Michal used to say we weren’t real Indians, just leftovers. He was still very young then, and it would often surprise me that he knew so much, understood the situation we were in so well. Maybe that’s what caused me to start to suspect there was something different. Something wrong. I think back to that last day often, the memories a blur, trying to unravel if I did the right thing. These days I don’t know. It’s just been too long, and it’s easy to forget. Either that, or it’s terribly difficult, and I’m just not ready to admit that yet.
I woke up to the blue sunlight, refracted and dim through the ceiling of the tent, yet still unwelcome. Unlike the others, I’d barely slept, clocking in at just under two hours of rest, and just over four of waking dreams. By now the other three sleeping bags were empty, and I could smell the coffee brewing through the half-zipped door. It was strong, so Eric probably made it.
Exiting the enclave, I found the trio gathered around cooking half-assed eggs and bacon on one portable stove, with the bubbling caffeine steeping over a second. Without speaking, I marched solemnly in the direction of the coffee. All of the others were fully dressed and ready to go and were clearly amused by my boxer clad person taking unashamed strides across the campsite. Devin was the first to pipe up.
“Enjoying the breeze, are we?”
The others laughed, and I feigned a smile. The breeze was indeed rather cool, but luckily the coffee was rather hot. I began to pour myself a spot into the mug I dragged from the tent. Despite the summer heat, down at the bottom of Keams Canyon things got fairly chilly, especially at night. There was more shade than I’d expected, and I really hadn’t brought any warmer clothes to make the nights any easier to sit through.
“Just wanted to give you guys a show with breakfast,” I joked, which garnered a few chuckles.
“Well after you grab your coffee, if you want to wrap up and eat something we were thinking we could pack up the site and head down along the river a little way. Brock thinks he saw some cave entrances down there,” Eric chimed.
Caves would’ve sounded fun, but I felt like shit. I agreed anyway. I just needed to keep moving. Site-to-site. For some reason I just didn’t want to stay in one place. We’d been down in the canyon for two days now, and it just wasn’t having the effect I’d intended. The goal was to reconnect with my heritage, reconnect with my sense of self. Really, I just wanted some magical reset button, so that when we took that last step out of the canyon in two days I’d feel like a new man with a fresh start. And yet I couldn’t help but feel like the further downwards we hiked, the more closed off I was becoming.
I wasn’t reconnecting with who I wanted to be. Instead, I was being bombarded by the memories of who I was. What I’d done. The canyon walls felt like they were closing in. And on top of all of that, there was this strange tingle in the back of my head, whispering in my ear and telling me something I was afraid to broach with the others.
We’re being watched.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
When we were kids in the 80’s, Michal had a deep fascination with animals. He practically spent more time with the neighbor’s cat than with me. Mom always loved that about him though. She would say it was in our Hopi blood. That’s how it was with her back then, it was all about heritage, roots, traditions, etc. That’s the whole reason her and dad moved to Arizona when I was born. It was the home of her people.
Our parents met in New York in the 60’s. Dad was a black man that grew up during the civil rights struggle, and mom was a Hopi who’d barely seen her homeland, barely knew her traditions, and felt generally disenfranchised. Their sufferings connected them, and their bond were inseparable. Despite all that happened later, they really were good people, and they tried to be good parents.
After the two wed and changed their names to Ahote, they decided to move out here to get back in touch with mom’s Hopi roots. Dad purchased some farmland, they built a house, and made a living earing the blue corn mom’s tribe was traditionally known for. She went all in on her newfound cultural identity, and when I was born, and later Michal, she wanted to make sure that neither of us ever felt separated from that tribe by time and testament. It was noble enough, she wanted to correct her perceived mistakes in her own children.
