Mythic Journeys Read online

  Sarah danced up to me and took a swallow without taking her eyes from mine. She grabbed me roughly by the neck and into a kiss, passing the cognac to me and oh, it tasted like a pass thrown all the way to the sea, and she wrapped me up in her arms like she was trying to make up Homecoming to me, to say: I’m better now, I’m braver now, doesn’t this feel like the end of everything and we have to get it while we can? I could feel her stomach pressing on mine, big and insistent and hard, and as she ripped my shirt open I felt her child move inside her. We broke and her breasts shone naked in the bonfire-light—mine too, I suppose. Between us a cornstalk grew fast and sure, shooting up out of the ground like it had an appointment with the sky, then a second and a third. That same old blue corn, midnight corn, first corn. All around the fire the earth was bellowing out pumpkins and blackberries and state fair tomatoes and big blousy squash flowers, wheat and watermelons and apple trees already broken with the weight of fruit. The dead winter trees exploded into green, the graduating class fell into the rows of vegetables and fruit and thrashed together like wolves, like bears, like devils. Fireflies turned the air into an emerald necklace and Sarah Jane grabbed Coyote’s hand which was a paw which was a hand and screamed. Didn’t matter—everyone was screaming, and the music quivered the darkness and Sarah’s baby beat at the drum of her belly, demanding to be let out into the pumpkins and the blue, blue corn, demanding to meets its daddy.

  All the girls screamed. Even the ones only a month or two gone, clutching their stomachs and crying, all of them except me, Bunny Rabbit, the watcher, the queen of coming home. The melons split open in an eruption of pale green and pink pulp; the squashes cracked so loud I put my hands (which were paws which were hands) over my ears, and the babies came like harvest, like forty-five souls running after a bright ball in the sky.

  Some of us, after a long night of vodka tonics and retro music and pretending there was anything else to talk about, huddle together around a table at the ten year and get into it. How Mr. Bollard was never the same and ended up hanging himself in a hotel room after almost a decade of straight losses. How they all dragged themselves home and suddenly had parents again, the furious kind, and failed SATs and livers like punching bags. How no one went down to the lake anymore and Bobby Zhao went to college out of state and isn’t he on some team out east now? Yeah. Yeah. But his father lost the restaurants and now the southland has no king. But the gym ceiling caved in after the rains and killed a kid. But most of them could just never understand why their essays used to just be perfect and they never had hangovers and they looked amazing all the time and sex was so easy that year but never since, no matter how much shit went up their nose or how they cheated and fought and drank because they didn’t mean it like they had back when, no matter how many people they brought home hoping just for a second it would be like it was then, when Coyote made their world. They had this feeling, just for a minute—didn’t I feel it too? That everything could be different. And then it was the same forever, the corn stayed yellow and they stayed a bunch of white kids with scars where their cars crashed and fists struck and babies were born. The lake went dry and the scoreboard went dark.

  Coyote leaves a hole when he goes. He danced on this town till it broke. That’s the trick, and everyone falls for it.

  But they all had kids, didn’t they? Are they remembering that wrong? What happened to them all?

  Memory is funny—only Sarah Jane (real estate, Rotary, Wednesday Night Book Club) can really remember her baby. Everyone just remembers the corn and the feeling of running, running so fast, the whole pack of us, against the rural Devil gold sunset. I call that a kindness. (Why me? Sarah asks her gin. You were the queen, I say. That was you. Only for a minute.) It was good, wasn’t it, they all want to say. When we were all together. When we were a country, and Coyote taught us how to grow such strange things.

  Why did I stick around, they all want to know. When he took off, why didn’t I go, too? Weren’t we two of a kind? Weren’t we always conspiring?

  Coyote wins the big game, I say. I get the afterparty.

  This is what I don’t tell them.

