by J. M. Hayes
Sasaki was on his face and J.D. was above him but the Oriental put an elbow into J.D.’s jaw and forced him off. J.D.’s right hand somehow got pinned under him and Sasaki got his good hand on the back of J.D.’ head and jammed his face into the sand. J.D. fought, but Sasaki had his full weight on him. J.D. couldn’t break free and he couldn’t breathe because of the rib and the blood in his lung and the sand that blocked his mouth and nostrils. His struggles grew weaker, spasmodic. A crimson mist swept out of the dark and engulfed him. It gradually ceased to matter that Sasaki still held him and kept his face jammed in the sand. He hardly heard the soft footsteps that approached them, no longer cared who they belonged to.
Whatever Future There Might Be
Sasaki’s life had narrowed down to a single focus—victory, glorious victory. He would finish this worthy opponent.
He was so intent on completing his conquest that he didn’t hear Talker coming. Talker hit him on the back of the head with the butt of his knife. He had to do it three times to make Sasaki stop.
That left four inert forms on the sand. Talker checked Parker first. He was just as dead as he looked. There was a wad of soggy bills in one of the attorney’s pockets and Talker transferred them to his own without looking at them. The woman wasn’t wearing anything but a soaked cotton shift. It was obvious she had nothing of value so he didn’t bother with her. The White Man seemed in danger of drowning in his own blood. Talker turned him over and started going through his pockets. When he found the badge he quit.
He went back to Sasaki. The Jap was unconscious, messed up bad from the fight. He didn’t seem likely to be a problem for a while, but he’d killed the only man Talker believed could restore his dreams. Now, whatever future there might be for him depended on what he’d taken from Parker and the roll of bills he knew this man had been carrying in the wallet inside his jacket.
Sasaki was still alive but his face looked like ground beef. Little bubbles frothed in the blood oozing from the corner of his mouth. Talker checked his coat. The billfold was still there. It was soaked, but it was thick with American currency, mostly in denominations he’d never seen before. Talker put it in his pouch. He might have a future after all.
Sasaki’s hand shot up and grabbed Talker by the neck. His grip was vice-like. Sasaki’s eyes were wide. His mouth was drawn back in a rictus of contempt. Talker didn’t bother fighting him. He just ran his blade across Sasaki’s throat. The man’s eyes registered surprise, denial. The artery pulsed a fountain onto the sand. The flow grew weaker and Sasaki’s eyes clouded, his arm went slack and the hand fell away. Talker cleaned his blade on Sasaki’s jacket, sheathed it, and went up into the rocks where he would be hard to follow. His horse wasn’t far.
Beginnings and Endings
Someone told Jujul the world was round. That seemed appropriate. A great circle, without beginning or end. He liked that. But the world was not like a man’s life. A life was more like a line drawn in the sand, however crookedly. A life had clear beginnings and endings. Those weren’t the important parts, though. The middle was what mattered. There, one could exercise a little control. He knew the line that was his own life was nearing its end. It didn’t matter. Parts of the middle had been very good indeed.
He had spent all his days in a land of distant horizons and great emptiness, a place with few people and little water. It was strange and a little frightening to find himself somewhere so different. Following his conviction he was sent by train to a city called Los Angeles, and, truly, it dwarfed Tucson the way Sells dwarfed Stohta U’uhig. It was a fabulous journey, filled with the White Man’s wonders. He was driven from the railroad station to a place called Terminal Island. It was difficult to comprehend. It consisted of a chunk of earth completely surrounded by water. No wonder, he decided, there is so little water in the People’s land when there is so much here.
The place they called a prison was intended, if he understood it, to be a punishment for crimes committed against others. He found a sense of implausibility in the concept. The prison provided him with a room called a cell. It was larger than any home he remembered, brighter, and less subject to the effects of weather. The cot they gave him was the softest bed Jujul had ever known. He understood his fellow prisoners found the food especially dull and monotonous, but, to Jujul, it was a constant adventure of new and exotic tastes. He never before ate so well or regularly. The White Men must be a very rich people indeed, to find such treatment a punishment.
Each prisoner was assigned a job. The prison officials discovered Jujul had some experience at cultivation, so they put him to work in the warden’s garden. From there he could watch the ocean and the parade of boats that drifted about its surface, each proceeding majestically on some mysterious errand. And he discovered previously inconceivable forms of vegetation. Imagine, having the time and water to grow flowers, things with no value beyond their beauty. That was his greatest delight, even if these blooms were nothing like the ones from his visions. Every reward he might have dreamed of finding when he journeyed to the world of the dead was provided in the place he was sent to be punished. Most strange, most curious, these White Men.
It was not perfect, of course. First, he was confined. It was hard to be near so many wonders and be unable to explore them. Having lived in a world not even bounded by distant horizons, it was difficult to be suddenly closed in by walls and bars and guards. An even greater problem was language. Jujul knew so little English and no one spoke O’odham. The few who spoke Spanish seldom spoke it with him. Initially, one of his guards learned a few phrases with which to communicate certain basic things to him, but the man often confused them and asked Jujul to eat when he wanted him to go someplace or asked if he wished to relieve himself when he meant to say it was time to return to his cell. Jujul decided to learn English.
