Sequoyah, Part Two, a novel

PART TWO – SEQUOYAH

Chapter Fifteen

Buff Speaking June 7, 1978

After two days hitching across deserts and mountains to La Plata, I walked up the steep hill to Mountain State University where I had been Buffington Journeycake PhD, Introduction to Anthropology. I had hoped for an advanced class as soon as I could get enough students to sign up.

I had dropped out of teaching after I got just too busy with the business of the Circle. Something very important had come out of the Circle and I wanted to be part of it. So I quit teaching after 1973.

The spring before the Circle I had gone to Santo Toribio Pueblo like my old professor Taze had done before me. I took Uncle Denny fishing at a nearby lake and we talked corn crop until the stars came up. I told him about the kinds of corn the Cherokees raised in their slash-and-burn fields on the hillsides on my state Sequoyah. He showed me the blue corn of his people. We caught no fish.

Corn talk turned into talk of the strangeness of everyday doings in the little rural Indian communities of Sequoyah – places like Gourd Holler and Chicken Town. Uncle Denny told me the very similar and equally strange gossip of Santo Toribio. Heck, how could any of this stuff go into a scholarly paper for the American Anthropological Association?

In the end I had mentioned the Circle. Uncle Denny’s eyes lit up for a second in the campfire glow. He told his vision of a great assembly. Then we talked corn a little more and we went to sleep under the sky in our blankets.

Manny Zamora was the first one who had told me about the circle as we sat around in his office in the drama building at Mountain State University.

     As soon as I got back from Santo Toribio, I told Manny, “Uncle Denny really wants to go to the Circle. Let’s make sure that Louie sends him a formal invite.”

Manny knows something about Pueblo culture, so he was amazed that Uncle Denny took us into the kiva. I wasn’t so surprised by that. I knew it was the only way that Uncle Denny could show all his people how seriously he took us – and the Circle. But that he let the women in – that made it extra-special.

I was the one who went to Santo Toribio in the summer of 1972 to take Uncle Denny to the Circle in Colorado. We had an endless, bumpy ride in Rural Bus service vehicles to a crossroad near Fred Zeller’s farm. Then I stuck out a thumb to get a ride for me and this nearly blind old man who smiled like this journey was the most ordinary thing in the world for him.

We ended up in the back of a pickup with five young people. I unrolled my sleeping bag and wrapped it around me and Uncle Denny to protect us from the bitter wind as the pickup drove along.

When we got to Fred’s log cabin, Fred seemed to know right away that Uncle Denny was an important person. Fred found sleeping space for Uncle Denny in the warmest room and heated up some venison hash on his wood stove for the old man. And he provided the pony for Uncle Denny to ride the day we went in our thousands with Louie in front and the National Guard backed down. Then we walked and Uncle Denny rode his pony twelve miles to Flat Mountain Valley.

Now in 1978 I went to Manny Zamora’s office to see my oldest friend at the college.
     In this year of 1978 we were getting ready to make the Circle the seventh time.
Manny had kept on teaching at the college when I had quit. His office door was open, but he was standing in a large studio telling a group of students how to perform a particular scene. As usual, his hands, his voice and his hair were all waving in the air, wildly excited. When he saw me, he made a leap that would have looked good in the Olympics and I had his long, skinny

arms around me. Then just as rapidly, he said, “Excuse me a second,” leaped back to his students, finished explaining the scene and said goodbye to them. As they left, he strode towards me and said, “OK, now let’s talk.”

We went into his office. While quickly drawing two paper cupfuls of coffee from his percolator and handing one to me, Manny said, “Say, have you seen Louie’s new book? Here’s my copy.”

He put the small book into one of my hands. My other hand put my coffee cup down on Manny’s desk and I sat down to look over Tales of the Circle by Louie McGowan.
The book was full of the same kind of stories that Louie told so well around a campfire. But without his voice and his gestures and the light of his eyes, the stories didn’t go over in print. Louie wrote of many strange and funny incidents – but Louie himself, the genius who had led us all, was there only in name. He left himself just as much of a mystery as before. There were so many things that he would know best about how the movement of the Circle developed that he did not tell. Louie mentioned me once in his book, but he never mentioned his ex-wife Rivka. I shook my head.

“Hey Manny,” I said, looking up from the book at him, “I know I’ve been out of anthropology for a while. But I thought I’d use some of my old training to write a book about the Circle – to explain why everything happened. At first I thought I’d just go to Zarahemla and interview Louie. Then I met up with Nephi and Taze and Rivka and recorded them. And now Louie’s book – after seeing it, I don’t know what he’ll ever tell of the things he really knows. So I was wondering if you…”

“Excellent!” Manny said, slamming his hand on his desk top. “We can get started now!” and he drank down the last of his paper cup of coffee and drew another cupful. I reached down on the floor and undid my bedroll and pulled out my tape recorder. Manny started his story. He kept going until the office grew shadowy. Then we walked down the hill for supper at the

café with the good goat cheese enchiladas and there was more talk and more talk. I scribbled Manny’s words there as fast as I could into a battered notebook.

Manny speaking

It’s great to have a Spanish last name like Zamora now that I live among all these Chicano people here in La Plata. Of course my grandparents came to America from Poland but I have distant ancestors who were Sefardis – Jews from Spain. They were forced to leave Spain in 1492 on the same day that Columbus set sail across the Atlantic.
When they left Spain, my ancestors first settled in Greece and then they came up through Bulgaria and Romania to Poland. They brought Klezmer music with them – that’s a bunch of clarinets and a couple of fiddles, maybe an accordion or a hammered dulcimer, just going out of their minds. It has this real Balkan-style Greek and Romanian sound. For generations my family traveled from town to town playing Klezmer music at weddings and all other kinds of parties. We intermarried with the local Jews, and most of us are short. But my dad and I are throwbacks – slender and elongated like Spanish Jews.

In the last few generations a lot of us branched out from being musicians to acting. We would go around the week of Purim – that’ a Jewish holiday about the time of Mardi Gras, late February and early March. At that time a lot of Jews dress up in crazy Mardi Gras-type costumes. My grandparents and my aunts and uncles would be standing in a wagon, dressed in crazier costumes than anybody else, putting on a play, passing the hat to raise enough money to get to the next town.

When my grandparents came to New York, they would act in the regular Yiddish theater – ordinary stages inside a building, the whole bit. But my parents got back into the nomad theater thing again, doing shows for crowds on street corners and passing the hat. Only they were doing it for the People’s Party and labor unions and any other good causes they could find.

I was born in 1946 and I did my first street theater shtick with my parents when I was four years old. Then in 1952, the Democrats under President Douglas went out of office and the Republicans came in under Taft and Nixon. The New York cops started going after street musicians and street theater. I can remember my mother whispering to me, “Say goodbye to the audience.” I would wave and say “Goodbye, folks!”

That was because my parents could see the cops a few blocks off. We would fake a couple of final lines to close the show up with and then we would run. In a situation like this, you can’t have fancy scenery. We would have folding chairs with signs on them that said TREE, MOUNTAIN, HOUSE, etc. and when we saw the cops, my parents and the other grownups in the cast would fold up the chairs under their arms and we would skedaddle.

My parents got arrested a couple of times.

Once they were performing next to a big garment workshop where strike was going on. Their show was to support the strikers and try to get the strike breakers to come out and join the strike.

My parents didn’t allow me to go to that show. They said the cops would be swinging clubs at the strikers and a lot of the strike breakers had baseball bats and Mom and Dad didn’t want my noggin in the way.

It was on my eighth birthday. My parents went to jail. I was with my father’s mom. She went to the police station, then to the court to see my parent’s trial, then to see them in jail – they got 30 days. So she didn’t have time to fix me a cake. All she had time to do was fix me a cupcake with a candle on it and say “Mazal Tov. Happy birthday.”
My grandmother decided it was more wholesome for a growing boy like me to go to summer camp than to risk this whole cop and jail scene. The People’s Party and the unions have some beautiful summer camps in the Adirondacks – ultra, ultra cheap. That’s where a lot of New York kids find out there’s such things as lakes and forests and MOUNTAIN is more than a label on a folding chair in a street performance.