I tried my best to comply, and so did Michal, despite the age difference between us. Had I not known better, I may not have realized that mom didn’t grow up around the Hopi traditions. She was a regular chieftain. By the time I was ten I could recite most Hopi legends by memory, knew the meanings of all the classical family names (Ahote means “Restless One”), the symbolism, ceremonies, and even clothing. Of course, some might argue that real understanding of such things can only come from growing up on the reservation and hearing the stories from some blind old man yourself, rather than from books and magazines like my mother. But it seemed to be good enough for her.
All of this is to say, whenever Michal seemed remotely interested in something Hopi, mom was over the moon about it. It wasn’t that he knew more than me, nothing like that, he wasn’t a prodigy. He was just smart, and she was enthusiastic. Michal was her baby. I was too in a sense, but my time was passed. And to be honest, that thing parents say about not being able to choose between their kids because they love them all the same? That’s bullshit. Nobody loves everybody the same.
Michal was the favorite. Everybody knew that except, so it seemed, Michal himself. Or perhaps it would be better to say he just didn’t care. Michal was a very calm and collected child. He never got too excited over much of anything, never screaming, never crying, rarely laughing. People found it fascinating how reserved he was. How matter of fact he could be. The novelty of his nature was a wonderful party trick when guests were over. If I had earned a nickel for every time some aunt or work buddy had called him a “little gentleman” I wouldn’t have been able to count all of them. He was just so darn cute.
Right?
Sometimes I wasn’t sure. I hated to think oddly of my little brother, it was just… there was something off about his behavior that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Others didn’t really see it though, so it didn’t feel worth mentioning or debating for fear of sounding crazy. There wasn’t really the same focus on mental health in those days as there is now, so it would only have sounded like I was jealous of the attention Michal received. And part of the problem was that this wasn’t entirely untrue. A little green flame of envy did indeed wick up in my heart on occasion when Michal stole the spotlight. Only the more so as he seemed to simply not care for it.
But underneath all that, despite my one-sided rivalry, I also knew there was something going on behind Michal’s eyes. Something that concerned me on a very deep level. For a while I didn’t have too much difficulty keeping those ambiguous concerns to myself. They were after all, without form. I couldn’t actually define what I felt was wrong, so it was easy to simply say that there wasn’t anything wrong at all. That it was all a product of my jealousy. Unfortunately, this was before I found Michal’s collection.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Before I found the bones.
By the time we got to the caves, it had become clear that the short distance estimates we’d been given by Brock were somewhat exaggerated. It took us over an hour to get to the entrance, which was terribly small, and by that time I’d begun to really feel the effects of my insomnia. I could sleep alright back home, but down here it was like being at the epicenter of my bad memories. As if proximity to the site of my childhood had infected my dreams.
Everyone else was excited as hell to run in and start exploring, but I just couldn’t do it. The claustrophobia wasn’t what I needed right then, and I felt as if it would be easy to walk too far in, lose all of what strength I had, and become unable to trek back without help. Of course, there was another reason, one gnawing at the back of my head. Something felt off about the caves. The shadows seemed to live and breathe out of the entrance, like the throat of some great stone being. I couldn’t pin down why, but there was some kind of malevolent feeling to it.
Despite knowing better, I told my friends I couldn’t go in regardless. I said it was my stomach, making a joke or two about the strength of Eric’s coffee. They were notably bummed, as it was I who had planned this whole trip after all. Regardless, they were respectful, and I resigned myself to sit by the entrance with our extra supplies until they returned.
Once they had all descended into the shadows of the cave mouth, time seemed to slow. I had a watch with me, but it was a cheap digital one, and I’d forgotten batteries. What seemed like hours began to blur together. I desperately wanted to sleep, if but for a short while. And yet, every time I shut my eyes, I saw flashes. A room, a house, a knife, a bed. Was it too much to ask to be free of my past? Some days it appeared so. The rough dirt poked at me through my pants with the scattered rocks and stones that littered it. Little reminders. Maybe it was my fault. Maybe there had been another way. Maybe I was wrong.
“You weren’t wrong.”
