THIEVES

            Aliksa’i.

            This is the way Hopi Coyote stories always begin, but I have no idea what it means. It may even be untranslatable.

            The fellow who told me this also explained that the Hopi think of Coyote as a particularly stupid person. Most other American Indian tribes hold Coyote – or his alter-egos Fox and Raven – to be a hero, a demigod almost: a Trickster who can pull some pretty dumb stunts at times, but who usually outwits everyone in the end. Maybe the Hopi developed this irreverence because they’re farmers, not hunters, and Coyote isn’t so much a competitor as a nuisance, someone who’s always tipping their garbage cans over, so to speak.

            To the Hopi, Coyote is nothing but grade-A, number one, flat-out stupid. Since Coyote stories are cautionary tales, I suppose there’s no reason not to go to the extreme. If you want to teach kids what it means to be human, how not to be a fool is as good a lesson as how to be a hero. Maybe better. Even if heroes don’t wind up getting themselves killed, they usually don’t get the crops taken care of either.

            Somehow, Eddie Tlayumptewa never learned that lesson. Eddie had to go and try to be a hero.

      Eddie and I met before he became a celebrity. In fact, it was our chance meeting – which he planned so well – that lifted him to the ranks of martyrdom. I was the one he let catch him pilfering the museum.

*

            The night I caught Eddie really was a dark and stormy night C October 31 to be exact -- the kind of Halloween you read about in novels or see in Hitchcock movies, but don’t believe because it’s just too much of a coincidence. Trees whipped in the wind; rain pelted the room and slashed at the glass doors. That in itself was unusual C stormy nights in Tucson are rare. During the monsoon season, thunderstorms often rampage through the valley in the afternoons, but hardly ever at night; and anyway, by October, things have pretty much calmed down.

            Not this night, though. Thunder and lightning and rain and hail, it was a regular Donnerswetter kind of night, as my grandmama would have said.

            Working as a museum guard is actually a pretty light-weight kind of job. I have buddies who are security for Hughes and Burr-Brown and the airport; now those guys work for a living. Most of the time I feel like I need to justify my pay by playing janitor, cleaning up after the crowds have gone. Heck, I even pick up a broom and sweep some nights when I don’t have a good book.

            But even if my job isn’t that heavy duty, I still take it seriously. That night, it wasn’t anything I heard that made me put my book down, and start poking around with my flashlight. It was more a feeling, like someone had left open a window, and the air had a freshness to it that it wasn’t supposed to have.

            My wife Sheila likes watching monster movies all the time. She’ll scrunch up against me till the movie is over, then make me leave the lights on all night. Beats me why she does that to herself. Me, on the other hand, monster movies make braver. Ever since I was a kid, they’ve shown me that something’s lurking out there, and whatever it is, I’ve got to be tougher than it is, or it’s going to rip me to pieces and strew my body parts all over.

            So, anyhow, I didn’t hear anything, but I knew that something wasn’t right, so off I went to see what I could find. Not so much a “search and destroy” as a “search and satisfy my curiosity.”

            The museum is run by the University, and its glass showcases are full of pottery and clothes and beaver pelts and pieces of petrified trees, and guns and knives and bows and arrows, and the hides of animals nobody has seen since the last ice age. During the day when school kids are trooping through, hollering and  laughing, and teachers are whispering hoarsely for them to use their inside voices, that’s when the exhibits are solid and real and unable to move, but at night when the place is empty, ground-sloth dung, and Maricopa mortars and pestles, and mounted tarantulas, and stuffed eagles all weave and bob in the wavering light and generate a silence that swallows up noise and gives your footsteps a floating quality, like you were in outer space with no gravity or sound waves and you were walking on a beam of light.

            I slunk around the display area lining the walls on the first floor, the exhibits of Indian tribes like the Apache and O’odham and Navaho lurking in their showcases on the east wall. In the south wall, the theater alcove where the docents show movies and slides was empty; beyond that the wide stairs led up to the mezzanine that runs all around the room; and on the other side of the stairs, the recess that holds the diorama of an Arizona water hold 10,000 years ago: trees and wooly mammoths and camels, and a jaguar stalking deer, and one lone human being crouched behind some scraggily creosote bushes in the corner.

            All of these areas were empty and quiet, but I still had the feeling I wasn’t alone. Maybe it was a sound of breathing that was just below my threshold of awareness; maybe it was a movement of air that should have been still; maybe I could feel the heat of another body in the building with me. Who knows? Almost crouching, I moved on.

