Part 10 (1/2)

”Votre mere,” I tell him. He gives me a good kick in the ribs and he's wearing those pointy-toed kind of cowboy boots, so I feel it, all right. Finally I hear the sound I've been waiting for, a hoot owl over in the trees behind Ms. Cooper, and then he rides up. He hasn't even gotten his gun out yet. ”Don't move,” he tells Pierre, ”or I'll be forced to draw,” but he hasn't finished the sentence when Russell Wilc.o.x has his arm around my neck and the point of his knife jabbing into my back.

”We give you the Injun,” he says. ”Or we give you the girl. You ain't taking both. You comprendez, pardner?”

Now, if he'd asked me I'd have said, Hey, don't worry about me, rescue the woman. And if he'd hesitated, I would have insisted. But he didn't ask and he didn't hesitate. He just hoisted Ms. Cooper up onto the saddle in front of him and pulled the bottom of her skirt down so her legs didn't show. ”There's a little girl in Springfield who's going to be mighty happy to see you, Ms. Cooper,” I hear him saying, and I've got a suspicion from the look on her face that they're not going straight to Springfield anyway. And that's it. Not one word for me.

Of course, he comes back, but by this time the Wilc.o.xes and Pierre have fallen asleep around the cold campfire and I've had to inch my way through the dust on my side like a snake over to Russell Wilc.o.x's knife, which fell out of his hand when he nodded off, whittling. I've had to cut my own bonds, and my hands are behind me so I carve up my thumb a little, too. The whole time I'm right there beneath Russell, and he's snorting and snuffling and s.h.i.+fting around like he's waking up so my heart nearly stops. It's a wonder my hands don't have to be amputated, they've been without blood for so long. And then there's a big shoot-out and I provide a lot of cover. A couple of days pa.s.s before I feel like talking to him about it.

”You rescued Ms. Cooper first,” I remind him. ”And that was the right thing to do, I'm not saying it wasn't; don't misunderstand me. But it seemed to me that you made up your mind kind of quickly. It didn't seem like a hard decision.”

He reaches across the saddle and puts a hand on my hand. Behind the black mask the blue eyes are sensitive and caring. ”Of course I wanted to rescue you, old friend,” he says. ”If I'd made the decision based solely on my own desires, that's what I would have done. But it seemed to me I had a higher responsibility to the more innocent party. It was a hard choice. It may have felt quick to you, but, believe me, I struggled with it.” He withdraws his hand and kicks his horse a little ahead of us because the trail is narrowing. I duck under the branch of a prairie spruce. ”Besides,” he says, back over his shoulder, ”I couldn't leave a woman with a bunch of animals like Pierre Cardeaux and the Wilc.o.xes. A pretty woman like that. Alone. Defenseless.”

I start to tell him what a bunch of racists like Pierre Cardeaux and the Wilc.o.xes might do to a lonely and defenseless Indian. Arnold Wilc.o.x wanted my scalp. ”I remember the Alamo,” he kept saying, and maybe he meant Little Big Horn; I didn't feel like exploring this. Pierre kept a.s.suring him there would be plenty of time for trophies later. And Andrew trotted out that old chestnut about the only good Indian being a dead Indian. None of which were pleasant to lie there listening to. But I never said it. Because by then the gap between us was so great I would have had to shout, and anyway the ethnic issue has always made us both a little touchy. I wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard him say that some of his best friends are Indians. And I know there are bad Indians; I don't deny it and I don't mind fighting them. I just always thought I should get to decide which ones were the bad ones.

I sat in that car until sunset.

But the next day he calls. ”Have you ever noticed how close the holy word 'om' is to our Western word 'home'?” he asks. That's his opening. No hi, how are you? He never asks how I am. If he did, I'd tell him I was fine, just the way you're supposed to. I wouldn't burden him with my problems. I'd just like to be asked, you know?

But he's got a point to make, and it has something to do with Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. How she clicks her heels together and says, over and over like a mantra, ”There's no place like home, there's no place like home” and she's actually able to travel through s.p.a.ce. ”Not in the book,” I tell him.

”I know,” he says. ”In the movie.”

”I thought it was the shoes,” I say.

And his voice lowers; he's that excited. ”What if it was the words?” he asks. ”I've got a mantra.”