I jumped up from the ground at the sound of the voice. Had I been asleep? I turned around. Nobody had left the cave yet. How long had I been sitting outside?
“How did it feel?”
I spun again. My body tensed. We locked eyes, just twenty feet away, right past the trees.
A goat.
The voice had to have been in my head. This was just an animal. So why did I feel my blood freeze as I stared into its eyes? Goats have odd, alien eyes, with those inhuman, rectangular pupils. Something about them staring into your soul, especially with intent, felt like God himself was peering into you. But that was all just raw emotion and nerves talking. It was a damned goat. And that voice… I recognized it. My brother’s. Michal’s. And of course, that couldn’t be more obviously something deep within my psyche. Dead people can’t speak.
“How did it feel?”
No. It couldn’t have been. Its lips moved. Did goats have lips? It was Michal’s voice. Holy shit. It was Michal’s voice. The goat stood. On its hind legs. Rising. Slowly. Like a man.
“The warm blood dripping down your palm.”
Holy shit.
“You liked it didn’t you, brother?”
Holyshitholyshitholyshitholyshit.
I turned to run. I only got a few feet before I ran into Devin, toppling over and onto the ground. My breathing was heavy. Looking up I saw the faces of concern that belonged to my friends. Facing away, I looked back to the edge of the trees. The animal was gone. I tried to slow my breathing, nearly choking on my own breath. What was that thing? Why did it speak like Michal? Maybe… maybe it was the insomnia. Somehow combined with the heat.
“Sorry Abe, didn’t mean to freak you out,” Devin consoled as he held his hand out to me.
I took it and stood, never removing my gaze from the trees.
“You see something over there? You look really pale.”
“What? No. Just a goat.”
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Admittedly, I should have checked on Michal sooner. Not that it wasn’t normal for him to be so quiet on days when he was stuck home in his room. Michal was far from the most boisterous or energetic child I’d ever seen. But even at that age I knew my responsibilities. Family was a large part of Hopi culture; our mother had been engraining that in our heads for years. If mom and dad were out of the house, Michal was my responsibility as the older sibling, that was just how it was. We didn’t do babysitters. Being home alone and carrying that weight properly was part of becoming a man.
Sometimes we all shirk responsibility however, and so it was for me that day. Thinking back, and I can’t even recall what exactly it was that I had been so captivated by which caused time to slip by. What followed took up far too many of my memory slots to be bothered with menial things like that. Regardless, eventually I came to the realization that it had been some time since I’d seen or heard from Michal.
Not thinking anything terribly of it, I decided to go visit his room and make sure everything was alright. I knew deep down that everything would be. Michal was just a child. He was a bit odd yes, but as I was constantly reminded, everybody is a bit odd to somebody. Even Michal said it. We weren’t real Indians. Just halfway. Our mother got her lore from books and articles. Our father was descended from African slaves. Real Hopi would no doubt think of us as nothing more than pretenders.
I rounded the corner of the living room and began to ascend the stairwell of the farmhouse. Mine and Michal’s rooms were on the second floor, with our parents’ bedroom, the kitchen, and the living area on the first. I kept waiting to hear some noise from the direction of his room. Even for a quiet kid, with each step I felt an eerie feeling build up and spider its way along the small of my back.
The door to his room seemed inconspicuous. It was a door, nothing more. Why shouldn’t it be? What was going to happen was that I’d open the door, find Michal sitting in the floor with a few toys, and ask him if he was doing okay. He’d say yes, I’d say great, then I would shut the door and head back downstairs, and watch something on TV. With this scenario running through my head, it came with great surprise that I opened the door to find that Michal was in fact, not in the room.
I took a step in, confused, and nearly tripped. Staring down at the floor, I realized it was littered with small white pieces of something. For a moment my mind didn’t register, but it wasn’t long before I realized that the floor was covered in animal bones.
“Michal?”