  I woke up before anyone the morning after the championships. Everyone had passed out where they stood, laying everywhere like a bomb had gone off. No corn, no pumpkins, no watermelons. Just that cold lake morning fog. I woke up because my pick-up’s engine fired off in the gloam, and I know that sound like my mama’s crying. I jogged over to my car but it was already going, bouncing slowly down the dirt road with nobody driving. In the back, Coyote sat laughing, surrounded by kids, maybe eight or ten years old, all of them looking just like him, all of them in leather jackets and hangdog grins, their black hair blowing back in the breeze. Coyote looked at me and raised a hand. See you again. After all, it’s nothing we haven’t done before.

  Coyote handed a football to one of his daughters. She lifted it into the air, her form perfect, trying out her new strength. She didn’t throw it. She held it tight, like it was her heart.

  “TRICKSTER”

  STEVEN BARNES AND TANANARIVE DUE

  The American came during the time when the rains shunned us; when the grass withered, the drinking pools grew shallow and the Earth revealed its age.

  He came in one of the fleet, five-footed Spiders that gleam in the sun. I have painted the day of his arrival on the wall of our sacred cave, where we return once a year to sing new songs to our ancestors. Like my father and his father, I visit Shadow Cave. There, beneath its vast ceiling and beneath the eyes of my dead fathers, I paint the cave walls with pigments of ground clay with eland fat.

  My name is Qutb, which means “protects the people.” I am an old man now. My head holds my people’s story, which I paint on the cave walls. I draw natural things: animals hunted, raindrops fallen upon my face, the eternal walking circle of giraffe and antelope and lion north through what the white men call the Great Rift Valley since before their Great War, and we of the People call home.

  It is difficult to draw the Spiders, because these are not of nature: rounded backs like silver tortoises, yet as big as a hut where even six people could sleep without touching. Five legs racing across the plain faster than a cheetah. White men use Spiders in place of their legs, or the boxes with wheels men rode when I was a boy. It is rare to see a white man walking.

  But this stranger was not a white man. His face was shaped somewhat like mine, but he had orange-red dusk fire hidden underneath the night in his skin. He stood a full head taller than me, with a runner’s body, although our children could outrun him. He wore pieces of glass held by wire over his eyes, and a white shirt beneath a sand-colored coat.

  He said his name was Cagen. It sounds like Kaggen. This is the Trickster. The Mantis of our stories, he who loves eland well. It is in Kaggen’s honor that I use the fat of his best beloved in Shadow Cave.

  He did not speak the People’s tongue, a proper language. But he did speak the Swahili, the tongue of those who lived far to the east. I speak that and the tongue of the Kikuyu, who dwell in the great villages and valleys much closer to where People roam, so we were able to understand each other. Cagen’s head was filled with the place called America, and he called us his “brothers” because of the night in his skin, but to us he was just another white man. Our children laughed at him and with him.

  He offered our children trinkets and sweets, the men tobacco and knife metal, gave my second wife Jappa cloth for a dress. He asked me if I had sons and I said that once I had, but they had gone to the great villages, and I had never seen them again. He said he wanted to learn our stories and knowledge of the plant people. He said his head was empty and he wished knowledge. Empty head! Our children called him Empty Head.

  I laughed and he laughed, as if we had made an agreement. He wished knowledge. I wanted to paint Cagen’s story, so I said I would teach him.

  I watched Cagen for many days from the corner of my eye. After I knew him for a time, I took him to Shadow Cave to see the paintings my fat
hers and grandfathers had made.

  Shadow Cave is at the center of a wheel. My people walk the wheel every few years, moving from place to place for water and game. But the sacred cave is never more than a few days’ walk away. Although the entrance is taller than a man, and wide, we crawl when we enter the cave, a sign of respect. We are all children in the sight of the gods.

  Once in, light a torch to watch shadows leap to the spiked ceiling. My heart always smiles to see the smooth stones, the empty rock streambed, and most of all the walls covered with endless paintings, some made when men still had tails.

