Stallion Gate by Martin Cruz Smith

comfortable.”
    Every time one of them stirred, water—pungent, buoyant, black—spilled from the well and over moss soaked with the same sharp smell. Between branches they could see the peaks of the Jemez, some hanging in shadow, some shining with scree. Clouds on an easterly wind made the mountains move forward like a wave.
    “There was a volcano here as big as Everest about a million years ago.” Joe spread his arms along the rim of the well. “When it blew, it threw rocks as far as Kansas. There’s still a volcanic vent beneath us.”
    “Like a deep-banked ember,” Anna said.
    “And all these hills are sacred to the old people. Shrines in the caves. You never know what you’re going to stumble into. My father and I were hunting one day when we both fell into a hole. A hole in the ground, dust swirling around. We’d fallen into an old kiva. We were sitting on the floor of it. All around us were these figures. A man with blue skin, blue as a bluebird, and the head of a buffalo. A purple swallow with the head of a girl. A mountain lion sitting like a man. The kiva could have been five hundred, maybe a thousand years old, but the colors were as bright as if they’d been painted the day before. In about an hour they faded. In two hours you could hardly see them. I couldn’t evenfind the place now. It’s filled in with dirt and disappeared, but there are more.”
    Joe was surprised at himself for telling the story. First, that he remembered it. Second, because it smacked of noble-red-man-seduces-tourist. Maybe that’s what he was trying to do, though. Obviously that’s what he was after.
    “What is the religion here?” Anna asked. “Was Adam created on the sixth day? Was Eve created from his rib?”
    “Different.”
    “How different?”
    “There are different stories, which I remember poorly. Have you seen the clowns at the dances here?”
    “No.”
    “Well, when the world was new, a brother and a sister set out across the mountains. He was handsome. She was beautiful. As they slept on a mountaintop, he realized that he loved her. When she woke up, she saw that he did. She tried to escape by stamping her foot and splitting the mountain so that a river flowed between them. He threw himself on the ground until he was bloody, and she felt so sorry for him that she swam back across the river and slept with him. The incest made them outlaws. Their children became clowns.”
    “What about everyone else?”
    “Everyone sort of wandered up out of the earth.… I really can’t tell you about Indians.”
    Least of all, the Indian steeping in the water. Why the hell was he taking the chance of stealing high explosiveto give the stuff for nothing to Cleto when he could make a killing off the contractors in Albuquerque? Did he want to get caught and sent back to Leavenworth or shipped to the Pacific? There was an element of not just self-contempt, but of self-destruction.
    “I can tell you about Indians,” Harvey said. “When I was eight, some so-called civilized Cherokees threw me into a water tank. The walls were about six feet high and it was half full. It didn’t have the aroma of this water, but it had slime, hence amusement value, the payoff being what I would look like when I hauled myself out. As I climbed out I noticed the water level sinking a little bit. I got back in and the water level went up. I went in and out, in and out. Then I calculated the volume of the water displaced and its weight, and from that my weight and volume. I had recently read in the
National Geographic
, between pictures of African breasts, that crocodiles weighted themselves by swallowing stones so they could swim lower and sneak up on those poor African girls. So I shouted from the water for the kids to throw some rocks into the tank. That was my real start in physics. You know, I’m starting to like this water. Does it mean I’m sweating poisons or I’m cooked?” He paddled back and forth between Joe and Anna Weiss.