No answer. What was all this? I’d been in Michal’s room plenty of times, and I was not aware of him owning a collection of bones. Besides all that, where the hell was he? I looked around the room, careful not to step on any bones as the breeze whipped at my face. Wait, breeze? I looked to the window. Ajar it stood, the cool wind quietly howling through it. Surely he didn’t jump out the window. He was odd sure but…
Cautiously, I moved towards it. A few feet away, I had to stop and cover my nose at a rank smell invading my nostrils. I turned to my right, seeing something I couldn’t process around the side of Michal’s bed. It was like a lump of fur and flesh. I couldn’t barely tell what color the fur had been, as stained with blood as it was. From appearance, it didn’t seem to be an animal, as there were no limbs.
I turned back to the window. Placing one hand on the edge, I stuck my head through and looked down.
“Michal?”
Below was only grass. The wind blew my hair, as the green blades danced to its song. I looked up at the fields of blue corn. Harvest time would come soon. The reaper would reclaim. Then my eye caught something below. A red stain on the ground a few feet away.
“Ha’u brother.”
My head whipped to the right as a shuffling sounded from the slope of the roof. Further down was a hunched figure. It was Michal. He stared into my eyes, still and calm. Beside him was a hunk of flesh. This one had limbs, but no skull, and no fur, and was covered in even more blood.
It was the body of the neighbor’s cat, skinned. Beheaded. Blood steadily dripped over the side of the roof into the grass. I looked back at my brother. There was something on his head. Tied with string. The head. The cat’s head. Mostly skinned, nearly cleaned, with only small bits of sinew and meat still clinging to the bone. A macabre headdress.
Michal didn’t smile, speak, or move. He simply sat, silently, as I turned away and vomited across the shingles.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The others had started to think that I’d contracted altitude sickness, or something of a similar manner. One couldn’t blame them; I knew that I looked horrible. Eric and Devin were already suggesting that we cut the trip a bit short and begin the trek back to the switchbacks down. Granted, we were a long way from that, and I wasn’t able to move as fast as I wanted. On top of this, I knew what they didn’t, which was that I didn’t have altitude sickness.
Whether it was real or not, Michal was in my head. If it was an illusion caused by a heat addled mind, then I’d done a much worse job of moving past my guilt than I thought I had. If it was real though? God help me.
There was the real pinpoint though. The guilt. It was an intangible guilt. Almost like a feeling that guilt should be where it wasn’t fully. Guilt over not feeling guilty, if such a thing exists. I’d spent years trying to avoid thinking about questions like that. My parents asked them at first, but those interrogations turned into radio silence with time. What if I was guilty after all? Would it matter? I no longer had the luxury of apology. Mom and dad were years gone by then.
But why did the Michal-goat tell me I wasn’t wrong? I couldn’t wrap my head around that one. He’s the one who my actions affected. Surely if his presence was somehow out here, skirting about the rock, it would be for revenge, not to vindicate me. As far as I was concerned this was only one more piece of evidence that the whole scenario was in my head. I could feel the canyon walls closing in, and I’d had a momentary lapse, that was all.
Quickly it became apparent that we’d need to camp for the night again. We had decided to head back the other way after all. The next morning we’d wake early, hoping to exit the canyon at a brisk pace by dinner. I didn’t help much with setting up camp. Here and there I tried, but mostly got shooed off by the others. It seemed I truly wasn’t looking great. Brock cooked a dinner of hotdogs and baggies of chips. I only nibbled.
Everybody sat around the fire and talked of the cave experience. The corners of my mind that weren’t occupied with thinking about the goat scenario over and over had to admit it sounded pretty cool. Regardless, I was the first to retire. Part of my onset psychosis was likely due to my meager two hours of shut-eye the night before. It would no doubt be as difficult or worse going to bed this night, so I knew I needed all the time I could get. At some point I simply blacked out, finally claimed by sleep. But the sleep was itself claimed by recurring memories and nightmares. Not that it mattered.
