowly and stiffly she sat up, rubbing a swelling lump on the back of her head and blinking back the cluster of stars that invaded her vision.

  “That, old girl,” she said to the still-thrumming plane, “was a classic ‘arrival.’”

  The cockpit listed to the left but not badly. She had only blown the tire and not collapsed the wheel struts. After knocking the remaining glass from the left side window, she poked her head out, wondering how close she was to the edge of the cliff. She feared she would see nothing but air beneath the left wing and that the battered wheel hub would be teetering on the brink. Instead, wet rock and gravel spread into the fog on all sides. She faced the sheer wall of rock that showed her she had come to rest at the rear of the terrace.

  One glance backward at her tire-tracks told the story of her landing. The plane must have swapped ends several times on the rain-slick rock after it finished bouncing. A chalk-white gouge along the rockface shone with bits of embedded aluminum from Gooney Berg’s right wingtip. Kesbe was lucky she hadn’t lost the wing.

  Shaky with relief, she slumped in her seat until the sputter of idling engines reminded her she still had a task to perform. Now that panic no longer spurred her mind, her thoughts went leaden. It seemed to take forever to go through engine shutdown.

  When at last the old Pratt and Whitneys coughed to a halt and the props stilled, Kesbe lost the battle with exhaustion. Knowing dimly that she should clamber out and tie down the aircraft, she made a brief struggle to rise from her seat, but her legs would no longer obey. She gave up She was as safe as she could be at the moment, nestled at the rear of the ledge. It would take one hell of a wind to blow her off now. With that thought, she let her mind slip away.

  She had been ten when Morning Bird Man took her from her home in the suburbs of Kayenta up to the deserted villages on First Mesa. There she had walked with him in amid the closed, empty pueblo houses and now, instead of dreaming, she re-lived that afternoon.

  Conscious of the leggy awkwardness that had come upon her that summer, the child walked beside her grandfather in the deserted village, glancing up at him as they went. Bajeloga was becoming bone and sinew now, from his ropy neck to the stark and stubborn squareness of his face. He had lost the roundness and stolidity of stature that had once seemed to root him into the soil. His fleshlessness was not emaciation but rather the strength of spareness. His body seemed to have lightened, as if anticipating a move from earth into sky.

  She had seen images of ancient Hopi clan leaders from the beginning of the twentieth century and was struck by the intensity burning in their eyes. She had read the names in the captions: Lololma, Tawakwatipia, Yukioma. The syllables rolled from her tongue, the massive cheek bones of their faces became fixed in her mind. Bajeloga, born several hundred years later, in 2184, sometimes frightened her by his resemblance to them.

  She watched his keen eyes study the sky overhead, resting momentarily on a wisp of cloud. Almost unconsciously, his lips formed the words of blessing that the cloud was there and hope that the wisp might swell and bring rain. Each time he saw a cloud, his eyes would light with the ancient hope. Kesbe would watch him, not saying the truth that they both knew, that now it was climate control and cloud seeding that brought the rain, not prayers.

  Yet with the growing heat and aridity of the Southwest, caused by a global temperature rise, Kesbe knew that weather control technology was slowly losing the gains made in previous decades. Perhaps there would come a time when people would again plead to spirits for rain.

  Barefoot, Kesbe and Morning Bird Man walked along the uneven rim of First Mesa, looking west. There was not much space to pass between the rear walls of the pueblo houses and the tumbled edge that fell away into the desert. Some buildings had been reconstructed during a brief revival of interest in Pueblo culture, but others had withstood time, refusing to fall. Kesbe and her grandfather sat down on a rocky point that seemed to thrust outward like a spear from the clenched hand of the mesa. Bajeloga’s faded, tattered canvas shirt and pants blended into the pale sandstone his seamed face blended into the late afternoon shadows thrown across the rocks.

  “Is it sad, chosovi, Little Bluebird?” He turned his deep-set eyes from the sky to her face and she felt as if those eyes could wring from her every drop of what she was as easily as they could pierce the sky and seek out the clouds. Those eyes could be hard if they chose: there was that strength deep in their brown-clay depths. “ls it sad that the people are gone and the village is empty?”

  The wind blew dust around the crumbling corners of the pueblos, making a mournful hooting and wailing, as if the adobe buildings could answer Bajeloga’s question. Kesbe let the wind fill the silence before she drew her brows together and said, “But they went to find something better.”

  He settled down on his bony haunches with a long “Aaah,” that Kesbe heard as a mixture of pleasure at her perception, and an expression of pain.

  “They travelled such a great distance and then…”

  Kesbe leaned her head against her grandfather’s shoulder. The hardness of it gave her comfort. “Do you think all of those people died?”

