Through our tears, we see rainbows. — Mescalero Apache saying
See the scrawny kid with gimpy leg and cross-eyes shoveling bull manure into that rusty wheelbarrow? His name is Billy Roto. Other kids have mercilessly ridiculed his deformity since kindergarten. And early on, some classroom clown called him Billy the Kidded and it stuck.
Billy’s fifteen-years-old, and every one of those years he’s lived here in the desert town of Dog Creek, New Mexico, a dusty trailer camp no bigger than a junkyard under the shadow of the majestic Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He’s never traveled more than fifty miles from this eyesore. And since the age of twelve, he’s been working at this rodeo pen, feeding the animals and shoveling manure.
Look at him, all crookbacked and spastic. He can barely hold that shovel straight. You’d never guess that he could be responsible for preventing the deaths of countless people or have anything to do with fighting enemies who want to bring America to her knees and crush the free world. Who knew? Well, nobody at all – except Billy and me.
My name’s Roy Dobbins. I own Dobbins Used Cars-and-Trucks just outside Dog Creek at the juncture of Route 64 and Medicine Hat Road. (Fall by if you’re in the area, mention this here short tall tale and I’ll cut you an Adam’s-apple-bobbing deal on the vehicle of your choice. For real.)
Now, I look like a bowlegged, straw-haired, flinty-eyed, leather-faced cowboy. But that’s just a disguise. I’m really a coyote – and my true name has many variations among the tribes: Q-nick, Missa Booz, Wena Bozho, Nih Haw Thaw. In English, of course, it’s Trickster.
I met Billy long before he was born. He’s in disguise, too. But he doesn’t know it.
How could he? He had to forget who he really is so that he could protect himself. But I’ll get to that later. First, let me fill you in on the miserable history of Billy the Kidded.
Billy never knew his daddy. His mother didn’t, either. Usually drunk by noon, Wyome Roto didn’t remember half the men she entertained for drinking money. I know, because the only place for fifty miles around to buy liquor is Dobbins Fire Water Hole. I also own the rodeo, which employs just about all of Dog Creek, and I’d see Wyome stumbling around the pens with visiting bull riders or behind the stands in the arms of the enlisted men from the nearby airbase.
After she delivered Billy, Wyome disappeared. Chenoa, Wyome’s robust older sister, and Chenoa’s rawboned husband, Rhett Hudson, took Billy into their trailer home and brought him up with a lot of tough love and self-sacrifice. Good, hard-working people. Rhett is my rodeo’s best bullfighter – and don’t you call him a rodeo clown unless you want your nose bent.
Like his step-parents, Billy’s a hard worker – except during flybys of the fighter jets from that airbase previously mentioned. Billy will lean on his shovel, cross-eyes gazing dreamily skyward during the roaring flyby and for fifteen minutes after if someone doesn’t smack him back of the head and get him shoveling again. He daydreams about his heroic life as a fighter pilot, defending America from her enemies.
“That’s a loco fantasy,” Rhett Hudson has told him time and again. “Your mama is full-blooded Mescalero Apache.”
“S-so?” Billy would likely reply in his electrocuted stutter. “Th-this is our cu-country, too.”
“Wise up, little brother.” Rhett’s got a long, hangdog face with the most woeful eyes, sad as Jesus in the Garden, and when he levels a disapproving look even a cactus will curl thorns with pity. “This is the same brutal country that broke your people’s greatest warriors, Cochise and Geronimo.”
“Ancient hi-history, uncle.” Cactus might curl its thorns but not Billy. A lifetime of tripping over his own tongue while the world laughed has made him more stubborn than a tree stump in concrete. “Th-this is th-the twenty-first century. We’re all Americans nu-now.”
Even gimps need dreams, and so Uncle Rhett never much pressed his historical argument beyond this point. But he regretted that sorely the day three F-16 fighter jets shrieked low over the desert and spooked Dancin’ Satan, three thousand pounds of stamping hooves, slashing horns and snorting ferocity.
The massive bull, black as tar at midnight, had lumbered from the grooming pen into the main corral when the jets ripped the sky open with their sonic booms. The black beast fired up a kick-and-spin that threw his handlers like hot popcorn.
Billy the Kidded, in his imaginary cockpit tearing after North Korean MiG-29s, leaned heavy on his shovel and heavier yet on his dream and never heard that enraged bull hurtling toward him, head lowered to gore. And Dancin’ Satan surely would have gouged and tossed that spindly fool half way to the moon if Darlene Appleyard hadn’t waved him back to reality with her pink felt Stetson.
Darlene and a half dozen other classmates had come by bus to Dog Creek from Thundercloud High School in Buford, fifty miles down Route 64. They sat in the stands buckling chaps, strapping on spurs and working rosin into their gloves for their weekly lessons in trick roping and bronc riding. When the F-16s screamed overhead, they had ringside seats for Dancin’ Satan’s furious charge.
