The Collection

Small Raven's voice when he spoke was frightened. 'You are not going to go there?'

He had not known it until that moment, but, yes, that was exactly what he was going to do. 'I have to,' he said.

Black Hawk nodded. 'It is right,' he said. 'If he saw them, he saw them for a reason.'

'But—' Ronnie began.

Black Hawk silenced him with a look. 'It is not for us to say.'

'I'm telling Lone Cloud,' Full Moon said.

Black Hawk nodded. 'It is yours to decide.'

After the council left, Rosalie emerged from the kitchen. She was scared but supportive, and he hugged her and held her and the two of them sat down in the living room with John and told him about Death Row.

It was after midnight by the time they finished talking and Rosalie was tired and wanted to go to bed, but Full Moon was still wide awake. He told her to go on ahead, he was going to stay up for another hour or so.

He wandered outside, looked up through the cotton-woods at the night sky. There was a warm desert breeze tonight and it carried with it the soothing sounds of the Gila River, many miles away.

Many miles away.

He thought of Death Row. He had not been back to the street, or to Rojo Cuello, since his father had been killed. Neither, to his knowledge, had anyone else from the tribe. It was probably a regular city now, like Tucson or Tempe or Casa Grande, with malls and subdivisions and cable TV, but for himself and for most members of the tribe, it was a bad place, an evil place, tainted forever by its history, its charac­ter determined by its past.

He had learned of Death Row from his father. He had been nine, maybe ten, when his father brought him to the hill overlooking the town and pointed out the street to him. It was called 'Death Row,' his father explained, because so many of their people had died there. Had been murdered there.

His father had been killed on the Row, he said. As had his father before him and his father before him. 'They were killed in the street like dogs. Beaten and stabbed while other people, white people, stood there laughing.' 'But that's against the law.'

'Don't make no difference on the Row. The law has no power there. Never has, never will.'

'How old is the Row?' Full Moon asked.

A shadow passed over his father's face. 'Old.'

'How old?'

'It was here before the town. Rojo Cuello grew up

around it.'

'Is it older than—?'

'It's older than the tribe,' his father said, and that shut him up. Full Moon looked down at the street, and though he'd felt nothing before, there now seemed something sinis­ter about the false fronts on the old buildings, about the wooden sidewalks and the hitching posts. It looked like a street out of a western, the type of movie he loved best, but at the same time it looked different, set apart from that glam­orized screen world in a way that he could not identify.

Older than the tribe.

That scared him, and he wondered why his father had brought him there.

'I will die on Death Row also,' his father said quietly.

Full Moon could still remember the horrifying, frighten­ing feeling that had lodged in the pit of his stomach when his father spoke those words. 'Let's get out of here,' he said.

'It won't happen now.'

'If we don't come back, it can't happen at all.'

'It don't make no difference.'

'Why?' Full Moon was close to panic, as unnerved by his father's attitude of resigned fatalism as by the substance of his words. 'We could move. We don't have to stay on the reservation. We could move to California.'

'No matter where I move, no matter what I do, I will have to return.'

'If you know what's going to happen, then you know how to change it,' Full Moon said.

His father shook his head. 'If you know what will hap­pen,' he said softly, 'it will happen.'

He had been right.

He'd been killed on the Row less than two years later.

And Full Moon had watched him die.

He stopped the next day by Lone Cloud's house. 'You heard?' he asked after his friend had opened the door, in­vited him inside, and the two of them were seated on the couch.

Lone Cloud looked away, nodded. 'I heard.'

'What do you think?'

'I haven't seen anything.'

'I know that. But what do you think?'

'I think they killed our fathers. I think we should blow the fuckers away.'

Yes. Full Moon found himself nodding. He'd known that he had to return to Death Row, but he hadn't known why he needed to return or what he was going to do when he got there. But this sounded right. No, it felt right.

'What if they're ...' His voice trailed off.

'Ghosts?' Lone Cloud finished for him.

Full Moon nodded.

'Dead or alive, we kick their asses.'

Full Moon smiled. The smile grew. Then he started to laugh. He hadn't realized how tense he'd been, how tightly wound. This whole thing had frightened him more than he was willing to admit, and it felt good to laugh again.

Lone Cloud smiled back at him, but there was no humor in it.

Full Moon thought of the way the man with the mustache had smiled at him from across the casino.

His own smile faded, his laughter dying.

'We're going to kill those sons of bitches,' Lone Cloud said.

Full Moon nodded. 'Yes,' he said.

But was that really what they should do? Was that what their fathers would have wanted? Revenge?

He didn't know.

He felt like a teenager again, unsure and indecisive. His father had not been there for his high school years, but Full Moon had always acted as though he was, behaving the way he thought his father would want him to behave, doing things that he thought would make his father proud. Some­how, though, he had always fallen short. It was not that he had not done well, it was just that he had the feeling that his father would have expected more from him.

What would his father expect him to do now?

'I think we should talk to the council,' he said. 'Tell them our plans.'

Lone Cloud snorted. 'What for? It's a free country. We don't need their permission.'

'They know more than we do,' Full Moon said. 'Maybe they can help us.'

Lone Cloud thought for a moment. He nodded. 'Okay. But we'll tell them. Not ask them. Tell them.'

'Deal.'

He let Lone Cloud do the talking when they met with the convened council later that afternoon. His friend was typi­cally forceful in his presentation, typically defensive in his attitude.

'No,' Black Hawk said vehemently when Lone Cloud finished. 'No guns. You cannot bring guns.'

'Why not?'

'It is not the way.'

'It's our way,' Lone Cloud said.

Black Hawk stood with difficulty, his hand shaking as his finger pointed at the younger man. 'No!'

'We're not asking you, we're telling you,' Lone Cloud said.

The other council members looked nervously at each other.

'You will die!' Black Hawk said. His voice was an en­raged whisper.