I learned in camp how to make a fire by rubbing sticks and I got a prize for canoeing skills. When I was 17 I became a camp counselor. So I have two things in my blood – the theater and youth work for social movements.

I also grew up able to get into different cultures. By the time I got out of high school I could speak Italian as well as English and Yiddish. We put on most of our street plays in English, but some in Italian or Yiddish. Sometimes some of our theatrical company would put on plays in Polish if we were playing in a Polish neighborhood and my parents and I learned enough Polish to chime in a few lines.

There are so many millions of poor Jews and other poor folks still in Europe who are always coming to New York from the old country. So in the working class neighborhoods they still speak a lot of the old country languages – especially Yiddish and Italian – although all the young people born in this country know English.

Even white-collar people like Rivka’s family…Say that surprised me when I was listening to your tape of Rivka and she said she couldn’t speak Yiddish well. I’ve conversed with her in Yiddish and I thought she rattled along in it pretty good.

When TV got big around 1968, our street shows and our shows in the halls we hired continued being popular, even though New York has English TV, Italian TV, Yiddish TV. Everybody knows TV was possible in the Thirties. The only reason there were suddenly lots of TV channels in the late Sixties was that big business wanted to sell product and propagandize against the People’s Party.

By then I was in Willard, a private college in Vermont that had a good drama school. My grandmother scraped up every nickel she could to send me and I got a small scholarship. Willard is run by Unitarians. They started having boys and girls co-ed in the 1850’s which was very radical for those days. They had to be cautious back then to avoid a scandal so there are big wooden beams under the dining hall tables connecting the legs so that the boys and girls can’t reach out their ankles and play footsie with one another.

Willard College was where I first met Kathy McNaughton. She was tall and fine-boned with a long braid of orange-gold hair down her back. She was a Unitarian minister’s daughter and the first lover I ever had. I had just turned 18 when I got together with Kathy. By the time I was going to Willard, there was sill no footsie in the dining hall, but couples often went to the woods with blankets over our shoulders. There was always something about it that seemed pure and modest to me. I may be the most talkative person one earth, but I’m still shy. I could see the pink of Kathy blushing and feel the warmth of the blush in my own face.

Some weekends Kathy and I toured small towns and rural areas of northern New England with People’s Party cultural teams. We put on lots of plays – some of them we wrote ourselves. We would write left-wing songs for the whole team to sing – we tried to come up with the funniest words possible. In all our political and cultural work, Kathy and I always collaborated together.

Finally in our senior year after four years together, Kathy told me, “I’m tired of all the travel and hubbub of the theatrical stuff. I want to learn to express my own inner world by painting.”

And I said, “fine. Next time there’s a tour by the cultural team, I’ll go and you stay back at college and paint pictures.”

But then after I was gone on a couple of tours, I found that Kathy was seeing this other guy while I was away. It was all over between us. I never have gotten over the shock. I have been with other women since Kathy, but it never has lasted as long and I have never had such an intense love in my life. I love her still.

After I graduated, I wanted to get as far away from the Northeast as possible so I wouldn’t have to see Kathy again. I went to the University of New Mexico and did a couple of years of graduate work. I got good recommendations.

That’s how I cam to this isolated out-of-the-way college at La Plata as a drama instructor.
I found myself being an advisor to People’s Party Youth Alliance cultural teams all over this region. The team in La Plata was mostly Chicano miners’ kids – good folks. When they saw my last name was Zamora, they would talk to me in Spanish. At first Spanish to me was like hearing pebbles clatter around in a tin can, but now I’ve learned to speak it and I’ve found myself becoming more and more a part of the culture of this region.

Chapter Sixteen

Manny speaking

I got to know Rivka before I ever met Louie. I first met Louie in April, 1971, at the Spring Festival here at Mountain State University. Our drama class put on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and I was really concerned that the play should be every bit as funny as old Will intended it. So it did me good to see this weather-beaten guy in a cowboy hat, obviously a real local formed from the soil of this Rocky Mountain country. He had his head flung back, laughing harder than anybody else. hen I went down into the audience to talk to him after the show, I found out he was Rivka’s husband Louie.

Louie came backstage with me. I pulled out my guitar to practice some of the Mexican ranchera songs I was learning, singing along with some of the Chicanos in the cast of the play. Then Louie said, “I know a few songs.” A few! He sang through all these old cowboy songs about herding cattle in the rain and heat and cold and ballads about outlaws from over 100 years ago, and other songs of more recent events that had happened in our lifetime – true folk creations of modern times. And Louie sang epic songs of the migration of the Mormon people across the prairies to escape from persecution.

The tunes were simple, easy for me to accompany on my guitar. Louie’s voice wasn’t all that great, but he was singing all this incredibly real folklore material. “Where did you get all this stuff?” I asked him.

“From my ma, my dad and my uncles,” he said. I could have kicked myself. Here was all this first-hand folk material from the laboring people of our mountains and our college didn’t have a professor of folklore to record it. I knew as soon as I could, I wanted to get up to Louie’s community in Zarahemla Valley to put on a show and record Louie’s songs. After all, the importance of a cultural team is not only what it brings to the people from the outside, but what it learns from them.

As I began to learn what was going on in the mountains north of La Plata, I wanted to go to Zarahemla and see Louie more than ever. Something very dangerous was starting to take shape up there.

My main source of information for this was a 17 year old boy in the People’s Party Youth Alliance. His name is Roberto Molinas and everybody called him Turco.

When I first went to a Youth Alliance meeting in La Plata, I was introduced to the kids as the new drama coach for the cultural team. I said, “Hey, it’s great being here. It’s gonna be a lot of fun learning this whole new culture around here – a little different from what I’m used to, since I’m from New York and Jewish and all that.”

Just then a girl in the back of the room stuck up her hand. I pointed to her and said, “Go ahead.”

She stood up and said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve always wondered. I’ve heard people talk about Jews a lot and I’d like to know –what is a Jew anyway?”

Before I could answer, a stocky, dark-skinned boy stood up. “A Jew is like what everybody calls me,” he said, tapping his chest with his forefinger, “Turco!”
The girl said “OH, OK, I understand,” and sat down. I didn’t understand, but apparently Turco’s answer satisfied her and I went on discussing plans for drama activities.
After the meeting, Turco came up to me and said, “Would you like to come have dinner with me and my parents Friday night?”

And I said, “Sure.”

When I got to Turco’s house, his mother was standing at the head of the table. Turco’s dad and his six brothers and sisters were standing along the sides. Turco’s mom had the kind of black lace cloth on her head that Catholic women wear to Mass. A candle was standing on the table in front of her. She lit it and then she and all the others held their hands in front of their eyes. I took my place at the table and held my hands in front of my eyes too. This is the same gesture my family made when we ate at my mom’s parents’ home on Friday nights when they celebrated the beginning of the Sabbath.

Turco’s mom spoke some words in Spanish and I could catch a few of them. “Señor Dios bendito, nuestro Rey del mundo…”

Of course! Now I realized. These words were a Spanish version of what my mom’s mom said in Hebrew – “Blessed are thou, oh Lord our God, King of the universe…” when she lit her seven-branched candlestick and ushered in the Sabbath on Friday night.
But no Orthodox Jew would ever eat the meal we had in Turco’s house that night – chicken tacos with cheese sprinkled on top. In the kitchen at my mother’s parents place, they kept all the dishes that were to hold cheese and other dairy products in a separate cabinet from the dishes that held meat.