Of course, I'm aware of this. It always used to bug me that he wouldn't tell me what it was. Your mantra, he says, loses its power if it's spoken aloud. So by now I'm beginning to guess what his mantra might be. ”A bunch of people I know,” I tell him, ”all had the same guru. And one day they decided to share the mantras he'd given them. They each wrote their mantra on a piece of paper and pa.s.sed it around. And you know what? They all had the same mantra. So much for personalization.”

”They lacked faith,” he points out.

”Rightfully so.”

”I gotta go,” he tells me. We're reaching the crescendo in the background music, and it cuts off with a click. Silence. He doesn't say good-bye. I refuse to call him back.

The truth is, I'm tired of always being there for him.

So I don't hear from him again until this morning when he calls with the great Displacement Theory. By now I've been forty almost ten days, if you believe the birth certificate the reservation drew up; I find a lot of inaccuracies surfaced when they translated moons into months, so that I've never been too sure what my rising sign is. Not that it matters to me, but it's important to him all of a sudden; apparently you can't a.n.a.lyze personality effectively without it. He thinks I'm a Pisces rising; he'd love to be proved right.

”We can go back, old buddy,” he says. ”I've found the way back.”

”Why would we want to?” I ask. The sun is s.h.i.+ning and it's cold out. I was thinking of going for a run.

Does he hear me? About like always. ”I figured it out,” he says. ”It's a combination of biofeedback and the mantra 'home.' I've been working and working on it. I could always leave, you know; that was never the problem; but I could never arrive. Something outside me stopped me and forced me back.” He pauses here, and I think I'm supposed to say something, but I'm too p.i.s.sed. He goes on. ”Am I getting too theoretical for you? Because I'm about to get more so. Try to stay with me. The key word is displacement.” He says this like he's s.h.i.+vering. ”I couldn't get back because there was no room for me there. The only way back is through an exchange. Someone else has to come forward.”

He pauses again, and this pause goes on and on. Finally I grunt. A redskin sound. Noncommittal.

His voice is severe. ”This is too important for you to miss just because you're sulking about G.o.d knows what, pilgrim,” he says. ”This is travel through s.p.a.ce and time.”

”This is baloney,” I tell him. I'm uncharacteristically blunt, blunter than I ever was during the primal-scream-return-to-the-womb period. If n.o.body's listening, what does it matter?

”Displacement,” he repeats, and his voice is all still and important. ”Ask yourself, buddy, what happened to the buffalo?”

I don't believe I've heard him correctly. ”Say what?”

”Return with me,” he says, and then he's gone for good and this time he hasn't hung up the phone; this time I can still hear the William Tell Overture repeating the hoofbeat part. There's a noise out front so I go to the door, and d.a.m.ned if I don't have a buffalo, shuffling around on my ornamental strawberries, looking surprised. ”You call this gra.s.s?” it asks me. It looks up and down the street, more and more alarmed. ”Where's the plains, man? Where's the railroad?”

So I'm happy for him. Really I am.

But I'm not going with him. Let him roam it alone this time. He'll be fine. Like Rambo.

Only then another buffalo appears. And another. Pretty soon I've got a whole herd of them out front, trying to eat my yard and gagging. And whining. ”The water tastes funny. You got any water with locusts in it?” I don't suppose it's an accident that I've got the same number of buffalo here as there are men in the Cavendish gang. Plus one. I keep waiting to see if any more appear; maybe someone else will go back and help him. But they don't. This is it.

You remember the theories of history I told you about, back in the beginning? Well, maybe somewhere between the great men and the ma.s.ses, there's a third kind of person. Someone who listens. Someone who tries to help. You don't hear about these people much, so there probably aren't many of them. Oh, you hear about the failures, all right, the shams: Brutus, John Alden, Rasputin. And maybe you think there aren't any at all, that n.o.body could love someone else more than he loves himself. Just because you can't. Hey, I don't really care what you think. Because I'm here and the heels of my moccasins are clicking together and I couldn't stop them even if I tried. And it's okay. Really. It's who I am. It's what I do.

I'M GOING TO LEAVE YOU with a bit of theory to think about. It's a sort of riddle. There are good Indians, there are bad Indians, and there are dead Indians. Which am I?

There can be more than one right answer.

THE BREW.