It was hard work, and it failed to relieve the oppressive sense of loneliness he felt. The art of communication and persuasion had been the hub around which his life was centered. Now, even when he puzzled out a word, he had difficulty understanding the concepts on which it was based. His fellow prisoners shared so few common experiences with him and held such a different view of the world. He tried to talk to them, but only a few made an effort to understand, or be understood. In the midst of more people than he had once believed inhabited the earth, he was lonelier than he had ever been.
The man who might have been most helpful was the prison chaplain. Because of the similarities in their professions and the abundance of free time they shared, they should have found a common ground from which communication might spring. Unfortunately, the chaplain had a mind far narrower than his portly body. He tried to tell Jujul about Jesus, and the old man listened attentively though without much comprehension. In return, he courteously tried to explain about Elder Brother, but the dumpy little man became as stiff as his collar and stormed off to shepherd a more conventional flock.
It was the warden who helped Jujul decipher the occasional letters Jesus and Marie sent. They had tried hard to aid him against the charges the BIA man, Larson, made sure were brought against him, but Jujul never joined the contest. He understood. Someone had to pay for all the damage done and the lives lost. He was the logical candidate, especially when he was allowed to trade his own acquiescence for the dismissal of charges against his fellow villagers, even those who followed Sasaki into Mexico. Marie and the deputy told him that Sasaki’s existence was his strongest defense, but it was like a knife that was pointed at both ends. It might cut him free, but it would wound his people in the process. Agents from some investigation bureau persuaded all of them to stay silent about Sasaki. They tried to explain it to him. The United States was on the verge of war with Sasaki’s country. Some Americans had originally immigrated from that same nation. If it became known that Japan had sent someone to sabotage and kill in Arizona, those people would suffer from the fear and suspicion of their fellows. Perhaps even random acts of violent revenge might occur. The O’odham were equally in
peril if the facts were known. Jujul did not understand all the subtleties, especially as they involved peoples other than his, but the concept of the sacrificial goat wasn’t hard to fathom.
And he was guilty. He had underestimated the Americans, then Sasaki. The Japanese was dead. The attorney was dead. Marie and her husband and the deputy, Gonzales, were hurt, and J.D. Fitzpatrick….The marshal was still alive, but he had barely survived the journey back to Sells and none of the letters had mentioned him for some time. Jujul didn’t know just where or how J.D. might be anymore. The world was much bigger than Jujul had thought. He could understand how a man might become lost in it.
With the warden’s aid, Jujul sent replies containing the half-truth that he found jail most fascinating and hardly a punishment at all. And so his days passed, each very much like the one before, until the world chose to interfere again.
It was early in the month the Anglos called December, in their year of 1941, when word came that the Japanese had attacked the United States at a place named Pearl Harbor.
The prisoners were to be moved. A mood prevailed which bordered on hysteria, a nightmarish fear that hordes of Japanese would soon pour down on California from out of the sunset. Terminal Island was to become a military base. The prisoners would be evacuated inland to a place called Fort Leavenworth in the distant land of Kansas. Everything was rushed. The Japanese might come at any moment.
Jujul wondered what would become of those citizens of Japanese descent Gonzales and Marie had been so worried about, now that war had truly come. He felt sorry for them, but was glad he had helped prevent the People from sharing their fate.
A federal order commuting Jujul’s sentence reached the warden in the midst of the evacuation. There wasn’t time to carry it out. He forwarded it to Fort Leavenworth, but for all the good it did he could have sent it straight to Oz.
The prisoners were loaded on a train at dusk. Jujul was excited, curious what strange new country he might see from the train and what the mysterious Kansas would be like.
The railroad car was cold and drafty. Dust and soot sifted in through broken windows and cracked floorboards. It was crowded, cramped, and the car rocked violently, making a regular metallic complaint as it rolled toward the sunrise. Jujul wasn’t the only one who found it impossible to sleep.
They stopped shortly after first light. Outside lay a desert not unlike the one Jujul had known most of his life. Some plants were different and it was colder than he was used to, but the horizons were where they should be, the rocks and mountains gaunt, spare reminders of the world Elder Brother had left for the People.
They stopped in the middle of nowhere, at a place where the engine could be resupplied with coal and water, and where a simple breakfast was made available for the convicts and their guards. It was a place with nowhere for the former to run and nowhere for the latter to lose them.
Jujul was glad of the excuse to stretch his aching limbs. He was feeling his age. All his old wounds ached. He limped down off the train, dragging the chains that linked his wrists and ankles and kept his pace unnaturally short. He shuffled aside, uninterested in breakfast. A guard said something to him, probably ordering him back in line, then turned his attention elsewhere and Jujul ignored him, breathing the fresh cold air, savoring the sense of a world without artificial limits. He felt a different hunger, an ache he would have found difficult to define.
