2011-07-06T12:03:00.000-07:00

Des Montes Casita Sky
by antoinette nora claypoole
published in "Voices of New Mexico" anthology (2011)
a finalist in anthologies for 2011 New Mexico Book Award

The evening sky is striped. Not like a flag at the pentagon of a superpower. Striped like the way autumn sun takes aspen leaves delicately at first. There are vine lines which hold the essence of the tree scraping into the wind with high desert sun claiming it is the one to make these colors happen. Phew. This is the way life is near Taos Mountain. Life is a run on sentence with no desire to be punctuated.

Breath here is wet one as a moon relinquishes her cycles.

That is, when the balsamic moon comes it is Colonizers on the run. For darkness is not their forte. But today there is something more pressing than the politics of conquest and how it looks very much like the Great Inquisition. Once I told a Tewa man that white people killed their women the same way they massacred his people. He could not wrap himself around this. The weave was too familiar. That's how I explain it. Don't like to feel he was invested in being more oppressed than me.

But there is something more pressing I must write about. Can there BE anything more pressing? Yes. Landscape and the way people shape the day here in a Northern New Mexico town. Is what presses like rose inside journal forced to submit to pages she would rather forget. This is a story about what happened to the Pueblo Man and his new chick. How what happens to him affects all of us.

He was born seventh of eight. On the pueblo at the base of Taos Mountain. Everyone still says all the brothers look the same. Always did. Their father was not on any kind of grid. Never was. Pueblo Man's mother called him Walking Easy when he was little. But I don't know her language well enough to translate that into Tewa. Tewa is the Indian word for Taos. Taos is the Spanish word for Tewa. Which means Red Willow People in English. Sometimes words make ideas obsolete. There are lots of people in the mix here. Some say the prophecies made it that way. Others just wait for someone to give in and then a winner can be called. Walking Easy went to BIA school when he was little guy. His mother braided his hair each morning. He was the only son who found glory in this ritual. Or maybe it was tenderness he sought. I am telling these things the way I believe he wants them remembered. There are no journals to consult. No diaries locked in vaults.

Walking Easy was always the handsome one. The other brothers still talk about his. They are proud that he became a movie star. When he picks up women at the local cantina the first thing Walks Easy does is tell a story about his part in Moby Dick. He is proud to know that picking Herman Melville from a multiple choice question in high school may have just gotten him the role. The women from the cantina are always smitten by him. His stories, his looks, his knowledge of white books. While he picks up the drawl and texture of Texan women, his brothers are readying for ceremony at Blue Lake. For something like 40,000 years this ceremony has been done. In mid September when the weather is just beginning to breath ice into heathered memories of summer. The ceremony is an intense pack into the canyon, on Appaloosa , all supplies carried by the keepers of this way. But while the families prepare for this trek there are some who would rather not be carrying this deck. They hang out at the casino or even go into town to fool around. With white women.

But all of this may not seem important. When the world, the human beings, are struggling so right now. This story of Walks Easy may even feel like a Narcissus indulgence of insignificant consequence. Except that some people believe that what happens to one person happens to the entire human race. Not to say that there hasn't been a Taos mountain share of UFO sightings here. Yes Roswell is famous, but all of New Mexico plays a hand in those landing strips. So. What happens to one human happens to all of us. Probably even happens to the four leggeds, the wingeds and those beings who fall from the Sky. Who are truly known to visit when the Earth forgets to cry. So. Walks Easy story may explain why you have this pain. In your heart. Or why just when you feel your lover has jump started there is a backfire and the whole thing stalls.