It wasn’t going to last long.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I cleaned up after Michal’s incident with the cat. There was no chance I’d allow my parents to discover what he really was. The whole time I coaxed him down he was silent, only staring and obeying as I got him off the roof, cleaned the floor, threw out the bones, and buried the feline flesh. The only time he resisted was a brief moment when I told him to bathe or shower or do anything to get the blood off of himself. A gleam in his eye caught me then as he hesitated, something that I caught which felt distinctly inhuman.
Sociopaths and psychopath were things I’d read about, people with the inability to feel emotions the way other people do. Felt like something out of a movie to me. But my brother? I knew he was strange, and his behavior was often unexplainable. After all, what the hell kind of person dissects a cat and wears its skull like a party hat? I couldn’t imagine how it would go over if I tried to tell my parents what I’d found. They loved Michal too much, a would likely never even believe me.
Time passed, Michal and I ceased to speak to one another, and my parents stayed blissfully unaware of that bloody afternoon. To this day I feel the pain of wishing I’d told them anyway. Wishing I’d at least tried. Coming to the canyon had been to reflect on my guilt and move past it. But the hook was in.
Night fell on the farmhouse. It had been months since the cat incident by then, and I’d been trying my damnedest to forget about it. I would lay in bed and stare up at the ceiling, thinking about anything to keep my mind off the thing they called my brother that lay in the room across the hall. Sometimes my mind would drift to an old Hopi prophecy my mother had told us about.
When the earth is ravaged,
and the animals are dying,
a new tribe of people shall come unto the earth from many colors, classes, and creeds.
By their actions and deeds shall they make the earth green again.
They will be known as the Warriors of the Rainbow.
Were we that new tribe? Perhaps that was why Michal said we weren’t real Indians. We were something else. The start of a new tribe, our blood mixing with that of others to create something the world had never seen. I sat straight up in bed.
A noise came from outside the room. A series of low, rhythmic creaks. Someone was descending the stairs. I found myself petrified, incapable of moving. It was Michal, it had to be. But what was he doing? He never got up in the middle of the night like this. Then again, I hadn’t known him to mutilate animals before I saw it happen. Haphazardly, I pulled off my sheets and swung my legs over the edge of the bed, jittering. I nearly tripped. Knew I needed to be more careful, I didn’t want to alert Michal, especially if I was wrong about this. Maybe he was just getting a glass of water.
Stepping out into the hall, I found myself facing the open door to Michal’s room. At least the window was shut today. And there weren’t any bones scattering the floor. I refocused my attention towards the stairwell. Stepping onto the first step, I could see light emanating from the direction of the kitchen. My body was unfathomably tense. I took another step.
At the bottom of the stairwell, I grabbed the banister with a sweat stained hand and rotated to look around into the living room and dining room. The kitchen was still around another corner at the edge of the dining room, but I could see that the light was indeed coming from there. I marched my way slowly across the span, trying not to collapse along the way from my nerves.
I turned the corner into the kitchen to find it empty. Had I missed Michal somewhere in the shadows along the way? The fridge was closed, the cabinets undisturbed. At first glance the room seemed unchanged. My eyes drifted to the area of the counter where we stored our utensil, and my heart stopped. Mom kept her set of kitchen knives there above the silverware drawer. They’d been a gift.
One was missing.
Hearing a small noise, I spun around, the hair on the back of my neck at full attention. The door to the master bedroom was open. Through the dark I could see something within. A glint of light. My breathing slowed. Each step felt heavier than the last as I approached the door. Heavier than any step I’d ever taken.
Another step.
Maybe the knife was in the dishwasher.
Another step.
It wasn’t him.
Another step.
It can’t be him.
Another step.
Please don’t let it be him.
I stepped through the door. Standing over the bed was Michal, on my mother’s side of the bed. In his right hand he held the missing knife from the kitchen. Mom and Dad were still sleeping. He slowly began to raise the knife, staring at them with eyes devoid of any feeling. A flicker of moonlight reflecting off of them through a gap in the curtains. It was like stage lighting. Like none of it was real.