Turco and his family were very dark-skinned with the Oriental-looking eyes of Mexican Indians. They had only a trace in their features of any ancestors from Spain. Yet long ago some of their ancestors were Spanish Jews who had been forbidden to practice their religion openly and left their descendants only the traditions of Friday night candle lighting to preserve their identity as Jews.

Turco’s family went to Mass at the Catholic church every Sunday. His father told me, “Whenever I go in the church and see the images, I say the words my father taught me:

“Lo que está aquí es madera y piedra.
Yo rezo soloa Dios Altísimo.”
These words mean
‘What is here is wood and stone.
I pray only to God above.’”

Turco got his nickname because in La Plata and the other towns in the area there are small stores owned by Sefardis – Spanish-speaking Jews who had immigrated from Greece and Turkey,, the same countries where my own ancestors had lived when they were kicked out of Spain. Everyone called them turcos – Turks.

Turco’s family had never lived in Turkey. Most of his ancestors had probably always lived in Mexico and the Southwest USA. Turco’s mom made tamales and tacos which she sold at the bus station and other places around town. But everyone knew there was some connection between them and the people from Turkey who owned a second-hand clothing store in downtown La Plata. So Roberto Molinas, the oldest boy in the family, had the nickname Turco.

In the summer Turco worked on farms and ranches around the area. One night after a cultural team meeting, Turco nudged me with his shoulder and said, “Say man, come over in the corner. I want to talk with you a moment.” I followed him there and he said, “Last week I was up north of town hoeing chile peppers. Twice I seen trucks with tarps over the back turn off the main road onto a dirt road by the field where I was.”

“So what?” I asked.

“Both of these trucks had rifles sticking out from under the tarps. Someone is storing a lot of rifles around here. I listen to the Anglo farmers I work for talking about how bad the Jews are. Of course they can’t tell I’m a Jew,” he said with a chuckle. “Anyhow,” he went on, “They say they don’t want the Jews and the Communists to get elected again. They say the Mexicans are crazy to vote People’s Party because that’s all Jews and niggers and Communists. They say they’ll put a stop to it in 1972 before the elections next year. I listen and I keep hoeing weeds – act like I don’t speak much English.”

Next week Turco told me he had seen another truck with guns sticking out from under the tarp. I began to connect this with other stuff I had seen like Rivka’s former professor Taze who said he had come to La Plata to study Chicano folk religion and then spent his time with the Anglo guys who ran the security services for the mining companies. There had been some real battles at strikes in the mines around La Plata in the recent past. The mining companies had little private armies and ran their own spy system to keep up with what the union was doing. All the workers in town knew who the local security guys were and they wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole.

I called up a friend of mine at the University of New Mexico and asked, “Say, what’s with this Professor Taze guy, anyway?”

“Oh, he’s the professor with all the connections to the Pristine Foundation,” my friend answered.

“He is?” I said. “Thanks! You’ve answered my question.”

You see anybody as active in the People’s Party Youth Alliance as I have been has heard of the Pristine Foundation as one of the real bad guys. Pristine is said to be a conduit for funds from the Corporate Security Agency – a super-duper secret outfit which big businesses use for spying on the People’s Party and labor unions and small farmers’ co-ops. Basically the Agency is out to screw up and sabotage anything progressive in this country. The Pristine Foundation is one of their fronts.

That summer I heard Rivka had left Louie and then later I heard how Louie’s community got shot at and his church got burned down. With all that Turco had told me and my suspicions about Taze, I knew I wanted to get up to Zarahemla as soon as possible to talk with Louie about what was happening. At first I intended to save money and have the cultural team go up to Zarahemla by Rural Bus service. We would bring absolutely minimal stage props. But when I went to put the props in the bus storage area, the gray haired Chicana woman who ran the bus station said, “I’m sorry but we don’t have connections to Zarahemla any more.”

“What’s the matter?” I said. “You had connections there this spring – “and I have a season ticket.”

“Oh yes,” she said with an uneasy smile, “But you know about all the shootings and the church getting burned down.”

“Look,” I said, “the people doing the shooting are way up the valley from the highway. They won’t shoot at busses on the road, will they?”

“Don’t you understand?” she asked, spreading her hands helplessly. “I guess you don’t,” she went on and there was an undertone of anger in her voice. “Around here they call you El Fuereño, which means the Outsider. Don’t you realize, somebody came here to the station and told us they would shoot at the buses if they stop there, shoot at them anywhere along the route. You see it’s not just the people up the valley who burned the church – its others. Also…” and she looked ready to cry, “the others said they would burn down this station if we stopped there.”

“Why don’t you go to the police?” I asked.

“You really are an outsider,” she said with a note of pity. “We just don’t know which side the police will be on, if you know what I mean. Now just don’t talk to me anymore. I’m busy.”

So we waited another week and went in the cultural team truck, which costs us a lot in gas money. I made sure that Turco went with us. We did a socko performance for the people of Zarahemla and then I whispered to Louie that I was ready to talk with him about certain urgent problems. Louie motioned to Aries John, who I had never met before. When John came over to us, Louie muttered, “Go find Clark and tell him to come by my house.”

Louie and Turco and I walked to the small adobe house and went in. Louie let a kerosene lamp and soon Aries John showed up with Clark, who was only about 17 then but very big and strong.

Aries John unfolded onto the table several large maps of the Rocky Mountain area covering in detail from New Mexico to Montana. There were X’s in ink on the maps in various places.

“Louie says you know something about where they’re storing guns,” John said to me.
“I don’t, but he does,” I said, pointing to Turco.

“OK, son, tell us about it,” Aries John said.

Turco told him about the trucks with weapons turning onto the dirt road going past the chile pepper field where he worked and gave the exact location.

“Looks like they have a new arms dump,” Clark said. “I’d say its in this canyon up here where that dirt road leads,” and he stuck his forefinger at a place on the New Mexico map. Aries John reached down with a ball point pen and made an X on the map next to Clark’s forefinger.

Then Aries John and Clark started asking Turco about the activities of various people in the La Plata area, people I didn’t know or had barely noticed. All I had to add to the discussion was what the woman in the bus station told me. They nodded and went on talking with Turco.

Finally I asked, “What is going on anyway?”

“They’re storing up weapons all up and down the Rocky Mountains,” Aries John said. “Me and Clark have checked out all their arms caches. I think they might have a big uprising before the elections next year.”

“Who?” I asked.

“The Nationalists!” Clark said, “I used to work for them. They’re like back in Germany in the Thirties. They want to get rid of your damn People’s Party.”

“So you don’t like us either?” I responded.

“I don’t know what I think about your Party any more,” Clark said, twisting his face into an expression of hard, uncomfortable thought. “All I know now is I don’t want the Nationalists to win.”

“There’s something else I know that may be of value,” I said. “There’s a college professor, Tazewell or Taze, who’s been visiting Louie and hanging out down in La Plata. I found out from a reliable friend that Taze has connections with the Pristine Foundation, which is a front for the Corporate Security Agency. Now I think that…”

“Don’t worry about that!” Louie interrupted suddenly, speaking for the first time in quite a while. Behind his glasses his eyes seemed to be focusing on something millions of miles from us. He lifted his right hand and held it in front of his face in the lamp lit dimness. He waved his hand like he was trying to clear away something to see better. He began to breathe slowly and deeply and seemed to be going into a trance.

“But Louie, we got more stuff to talk about!” Clark said in a voice that was disconcertingly loud in the stillness that was settling in the room.

“Come on, let’s go,” Aries John said in his quiet voice. “We can talk about it tomorrow.”
Aries John, Clark, Turco and I got up and walked out of the house. Aries John closed the door softly. As we walked away into the night, I could see the weak light of the kerosene lamp through Louie’s window. The light flickered a few times and went out. Then I walked under the stars back to the cultural team’s truck to get my sleeping bag and rest for the night on the ground.