Walks Easy went to town alot as he grew older. The movies star gigs took him to Los Angeles the first time. When he was 18. He didn't stay very long. The limousine kinda freaked him out he told me that still a little nervous 30 years later. So he jumped out of the limo and made his way back to the airport. The first night he was there. The film crew came to Taos to do the shoot. Or maybe it was that they went to Albuquerque. He has a sister there who let him sleep on her floor. While the whole thing went down. Yes. I forgot to mention that of the 8 brothers there was a sister. But she left the Pueblo when she was very young. Liked the city everyone guesses. Well Walks Easy didn't like LA but he now puts in his time with women from that town. Kinda like his penance or something. For putting the movies through so much that first time they gave him the moon and what he thought were the stars. Turns out Walks Easy is a hometown boy. He doesn't do ceremony. He digs the cantina on Friday nights. And well once he got into a fight when he was with the paratroopers and has a scar down his back from a stab everyone says shoulda killed him.

Walks Easy saves women. Like he believes Creator saved him. In that fight. He still walks lightly as he sweeps us into his Dodge Mini van and with the tape deck blaring does what he can to doctor our eyes. Doctoring us from what it is we believe we have no right to remember seeing. There is a healing in the whiskey on his breath and the way he helps us women forget about the scars. Where is this story going??? Sexual healing. A dance hall song. Long before so many young lover's time. Okay. He meets a school teacher, her best friend is in love with him, school teacher loves a drummer from a local band, but when she cannot find the drummer she goes for Walks Easy. Betrays her friend by taking the medicine from Pueblo man. Old story?? Well I guess. But for one thing. All the women he has loved are taken from him one by one, they move away to Los Angeles. A kinda weird twist. His heart is like red licorce.

The streets are dry tonight. It is nearly November. In Northern New Mexico. Alot of people live here now. The Pueblo is still the Pueblo. No Hilton condos there. Yet. Walks Easy's mother passed away last May. He wanders the town from bar to bar looking for her. When any of us mention her name he denies the frown, starts clowning around says she was never a schoolteacher. Never an actress or a writer. His mother braided his hair and cooked him stew. Sometimes made blue corn cakes. For special. Inside an envelope in his pocket he carries a valentine she gave him once. D.H. Lawrence wrote Sons and Lovers. But not in his ranch down the road. He wrote that before he came here. Walks Easy has a speaking part in the independent production of it to be filmed next year. His mothers' birthday is every day. White women generally don't know how to snake braid hair.

For all any of some townspeople care, love is a lost ritual. It is a drive-through espresso shot. A loves me now greeting card sent through the internet. Is a fax, no original quite necessary. Is a McDonald's apple pie. Two for 99. Is a Super Walmart oil change. 10 minutes no more.

Once I asked him if he wanted me to find him a whore. Walks Easy asked "Do they have those here in Taos?" See what I mean. All of us live inside these lines. If Walks Easy starts using a cane, the rest of us will limp. But he is no pimp. There is love inside these lines. He has been my husband, lover, son and father ever since I can remember. No kidding.

The wind is wailing up the mesa. The sage brush is not ever quite for kindling. There is a fire in the truth of all the lies we promise never to tell anyone. I run into one of his women. As I write this. She tells me; "The archway is too short for him. He frowns at sports on the television set. I would bet he can get any white woman he wants."

At any bar in town he will ask me to forgive him. For sitting by doors too short for his long hair to vine. He was never really mine. But I helped him once. Hold up a viga. On the Rio Grande. Gorge bridge. On the highway berm. Against the van. Slow dancing out on highway 64. Drunk on Bruce Springsteen stretched into each other like that bridge to no where. The cd skips. As I write this the cantina is all empty. But for stories the dance floor tells I am not blonde. He is not blonde. There is mahogany in the breath of any afternoon storm at any intersection he could be the reflection of a self he has resurrected a libido thought lost. Felt tossed into a droughted fountain. He is the mountain. I will climb. To a sky kissing me goodnight. For some reason the body rose right. Then left. Through the portal of my soul his mouth was never a swamp. Cooler. There are trees who died to house the dry and wet of all of this. How sweet it is I mean this to be loved by you.

"tobacco man hits"

butterfly writings by antoinette