Darlene’s pink hat flagged Billy’s attention, but it was Darlene’s boyfriend, Trace Trumble, blond as sawdust and handsome as a puma, whose leer of expectant joy alerted Billy. Billy’s crossed eyes widened, because he had seen that crazed glee in Trace’s face too many times before as prelude to a collapsing chair or toads bouncing out of his lunchbox. He flung a concerned frown over his shoulder, a frown that dissolved like a fevered snowflake when he saw Dancin’ Satan bearing down.
Whimpering with fright, Billy staggered for the fence. He staggered, because he couldn’t decide whether to spring for the left fence by the bronco stalls or bolt right for the stands and his gawking classmates.
“Billy, git on.” Rhett Hudson waved to his stepson from atop a bronco gate as casually as if inviting the boy to sit in on a hand of Texas Hold ‘Em. He perched there in his full bullfighter gear like some madcap cartoon critter – red greasepaint with a white stripe across his eyes, green Afro, Kuchina dancer shirt brilliant with jagged lightning and geometric sunrays, and baggy trousers of loud orange polka dots. “Step smartly, son.”
Stepping smartly wasn’t one of Billy’s skills. He pranced with unrestrained panic toward his uncle. And he might have made it. Dancin’ Satan was charging from clear across the arena, and Rhett Hudson had leaped the gate to distract the enraged bull. But Billy slipped on a cowpie and collapsed face first into the dung.
A raucous guffaw from Trace, shrieks from Darlene and the other kids, and Rhett’s bark, “Get up!” swept over the boy as he rolled about to see Dancin’ Satan galloping toward him, horns lowered. Rhett rushed forward, too far away to snag the maddened bull’s attention.
Billy rolled to hands and knees presenting his rump to the powerful brute and crawled frantically toward the nearest shelter – a clown can, one of those metal barrels bullfighters sometimes use for protection.
Billy squirmed into that colorful barrel an instant before Dancin’ Satan struck. The ferocious blow lifted the can clear off the ground and launched Billy into darkness deeper than outer space. For real.
~
The clown can hit the ground so hard fireworks exploded behind Billy Roto’s squeezed shut eyes. He spun around in the rolling barrel like tumbling laundry. With a jolt, the can struck something hard and slammed to a stop.
Billy lay curled up, panting with fright, listening for the pounding hooves of Dancin’ Satan. He heard birds twittering. Wind rustled through what sounded like tall grass. Bees buzzed.
“Shilaa-n!” a young woman’s voice called, saying ‘my brother’ in Apachean. Only Chenoa called him that, a personal term of endearment for the son of her sister. But this didn’t sound like his stepmother’s husky voice. “Come out, shilaa-n.”
Timidly, Billy grabbed the rim of the barrel and edged forward. His fingertips felt grass. When he dared open his eyes, he faced small blue flowers of wild flax, tufts of fluffy cotton grass – and the most beautiful moccasins he had ever seen. White fawnskin covered small feet, the stitching trimmed with glass beads tiny and clear as teardrops.
Billy poked his head out of the clown can and stared up at a scowling young woman. Her blue-black hair fell straight as a waterfall to her moccasins. “Come out from there,” she said in Apachean, with a voice irked as broken music. “Let me see you.”
He blinked up at her. She had a face the color of the desert and just as flat. His stare slid right off her and into the immense landscape beyond. Snow peaks under a vivid blue sky rooted the horizon in white swerves of snow slides.
In the near distance, colossal towers of dirty ice stood. Stranded icebergs studded with boulders and veined with silt, they rose tall as skyscrapers. Meltwater ponds laced the terrain. Large flocks of waterfowl floated there like clouds.
“You coming out or not?”
The teen felt surprised at how agilely he unfolded from the clown can. He knew then for sure he occupied a dream. Spine straight, limbs steady, he stood erect before the glowering young woman and stared at her with the shamelessness of a dreamer.
“So, do you recognize me?” She asked this brusquely and with a tight, unhappy smile. Her long eyes, tapered sharply as flame-tips and brilliantly dark as a clear winter night, gazed at him, shockingly direct and familiar.
He took in the slender headband of woven feathers, red above her left ear, yellow and green across her brow, and blue over her right ear. Her white, one-piece dress, cut from buckskin soft as satin, draped a narrow, athletic body. She wore no jewelry, no beadwork. “I-I know you?”
“Yes! You know me!” She glared, annoyed. “Who do you think I am?”
“I-I du-don’t know.”
“Take a guess. Take a wild, wild guess.”
“A dream?”
“No! You just came out of the dream.”
“I di-did?”
In English she recited, “‘Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream…’” She motioned impatiently for him to complete the rhyme.
“‘Merrily, merrily, merrily life is but –’”
“Nagoldi’é!” she barked. A dream.