Chapter Seventeen

Manny speaking

Next morning I was standing in the crowd in front of the ruins of the church. I was hoping Louie would get through his Sunday sermon quickly so we could get an early start back to La Plata. Then Louie raised his hands over his head and announced his revelation of a great prayer circle to take place that next year in the mountains.
My parents were scientific and agnostic. All that I had of traditional religion came from my mom’s folks. But I felt a thrill go all through me when I first heard Louie talk about the Circle. I looked up at the sun shining sliver on the leaves of the tall cottonwood trees and the huge clouds like masses of pure white fibers drifting in the deep blue sky – and I felt how amazing this world really is. “Wow,” I whispered.

Louie may have found the only way to stop this uprising by all these anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-everybody forces. If we could bring together all the unemployed young folks who were wandering the roads and inspire them with a movement for peace, not war, then these right-wing nationalist gangs couldn’t use them as a ready-made army. It was such a simple plan and so strange to a skeptic like myself – but somehow, it made sense. I ran out of the crowd to Louie and shook his hand. He grinned and gave me a hug.

After Louie finished telling about the Circle, he asked for six of us to come to his house – Clark, Aries John, and three women who I found out were Aries John’s wives. Aries John laid out his maps and pointed to a spot in the Colorado Rockies. I’ve hiked into that valley,” he said. “I think it would be the best place to make the Circle.”

Our cultural team loaded up our props and our string of Japanese lanterns that we used for lighting our shows and we drove back to La Plata.

Shortly after we got back I wrote out an invitation for the big Circle next year. I had been good at calligraphy since I was a teenager when I used to prepare handbills for the performances my parents’ theatrical company put on. We went to a local offset printer and got 2,000 invitations run off.

That was just the first batch. By the time we finished, we must have had at least 10,000 copies of the invitation printed in all. We handed them out around town and gave them to friends to hand out in other towns. And we mailed and mailed and mailed. I remember when I sent an invitation to my parents. They sent me back a letter. The first paragraph in so many words said “Huh?” And the rest of the letter had strong implications like – “Why don’t you give up this Circle nonsense and come back to New York and help us put on our shows?”

But my grandmother wrote me, “Good for you! Good luck to the Circle. And at the bottom she scrawled in her hard-to-read Yiddish handwriting like leaping spaghetti – “A leben oyf dain keppla!” Which means, “Long life to your head!”

The very first copy of the invitation that I wrote out by hand was rolled up and tied in a multi-colored macramé cord and our delegation that was called the Twelve Disciples took it to Uncle Denny at Santo Toribio Pueblo.

All through the winter and spring it seems to me that most weekends I went up to Zarahemla to confer with Louie. I was amazed at how fast he jumped from the highest peak of prophecy to the most exact calculation of the practical details – how much money we would need for food and medical supplies, big tents that could shelter lots of people who didn’t bring theirs (you never know when there might be a summer snowstorm), extra blankets and sleeping bags – down to the cost of the last few bottles of spray for lice. The one thing that bothered me was how much Louie relied on Taze to pay for all this.

“But Louie,” I said again and again, “Taze is all wrapped up with the Pristine Foundation. Don’t you realize? Pristine may be making some kind of deal with the very same people who are storing those arms caches in the mountains.”

“You just gotta trust the Spirit,” Louie kept replying to me time after time. “Taze has money and we need it. I believe with all my heart the Father and Mother are covering for us in this movie. Besides, Taze ain’t the one who decides how we spend the money. We are. Every time I ask him for money, he sends it. He never asks me what we do with it.”
“But Louie,” I would go on, “the Pristine Foundation is connected to the Corporate Security Agency which…”

“Shaddup!” Louie would bellow and slam his fist on the table. That would be the end of that particular discussion for a while, but Pristine kept coming up.

However most of the time we were swamped with handling immediate, practical problems. Every invitation we sent out seemed to bring back half a dozen letters. Everybody wrote us, from county organizations of the People’s Party to bird watching clubs. We would sit in my office or Zephyr’s kitchen until after midnight with letters piled high on the table. I admired how Zephyr and Rivka knew how to answer all this mail so appropriately. And Buff, I remember how you handled correspondence with people in Indian tribes that I had never heard of. I would just take my typewriter or pen, whichever was closest, and try to plow through answering as much mail as I could.
One thing I will pat myself on the back for. In the middle of all this chaos about preparing for the Circle, I got Rose, a woman from the cultural team, to go with me up to Zarahemla and tape record as many of Louie’s old folk songs as he could remember on one beautiful cold Saturday night.

Louie was going to take off the next day with Aries John to see Governor Hass of Colorado about possible co-operation of his office with our Circle. I was pretty doubtful about whether the Governor would give us any help. How much sympathy might he have with the Nationalists who were storing weapons in his state? Probably more than he did with us. But Louie’s rough, grainy voice, that was the perfect goodbye for a while. For once we didn’t argue about the Pristine Foundation – or Taze.

Not long before the spring semester ended, Louie phoned me the directions of Fred Zeller’s cabin on the west slope of the Rockies, which would be our headquarters for getting people to the Circle. “The governor was pretty negative, Louie told me. But I had no idea how negative until I actually got to Colorado. The Highway Patrol and National Guard were putting up road blocks, taking them down and putting them up again on a completely unpredictable schedule. The Colorado National Guard’s only helicopter was patrolling the sky above the trails that led into Flat Mountain Valley, where were going to make the Circle.

Just imagine that! The cost of gasoline for a hovering helicopter makes it one of the most expensive kinds of aircraft. Governor Hass was gouging the taxpayers for a fortune to stop us.

When I got my truckload of people from New Mexico to Fred’s cabin I found Fred with his head in his hands, sitting at his kitchen table.

“All my old buddies,” he groaned, “I used to go hunting and fishing with them. Now they’re riding in their pickups up and down the road in front of my cabin hollering at me, aiming rifles out their pickup windows at the people in my yard. So far they haven’t shot into the crowd, but…”

That was the first time in my life I ever had to take over a situation.

“Let’s get as many people as possible out of here and into the valley,” I said. “If we can just create an accomplished fact that the Governor has to put up with…”

Fred went over to his cabinet and got out his Forest Service map of the area and started pointing out trails to me and a bunch of people who gathered around his table.
Getting the feel of unfamiliar country and the trails through it is like learning a new language or how to swim or anything else you’ve never done before. My first time leading people to the valley took me a three day trip through the dark forest. After a while I was doing it in a day and a half. And every time I stopped in the valley, I learned to love more something that has haunted me ever since then – the flavor a wood fire burning in the open gives to food.

The more people I led from Fred’s pasture across the mountains. The more there were to lead. Several others started taking groups to the valley. Still more and more people were piling up around the cabin more and more noisy and restless. There was the wailing of children who had lost things, the whine of people begging for cigarettes, occasional fights breaking out and the hassle of us having to separate a pair of flushed, sweating, angry young men – or sometimes women.

Finally Aries John and Louie drove up one late June Friday in John’s old red pickup. “I talked with a lawyer in Denver,” Louie said. “We can’t get a federal court order until maybe next Tuesday.”

Louie looked around at the crowds and their shabby muddy tents and shelters. There was a smell of decayed food and human waste. “This is bad,” Louie said, shaking his head. “We don’t have until Tuesday before this place might blow up.”

At sundown next day Uncle Denny showed up. It had been a cloudy day, but his smile showed everyone of his three teeth, like the whole world was sunshine.

Louie ran into the middle of the pasture. “Everybody listen up!” he shouted in his harsh voice that cut across a thousand conversations.

“A great Indian spiritual leader has just showed up to lead us into the valley to make the circle!” Louie yelled at the tip of his lungs where all those thousands could hear. “Tomorrow we will get up before day light and walk to the road block. Our Native American brother will speak words of wisdom to the National Guard and his spiritual power will get us through. Everybody go to bed now, so we will be awake and ready at five AM tomorrow!”

