A Decade Before
Y aqui voices chanted in Moki’s ears as he loped up Jackson Street, his stride keeping pace with the water drums and rattling gourds. This wasn’t really a San Francisco sidewalk beneath his feet, but the Red Rock Trail into the Chiricahuas. Those weren’t shrubs grown tight against fences, but tumbleweeds trapped by the Sonoran wind. That wasn’t a sprinkler, but a headwater spring feeding desperate patches of peppergrass and sage… each alive only by the grace of the weeping earth.
The boy glanced up as he crested the hill, his view of the darkening Pacific framed by six-story cliffs of stucco and brick. A startled pigeon-no, a desert nighthawk-swept across the dying sunset, then spun and dove toward a swallowtail emerging from the Flower World below.
A-la in-i-kun, mai-so yol-e-me, hu-nu kun, mai-so yol-e-mee
So now he is the deer, so now he is the deer
Moki pressed his palms against the earbuds, leaving himself deaf to all but the Mexican harps and the violins and the flutes of the Deer Dance singing in his head, the hunt played out in song and shuffling feet from dusk till dawn… through the eyes of the hunter, and of the deer.
So now he is the deer.
Moki cut right, startling a coyote that ducked behind a hedge. He smiled to himself. The blur of reddish-brown had merely been a family dog stalking whitetails that no longer grazed the asphalt-covered hills. He raced on, angling across the pavement, dodging a black Hummer charging up the hill, its chrome wheels flashing, its engine growling, its music thumping.
Now down toward the bay. The sidewalk steep and slick. Shorter steps. Touching lightly, almost skipping-but off the beat. He lengthened his stride to catch the rhythm… almost… moving faster.
That’s it.
He heard his uncle’s voice soar above the other singers:
A-la in-i-kun mai-so yol-e-me
So now he is-
Screeching tires ripped the air. The Hummer skidded and jumped the curb. His thin arms flailed as he slammed into its side and ricocheted into a retaining wall, his CD player exploding as his head and hands snapped back, the cinderblock scraping his flesh as he collapsed to the ground.
Stunned, dazed, nauseated.
Boots thudding on pavement. Laughter raging down. The stench of spilled beer and wet cigarettes. Throbbing subwoofers vibrating sheet metal and plastic and glass, savage words pounding through the haze from someone else’s music, someone else’s drums, someone else’s life.
Slumping to his side, squinting up in terror, the streetlights blocked by ghostly screaming heads-then punching fists and stomping feet and cracking ribs and spattering blood… until… at length…
The stillness of the weeping earth.