He reverted to his native tongue and stammered, “And yu-you’re real?”
She grimaced. “Stop it.”
“Wu-what?”
With the palm of her hand, she struck his forehead. “Stop talking like that.”
The blow knocked Billy back a step, and he toppled over the clown can.
“Listen, you. I’m getting tired of your good deeds.” She stood over him, scowling. “When are you going to realize you can’t save everybody?”
“What are you talking about?” he blurted, then realized. “Hold on. Wait one minute. What is this? I’m not stuttering!” He squinted, hand to his mouth. In English, he said in a rush, “Peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Whoa! What did you do to me?”
“I didn’t do anything. I’m trying to bring you around – again. You hid your memories, didn’t you? I told you to stop that. It’s a bad strategy. It’s going to get you killed.”
He peered up through his bulging ignorance. “Hid my memories?”
“All right, all right,” she said, peeved. “I’ll run it by you again. But this is the last time, Blue Horse. I really mean it. The. Last. Time.”
“Blue Horse?”
“You’re Blue Horse. You’re a nakay-do-klunni – a healer of the First People – the ones who wander in Tú Nchaa, the Land of Much Water. We are looking back at America nineteen thousand summers ago.” She gestured at the glacial terrain around them. “This is the landscape of the First People. Our people. We live here with the white buffalo, the woolly mammoths, the giant sloths and the rhinos.”
“Rhinos?”
“Get up. Come here.” She took his hand. He rose light as smoke, and she led him with easy, graceful steps to the grassy brink of a drastic precipice. “Look.”
Under a cobalt sky that swept down to jagged and white horizons, grasslands flexed in the wind. A thousand zebras milled there. Nearby, a flock of camels laid their long reflections over potholes of glacial water. Farther off, tramping across gravel flats, two herds of mammoths converged.
Wonder crested to a smile, and Billy shook his head in disbelief. “How…?”
“Magic. You’re big-time magic, nakay-do-klunni.” And then added almost voiceless, “And you have big time enemies.”
“Who?”
“The oldest enemies.” She pointed in the opposite direction across sere wasteland of alpine tundra toward distant sky lakes of glaciers dull-green and black. “That way. Look that way, west, from where we came.” Saurian shadows twisted upon a regolith of barren rocks in titanic causeways plowed by retreating icesheets. “Fire Freak. Dirt Dervish. Snake Spit. Claw Creep. You became a healer to protect the people from them. You got so good, the enemies went bawling back to Mother -”
“Earth Mother?”
Taut disbelief stretched a grimace. “No, silly. Fang Mother.”
A vision blipped of a charred hag hunched under twitching fin wings. Her knobbed face fixed on Billy with black clotted eyes in a hilarity of staring white orbs, and her jaws widened, a pulsating maw of tapeworm teeth, needle-thin and carousel-spinning around a scream where silence raved its rage.
Billy staggered backward.
“She’s been stalking you ever since you led us east.”
“Since Africa?”
“Yeah, right.” Her scowl punished him. “If you’d been that powerful, we wouldn’t have had to leave our homeland. No. You didn’t get really good as a wizard until we got here. That’s why we’re still here. Fang Mother has gone crazy in this land, totally mad, savaging the people, trying to draw you out and trap you. And you keep taking her bait.”
“I do?”
“You won’t listen to me.” She stamped one foot, then the other. “Leave the people alone. You’ve done enough for them. They either make it from here on their own or they don’t.” Her features softened to see his faint, insistent caring. “It’s not your business to save everybody. But she keeps upping the ante, and you fall for it each time. And one of these times, she’s going to get you.”
Billy nodded, searching her face, completely bewildered. “And – uh, you are?”
“I’m Rainbow!” Incensed, she leaned her frown closer. “I’m your wife!”
~
There’s more to tell. (There’s always more to tell, ain’t there?). But this Shoodii coyote trickster is working with a Magaanii – a white man – wearing a tzi-daltai – an amulet of lightning-riven wood – which is what obliged me to tell you this much in the first place. I’ve already loped too close to too far. If I find an outfit willing to satisfy my appetite for legal tender and able to broadcast what I have to say, I’ll fill you in about the fifteen steps of Billy the Kidded’s line dance with fate, love for America happy as grass, and the Fang Mother’s family recipe for prickly pear soup:
First Morning in the Hereafter
Rainbow Girl Makes Breakfast
Why Fire Won’t Sit Still
Lightning Rides a Blue Horse
World without Names
Coyote’s Underpants
Cosmic Dog
What Wildness Was
Eight Sacred Sorrows
Sharpening the Edge of the Flat World
Winter Wolves, Spirit Horses
In the Arms of Our Four Mothers
Dancing with Stones
Fang Mother Bites the Universe in Two
And an epilog you won’t believe: Footprints on Clear Water
Until then, Haee’a – see you around (if you don’t see me first).