I caught my breath. Louie had not exchanged one word with Uncle Denny since he arrived. If sheer nerve could move mountains, Louie could flatten the Rockies.
But the whole camp got silent. Next day before light, there we were heading down the road under the smoky glare of pine torches. I was in front with Louie and you, Buff, and Uncle Denny on the little pony with Fred.

There were three National Guardsmen awake. They were young working class men who couldn’t find a job any place else. I could see the basic good will on their ruddy, healthy faces. They stared at our multitude of youth, many of them also unable to find a job anywhere. In the glow of the torches they could see mothers carrying babies. The National Guardsmen pulled back the barriers.

An officer came running out of a tent. “Hey, what the hell’s going on?” he shouted. But it was too late. We marched on past him.

It was the Exodus. I started roaring out a song:

“Ilu hotzi, hotzi-anu, hotzi-anu mi Mitzrayim – the song at my mom’s parents’ Passover supper.

“If he had only led us; led us out of Egypt.” I knew someone in a crowd this big had to know that song. Sure enough a few voices shouted the last word of the verse with me “Dayenu!” meaning “It’s enough!” And we walked up the road until we got to the main trail which we followed over the ridge and into the valley. The walk took a little over six hours and we headed down into the valley a little after noon. There was a pale green gold of aspen leaves shivering against the dark pines. The day was cool and bright.
That’s my memory of the first circle from then on – everything just getting brighter and brighter. The nights seemed brief, like passing under the shadow of a branch. Some of the campfires were huge. I remember eager voices around them, talking of plans for the future. Even at this altitude, many people were taking their clothes off – sometimes even at night.

But of that great Circle on the Fourth of July on top of the mountain – what I remember is I had to leave it too soon. The silence was just over and the whooping had started when Aries John came up to me and Louie. “See that guy over there?” he said, pointing to a naked young man who was making a joyful noise with all his body and soul.
“Yeah,” I said.

“That’s a National Guardsman,” Aries John said. “He warned me they’re gonna serve warrants on you guys as soon as enough of the crowd is gone. You all better leave with the thickest crowds.

That afternoon, those people who did have jobs started leaving as soon as the Circle was over to get back to work on time. Louie and I tried to stay in the very middle of the crowd all the way down the trail and the road to Fred’s cabin. Thanks to Aries John’s words, several of the others who had worked with us from the beginning were down at the cabin.

I trusted Clark to wait with my truck for all the people who had come with me – then he drove them to New Mexico. Louie and I got in Aries John’s pickup. We drove off in the midst of the huge traffic jam. I don’t think I drew a breath until we got out of Colorado.
That fall I was living for a while with Rose, the woman who had recorded Louie’s songs for the cultural team. She was called Coyotita – Little Female Coyote – because Coyote is the word in New Mexico for an Anglo-Chicano mixture. Her last name was Anderson, but her mother’s last name was Martinez. Rose had very dark black hair and very pale blue eyes.

We were still getting floods of letters. What was going to happen now that we had held the Circle? People wanted to know. But none of us – not even Louie – had thought out what our new movement was to do. None of us had any plans beyond the Circle. “Boy, I sure thought that was gonna be the end of the world, “Aries John said with a chuckle, “and we all could go happy.”

Sometime in December our questions were answered. Zephyr, Rivka, Rose and I and many others got envelopes from the Maria Russell Mission in Santa Fe. They contained crimson and gold on the gold handbills with a picture of Taze wearing a pyramid-shaped headdress. He was surrounded by a circle of glitter to look like the sun with rays of glitter streaming out.

“From this solstice on, the light grows more brilliant!” the hand bills said under the picture of Taze. “We wish to proclaim that the Spirit of the Prophetess Marie Russell has revealed that Brother TAZE is the True White Friend in the prophecies of the Santo Toribio Indians! The Great Circle in Colorado was called to prepare the way for this True Friend. Now Brother Taze is calling a new and Greater Circle on Ancient Indian land in Sequoyah to begin a new Era of Peace and Spirituality on July 4, 1973!”

At the bottom of the handbill was a map of the state of Sequoyah showing a spot marked with a heart. “Brother TAZE calls the circle here.” Words under the map said, “Next to a Native American holy place.”

The only words I could breathe to express what I felt were “What the fuck?”

Chapter Eighteen

Taze speaking

I confess – in Colorado I had doubts that the Circle would take place, the same kind of doubts Christ had in the garden of Gethsemane. When I heard that hundreds of people were slipping across the mountains into the valley, I said to myself, “it’s a matter of time until Governor Hass stages a mass arrest.”

Louie had gone to Denver to get a federal court order to stop the roadblock. He found a left-wing lawyer, but the Federal Court was moving slowly, as usual. The lawyer worked for free, of course, but Louie was burning up a fortune in gasoline and he was ringing my phone off the wall asking for more money so he could drive around Denver.

Then all of a sudden, Louie and all those thousands of people just walked into the site, led by Uncle Denny! I would have gone up there to Colorado at once. But some people who are really big in the Pristine Foundation called up and made a dinner date with me for July 2. They said, “We want to ask you everything you know about the Circle.”

I was tempted to say, “Why don’t you go to Colorado and find out for yourself?” But I didn’t say it. The Pristine Foundation people have their commitments and they can only fit so much into their schedules. Their word to me was – “Be there.”

So I had dinner with them and talked about the significance of the Circle. The next day, I got in my car and burned rubber all the way up to that log cabin where everybody was parked. The National Guard would permit me to walk beyond that point, but not to drive.
For the first time since I was in the ashram in Berkeley, I had to get up before daybreak. I tried to hurry up the steep road which led into a trail. I was out of shape. I couldn’t do a full lotus any more. In fact I couldn’t even walk so good.

It was close to noon when I started wheezing up Flat Top Mountain. Just as I reached the top, I could hear the whoops and cheers. The Circle was over. I wanted to cry.
I looked all around and couldn’t find Louie. I could see Rivka off at a distance, but I was unwilling to go over and talk to her after the way she left me. I just turned around and walked down the mountain back down the trail. I reached the log cabin about sunset and got in my car and drove back to Santa Fe. I was pretty despondent.

But then the Pristine Foundation turned out to be more interested in the after-effects of the Circle than they had been in the Circle itself. They were calling me up at the Maria Russell Mission all the time asking, “Hey, what’s Louie’s movement doing now that the Circle has already happened?”

Pristine got really excited after the Presidential election. You see, some friends at the Foundation had let me in on a hot secret tip: anti-Jewish and anti-Negro groups were storing weapons all through the Rocky Mountains to stage an uprising before the election. Most likely Sidney Lens, who is Jewish would be re-elected President and Ella Little, who is black would be vice-president – if nothing happened. These groups planned to declare portions of the mountain and desert west to be an independent country.

They would declare as much as they could seize to be independent sometime in late October. The area is so wild and remote it would be difficult to suppress the uprising, especially when you consider that the United States has an army of only 250,000. That’s smaller than the army of Romania. And Pristine Foundation people assured me that many officers in the Army and many state and local police were sympathetic with the uprising.

One of the potential strength of this would-be uprising was obvious to me at the Maria Russell Mission. Every day hungry, unemployed young people of prime military age come to my door and I feed them. As I’ve said a million times, this bumbling left-wing People’s Party government has never really pulled us out of the Depression. Sure, they build shelters for the homeless kids on the road. They provide temporary public works, jobs building schools and highways and planting trees in the national forests. But none of this is a permanent solution. At any time at least ten per cent of the population are unemployed, most of them young. They’ve a ready-made army for any attempted uprising that promises to make conditions better.

Yeah, yeah, I know I told you that Pristine is mostly interested in spiritual phenomena. But there are a bunch of psychic groups in the Rocky Mountains who had a lot of connections with the plans for an uprising.