I spent last Christmas in The Hague. I hadn't wanted to be in a foreign country and away from the family at Christmastime, but it happened. Once I was there I found it lonely but also pleasantly insulated. The streets were strung with lights and it rained often, so the lights reflected off the s.h.i.+ny cobblestones, came at you out of the clouds like pale, golden bubbles. If you could ignore the damp, you felt wrapped in cotton, wrapped against breaking. I heightened the feeling by stopping in an ice cream shop for a cup of tea with rum.

Of course it was an illusion. Ever since I was young, whenever I have traveled, my mother has contrived to have a letter sent, usually waiting for me, sometimes a day or two behind my arrival. I am her only daughter and she was not the sort to let an illness stop her, and so the letter was at the hotel when I returned from my tea. It was a very cheerful letter, very loving, and the message that it was probably the last letter I would get from her and that I needed to finish things up and hurry home was nowhere on the page but only in my heart. She sent some funny family stories and some small-town gossip, and the death she talked about was not her own but belonged instead to an old man who was once a neighbor of ours.

After I read the letter I wanted to go out again, to see if I could recover the mood of the mists and the golden lights. I tried. I walked for hours, wandering in and out of the clouds, out to the ca.n.a.ls and into the stores. Although my own children are too old for toys and too young for grandchildren, I did a lot of window shopping at the toy stores. I was puzzling over the black elf they have in Holland, St. Nicholas's sidekick, wondering who he was and where he came into it all, when I saw a music box. It was a gla.s.s globe on a wooden base, and if you wound it, it played music, and if you shook it, it snowed. Inside the globe there was a tiny forest of ceramic trees and, in the center, a unicorn with a silver horn, corkscrewed, like a narwhal's, and one gaily bent foreleg. A unicorn, tinted blue and frolicking in the snow.

What appealed to me most about the music box was not the snow or the unicorn but the size. It was a little world, all enclosed, and I could imagine it as a real place, a place I could go. A little winter. There was an aquarium in the lobby of my hotel, and I had a similar reaction to it. A little piece of ocean there, in the dry land of the lobby. Sometimes we can find a smaller world where we can live, inside the bigger world where we cannot.

Otherwise the store was filled with items tied in to The Lion King. Less enchanting items to my mind-why is it that children always side with the aristocracy? Little royalists, each and every one of us, until we grow up and find ourselves in the cubicle or the scullery. And even then there's a sense of injustice about it all. Someone belongs there, but surely not us.

I'm going to tell you a secret, something I have never told anyone before. I took an oath when I was seventeen years old and have never broken it, although I cannot, in general, be trusted with secrets and usually try to warn people of this before they confide in me. But the oath was about the man who died, my old neighbor, and so I am no longer bound to it. The secret takes the form of a story.

I should warn you that parts of the story will be hard to believe. Parts of it are not much to my credit, but I don't suppose you'll have trouble believing those. It's a big story, and this is just a small piece of it, my piece, which ends with my mother's letter and The Hague and the unicorn music box.

It begins in Bloomington, Indiana, the year I turned ten. It snowed early and often that year. My friend Bobby and I built caves of snow, choirs of snowmen, and bridges that collapsed if you ever tried to actually walk them.

We had a neighbor who lived next door to me and across the street from Bobby. His name was John McBean. Until that year McBean had been a figure of almost no interest to us. He didn't care for children much, and why should he? Behind his back we called him Rudolph, because he had a large purplish nose, and cold weather whitened the rest of his face into paste so his nose stood out in startling contrast. He had no wife, no family that we were aware of. People used to pity that back then. He seemed to us quite an old man, grandfather age, but we were children, what did we know? Even now I have no idea what he did for a living. He was retired when I knew him, but I have no idea of what he was retired from. Work, such as our fathers did, was nothing very interesting, nothing to speculate on. We thought the name McBean rather funny, and then he was quite the skinflint, which struck us all, even our parents, as delightful, since he actually was Scottish. It gave rise to many jokes, limp, in retrospect, but pretty rich back then.

One afternoon that year Mr. McBean slipped in his icy yard. He went down with a roar. My father ran out to him, but as my father was helping him up, McBean tried to hit him in the chin. My father came home much amused. ”He said I was a British spy,” my father told my mother.

”You devil,” she said. She kissed him.

He kissed her back. ”It had something to do with Bonnie Prince Charlie. He wants to see a Stuart on the throne of England. He seemed to think I was preventing it.”