“Michal?” I asked.
It came out as a whisper that was more like a whimper. I tasted salt and realized that tears were running down my cheeks. Michal turned to face me. He paused, looking through me.
“We were never real Indians, brother,” he whispered calmly.
“Then what are we?”
He smiled.
“The Warriors of the Rainbow.”
Michal raised the knife over his head, and I lunged at him. The struggle ended quickly enough. I don’t remember all that happened there in the dark. Just flashes and shadows and a wet sound. My parents woke up, and the lights were turned on, and my mother screamed. As the room was illuminated, all my parents saw was their eldest standing over Michal’s lifeless body, a steel blade stuck deep in his gut.
Despite all I’d seen, all Michal had done, it would be I who was labeled the sociopath. I tried to tell my parents about what had happened. So many times I tried to tell them, but it was in vain. Michal was their baby, and I had taken him from them. This was something they just couldn’t forgive.
I was in and out of mental institutions for the rest of my childhood, sent to schools far away that could give a decent education to people who weren’t right in the head. While my parents certainly believed something to be wrong with me, I have to think that they also just wanted to get me away from themselves. This barely bothered me in due time. I wasn’t wanted around that town anymore. I was a black sheep. A boy who cried wolf far too late. I split from my family and denounced contact as soon as I turned eighteen.
In college I made real friends and started to put my past behind me. But it caught up when I learned my parents had passed on. The guilt resurfaced, after all the years of therapy, and I found myself wishing I’d tried once more to make them understand. Maybe they were right. Maybe it was my fault he was dead. My fault for not trying to save him.
If only I’d said something before.
Keams Canyon was near the old farmhouse property. My friends and I were into hiking, so I proposed the trip as a way to make amends with the past. To work through my grief and guilt on a sabbatical journey. Instead, I found myself stuck between walls of rock. Unable to sleep. Barely able to eat. Assaulted by the sins of the past.
And my sins had a voice.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I awoke to whispers slipping through the cracks of the tent. Voices could be heard all around me, muffled by the nylon walls. Laying still, I tried to wait for them to pass, hoping the sounds would be revealed as nothing but mental apparitions. A few minutes passed, and the whispers seemed only to grow. I turned to one side and the other, observing the three quiet lumps of sleeping bags spread out in the rest of the tent. Surely the noise would be enough to wake them were it real.
I sat up to find that that zippered entry to the tent was in fact not zipped, gently breathing in and out with the nightly breeze. The whispers were clearly coming from the half open flap. All that could be seen through the gap was the bluish darkness of the canyon under moonlight.
Quietly, I unzipped my own sleeping bag and stood in the tent, still wearing much of my clothing from the day aside from my shoes and jacket. I crouched, walking up to the tent flap, and unzipped it enough to squeeze myself through. Sucking in a strong breath, I stepped through.
It felt like shutting the door after entering a sound-proofed room. The whispers vanished immediatly, replaced by a thick silence. Despite the lack of sound, the entire campsite felt as though it were covered by a thick fog. An invisible, vague presence. The fire had been out for a while, only the faintest red specks of ember remaining deep in the wood as the scent of smoke hung as an afterthought in the air.
To my left, a twig snapped, breaking the silence. Looking, I saw nothing but darkness among the bushes along the edge of a steep drop-off. I walked to the edge, staring down into the abyss of the canyon’s basin, the bottom nearly invisible in the shadow. What time was it?
“Abraham.”
Spinning around fast enough that I nearly lost my balance, I faced the treeline on the opposite side of the tent which ran along the trailhead. There were at least ten of them. Mountain goats. They looked at me with their rectangular, soulless eyes. One stood at the front of the pack. Most mountain goats look fairly similar, but something in my gut told me that this one was the same I had seen at the caves.
“Michal?” I asked the goat.