            Along the west wall stretched a life-size display showing how one Stone Age family had furnished a natural cave so that it was a fairly comfortable home. The man of the house was putting the finishing touches on an adobe storage locker; the woman tended the fireplace; and around the room, basins had been hollowed into the rock itself to catch water dripping from the ceiling. But nothing showed any signs of having been disturbed. And the door to the restoration room was still locked, so I turned my attention to the Hopi kachinas.     

            The stone-like, papier-mâché walls of the Hopi display sprawled over the central space of the first floor like a maze. Above its arched entry, the legend “Hopi Kachinas/Hopi Dances -- Spirits and Powers” stood in bold relief. Inside the maze, insets and nooks and shelves niched the walls and held examples of Hopi fetishes with hand-lettered placards explaining the histories and uses of the various pieces. Reproductions of paintings four hundred years old of kachinas, and reprints of turn-of-the-century photographs of groups of sullen-faced Indians lined the walls with the ubiquitous placards posted next to each.

            I had already been through the display enough times to know the layout by heart. It began with older kachinas, blockish, worn, and dispirited-looking. Behind their protective glass, the lumpish dolls seemed to glow dully, their once-blazing colors reduced by time to pastels. As the display wound its way on, it more or less traced the kachina’s evolution into modern carvings, more articulated and graceful in their poses.

            In a snap of intuition, I suddenly knew there was someone in the center of the maze. I could feel an alien heartbeat.

            I turned my light off and waited until my eyes had become used to the dimness, then eased forward. A few displays on the mezzanine were lit and provided enough glow for me to maneuver without bumping into anything. Through the rain-smeared glass of the front doors, sudden, jagged flashes of light showed that the storm outside was thundering on.

            At the archway to the central display area, I hesitated; someone was just around the corner -- I felt him as surely as you can feel the dampness in a cellar. One deep breath I took, then stepped boldly through the entrance and snapped on my light and said, “Okay, hold it right there.”

            It wouldn’t have surprised me if something extraterrestrial had been luring there with eye-stalks bobbing and tentacles clutching ray guns. The fact that it was only a man, though, didn’t disappoint me in the least. I didn’t really want to have any of those kinds of stories to tell Sheila.

            A short, dark man, he raised his hands slowly, rather languidly. “Okay. I give up,” he said unhurried and unexcited. The expression on his face, like his voice, was grave and clam, his gestures slow and moderate. Around thirty years old, he stood about five feet three or four inches in height, was muscular and stocky, with a wide face, slightly slanting eyes, and light brown skin. His thick black hair was cut in short bangs straight down over his forehead but long on the nape of his neck where it was gathered up in a heavy knot. Around his forehead was bound a brightly-colored band of cloth. His pants were the color of sand, his loose shirt gauzy and off-white. His white tennis shoes fairly glowed. As I noted these things for possible future use (in case I had to testify in court), I wondered if they weren’t odd clothes for a burglar to wear.

            He stood next to a special case which housed an exhibit of several of the oldest kachina dolls. In the glass a circular hole as big and as neat as a dinner plate had been cut; in his right hand was a glass cutter; and in his left was a kachina I recognized from having read all the placards so many times: Mumwar, the Great Horned Owl.

            “Who are you?” I asked in a voice heavy with authority, calculated to awe and humble. “What do you think you’re doing?”

            “My name is Eddie Tlayumptewa, and I’m stealing kachinas.” He spoke with his clear voice, poised and well-balanced, obviously not at all impressed with my uniform. With the back of the hand which held Mumwar, he rubbed the bridge of his hooked nose as he explained, “Actually, since I’m Hopi and these are Hopi kachinas, I’m not really stealing them. I’m just returning them to their rightful owners.”

            The fact that he used the plural made me wonder if others were in the museum, and I glanced around, but the feeling that had led me to Eddie had gone, and I was sure no one else prowled the building. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “The museum is the rightful owner.”

            He shrugged and looked down at the figure in his hand.

            “Really,” I said, as if trying to convince him that he had simply made a mistake. “We bought all these pieces from people who wanted to sell them to us. We didn’t steal them.”

            He shook his head. “No,” he agreed, “you didn’t steal them as I was trying to do. You stole them so subtly no one realized that was what you were doing.” He lowered his hands back to his side again.     

            I stood there nonplused, staring at him. “What do you mean?” I asked, falling into his trap.

            The corners of his mouth quirked up as he said, “You made us think that you bartered something of value for them.”

