Krokodil Tears

bone-white, dark-hole-eyed—sunglasses, he now realized—face of the Summoner. Two-Dogs had not always been a whisky Navaho, and he had taught his son the stories his father had taught to him. The stories of the Last Days, when the Summoner would open up the Dark Reaches of the Spirit Lands and call down the worst of the manitous to lay waste the worlds of the white man and the red.

Since he had caught sight of the Summoner, he had not liked to watch the resettlers pouring through into Utah, knowing what it was they were really following. He had talked with a plastic young couple in the Reservation Diner, listened to them enthusing about their new-found life and the dictates of their faith, but had seen the deadness in their hearts. Some of the Reservation Indians had gone with them when they left, eager for a chance at something better. The Navaho Jospehites were all young, as young as he had been when he joined the Sons and painted his face to strike a blow at the heart of the white man's world. That had been a futile crusade, he knew now, but it was better' than the lie Seth offered, the lie that concealed the end of all things.

The Indians of the Plains—Apache and Comanche—that he had known in the Sons of Geronimo had sworn that the white man's time was nearing an end, and that the buffalo would return. But he knew these were dreams of sand. The buffalo could do nothing against the deadweight of the Europeans.

He had been waiting for the spirit warrior his father had told him of in infancy, the One-Eyed White Girl. If the Summoner was abroad, then he would soon be followed. It was revealed in the series of pictures, drawn and redrawn in his family for generations. Two-Dogs said the One-Eyed White Girl would have steel in her muscles and fire in her empty eye, and that she would come to the Navaho—to the family of Armijas—for her education. It was the duty of the medicine man of the line of Armijas to tutor the spirit warrior through the Seven Levels, to prepare her for the final battle, in which she would stand with the other spirit warriors—the Holy Woman From Across the Great Water, the Man With Music in His Heart, the Red-Handed One, the Yellowlegs Who Has Lost Much, the Great Father in White, the Man Who Rides Alone—against the army of the manitous and the story would end.

Hawk had seen it told as a series of pictures on buffalo hides. The last pictures were just darkness. Much had been foretold, but the ultimate outcome was unknown, unknowable. 'I envy you, my son,' Two-Dogs had told him yesterday, 'you will see the last pictures.' Two-Dogs claimed his time was almost up, and was drinking even more heavily than usual. He had foreseen his death so many times that Hawk no longer bothered much with such presentiments, but, this time, things were different…

The Sons of Geronimo had been a wash-out in the end. Lots of fiery meetings and grand gestures, plenty of petitions to Washington and protests outside John Wayne movies, but in the end they had just been a bunch of dumb redskins battering their heads against the white man's bricks. Their political campaign had been as ineffectual as their terrorist 'outrages,' which had harmed no one but the odd insurance firm. Chata, their chief, had been shot dead by a bank guard in Wyoming during an attempted hold-up. The Sons had been running short of funds. Then Ulzana, the Apple Apache in his Gucci Ghost Shirt, would-be heir to the eagle-feathers, graduated from Berkeley, and set up a computer software firm. Hawk had sent him a parcel containing a bisected apple: red outside, white inside. The trickle of money raised by the tribes had dried up, the teevee crews stopped coming round, and the white girls all drifted away, with or without their pale-skinned babies, petitioning to rejoin the master race. Hawk didn't know where the others were. What had happened to Sacheen Littlefeather? Sky Buffalo? William Silverheels? Two-Dogs-Dying had shrugged, and gone back to waiting for his monthly security cheques. Only Hawk-That-Settles was there to carry the dream forward, to pass it on—if need be—to his son.

Now, there would be no son.

The motorwagons were gone, and everyone was drifting away. Jennifer White Dove smiled at him again, almost soliciting his interest. On the Reservation, being a medicine man meant literally that these days. He was in charge of the drugstore, and Jennifer's husband had left her with a habit or two. Sometimes, he knew, she would bruise herself with a rock to get morph-plus out of him. There were a lot of Indians like that, so used to the cycle of hurt and deadening that it was a snowballing addiction. He didn't meet her eyes, and she drifted away with the others.

'Father?'

Two-Dogs looked up, eyes not focusing.

'Father, I must leave.'

Two-Dogs nodded his head, yes. 'The Holy-Place-From-Over-the-Great-Water? '

'Yes, father.' It was the title of one of the pictures. Two-Dogs had long ago found the real place, an abandoned monastery in the desert. It was far south, near the Mexican border.

'She will come to you there, the One-Eyed White Girl.'

'So you have said.'

'And so my father said before me. So we have all said, back to the times of the peach trees.'

There was an embarassing pause. Hawk always felt ill at ease in these conversations, as if he were forced to read the lines of a savage redskin in a Hollywood film. He did not talk like this with anyone else, but his father would not laugh at talk of the Holy-Place-From-Over-the-Great-Water or the Yellowlegs Who Has Lost Much.

Beyond the road, Hawk saw the table mountains lumped against the sky. They had made many Hollywood films here. As a young man, Two-Dogs had fought with many armies of extras, firing off pretend guns at John Wayne in Stagecoach, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers. Once, Hawk had found a faded snapshot of Two-Dogs dressed in the beads and paint of an Apache standing proudly between a smiling John Wayne and a one-eyed Irishman he guessed was the movie director John Ford. Later, ashamed, Two-Dogs would picket screenings of the films he had appeared in, although he admitted in private that many times as a young man he had eaten well at a movie commissary when he would otherwise have starved. Once, a message had been sent to Ford in Hollywood, entreating aid for the Navahos after a hard winter, and the director had found a Western script to make in Monument Valley simply to bring some money to the tribe. Still, Hollywood had done an irreparable harm to the Indian, perpetuating the lies of the Manifest Destiny, the Savage Redskin and the Noble Bluecoats.

Two-Dogs took a swig on his bottle. Hawk would never grow old like this.

'Goodbye, fadier.'

Two-Dogs nodded, and Hawk turned. He had a long walk before him.

V

The figure stabbed at the empty air.

Naked and wet, Jazzbeaux leaped out of the tub at the knife-wielder. She didn't need this, but she was prepared. She hadn't lived through the hell of Spanish Fork to be carved up by some common-or-garden psychopath.

The knife raked her side, but she ignored the pain and struck out with the flat of her hand at the psycho's chin.

It was the old woman, she assumed. As the knife darted towards her like a hawk's beak, she glimpsed iron grey hair in a bun, and saw the swish of the long, faded dress.

Her blow connected, and Ma Katz staggered backwards, blade scraping the flower-pattern wallpaper. Jazzbeaux half-turned and launched a kick, punching with the side of her foot into the old woman's stomach.

The knife came again, and she chopped with bodi hands at Ma Katz's wrist, satisfied by the crunch of breaking bones.

Ma Katz shrieked like a wounded eagle, and the knife clattered to the floor. The old woman's fingers curved into talons and she scratched at Jazzbeaux's face.

There wasn't much more Ma Katz could do to her face that Elder Seth hadn't, but lines of pain opened up, and Jazzbeaux felt her vision distorting. She was used to having one eye, but now she knew she wasn't seeing what she should.

Ma Katz's face, twisted by hatred, was that of her son.

Jazzbeaux made a point with the fingers of her left hand, and jabbed it into the old woman's throat, twice.

Ma Katz coughed and spluttered, yellow tears coursing down her face. Jazzbeaux grabbed the old woman's