Sagebrush and sand stretched toward a horizon just this side of forever. That vast emptiness was something he needed far more than the thin oatmeal, biscuits, and coffee being served nearby.
There was a low spot just north of the tracks that caught the rays of the morning sun and held them, making it seem somehow warmer and more hospitable than what surrounded it. The place probably would have escaped his notice if it weren’t for the vegetation that grew near its center. It was a thistle with an unlikely cluster of exploding blossoms. He had never seen a plant like it before and yet he recognized it instantly. When he was a child he had dreamed of an earlier version with a single stalk on which only two flowers bloomed. When he told his mother about the dream she explained that he must have dreamed of her, for Two Flowers was her secret name. It was the first evidence of his calling to become a Mahkai. He saw the plant in his mind again when he fasted and consulted his crystals to find a name for the daughter of Raven and Grey Leaves, the child who would later become his second wife. There were more blossoms on it then. He’d seen it many times since, including for Marie, and each time more buds had opened. And now, here it was. The dream which had affected so much of his life was reality.
The guard was getting old. He’d been big once, a powerful giant of a man. Now his body seemed to be falling in on itself. Where before he’d strained his shirt with his shoulders and chest, now he strained it with his belly. He had a toothache that had kept him from getting much sleep before they left and a night on the train hadn’t helped. He was tired and his jaw throbbed. It made him even more short-tempered than usual. He kicked one prisoner, booted him in the seat of the pants, for trying to crowd into the chow line. As he hustled the man to the rear of the column he realized his bladder needed to be emptied yet again, another unkind reminder of how the years weighed on him. He took a few steps into the desert, opened his fly and aimed at the clump of weeds at his feet. It took much longer than it used to. When he finished he turned and began stuffing himself back inside his pants. One of the prisoners was standing nearby, watching him intently. It was a tall, slender, old man with skin almost as dark as the stock of the rifle the guard had laid on the ground beside him.
Jujul was offended. It felt almost like a personal violation when the guard began urinating on the flowers he recognized. They had been of such great significance to his life. He reminded himself that the man could not know what he was doing and that the plant would hardly care. Still, it felt like an insult and he stood and glared as the guard turned around.
There was something about the man that was familiar.
“What you starin’ at, old timer?” the guard grumbled, fumbling unsuccessfully with his pants. He looked back down to see why he was having a problem.
Jujul’s mouth dropped. That face had been seared into his memory with agonizing incandescence. The man stood above the clump of many flowers that he had defiled, just as, decades ago, he had stood above Jujul’s beautiful young bride, Many Flowers, to whom he had done much worse. Jujul was moving before he realized it. He had sworn he would find the man. He had vowed to make him pay.
The guard glanced back up. He couldn’t believe it. The skinny old codger was rushing him. What could he hope to accomplish? There was no place for him to go out here, even if the guard wasn’t going to reach down and pick up his rifle and blow his damn fool face off.
The guard bent, reached for his weapon. There was something about the prisoner. Something familiar. He touched the gun’s stock and looked back up. The prisoner was an Indian. He’d never known any Indians. And this one looked mad enough to kill him. Looked like that brave down along the border back about the time Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico.
The rifle slipped from his fingers but he couldn’t look away from the Indian’s eyes. Sweet Jesus! It was him. It was that damned buck who’d come at him with that big rifle, and then a knife, and tried so hard to kill him once when both of them were younger.
Jujul saw recognition in the guard’s eyes. He lunged and wrapped the chain between his wrists around the man’s neck and yanked. The guard’s head snapped up and his pants slipped off his bloated waist and slid down his thighs. Jujul added his cry to those of his women, still clear in his ears across the decades. Only, this time, they cried out in triumph. The guard nearest to them looked up and shouted.
Jujul didn’t recognize the words. It didn’t matter. He kept pressure on the chain and the man who had raped his wife flailed wildly and managed to put an elbow in Jujul’s ribs. Jujul hardly felt it.
Prisoners and guards were turning, looking aroun
d in wonder at where one old man howled as he strangled another. The guard who had shouted raised his rifle. He thought he had the angle. He though he was a marksman. Jujul didn’t let it matter, he twisted and thrust the rapist between them.
The end of his line. Jujul was there, but he was not afraid. He had always wondered why he had seen blood among the flowers, and why its existence did not trouble him.
The shot tore through the old guard’s face. It extracted the tooth that had been annoying him and, with the assistance of the chain, it broke his neck.
Jujul almost heard the shot. He almost felt the blow from a bullet with just enough force left to exit the back of the guard’s neck and then penetrate his own brain case. It tore the last thoughts from his mind and dropped him, just as his secret name predicted—Coyote Among Thistles.
In that last moment, just before the bullet struck him, it occurred to Jujul that his life was like a circle after all, looping back at the end to this unfinished business. A circle, not a line. A revelation. And suddenly, other things he had only partially understood before also became blindingly clear. Flowers of insight blossomed in his soul. It was magnificent, wondrous. He remembered an English expression. “Oh fuck!” he whispered into the guard’s ear, and he began to smile.