            “We didn’t barter for them,” I said without considering what I was saying. “We bought them.”

            “Exactly. You paid us with cash for them. You paid us with your money for them. Something that has value only because you say it does.”

            I started to ask him what he was talking about, but decided that was exactly what he wanted: to draw me into a philosophical debate about obscure issues of who could really own anything and the real nature of money. So I said, “Come on to the office.”

            He held out the kachina toward me. “Want this?”

            “Yeah.” I took it carefully, holding it so as not go confuse my fingerprints with his. The figure felt warm and heavy. It was little more than a rough-hewn block of wood with a few dabs of fading paint, and I thought it was one of the crudest carvings I had ever seen, but Eddie stared at it as if its beauty transcended words.

            Still not moving, he said with a sigh, “Do you want to handcuff me?”

            “No. If you had thought you could get away, you’d have tried before now.”

*

            In the office of the museum, I had him sit down, and I stood leaning against the desk as I phoned the city police. After I told the woman who answered that I had a suspect for them to pick up, she assured me a squad car would be by in a few minutes.

            Lightning flashed right outside the window and was immediately followed by a blast of thunder that shook the building; the lights flickered and went out; the phone squawked like a parrot, then went dead. I dropped the receiver and grabbed for the flashlight I had left on the desk, expected any moment to be whacked upside the head with whatever blunt instrument the Indian could grab, and to be left sprawling with my brains dashed out. Sheila I could imagine crying at the funeral, sobbing into her handkerchief that she had told me and told me to be careful.

            Nothing happened, though, in the what seemed like hours it took me to fumble with the flashlight and get it switched on. The spear of light was a shock in the dark of the windowless room. The first thing it lit up was an Apache gaan headdress hanging on the wall. I swung the beam around the room, figuring that I would never be able to catch the Indian now if he had bolted, but he still sat in the chair, looking as surprised as I was.     

            He scrunched his eyes shut, and I lowered the light till it only illuminated him from the neck down. I wanted to ask why he hadn’t tried to get away, but instead, I just said, “Wow.” To have given him the chance to explain would only have given him the opportunity to parade his moral superiority again, and I felt

confused enough as it was.

            I leaned back against the desk, keeping the light on the lap of the prisoner. “Well,” I said. “We won’t have to wait long.” I expected -- I needed -- to hear a siren any second, but the silence only grew deeper. Outside, rain pelted the roof as the wind slid around eaves and corners. Inside, all the little noises that skitter through any building at night, in the dark, in a storm, rustled and creaked. I concentrated on Eddie.

            Finally, I had to ask; curiosity allowed me to keep quiet no longer. “I don’t understand,” I admitted. “What were you doing in here tonight? You obviously weren’t stealing the kachinas. If you got in without me knowing, you could have gotten back out the same way. I only found you because you let me. What did you think you were doing?”

            The little man looked at the palms of his hands.

            “Come on,” I coaxed. “Say something.” It occurred to me that I might be treading on shaky legal ground by not telling him that he had the right to remain silent until he had a lawyer present, but my curiosity was too great. I couldn’t understand what he had hoped to gain, and I wanted to know. I could feel something huge and stupendous crouching behind his actions.     

            The lines in his face etched deeper as he smiled. He licked his lips as if he were going to say something, but then he just sat there, grinning.

            I thought he was being quiet because my authority intimidated him. This, after he had shown such unconcern earlier. But what do you expect? I’m a security guard, not a psychoanalyst.

            On top of the desk, I balanced the flashlight on its end so that it pointed up toward the low ceiling where the light splashed back down and covered us both in a dim glow, like being underwater; it freed my hands and put us on a more equal footing. I pulled up another chair, sat down, crossed my arms, and prepared to outwait him.     

            It was as if he had been waiting for an audience, someone to listen to him. After only a short pause, he said, “I come from the village of Shogopovi on Second Mesa where I am a kachina dancer. All Hopi are dancers, but only men dance as the kachina – spirits who bring rain from the other side of the world. Massau’u, the Great Spirit, ordained that the Hopi should live in the desert, because it keeps us pure enough to guard the world. Rain is important to us like nothing else. Our lives depend on what corn we manage to grow; the corn depends on rain; and the rain depends on the kachina. In February, the kachina return to us from the San Francisco Mountains during the Powamu celebration. When we dance as kachina, we are kachina. The spirit I become is Mumwar, the Great Horned Owl, a role that came down to me from my mother’s brother. As Mumwar, it’s my part to spy on the clown kachina.”