It spoke like a man.
“Abraham,” the goat repeated.
“No. You’re dead. You’re supposed to be dead. I came here to… to get away from that. To move on. And instead, I’m talking to a fucking goat. No.”
“Abraham,” came the voice, repeated from a different goat.
The chorus rose, the goats repeating my name. It was a cacophony, no longer sounding like speech. More like a curse.
Abraham. Abraham. Abraham. AbrAbraHaAbrahaAbHamArahaBrahaAbraham!!
Guided by the phantom echoes, the leader of the goats stood upright, like before. Michal stood. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and I could feel the same cold that I felt when Michal looked at me on that night in my parent’s room, reflected in these inhuman pupils. As he came to full attention, the chorus was silenced, Abrahams dispersing into the night air. It was a miracle my friends hadn’t awoken.
I opened my mouth to speak, but Michal spoke first.
“You didn’t come here to move on brother.”
I stepped back drunkenly, unbalanced by the rocks.
“What? Of course I-”
“You came here to bury. To forget. But I cannot be forgotten.”
There was something monstrous in that voice. Even if the voice of a child. Perhaps it was always there, even all those years ago.
“Why not?” I called out to the demon.
“Because we’re a new tribe brother. Both of us. You took me away from this place because you weren’t ready to see. The blood did feel good on your hand, but not because you wanted me dead. It was because you had become the agent of chaos, delaying the coming of the change. But it can only be delayed, and it will come whether you want it to or not. Mother could not see that. She was preoccupied with being who she could never be. The people who came before. But when the earth is ravaged, there will be a new blood in the heart of man. I only sought to forward that change.
You did not. Your desire was for our parents. The love and acceptance of the same heritage they idolized. From that point of view, you weren’t wrong to kill me. But even in death, I cannot die, and neither can you brother. For we are more than human. We are an idea. The future tribe. The Warriors of the Rainbow. And we will make the earth green again.”
“Shut up!”
As the sweat dripped down my neck, I reached for a stone below me, and threw it at the animals with all the strength I had. The rock impacted the air in front of the Michal goat like an invisible wall, splintering into a shower of pebbles. I huffed and puffed where I stood as the goat cocked its head to one side.
“You know I’m right Abraham. See how you’ve cast aside your heritage. Can you even speak the language anymore?”
I wanted to respond in Hopi. But he was right. I couldn’t. For some reason all the words escaped me. What had I become?
“Now you see brother. You buried it along with your guilt. Burned your tradition as an effigy of the past. Now you are free to move into the next world. The one people like us will create. One creed. One blood. Making nature live again. Even if the rest must die. It is our birthright. Mother just couldn’t see.”
“You’re wrong,” I trembled.
“I am above wrong. I am the new God.”
The ground began to shake. Michal turned to the tent. I began to lose my balance as the tent rose into the air. Nylon tore as rips appeared in the fabric, splitting the tent open like a ripe fruit, revealing the seeds within. My friends levitated from the remains of the tent, forming a barrier between me and the goats.
“Let them go Michal!”
Cracks formed in the earth as the suspended hikers spun in the air. The goats looked at me, all of them standing like the leader, the council of my condemnation.
“Not until you admit the truth, brother,” the congregation bellowed in unison as the night wind picked up.
“The truth?!” I screamed over the howling air, noticing the knife in Eric’s back pocket as he hung in the breeze.
“The truth is that you’re right Michal! I did abandon who I was, and I did want to leave it behind here. I threw away my heritage and my family because I was afraid. I was afraid that if I accepted what I’d done, what I’d left undone, that it’d make me a monster. But I have to live with the truth. I killed you Michal. I took my own brother’s life. And I did it to save our parents lives, because there was something wrong with you, and I failed to do anything about it before. I have to live with it, and it won’t be easy. But like the Hopi, it’s part of me, who I am. And I won’t let my past cause me to forget that again. Not for mom and dad. Not for you. For me.”