In the summer, 1971, before Louie ever announced his revelation about the Circle, the Pristine Foundation had me go to Denver and check out the Rocky Mountain League of the Spirit which had been set up by Dad McPherson, a disciple of the well-known psychic – and fascist – William Dudley Pelley.

When I saw the League of the Spirit, I found they were a bunch of big bozos who looked like lumberjacks. They talked a lot about traveling in the astral body and channeling the spirits of the departed. I did a little careful questioning around and found that the League of the Spirit were up to their thick red necks in storing weapons for the uprising.

The League’s representatives met with me at the home of a millionaire in Denver and asked me, “Can you get us money from Pristine?”

The Pristine Foundation doesn’t take formal political positions but they do like to have an investment in people who might be politically as well as spiritually important in the future. Pristine never asks to control you. All they want is to invest in whatever you’re doing. I called Pristine and they did authorize me to promise these guys a little money – provided that Pristine’s name wasn’t openly connected with it.

Then Louie came along. He was gathering the unemployed youth in a Circle for peace in the mountains – the very same young people that the League wanted as troops for their uprising. Pristine gave me a blank check for Louie. It was always, “Just write out what Louie says he needs.”

Louie got at least ten times what the League of the Spirit got from the Pristine Foundation. It was a signal from the people behind the Foundation – some of the most powerful people in the national economy – that they would not support the uprising.
So the uprising never happened. There was complete peace across the west on election day. Sidney Lens and Ella Little were re-elected. And the week after the election, Dr. Aloysius O’Connor showed up in Santa Fe to visit me.

Dr. O’Connor – everyone called him Al – was about 60 with a head of shining white hair, the body of a champion tennis player and the grin of a teenage boy who just got laid for the first time. His lectures on Psychology and the Spirit drew crowds of hundreds of students to his classrooms at Harvard. They say with the dramatics the old boy put into it, he could have been a movie star.

When Al got to town he called me up and said, “Meet me at La Frontera. The Maria Russell Mission sounds like too pious a place for me to be caught in.”

La Frontera is a bar on the plaza which boasts that it fixes tequila in 50 different ways. It’s not the kind of place I wanted my followers from the Maria Russell Mission to see me entering. But if Aloysius O’Connor PhD had come from Harvard to see me, it must be on Pristine Foundation business. So I went.

We had barely sat down at our sable in La Frontera and said “Hello!” when Al started in, “Tell me,” he said, sipping his chocolate and jalapeno and wild honey tequila cocktail, “What’s Bishop Louie up to now?”

“Louie’s not much on writing letters,” I answered, drinking at my pink lemonade, “but I hear from a friend of mine who works in the security department of a mining company in La Plata. He writes that more young people than ever are pouring into Louie’s community in Zarahemla, but Louie doesn’t have anything for them to do, so a lot of them leave.”

“But this is potentially such a valuable movement,” Al said, flashing his big white teeth. “Very valuable if it has the right kind of guidance. I know the Pristine Foundation would be willing to help out. But first a movement must move. It must take some action.”
“What can I do?” I asked.

“What can you do?” he said. “Man, you can do anything! No one has a copyright on making a circle in the outdoors. Young people need an alternative to both extremes – the extreme right who wanted an uprising or the extreme left of the People’s Party. Either you make sure Louie provides the alternative – or you provide it.”

“You make it sound so easy,” I said, hanging my head a little.

“You make the moves. I know the Pristine Foundation will make it easy,” Al said, giving a vigorous nod, a firm smile on his tanned face. “By the way,” he went on, “Do you know of any place where we could go in the wilderness outside of Santa Fe when we leave here?”

“It’s getting toward dark,” I said. “Remember this is November at 7,000 feet above sea level. I just started buying a ranch outside of town to raise horses and support the mission – and receive important guests like yourself with only a few trusted elders present who won’t mind if you drink distilled alcohol.”

“Sounds like a great place to go,” Al said.

“But we haven’t finished fixing up the old ranch house yet,” I said. “We haven’t installed gas or electricity or…”

Al interrupted – “If you’ve just got an old-fashioned fire place and you put a little wood in it, your voyage to the unknown will be a thousand times more real than if you are in an electric-lighted room with bland gas heating.”

“What voyage to the unknown?” I asked, so surprised I knocked my pink lemonade into my lap.

“You know,” Al said, “the Pristine Foundation has been paying for investigations of hallucinogenic plants that shamans use.” Al was grinning harder than ever. “Did you ever want to try one?” he asked.

“Yes, but…” I started.

“There are a lot of buts,” Al said, waving his hand to dismiss all those buts. “A lot of the vines and roots and leaves we’ve tested make you nauseous. And you never know whether a batch will be stronger or weaker. But now we’ve found the perfect modern standardized chemical substitute for all those plants – lysergic acid diethylamide – LSD for short. A Swiss chemist discovered it back in 1945. If we go out to the ranch, I will give you 800 micrograms of LSD and I guarantee you will take the voyage.”

Within five minutes, we were out of La Frontera and I was driving Al to the ranch house. He found some pieces of wood where once there had been a large wood pile. We went inside, and with considerable skill he arranged a cone of these small pieces of piñon wood in the fireplace, making a much warmer and brighter fire than I would believe possible. I felt the clean, sweet smell of piñon purifying my nostrils.

“Now,” he said, and I could hear his grin in the dark, “here’s the magic carpet.” He held out his hand to me. I opened my palm and he dropped a small white pill into it. “Have a good voyage,” he said.

I held the pill for a few seconds, not sure of what to do. “Taze,” Al said. “Don’t be afraid. Actually you’ve inspired me in my research on LSD. I’ve read your book, Commentary on Studies in the Scriptures. You write in it how the dimensions of the Great Pyramid are the key to predicting the course of history. I used your stuff on the Pyramid to guide my voyage on the course of the inner world. If you don’t mind, your book will be the main source for my own book about how to go through the LSD experience. I’ll call my book The Pyramid and the Voyage.”

“I’m flattered,” I said, and before I knew it, just to have my own hand free, I put the LSD in my mouth.

Then, a few seconds or a million years later, I saw her in the shadows near the fireplace, wrapped from her head down to her ankles in a dark striped sarape.

“Rivka?” I whispered.

She drew back the sarape from half her face and gave a smile. Then she flapped the sarape back over her face.

“Is that you, Rivka?” I said a little louder.

Then she let the sarape fall to her shoulders. Her head was bare. It was the face of an older woman.

“Maria Russell!” I murmured in amazement.

Usually I make contact with the spirit of Maria Russell after I have been in deep meditation for half an hour while wearing my pyramidal head dress and the contact is only her thoughts entering my mind. But now on this LSD voyage, she was there visually.

Her mouth never opened. But I know the message I received from her visible presence, as clearly as if she had said it aloud, “Call a Circle and tell the world you are the True White Friend of the Indian prophecy.

Then she was gone.

“I’m gonna call a Circle,” I said in a low voice to Al, “I’ll announce that I’m the True Friend who wasn’t revealed at the first Circle.” I found myself talking more and more excited. “And why don’t I call for a Circle in Sequoyah? That’s a state that was set up by Indians and I’m in Indian prophecy. Oh God, I can’t wait to see a map of Sequoyah! I hear there are some ancient Indian mounds there. Let’s make the Circle as near as we can to the mounds! I don’t have to wait for Louie! If he wants to, he can follow me! But I’m the one who will keep the movement of the Circle going!”

“Perfect,” Al said with his ever-present smile.

By now for the first time since childhood, I was jumping up and down with enthusiasm. When I calmed down, I looked at Al and said, “Do you have any paper with you?”
“I always carry a note pad,” he said.

He handed me a pad and I began to write down plans and scratch them out and re-write them for centuries until the first light of the morning entered the windows of the old ranch house.

Chapter Nineteen

Manny speaking

    Not long after Taze sent us the announcement of his new Circle, Louie came down to La Plata to see me. He had sharp lines of worry on his face. Louie handed me a letter he had just received from Uncle Denny.