            When he stopped speaking, the night filled up with the sounded of thunder and rain. He wet his lips, a nervous gesture I figured, watching him struggle to find whichever words should come out next.

            “I prayed about what to do,” he said eventually. “Not like Christians pray to their god, or even Moslems to theirs, I suppose. More like the Chinese who pray to the gods that their ancestors have become. That’s the idea behind Hopi religion; after we die, we have the chance to become kachina ourselves. Anyway, I prayed that I would know what to do, how I should act as a true guardian of my people. I sat for days in the kiva, praying, fasting, waiting, and finally I was rewarded.

            “It wasn’t a vision. It wasn’t voices or anything like that. I just suddenly knew what I had to do. Part of it was this. Getting back that kachina. The kachina of my spirit which we let Americans take from us.”

            The eerie lighting made him seem taller than I knew he really was, taller and somehow more solid, more massive. More real. His eyes were in shadow, and they sparkled like tiny fires.

            “So why did you give it up so easily when I stumbled on you?” I asked.     

            He shook his head sadly. “It wasn’t easy,” he said without looking at me. “Easy to give it up, I mean. To let go of it when I had it in my hand. But I knew I had to. That was part of the plan. And you didn’t stumble on me. You were led.”

            My scalp prickled. How did he know how I had found him? “What plan?” I asked to cover my confusion. “Whose plan?”

            He looked over at the Apache mask. “Our plan,” he said. “Our plan to teach you and your people a lesson.”

            It was such a presumptuous thing to say, and that he would say something so bully-like in such a low voice made me wonder if I had heard him right. Or at least if I had understood him. “Several years ago,” he said, “just after World War II, the Hopi elders decided that various prophecies had been fulfilled and so were certain that the end of the world was at hand. Some of the Hopi wanted the prophecies published; some didn’t. Unlike Westerners, we believe any prophecy can be avoided, and that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to avoid the end of the world. And so the prophecies were given out. We even addressed the United Nations. My father was one of those who stood up before the representatives of all the countries and said that the world teetered on the brink.     

            “There was a polite ceremony, but nothing really happened. A few noticed, but when you think about how important what we had to say was, not that many people paid any attention. We broke customs and traditions that were older than your people on our land, and no one really noticed. Some did, but most either ignored us or never even heard us. We wanted to help, but you wouldn’t listen.

            “So we came up with this one last scheme. This one final attempt to get you to listen. If we couldn’t get your attention by working from the top down, we would work from the bottom up. We would do it in a more subtle way; we would go gently, tread softly. If we worked insidiously instead of blatantly, maybe we could get your attention better. My family and I prayed about it and sought advice from others and it was decided that this might be a good way -- the only way -- to get you people to listen finally. You seem to understand nothing but violence, so we would use violence to get you to understand.”

            “Violence?” I said. “You call what you did ‘violence’? Breaking and entering can be violent, all right, but you did it so quietly nobody would hardly have noticed you at all. And stealing one kachina isn’t violent.”

            He shook his head. “Maybe not for you people, but for us, stealing is a breach of the very way we live. It is almost unthinkable. We are not doing violence to you, but to ourselves.”

            I had no idea what to say to that.     

            He sat looking at his hands lying so heavy in his lap. “About one thing the elders and I disagree, though. They hold that the end of the world is coming. It may be a sudden thing, they say, with fire and death and the shaking of the earth, with a gourd of ashes falling from the sky, but I think they are wrong. The end of the world has already started; it started as quietly as day changing to night, and we didn’t really notice it. The end of the world came like a thief in the night, and it was our fault for not recognizing it. It didn’t begin a few decades ago with the atomic bomb, but five hundred years ago with three boatloads of men.”

            We sat together in the quiet of the dark office, listening to each other breathe.

            “But we have a plan,” he assured me after a few minutes. “When your police come, they will take me away. There will be a hearing. If I refuse to plead guilty, there will be a trial, and

during the trial there will be reporters, and people will listen to what the reporters say, and the reporters say will be what I say, and what I say will be to tell how you people -- the Spanish and the Mexicans and the Americans -- have all stolen so much of our culture and how we have not fought it because we are the Peaceful Ones -- the Hopituh, and then I will say that this world is out of balance – Koyaanisqatsi – and that if we don’t set it right ourselves, the consequences will be terrible, and maybe this time, after so many times, we will be heard.” He took a breath and sat looking at me in the thundering dark.     

