The wind stopped as if turned off by a spigot.
Annie May shook her head in wonder. “I’ll be stripped naked and fried in goose grease. Maybe the boy ain’t such a lyin’ shuck after all.”
As the wind rose again, Hatchet Jack disappeared into the darkness. Just when they thought he had run out on them, he returned.
“Plaxico says it’s all right to join him.”
They followed Hatchet Jack down a steep path, descending a series of narrow, winding steps that led to a stone platform lit by a fire and a single torch set into a cliff. Beyond the platform, a deep canyon separated two mountains shaped like pendulous breasts.
Plaxico sat cross-legged on one side of a large circle made from white flour mixed with corn shuckings and colored stone beads. Above him on the crumbling walls, mounted warriors threw lances at running mountain lions and antelopes.
Hatchet Jack motioned for Zebulon and Annie May to sit opposite Plaxico, then took a position at the lower end of the circle, behind an altar of flat stones. On one side of the altar, a statue of the Virgin Mary had been placed next to an eagle feather and a brightly colored Kachina doll. On the darker side, the skeleton of a rattlesnake circled a human skull. A dozen tomahawks, as well as swords and hunting knives, were stuck in the ground in front of the altar.
Hatchet Jack stood up. “This medicine is from old Mex. It raises the dead and then some. It has the power to cozy up to the underworld of the snake, the middle world of the mountain lion, and the higher world of the eagle. I never tried it, but that’s what I been told. So here goes.”
Plaxico sat behind the altar pounding a flat drum and chanting an incomprehensible prayer. He broke off a few times to yell instructions in Spanish to Hatchet Jack, who motioned for Annie May and Zebulon to stand at the top of the circle. Then he approached them holding a hollowed-out gourd in both hands.
Hatchet Jack drank, then offered the gourd to Zebulon, who drank and passed it to Annie May. After she drank, she handed the gourd to Hatchet Jack, who handed it to Plaxico, who finished what was left. After a consultation with Plaxico, Hatchet Jack pulled a long curved sword out of the earth and rushed straight at mother and son, yelling and dancing around them as he slashed the sword above their heads.
Annie May and Zebulon stood as if their feet had been nailed to the ground, as Hatchet Jack replaced the sword in front of the altar and collapsed by the fire. Behind him, Plaxico swayed from side to side, shuffling around the circle, moaning and shaking his rattle.
The medicine roared through their bodies in noxious waves until they sank down on all fours, vomiting and heaving until nothing was left inside them. They stayed that way until the first light of dawn shuddered over the horizon. As the mountains grew bolder and more defined, Annie May cried out at a long parade of skywalkers moving toward them over the snowy peaks. Some were conquistadors and mountain men, others Hopis, Navajos, Zunis, and Apaches. All of them were raising their arms to greet the rising sun. Behind them, bringing up the rear was Annie May’s long-dead brother. He was followed by her mother and father and then the preacher of her youth, who used to terrify her with fiery sermons on sin and repentance, and who now seemed, as he looked over the valley, sad and confused. The sky shifted and the parade dissolved as she saw an image of herself as a young girl standing in the middle of a field of tall, wavy grass, a bonnet pulled over her head, her bare feet planted on the black earth, crying out in fear as an eagle glided toward her in slowly decreasing circles. Her mother watched from the door of their homestead as the eagle gently lifted her up in its talons and flew her across the grassy plains into the foothills and mountains beyond. Fragments of her life appeared one after the other: her first shoes; her marriage bed; the long white beard of her father as he stood behind the mule on the last furrow of a plowed field; her husband, Elijah, whirling her around a dance floor, then carrying her on his shoulders through the door of the cabin he had built for her; and there was baby Zebulon crawling over the dirt floor. She wept and wept, haunted by the memories and the approaching shadow of her own death.
“Are we dead?” she cried. “Or does it just seem that way?”
Zebulon cradled her frail, broken body in his arms as Hatchet Jack, seized with his own visions and oblivious to her racking sobs and sudden peals of laughter, smacked the earth with his palms. “Who are my real ma and pa,” he howled, “and why have they forsaken me?”
The only answer was the howling wind.
“Can you see the truth of it, boys?” Annie May shouted. “Life and death. The eagle and the washing up and the outhouse. The stove and the snow. The horse and the mountains and the ’baca juice. No doubt about it. The whole stew is only a passing, you and me and all the rest. The goddamn joke is on us, boys!”
Zebulon made his way to the edge of the platform. In front of him the mountains were undulating like three copulating snakes. He wept at the energies threatening to consume him, motherly and loving, violent and terrifying, a warm hissing breeze that flowed through the strangled knots of his being. He knew what he had always known and had always forgotten: that he was composed of the same elements as the plants and animals and the rain, which was now spreading in thick sheets across the deep valley, followed by the sun and then a rumble of earthshaking thunder that suddenly transformed into the roar of a mountain lion. He was part of it all, a drop of water in the ocean, a crushed wildflower under the heel of an outlaw’s boot, a sun-baked skeleton in the desert.
When Hatchet Jack loomed up in front of him, the vision dissolved into a vaporous fog.
For the rest of the night, mother and son slept in each other’s arms, each comforted by the other’s breathing. When they woke they were alone and the sun was shining directly above them as if through a huge prism.
Behind them, the altar was gone and the circle erased, as if none of it had ever existed.
Empty of thought or any emotion, they climbed up through the ruins until they found Hatchet Jack packing his horse. Plaxico sat against a crumbling wall, rolling a cigarette.
“I’m pullin’ out.” Hatchet Jack’s hands shook as he swung into the saddle. “Some of the medicine worked and some went south.” He looked at Plaxico, then at Annie May. “The spirits told me it wouldn’t be a good idea to give you the horse.”
“Who cares about any of it?” Annie May said softly. “It’s all the same, horse or no horse.”
They watched Hatchet Jack gallop off without a wave or a look back, as if pursued by a confusion of unknown mysteries.
“He talked to some of the spirits all right,” Plaxico said. “But he choked on the rest. Too big a meal for a beginner.”
And then he, too, was gone, disappearing back inside the pueblo.
Annie May and Zebulon smelled broken elbow before they saw it. What had been a trading post and a few shacks only a year ago was now a long, rutted street dominated by pandemonium and open sewage. Drunken miners shouted back and forth in a dozen languages, a naked Chinaman crawled past them into an alleyway pursued by a screaming whore, halfdead oxen pulled overloaded supply wagons through mud and melting snow, past signs advertising wares at outrageous prices: Boots $30, Flour $35, Blankets $30, Washing $20. Every square foot of ground that was not lived on was cluttered with mining equipment, dead dogs, pigs rooting in piles of stinking garbage, wagon beds, spare wheels, barrels, and stacks of lumber, as well as makeshift corrals where mules and horses stood knee-deep in muck. Farther away, on the banks of a swiftly moving river, hundreds of high-booted men—most of them Indians, Mexicans, and Chinese—squatted beside cradle-like gold washers and sluice boxes while others worked up a canyon in steep pits, hacking at the soil with picks and shovels.
At the end of the street, they reined up in front of a two-story trading post.
Inside the cavernous room, clerks ran back and forth filling orders in Spanish, French, and English, for rifles, canned goods, farming equipment, wagon beds, and sacks of feed. A few of the older clerks waved to Annie May as she approached a plump young man perched at a high-top desk, adding up small sums