    “In my village, many people in the other factions are angry at me because I went to the Circle,” Uncle Denny wrote in a clear, steady hand without the shakiness of old age. “People are telling me, ‘Denny, you talked to that man Taze first. Now he is using your name and our people’s name and he is going to bother Indians of other tribes. You have to stoop him.’

    “Louie, my friend,” Uncle Denny continued. “I am asking you for help because you started the Circle. I will do anything I can if you will help me with this.

        Your Friend
        Dennis Garcia of the Gourd Clan
        The Cake-Eater.”

    “Uncle Denny’s people don’t like to give bad news,” Louie said. “He wouldn’t write this unless it was awful serious.”

    I stood there and twirled a stringy little beard I had started on the tip of my chin.

    “Louie,” I said at last, “write Uncle Denny that we’ve got plenty of time to make plans. It’s January and Taze won’t be trying to set up camp there until June. He’s not the kind who would like to spend too many weeks having to shit in the woods.”

    By the beginning of February, my friends in Albuquerque had sent me newspaper clippings telling that the councils of every Indian tribe in Sequoyah had condemned Taze’s proposed Circle in the strongest possible terms. Several of them announced that if Taze was found on their lands, they would arrest him at once. A couple of the tribal councils thought that Louie and I were involved with Taze and included our names in their warnings of arrest.

    “If our True White Friend shows up, he’ll get a rear end full of buckshot,” one council member said. “His buddies will get the same thing!” the council member added, referring to Louie and me.

Comment by Taze

    When I heard how the tribal government officials in Sequoyah had condemned my plans for a Circle, I called the Pristine Foundation and said, “Why don’t you finance election campaigns for tribal council candidates who will approve of me?”

    One of the big shots at Pristine said, “Taze, you know that most council elections aren’t till next year and the ones that take place this year aren’t until November. We can’t move November back before the Fourth of July. We’re not God.”

    I hung up and said to myself, “But as True White Friend, I’m sort of a divinity. I should be able to…”

    Well, I guess even divinity has its rough spots.

Manny speaking

    Soon I was in as much trouble with Rose, the woman I was living with as I was with the tribal councils. Rose had loved the Circle in Colorado, but as far as she was concerned, it was strictly a one-time thing. Now her whole life revolved around the Youth Alliance cultural team. When she heard I would be into still more Circle business to come that summer, she wanted out if it, completely out!

    “Look,” I told her at breakfast, “All I have to do is go to Sequoyah for a few weeks next summer and…”

    “And get shot!” she yelled.

    “No, no!” I said, clanking at my breakfast plate with my fork. “What I must do is assure the Indians in Sequoyah that Louie and Uncle Denny have no connection with whatever Taze is trying to do. We also have to do something to protect the safety of several thousand people who might show up in Sequoyah for Taze’s Circle.”

    “Manny, please listen to me,” Rose said. She was crying a little. She picked up her napkin and sniffed into it and said. “I thought the first circle was beautiful and important. It was worth risking your safety for. This whole business is just ridiculous.”

    By now I was sticking my chin out with the spikes of my little growth of beard quivering defiantly. “I don’t care if it is ridiculous,” I said. “I helped start something and I’m responsible for the results.”

    “OK, Manny,” she said, tossing her napkin down on her plate. “I’m not your mother. I love you, but I don’t have to be responsible for you. As it is, you’re always so damn busy. I never see you till three o’clock in the morning anyway!” And she started to cry again.
    That was our last breakfast together.

    Rivka is the one who really understood all this. I have never had sexual relations with Rivka, but she is one of the closest people to me in the whole world. She felt just as responsible as I did for the future of the Circle. Now that I had broken up with Rose, I stayed away from the cultural team. I was at Zephyr’s kitchen table a lot with Rivka and Zephyr, talking about what to do next. I remember that you were there a lot, Buff, a big help to me at the time.

    “I want to do something about what’s going on in Sequoyah.” Rivka said once as we were drinking Zephyr’s hot sassafras tea, “but I have to be real careful what I do. It involves the two people I want to see the least – Louie and Taze.”

Taze speaking

    Al was on the phone with me a lot that spring. “Well hello, living Buddha,” he used to say laughing. “Maybe with a little more LSD you can go to Jerusalem and stage the second coming of Christ.”

    “I don’t see why you’re laughing,” I said when Al first made his living Buddha remark.
    “Aw, just let me have some fun about the whole thing,” Al said.

    “Actually,” he went on, “Actually I’m phoning you for the Pristine Foundation. Some of their experts on Native American spiritual traditions are awfully upset about what you’ve done – and about its possible negative implications for oil leases.”

    “Does that mean they’ll cut off my finances?” I asked.

    “Oh no, no,” Al said. “I actually got the Holy of Holies – the Pristine Foundation board meeting – and I out-talked the Indian experts. I said that what’s important is the potential leadership of the youth of the country as a whole, not just what happens to oil leases in Sequoyah.”

    “And what did the board meeting say?” I asked.

    “Most of them are still favorable,” Al said. “People from Pristine are on the phone all the time to some of the top state officials in Sequoyah. A lot of these officials are oil company executives – very big behind the scenes in some of the Indian tribal governments. They’re busting a gut to make sure you and the others who show up don’t get arrested.”

    “So what does Pristine want me to do?” I asked.

    “Get endorsements,” Al replied. “Get ‘em from all sorts of prominent people – spiritual leaders, politicians, scholars – you know them all.” He laughed and hung up.

    It’s true that one of the advantages of being a leader of a national religious organization like the Maria Russell Missions is that you have a lot of faithful followers who are willing to do free labor that raises money. We have devoted people all over the country selling our literature, turning over at least one tenth of what they make at their jobs to us – and our really devoted full-time workers turn over everything. This means we have a lot more money than we can use up just feeding oatmeal to hungry transients. We can invest that money in businesses which will bring in even more money – like that horse-breeding ranch where I went with Al to take the LSD. And all of it is tax-free.

    So first politicians show up to be photographed when we send in relief teams after a flood or a tornado. Then these same politicians ask us in private for a little campaign contribution. After a while they want to be in on the really big money.

    At that point these politicians want me to put them in touch with Pristine. A lot of them say they’re not in the Republicans or the People’s Party. They say they run as independents. I could laugh.

    There are politicians, religious figures, researchers in psychology and the physical sciences, anthropologists and sociologists – all paid for by Pristine. And why should the Pristine Foundation do all the work when I can line these people up?

    So I started getting lots of endorsements. Sure the New York Times wrote a feature story about me implying that I was a crank and that some of my famous sponsors endorsed me because they didn’t know what was going on outside their own specialties. But remember – the New York Times is written for people who think that the most important part of reality is the quarrels of government figures in Washington DC. And these people apparently believe that the world drops off in a gigantic cliff 15 miles west of the Hudson River.

    I started walking around every day with my pyramid-shaped head dress on – the one I wear when I am teaching doctrine or trying to make contact with the spirit of Maria Russell. I wore my pyramid on my head with a proud little tilt. After all, hundreds of intelligent educated people, leaders in their fields, had made some kind of endorsement for me. I was getting money from a foundation funded by some of the biggest corporations in the country. Why should anybody call me a crank?

Manny speaking

    I went up to Zarahemla in May to discuss with Louie our basic plans for dealing with Taze’s circle in Sequoyah. Of course Rivka wouldn’t come and Buff, I remember you were too busy preparing a final exam for your anthropology students. You didn’t quit teaching till that fall semester.

    I didn’t try going in the Cultural Team truck after my break-up with Rose. One result of our Circle in Colorado that amazed me was the Rural Bus service was running to Zarahemla again. So there I was in the bus painted with flowers and designs in all the colors of the rainbow heading northwest from La Plata.