  “No one knows, chosovi. The survey teams searched the worlds in that part of space where the last message from the colony ship originated. They found nothing.” He shaded his eyes against the bleached sky and spoke in a voice that had the color and tone of the adobe pueblos that made up the deserted village. “It happened so long ago.” He tapped the chronometer on his wrist with a fingernail ridged and roughened by age. “I think by the white man’s time now. All Pueblos do, even if we don’t admit it. But there are still times when the past seems to live in the present for me, as it did for my ancestors. That is when I remember, as if the migration had happened yesterday.”

  Kesbe gave a childish snort of derision. “Even with rejuv treatments, you can’t be that old. Stop teasing me.” Yet inside, she suddenly quailed, for she did not know how old he was. Bajeloga was not her grandfather by blood, he had adopted the withdrawn boy who later became her own father. So badly had the fabric of Pueblo life been torn that traditional barriers between tribes and against intertribal adoptions had broken down. Bajeloga himself was an example, his mother Hopi, his father Havasupai. To keep alive the dwindling remnants of his father’s tribal tradition, he used his Havasupai name of Morning Bird Man. Those of the Hopi and other Pueblos who still remained on the mesas respected his choice.

  “I am not that old,” Bajeloga agreed. “My memories are words, told to me by my father and his father before him and his grandfather before that. But sometimes they grow to be more than words, as if I had lived then and seen the last kachina dances.”

  “Tell me again what happened,” Kesbe asked.

  “Chosov
i, you know that from your school history. At first it was land pressures, Navajos, sheep. Later, the electronics industries moved in. If you look out there toward the southwest, you can still see a few of the slab-and-stand-style buildings made in the last part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. In 2062, when the Blue Star migration began, the desert was covered with them right up to the mesas. The whites called it Silicon Flats.”

  “After the Blue Star people left, the East Pacific War started and after that, the Colorado Water Wars started the Western Secession that split the old United States. The technology pulled out and moved to new planets then being settled.”

  Kesbe crossed her arms over her knees and laid her chin on her forearms. She knew the reasons why the believers in the Blue Star prophecy had left. Drought, desertification, despoilment. Not enough water to grow corn, that center of traditional society. Development, hi-tech industry, foreign wars, clashes over water rights, kids turning their backs on all things Indian. But there was something missing.

  “There’s something more than just reasons,” she said, with the stubbornness of a ten-year-old. “There’s a story too. The story of the last kachina dances.”

  He was quiet for a long time. At last he said, “I can not tell you the story…”

  Kesbe, listening, felt a sharp pang of disappointment and her feelings rushed away with her. Because I am a girl-child. Because despite the fact girls and women now can do anything we want and no one gives a second thought to it. But that doesn’t matter when we come back to the reservation. Here women grind store-bought corn and are kept from what remains of the old ceremonies. It’s not fair!

  But before she could explode into indignant protest, Bajeloga was looking at her quizzically. “My Bluebird, you have not heard me. You were off on a flight of your own, into the dark sun of anger.”

  She looked down, ashamed that her feelings had been so easily read in her face. That too was a pahana thing. It reminded her that her mother and her father were both more white than Indian in their attitudes and behavior. Like apples, red on the outside, white on the inside. And the red covering, like an apple peel, was so thin and easily torn.

  “It just doesn’t seem fair,” she burst out, and then found herself unable to articulate the thoughts that were swirling around inside her. Gently, Bajeloga coaxed her past the muteness of a child who did not have the words or the abstractions to express what she felt.

  “The boys and men got to do all the fun stuff, like foot races, the Snake Dance and the kachina dances,” she said, rubbing the calloused heel of one bare foot against the ankle of the other. “All the women got to do was the Bean Dance and knock corncobs together. And no one thought that stuff was important.”

  “So your mother’s been teaching you about the old ways,” Bajeloga said. He sounded a little gruff.

  “What’s the matter? Is she wrong?”

  “No,” the old man answered gently. “Lisa just sees things in a different way.”

  “She’s smart,” Kesbe said, lifting her chin in pride for her mother’s accomplishments. “She’s one of the best ethnopologists in Arizona. She was picked to help analyse the new dig at Betatakin and she figured out all sorts of new stuff from broken pots.”

  “Ethnologists,” he corrected.

  “Anyway, she is,” Kesbe said, undeterred.

  “Do you want to be an ethnologist, like your mother?”

  “Naw” She settled closer to him. “I’m gonna be a pilot like you. Fly those big spaceships, whoosh!”

  The old man was quiet, looking out over the blowing dust and rabbit-brush. She knew he didn’t pilot spaceships. He made his living coaxing the last airworthy hours out of crates that anyone else would have abandoned long ago. He flew freight,-salmon from Alaska and then, when that petered out, hydroponic cucumbers from island growers off the coast of Florida. He had hauled everything from engines to ocelots, in every kind of flying contraption invented in the last hundred years. She grinned. The ones she had seen looked and sounded as if they had been in service that long.