  “Ah, you have drawn the War,” Cagen said, pointing to my paintings of clouds and lights above a burnt horizon. His words gave me hope he might have a mind after all.

  I told him we did not call it “war,” that Great War which white men suffered when I was a boy, fifty seasons ago. We called it the time of silent thunder. Thunder you hear with your body, not your ears.

  “Not silent!” Cagen said. “Far from silent.”

  Cagen said that beings from another sun came to this world, with strange, strong machines that made the white man’s knowledge useless. The machines destroyed the great villages of the world, some even larger than Dar es Salaam!

  “And what stopped these creatures and machines?” I said as I inscribed the words Cagen spoke to me in my head and drew the story on the cave walls the way my father taught me. “Did the whites build their own great machine to fight for them?”

  “No one knows,” Cagen said, and shrugged his shoulders. “Lots of guesses, but no answers. Some say disease, some that they fought among themselves. We crawled out from under the rubble, and there were these big metal things everywhere. All dead. We pried them open, and studied the machines. We learned from them. The machines changed everything.”

  “Then they were gifts from the gods,” I said. Too often, humans do not give praise to the beings who watch over us.

  “That’s as good an answer as any,” he said.

  He told me that the world’s chiefs, who ruled the people with what he called governments, promised to protect their people from the machines and the sky men—if they were men—who built them. The governments traveled as far as the moon to build a great walled village with many guns. Such things are beyond my mind. I look up at the moon and see no village, so perhaps this is a lie.

  “But in return for this protection, we’ve lost our freedom,” Cagen said, gazing at the walls of Shadow Cave. His sigh was as heavy as an old man’s. “Everything is so peaceful here. Not like out there.”

  “Are there not sunsets in your land?”

  He laughed, but the sound was not happy. “Yes. But things are . . . different now. That’s what the history books say.” He paused. “When you can find a history book. My father was a history teacher.”

  “Ah. He held your people’s stories?”

  Cagen smiled. “Yes. But by the end of his life, men like him had a hard time finding work. Where I come from, too many believe it’s better to forget the past.”

  What would become of a people who forget their stories? Surely even white men have grandfathers and grandmothers who must be remembered.

  “I think you tease me,” I said to him. “You are a trickster, like Kaggen, your name.”

  “The Mantis,” he said. We had spoken of this before.

  I took the torch and moved him down to the other side of the cave, and found an image I knew he would like. It may have been painted by my grandfather’s grandfather. It was a half-circle of men driving a giraffe over a cliff. Behind them was Kaggen, the Mantis, mighty arms spread wide.

  “The Trickster.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The hunters tricked the giraffe into killing itself. They ate well.” I paused. “The men from the stars . . . were they hunters?”

  “We never found out why they killed us. Never.”

  He stared at the painting of the men and the giraffe and the trickster god, as if his heart was close to an understanding too great, or too heavy, for his head. Then we left the cave.

  Cagen and I spoke for many days, hours, and then moons. In times of drought, the hunters have less time to sit at an old man’s feet, so I enjoyed Cagen’s eager eyes, full of wondering. Cagen learned quickly, as if our grandmothers whispered in his ear. Tell him a thing but once, and he could recite it back to you even if you roused him from sleep in the middle of the night.

  Among the possessions he brought with him was the small listening machine he called a radio. He would play it at night, strange talk and strange music from far away. Our children would try to dance to the music, but they always laughed too hard to dance long.

  One afternoon, Cagen toyed with a scraggly red plant with white veins, growing at his feet. Like all things that lived in the earth during that time, the plant thirsted for water. “Is this bloodweed?” he asked.

  “Your eyes have grown wiser,” I said. “I did not know if you would see it. Tell me what you would do with this.”

  “Strip off the bark,” he said. “Boil it to make a paste.”

  “And?”

  “And . . . spread that on wounds to stop the blood.”

  “After the wounds have been washed. After.”