            From my own Christian background, visions of Apocalypse pounded through the booming of thunder. Was that what it was, I thought, just thunder? There seemed to be something about it that was almost alive, aware, something that wanted to get in from the night.

            With a start, I realized that it wasn’t just thunder; someone was banging on the front door. I jumped up and hurried into the foyer. Bright cones of light were flashing outside the glass doors, falling through the panes to dash themselves in circles on the floor. Dark figures moved about on the other side, illuminated by red and blue lights flaring rhythmically behind them. It was a scene from Dante’s Inferno.

            I unlocked the doors and let the officers in. There were only two of them: a burly man who towered over me and a short, Hispanic woman, sinewy and tough as a bantam. The beams of their flashlights darted around the museum.

            “Where?” the woman asked curtly.

            In the office, Eddie stood facing the doorway, his hands propped on either side of him as he leaned casually against the desk. “Good evening, officers,” he said pleasantly.     

            The woman handcuffed him and took him by the arm, and the man grabbed his other arm, and they hustled him out the door and through the foyer and out the glass doors. I watched as they hurried him away through the rain; the thunder and lightning had stopped and only a steady drizzle was left. He seemed so small a figure between the two of them. I watched as they lugged him to the squad car with its dazzling lights, and tossed him inside, and roared away into the darkness.

*

            Later, Eddie and I both made statements; he seemed anxious to cooperate with the investigation and was extremely helpful, but like he had told me, he refused to plead guilty at the preliminary hearing. With the courts as jammed as they were, it took several months for the case to come to trial, and Eddie made the most of his time. He was released on his own recognizance, of course, and he made sure that there were lots of newspaper articles about him, and he did interviews for the radio and TV, some as far away as Santa Fe, New Mexico. It seemed that everywhere I looked, I saw his broad face, at first beaming a bright smile, but as time wore on, he seemed to be stretched thinner and thinner, and lines began to creep around the ends of his mouth and around his dark eyes, and it looked like gravity pulled more heavily on his skin and bones and muscles. It seemed to me that he began to sag.     

            I found out where he lived, and went by to see him. Sheila came with me, but as I made more and more visits to talk with him, she began to lose interest and stopped coming. When I showed her pictures of the kachina he had in his hand when I first saw him, she said she didn’t understand why someone would make so much fuss over something so ugly.

            In the paper and on TV, Eddie was dynamic and articulate, with his long, black bangs and hair framing his round face that looked as harmless as a beach ball. It always surprised me how cheerful he was; all the Indians I had ever met were dour, sullen, and quiet. Eddie, though, was thoughtful and well-spoken, and no one could figure out why he had done what he had done. No one could guess what his motives could possibly be.

            When the trial started, though, they all found out.

*

            One of the columnists for the local morning paper, a Communist-hunting conservative, blasted Eddie as an egotistic, manipulating, racist, a view I’d never argue with because, even as soft-spoken as he was, that’s what he is. It’s just sometimes being a racist isn’t as bad as the label sounds. Eddie’s concern for his tribesmen had always been his prime motive. Everything Eddie did, he did for his people. Of course, Hitler and Caesar would have said the same thing about themselves, but that’s too trite an argument to push.

            My own personal theory is that Eddie is doing all this for nothing. He’s a flash in the pan; pretty soon white people won’t even remember who he was, and the reason is this: the one thing that he and his Peaceful People didn’t take into account when they started this campaign is the fact that Anglos just don’t care about the end of the world. The present is so much more important to them than the future ever will be that they won’t look past their next paycheck.

            The Hopis have had thousands of years of cultural stability, and so far they’ve managed to hang tough in the face of our cannibalistic society, but just you watch. One of these days, we’ll gobble up even them. And then who’ll be left for our terrible zeal? How far off will our own end be?

            The night of the first day of Eddie’s trial, I strolled through the exhibit, looking at the kachinas again. Some of them were smooth as if they had been die-cut, and were painted gaudy acrylic colors that would have pleased any child. Others were rough and full of splinters and their garish paint had long ago faded to a mere tint. But in the darkness and shadows of the museum, the essence of their meaning began to change for me, and I began to look at them as symbols of magic and hope rather than nothing but chunks of wood, and I began to understand how someone who loved them, someone who prayed to them, could see a beauty that was the essence of the world.

*

            Pay yuk polo, the Hopi say at the end of a Coyote story. “And here the story ends.” But Coyote stories never really end; there’s always another one, always another lesson to be learned. That’s what makes Coyote such a hopeful character; no matter what happens, he always gets another chance.

* * *