  His father had done it before him and his grandfather, too. It was puddle-jumping, bush-flying, barnstorming, the dirty unglamorous side of flying. Like steelworking and construction, flying was an occupation open to Indians and minorities. It became critically important when the easing of prejudices against them was abruptly reversed during the setbacks that followed the wars and turmoil of the late twenty-first century.

  As more Anglo pilots sought the high-status orbital shuttle and space transport jobs, the grubbier work was handed down to those willing to do anything to earn their living in the air and earn an honest paycheck, enduring the ramshackle condition of the craft they flew, the endless stretches of boredom punctuated with moments of sheer terror, as one writer had described the pilot’s existence

  Bejeloga didn’t pilot spaceships, Kesbe thought. He could have if he’d been given the chance.

  Cheerily she announced, “When I graduate from space-pilot school, I’m gonna give you a ride in my ship. And make you an honorary space-captain.”

  Bajeloga let a smile onto his weathered face and said that he liked that idea very much. He put one hand on Kesbe’s shoulder and with the other, slapped the sandstone of the mesa. “I live with the past and the future in one. It’s Indian time, all mixed up, hey?” He chuckled and she broke up into giggles, yet when she stopped laughing, she felt strangely solemn. Being with him was like that.

  Yes, she was going to be a space pilot and ride the trails between the stars. But her mother had told her that if she had been born on this mesa in the difficult times that followed the Water Wars and the East-West schism, her choices would have been dictated by the times. The fierce competition for jobs and resources led to the resurgence of prejudice and renewed discrimination against Indians. Grieved and bitter, the few remaining Pueblos isolated themselves on their mesas.

  If she had been born then, she would have spent her life in the endless tasks of grinding corn and making a life for the man she married. She would never have dared to dream. Her mother had dared to dream, not of the stars, but of a better life her own mother had lived.

  Lisa—it was funny to think of her mother by name—had dreamed of college, education and a profession. And perhaps, like Kesbe, she also had dreamed of the kachina dances and ceremonials that she was prohibited from joining because of her sex. Perhaps that was one reason why Lisa Temiya had chosen to become an ethnologist and to turn around and study her own people from a point outside their culture. As an enthnologist, she could see paintings and recreations of the ceremonies she had been denied. And she could analyse them down to the minutest detail. She was well-known and acclaimed for her papers on Pueblo religious symbolism.

  And yet there seemed to be an emptiness and an anger that crept between the words of academic text. Kesbe had read as much as she could of her mother’s work, though she had to ask for help with the hard words. And, though she was proud and impressed by what Lisa had done, there came a feeling that could not be denied. Yes, she knows it, Kesbe thought. But she has not lived it. Bajeloga has lived it.

  “Little Bluebird,” said her grandfather. “Don’t you want to hear the story of the last kachina dances?”

  She turned to him, feeling her eyes grow wide. “I thought you couldn’t tell me because I’m a girl.”

  “You didn’t listen to what I was saying,” he chided. “My words were, ‘I can not tell you the story in English because the words are not there. If you can remember the Hopi I taught you, I will tell it that way.”

  “Oh yes!” She hugged her knees and wiggled on her bottom, all the anger swept aside by eager expectation.

  Carefully he began, in the cadences of the old tongue, to tell her the story. The carefully spoken syllables brought rich pictures into her mind even as she struggled to understand the subtleties of meaning in the old Hopi words. As she listened to her grandfather’s voice against the soft wailing of the desert wind, sh
e felt as though she were there, in this same village, more than two hundred years before, watching as the kachinas began their last dances.

  Dawn. Grey, cold. Frost rimes the adobe, coats the rusty vehicles parked outside the pueblos. December is the season of Wuwuchim, the first of the great cycle of ceremonies. Outside, in the white man’s world, people are engulfed in the frenzy of Christmas shopping. Here too there is excitement, but it is deeper, more controlled.

  The people gather in the plaza, wrapped in blankets. Their breath steams in the cold clear air over the mesas. Children blink, sleepy-eyed, their hair ruffled. They knuckle the scratchiness of sleep from their eyes and force back the yawns. Soon the kachinas will come.

  There will not be very many, the children know. The kachinas are getting tired. Or perhaps they sense that the people of this land no longer need them. Rain is brought by cloud-seeding and climate control. By cash paid to the government or to the Navajo. And still there is not enough to grow corn.

  But still the children wait, wanting to see the magical beings who live in the dolls that hang on pueblo walls. The kachina dolls are set above the reach of little hands, for they are old and too precious to be played with. The cottonwood from which they were carved is depleted. Some are still carved in pine or balsa, or the dense foamed plastic brought from Japan. But the children know that those dolls are not real and the kachinas spurn them. The new kachina dolls are for the visitors that crowd the mesa each summer. But there are no tourists here today. This dance is for the people themselves.

  A distant high jingling brings the thoughts of children back to the approach of the kachinas. They wait, looking across the plaza with solemn eyes as the bells grow louder. But the sound is so weak and so is the tread of dancing feet. Could it be that there is only one kachina coming?