  We paused when we heard a whistling sound. Something glided through the sky, It looked like a wheels made of silver-blue metal. As it flew in front of .a cloud, it turned white. Against the blue sky a moment later, it turned blue again. Faintly, I could see snake-like tendrils trailing behind it.

  Cagen flinched.

  “Why should you fear?” I said. “Rejoice. Now they are the white man’s machines.”

  “I’m not a white man,” he said.

  “You are white on the inside,” I said, sorry to insult him so. He did not answer the insult, so perhaps he had not heard.

  “They were left behind after the war,” Cagen said quietly. “They could make their own spare parts, and we used those parts to change our world. We started out using them. Now, I think, they’re using us.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, hoping to learn something new for my cave from this strange young man.

  He scratched his head. “Sometimes I think that our own government is turning into a bigger threat than the aliens ever were.”

  “Why don’t you go to your elders and tell them that they are wrong?”

  “I don’t even know who our leaders are anymore.”

  “Your villages are so large that you don’t know your grandmothers and fathers?”

  Cagen did not answer. He seemed terribly tired.

  You go home soon,” I said to Cagen one night as we watched the moon. It was almost full. “I think you don’t want to go.”

  Cagen sighed. Then his eyes brightened. “Can we go to Modimo’s Hand before I leave?”

  Modimo is the Big God, the one who made all the others, who in turn made the mountains and clouds and animals and men. The place we call Modimo’s Hand is a clearing surrounded by four oblong stones jutting from the ground, two days’ walk south from where our people camped. It is sacred to all the People, and every two seasons all of the families scattered across the savannah meet there to trade and make marriages. It is a place of power.

  I had spoken to him of Modimo’s Hand, how my own father had there given me my secret name, how I had met my first wife there, Nela of the bright eyes, who gave me two sons and a daughter before the fever took her.

  Many times Cagen had asked me to take him. Always I had said “some other time.” We had no more time. I said yes.

  “We pack food for four days,” I said, “It will be good to have this last time together.”

  So we walked, out south across the grasslands. We would have seemed a strange sight, this black white man with his rifle, and an old man half his size, carrying the spear of his fathers. My bones groaned much of the time, as they often do now, but Cagen’s spirited walking carried my heart with him. We walked and talked, and at night, watched the stars.

  “You say they
are flaming gas,” I said, poking at the fire. “My grandfather said they were the eyes of the dead and the unborn.”

  He chuckled. “I think I like your story better.”

  “Mine does not explain all things.”

  “Neither does mine.”

  Far up in the clouds, another of those odd metal machines moved silently across the sky.

  They flew. They walked. They changed color and shape like chameleon lizards. I wondered who the sky men had been, who came to destroy and kill those in the cities, and what bad thing had happened to them to make them worship death.

  When I could no longer quiet the ache in my bones with ginger bark, I chose a path that would save us a half day’s travel. We climbed over rocks unseen since my boyhood, long forgotten now. Here, the grass thinned, brown sand and rock pushed through the Earth’s skin.

  I squinted my eyes against a sudden flash of light.

  “What is it?” Cagen asked.

  Not ten steps away, behind a fever bush, the light sparked again, and then died away.

  “I do not know,” I said.

  The light was wrong. Too much brightness where an overhang should have left only shadow. From this odd angle I saw the glimmer again, more brightly.

  The rocks shimmered as they might in great heat. This, at a time of day when the sun was too young to be so boastful.

  “What in the hell . . . ?” Cagen said.

  I do not believe in Cagen’s Hell, and in other times I might have scolded him for speaking of devils so close to our sacred grounds.

  We moved rocks away, revealing metal, unblemished but dull with dirt. Limp metal snakes as long as two men, as thick as my body, coiled at its side.

  This was a sky machine. Cagen said that this one had come from above, not one built by white men from odd pieces. Begging my grandfather for protection I backed away, making the secret signs he taught me to banish demons. How long had it crouched here in the earth, so near our sacred grounds?