The goats laughed. Behind them, the trees began to fracture, splintering into wood chips. Lightning stuck the sky. I almost thought I could hear war drums.
“I remember my legends too brother,” I screamed.
Rain began to pour, soaking the ground, the goats, and myself. This time I kept my footing.
“I don’t know who the new tribe will be. But when the earth is ravaged? It won’t be you.”
I charged forwards, towards the soaked firewood. Using it as a step, I jumped over it, grabbing the knife from the floating Eric’s back pocket. I hit the wet dirt and lunged towards the goat Michal. Rocks rose and flung themselves at my legs and back. I didn’t stop. Pulling back the blade, I reached the creature’s neck, and cut.
The blade flung through the smoke.
The goats were gone. I looked to my right. Our tent was still there. The sky was clear, and my clothes were dry. Eric’s knife was real though. I felt to the ground, and put my head in my hands, a small stream of tears welling. I’d not come to the canyon to resolve my guilt, I had come to bury it again, and do a better job this time. If I were to succumb to that, what happened all those years ago would have been for nothing.
I’d tried to convince myself that maybe part of it really was that I truly was as bad as they all said. That some part of me had hurt Michal out of jealousy, and a true malice somewhere in the dark of my mind. But I knew that wasn’t true.
If I couldn’t accept that, I would never be able to become more than what people believed me to be. I wasn’t the monster, he was. Yet the truth was, if I didn’t come to full terms with that, eventually I’d turn into one as well. I was just a child. Maybe I could have prevented it, but I didn’t. Nothing could change that. I could only change what I did from here. The guilt needed to be put behind me, permanently.
So, I left the monster in the canyon.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
In the morning, the four of us marched the rest of the way out. I told them nothing of the night before, as even I wasn’t sure how much of the experience had actually happened. It would be too hard to explain anyway. As we walked, I stayed mostly silent, and found myself reminiscing on the Hopi legends my mother had taught Michal and I about as children.
Many tribes tell stories of the Yee Naaldlooshii, or skin-walkers, including the Hopi. Many consider them the antithesis to the peaceful nature the culture is known for. Despite their popularity in media and online, most non-natives don’t know much about the legends, as they aren’t often shared with outsiders. As my family had been outsiders in a way of their own, my knowledge was also limited. I knew they were malevolent, users of witchcraft, and known for taking on the form of animals. As to whether the skin-walkers can become and animal, possess an animal, or some other profane thing, the stories aren’t always clear. But I most remember this one thing my mother had said.
To become a skin-walker, one must take a life. Usually someone close.
When we reached the top of the canyon ridge, seeing the 4Runner felt like seeing a miracle. I hadn’t truly realized how much I had missed air conditioning and leather seats. As we drove away from the park, the conversation became more jovial. The further we got from Keams, the more it felt like a fog was lifting from my mind.
Eventually I was joking and conversating with my friends again, unburdened by my dark cloud. It was getting to be close to 6PM, so we all agreed to stop at the next town for something to eat. Brock pointed out a Mexican place, and that sounded good enough to everyone in the party.
We pulled in just as the sky began to rotate into the pinkish hues of sunset. The place smelled great and had a nice atmosphere. It reminded me of a place mom and dad used to take us.
In short order we were seated at a corner booth. Our waitress was Native American. I didn’t ask her what tribe. I looked down at the table, which had little carvings near the edges of various animals, done in ornate tribal styles. Devin had a tiger, Brock a bear, Eric an eagle, and scanning my left, I noticed that in my corner was a goat. I stared into its wood-stained eyes, and they stared back at me. They felt… like nothing.
Eric brushed my shoulder, and I turned to see the waitress standing over me. She was ready to take my order. I told her I’d take the grilled chicken and rice. The native girl asked me what side I wanted with it. Pulling one of the discarded menus towards me, I scanned it briefly, then turned back to the waitress.
“Blue corn.”