Americana

"Do we sleep here tonight?" Sullivan said.

"We may as well get used to it," I said.

"We don't have to. Mildred left me the keys to her house. We'll be less crowded there. She's always asking me to move in with her but I tell her the garage is magical. It's full of emanations. I can't write anywhere but here. When do you have to be in Arizona?"

"Three weeks from yesterday. If all goes well, the crew will have everything set up by the time I get there. I hope you'll all decide to hang around while we're shooting. I don't know whether I'll be able to drive back with you. Most likely I'll have to fly. Pike, you and Sully can pick up my car here and take it back for me."

"My license expired eighteen years ago," Pike said.

We got our bags from the car and walked over to Brand's aunt's house. It was a fine old house, the place where everyone's grandmother lives in television commercials, full of other people's memories and yet warmed by a mood of love and simplicity that was universal. Starched lean men and little girls with straight blond hair looked darkly from photographs hung in the hallway. The living room was all chintz and needlepoint and bible kindness, wallpapered with faded yellow roses and soaked in an odor of old bodies rocking toward sleep. Brand took Sullivan and Pike upstairs and I wandered through the kitchen and pantry, feeling I had come to the heart of something, to the secret of the terror of small towns on Sunday, the eucharistic silence of coffee and buns after the long walk back from church. How long had it been since I had stood in a pantry at midnight, the dark shelves lined with cookie jars, jam and spices? Taste and smell can safecrack memory in the shadow of an instant, and in that pantry, nibbling dry cookies with the compulsive fervor of a penitent seeking the message of his past, I returned to a tight hot room in another town, the idle perfume of a summer.

I turned off the lights and went upstairs. Brand and Pike were sharing one of the bedrooms. They sat on their beds, the career soldier and the recruit, untying shoelaces, yawning, yanking T-shirts over their heads. Brand told me the other bedroom was at the far end of the hall and as I left them I heard Pike begin his account of the wanton slaughter of the buffalo in the eighteen sixties and seventies, herds three miles long and two miles wide decimated by Sunday huntsmen firing from trains. Sullivan was already in bed, reading her Yeats. The room obviously had not been used for a while and it was bare except for the lamp, the small table on which it stood, one chair, Sullivan's bed, and the cot where I would be sleeping. The roof sloped down over this part of the house and my cot was at the shallow end of the room. Sullivan turned off the light and I undressed, standing naked for a few seconds next to the cot, wondering whether she could see me. It felt wonderful to be sleeping in the same room as Sullivan. I slipped between the cold sheets. The ceiling angled down right over me and I raised my arm and touched it with my fingertips. All children, I thought, should be permitted to sleep in such a room; the child loves nooks and odd angles and is frightened into nightmare by equidistance, by parallel planes which conceal nothing.

"Pike is telling about the bison."

"His saddest tale," she said.

"We'll be out there soon."

"David on the way to Oz."

"I wonder if there are any Arapahoes still left. Or Chiricahuas. My favorite tribe. The Chiricahua Apaches. Burt Lancaster with that paisley headband."

"Will you get your blizzard?"

"I guess not. It'll be April soon."

"Desert flowers will be blooming."

"Did you ever notice? Darkness seems to make people speak in short sentences."

"Yes," she said. "And when the lights come on, we open up and ramble and say absolutely nothing. But in bed in the dark we're urged on by the monkey waiting in our sleep."

"What monkey?"

"We become documentary. We become newsreels telling what we think is the truth. Our listener is really no more than a fragment of the dark. The true audience is darkness itself. We unwrap our lives to it, trying to appease the monkey."

"What monkey?" I said.

"The Vie

"Which is?"

"The single unending sentence."

"Sleep and dream."

"Yes."

"Tell me a story," I said.

"What kind?"

"About the great golden West and the Indians and the big outdoor soul of America."

"Do I have to speak in short sentences?"

"No."

"I have just the thing," she said. "It's about a wise old holy man of the Oglala Sioux and what he said to me once on a moonlit night."

"Is this for real or are you going to make it up as you go along?"

"This is for real," Sullivan said.

"Tell me then."

"He was a hundred years old and he looked like the stump of an oak tree. As a boy he had fought at the Little Bighorn with Crazy Horse. Even then he had disliked bloodshed and he spent most of the years of his adulthood fasting and praying. Some time ago, through the good offices of an anthropologist who had once been a friend of my father, I was permitted to visit Black Knife in his shack in the hills of South Dakota. I asked him a few polite questions which he chose to ignore, displaying at the very outset a splendid contempt for the amenities. He puffed on an ugly old corncob pipe. I think it must have been filled with mud and wet leaves. Then I asked him if things had changed much since he was a boy. He said that was the most intelligent question anyone had ever asked him. Things had changed hardly at all. Only materials had changed, technologies; we were still the same nation of ascetics, efficiency experts, haters of waste. We have been redesigning our landscape all these years to cut out u

"He said this to you, this old Sioux mystic?" "He kept well abreast of things with newspapers and periodicals."

"Go on."

"What we really want to do, he said, deep in the secret recesses of our heart, all of us, is to destroy the forests, white saltbox houses, covered bridges, brownstones, azalea gardens, big red barns, colonial i