Kokuiena, bareboned, knifecheeked, with sockets shadowing the pale, the rashraised stubbled chin, the shallow chest heaving its fluish sigh, paws his ponytail, then takes it around his neck to his mouth to suck on its tip; it helps him remember the prophecy: how he’d been called, by the Chief over to the public telephone eavesdropped upon by the immortal operator, She of the 0 sunning out over Holbrook, frozenly nooned in the sky a hundred or so unmarked unmade miles away, past Oraibi Old and New and its mesas and their secrets he was told what would happen and then, the extension just died, beep beep beep and please press # for interpretation, a pounding…how a voice he’d never heard before deep and grave, yet un-characteristically white, had told him about a member of a foreign tribe headed this way, and had mentioned a reward, said it would be a formidable service, then described a Bahana named Ben, a Redeemer, a white mensch who, and it’s not like he’s sure how, is not a white mensch: a paleface with a red heart and lips blue from the cold who’d one day arrive in the plaza, who’d show up when one notch knifed into the stick — the last line past the last day, a moon from now with the tribe entire, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters all out to welcome this Messiah, imagined, their arms out laden with greetings, with gifts, here at Yellow Stone, there at Pointed Rock, Where the Ray of the Sun Goes Over the Line to the Place, south of Oraibi proper. He’s been tasked to search for this Ben, He Who Comes In Peace we’ve been waiting for for so long — and so what, to scout around, to ask questions, follow trails, which is futzed: tradition says He’ll come to us, not us to Him…how unexpectedly, He’ll arrive in the Plaza, which one you’ll know on that day when, middance and with the fire tamped down, the Tourist Kachina will remove its mask in front of the uninitiated kinder: a star shining brightly blond, the elders all masked in their finest white rubber, their eyes’ slits rounded and rung in corny plastic, threechinned husky, falsified faces grinning widely to expose an endless imitation ivory dentition, their dark naked torsos below bedecked in photographic and video equipment, bandoliers of film canisters, in their hands they’ll wield rainbow umbrellas while dancing dementedly, opening and closing their thrusts and parries upon thuds of foot raising the dust of the earth — this Kachina an advanced incarnation of their only spiritual future, lately channeled to this world not out of a wanting for myth, or from any metaphysical need, but because that’s what the audiences pay for, that’s what the tourists demand; and then, how there will be no more ceremonies, there’ll be no more faith, and, after a time, the elders say the wheel will renew itself, that it must, and then…how it’ll begin all over again, shakily spoked, the crossed axle of the baldest tire — another emergence, meaning other migrations…and these outlining an even greater swastika, another settling — and yet another death. Would you believe it. Who ever heard.
