Those Who Watch

Sometimes Charley got the best grades in the school. Sometimes he got the worst. It all depended on how interested he cared to be, for the subjects were all easy. He could read, he could write, he could do arithmetic and more. He had taught himself algebra out of a book, because with algebra you could figure out how things were related to each other. He had looked at geometry, a little. He knew stars. He knew how rockets worked. A woman who taught at the school thought he ought to become a carpenter in the pueblo. Charley had other ideas. There was one teacher, a pretty good one, Mr Jamieson; he had said Charley ought to go on to the high school the year after next when he was old enough. At the high school in Albuquerque there was no separation of Indians from the others. If you could learn, you were allowed to learn, no matter if your hair was black and shiny or not. But Charley knew what would happen when he asked his parents about the high school. They would tell him to be smart, to learn how to be a carpenter like the woman said. Marty Moquino had gone to the high school, they would tell him, and what good had that ever been to him? He had learned how to smoke there, how to drink liquor, how to fool around with girls. Did he need the high school for that? They would not let him go, Charley knew, and that meant he would probably have to run away from home.

By one in the afternoon he was back at San Miguel after his empty morning at school. In the afternoon he had different jobs, depending on the time of the year. Spring was planting time, of course. All children, all women worked in the fields. In the summer the tourists came. Charley was supposed to stand around and look helpful and let them take his picture and hope that they’d toss him a quarter. In the fall the crops were harvested. In the winter came the holy rituals, begi

The Fire Society dance was still a few days away. Charley made a pretense of working half the afternoon. Meanwhile, he quietly collected a little stack of cold tortillas, wrapping them in an embroidered cloth and taking care that no one saw what he was doing. When the early nightfall began to descend, he hid the tortillas by the old abandoned kiva on the far side of the village, where nobody went because there were supposed to be evil spirits there. He filled a plastic canteen with clear water from the spring and hid it beside the tortillas. Then he waited for darkness. He played with his dog and had a fight with his sister Lupe and studied his library book about the stars. He watched the priest trying to round up a few parishioners for evening prayer. He saw Marty Moquino grab Rosita and take her behind the gift shop and put his hand under her skirt. He had a quick, unsatisfying di

It was night at last.

Everyone was back at work. The important men of the pueblo were giving orders: the cacique, the lifetime chief, stood by the ladder to the kiza, talking to a priest of the Fire Society, while Jesus Aguilar, the newly elected governor of the village, strutted around giving everyone orders. This was a good time to slip away to Mirtin. Casually, Charley sauntered down to the end of the street of square two-story adobe buildings on which he lived, looked in every direction, ducked into the old kiva to pick up the tortillas and the canteen, and ran off into the scrubby underbrush that bordered the pueblo.

He moved in swift, loping strides. He pictured himself as a grown man, ru

Feeling a second wind, he began to run again. Now he moved effortlessly, threading a path between the clumps of sagebrush and yucca, scrambling down the side of the first arroyo and up the other side, streaking across the wide plain until he came to the second arroyo, the big one, with the cliff on the far side and the man from the stars lying in the cave in the cliff. Charley paused on the brink of the deep gully.

He looked up. The night was moonless again; new moon wasn’t due until the night of the Fire Society dance. The stars were extraordinarily bright and sharp. Charley found Orion at once, and his eyes fastened on the star at the eastern end of the belt. He didn’t know its name, though he had searched in his book for it, but it seemed the most beautiful star he had ever seen. A tremor of awe shivered down his back. He thought of big planets going around that star, strange cities, creatures that were not men buzzing around in jets and rockets. He tried to imagine what the cities of that other world might look like, and then he sensed the irony of his thought and his nose wrinkled in bitter amusement. Why look to the stars? What did he know of the cities of his own world? Could he imagine Los Angeles and Chicago and New York, let alone Mirtin’s city? He had never been anywhere at all.

In sudden furious energy he raced into the arroyo and up its far side, and across the little plateau to the cliff. He entered the cave. It was no more than a dozen feet high and perhaps twenty feet deep. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he saw Mirtin lying where he had left him, on his back, arms and legs carefully outspread. The star-man did not move. His eyes were open, and they glistened in the faint starlight that penetrated the cave.

“Mirtin? You all right, Mirtin? You didn’t die?”

“Hello, Charley.”

Limp with relief, Charley knelt beside the injured being. “I brought you food, water. How you feeling, anyway? I came soon as I could get away.”

“I’m much better. I feel the bone healing. I may be strong again sooner than I thought.”

“Here. Here. I got tortillas for you. They’re cold, but they’re good.”

“The water first.”

“Sure,” said Charley. “Sorry.” He unscrewed the top of the canteen and put it to Mirtin’s lips. Water trickled slowly into the star-man’s mouth. When Charley thought Mirtin had had enough, he took the canteen away, but Mirtin asked for more. Charley watched in surprise as he drained the entire canteen. How much he drank! How fast!

“Now the tortillas?”