    La Plata is a small town surrounded by mountains so you are always in sight of the out of doors, but as I drew near Zarahemla, I realized how much of my life since that Colorado Circle I had been confined in offices and apartments and classrooms. Now I could see herds of pronghorn antelope chasing along the roadsides. As the bus started to go up the steep slope to where the two-lane highway met the gravel road that descended into Zarahemla Valley, I saw a bald eagle flying near a peak.

    The bus let me off at the gravel road. I was safe. No one would shoot at me. I walked a couple of miles down into the valley, listening to the rustle of the Pobre Clara river over its stony bed. I came to Aries John’s tipi. His wife Zerena was in front of it nursing her girl Sariah, who was about a year and a half old. When Zerena saw me, she stood up, holding the baby tighter and called out, “Hey, folks, come out and see who’s here!”

    Aries John came out with Emma and Cassie, his two other wives and a short, plump woman with dark brown hair in many long thin braids. Emma and Cassie were hugging me when John walked up with the short, many-braided woman and said, “I’d like you to meet my new wife Teresa.”

    Teresa and I did our please-to-meet-yous. So the world was still turning around and new things were happening besides the Taze crisis. I noticed that Emma was pregnant.
    “Hey, congratulations!” I said.

    “Thanks,” Emma answered. “Back when I was with Bishop Louie I had a little girl my first year with him – but stillborn, God rest the poor thing.”

    “I wish you joy with this one,” I said.

    “Oh. I trust this one will be all right,” Aries John said. “And say, did you know? Louie’s got a chance to have him another one.”

    “Another what?” I asked.

    “Kid, of course!” Aries John said. “Louie will be here in a little while for lunch. You’ll see what I mean.”

    We went into the tipi. Aries John squatted by the pot on the fire where beans and green chile and little bits of hamburger meat were bubbling. He stuck a wooden spoon into the pot now and then to taste and see if it was right yet. “A little more time,” he kept saying.

    My stomach kept squeezing empty air and under my breath I was saying, “Hurry, John, hurry.” Also I was wondering – what did he mean about Louie having a chance for another kid?

    After nearly an hour, Louie stepped into the tipi and gripped my right hand in both of his. Behind him came a young woman with a big Roman nose, high cheekbones and large ears. She had dark hair with a reddish tint that reached to her shoulder blades. She wore a long skirt, almost to the ground, and a black leather cowboy vest. Her long, wiry arms were bare. This woman was short and not at all heavy, but something about her gave a feeling of great strength. Except for her freckles, she looked rather Indian, but I found out later that she had no Indian ancestors at all.

    “Manny, this is Liz,” Louie said in the tone of someone who is not overjoyed by a new fact in his life, but is acknowledging the fact as overwhelmingly important.

    Liz looked me over with her blue-green eyes - an honest, searching look of someone who is trying to size up another person, but who also has basic goodwill for newcomers in her life. Finally she gave a big smile and reached out and took my hand in a firm grip. Something about her look said, “I think you’ll do.”

    We all sat down and Aries John started pouring chile and beans into bowls for us. We ate with the sound of the river behind the tipi and the wind in the cottonwoods over us.
    We talked about Taze, but we weren’t talking about a desperate problem any more, but simply of steps that we knew we had to take. We would pick up Uncle Denny and go to Sequoyah and meet with the traditional Indian spiritual leaders. We would find a place where these spiritual leaders thought it would be good for people to come make the Circle – preferably on National Forest lands, not Indian lands.

The main problem was an adequate vehicle to carry us. We needed one that would have room for a mattress for Uncle Denny to stretch out on. The best possible one would be the cultural team’s covered truck – which meant I would have to swallow my anxiety and go face Rose and the other cultural team people and ask them for the loan of the truck. And this time we would have to be very careful about not wasting gasoline. We wouldn’t be able to call the Pristine Foundation and ask them for money.

Chapter Twenty

Buff speaking

    This part of the story is my own life. There I was, Buffington Journeycake, who was born and raised in Sequoyah. My doctoral dissertation in anthropology was, “Ethnic and Class Conflict in Sequoyah Politics.”

    The title may look a little strange, but the practical implications of the subject have left more than one person face-down with a bullet in their back. A lot of my knowledge came from uncles of mine who would never go out without a pistol under their coats.

    That’s why I didn’t do my dissertation at the State University of Sequoyah in Tulsa or at Oklahoma University in Norman in the next-door state. I wrote my doctoral study of Sequoian political culture at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, which I figured was a safe enough distance.

    Sequoyah has less than a million people. There are more blacks than whites and more Indians than either. There are about 25 Indian tribes.

    Each tribe in Sequoyah is divided into two basic groups. The mix-bloods live in the towns or in the fertile river valleys. They speak English and dress like most Americans, but with a touch of cowboy.

    Full-bloods live in the hills or in the areas of poor soil. They speak Indian languages and wear costumes with lots of embroidery and colorful patchwork. Many full-bloods have some white or black ancestry. The mix-blood/full blood distinction is more cultural than racial. Sequoyah is like an Anglo Guatemala. And I have not even begun to tell half the complications.

    I am named for T. M. Buffington, a former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation who was the grandson of a British missionary. Buffington founded the state of Sequoyah. You see, the US government had designated a large area as Indian territory and forced a lot of tribes to move there – at great cost of lives to the Indians.

    After the Indians finally got settled down, the government allowed huge numbers of whites to move into the lands in Indian Territory that had not yet been assigned to any tribe. The whites declared their area to be Oklahoma Territory in 1889 and applied for statehood.

    So Buffington and the other Indian leaders were afraid that the whites would try to glom the rest of the lands for themselves. Buffington persuaded President Benjamin Harrison to set up the remaining Indian Territory as the State of Sequoyah in 1891.

    President Harrison was a Republican, so Buffington said that he could guarantee that Sequoyah would be solid Republican state. Buffington and the other mix-blood leaders kept some of the best river valley land for themselves. Then they allowed blacks and whites from outside the state to settle in the remaining river valley area – more blacks than whites. Buffington and his friends thought that blacks would be more likely to vote Republican.

    Most of the land away from the river valleys – hilly country with sandy or rocky soil – was made into reservations for the full-bloods.

    The wealthy old mix-blood families like I come from have had some shooting feuds among themselves about political office. Then the full-bloods and the blacks and the whites started demanding more political power. (Of course, the rich whites wanted power for themselves and the poor whites wanted anything more than what they already had.)

    I showed my bias in my doctoral dissertation. I wrote that I hoped some day the poor whites and the blacks and the full-bloods – and even the poor mix-bloods (there are a lot of them) could all forget their racial hatreds and get together in one big movement for a better life.

    I didn’t think my ideas would make the rich whites or the rich mix-bloods very happy. That’s why I stayed teaching in a small college in La Plata, New Mexico, for several years instead of living in Sequoyah.

    Then I went with Louie and Manny and Uncle Denny to the hills of northeastern Sequoyah. I knew Isaac Gourd there, an old Cherokee medicine man who was a full-blood leader in the ceremonies at the stomp grounds. When I introduced Uncle Denny to Isaac, they hit it off right away. After all, Uncle Denny was chief of the Gourd Clan at Santo Toribio. Old Isaac Gourd scratched the scanty hair at the back of his head. (He had enough white ancestry so that he was mostly bald.) He told Uncle Denny, “Man, you and me are gourds off the same vine!”

    And we all sat down to a meal of squirrel soup with kanachi (That’s a flour made of hickory nuts that thickens the soup). We had grape dumplings and sugared tomatoes as well.

    Isaac Gourd’s wife cooked the meal. She was nearly 70, but still slender and beautiful with long white hair flowing over her shoulders.

    Isaac Gourd’s wife spoke only Cherokee, which I don’t know very well. The rising and falling pitches of her Cherokee speech made elaborate patterns like the embroidery on her floor-length skirt.

    After a lot of second and third helpings and joking around and talking about corn crops, we got into where to send all the people who would come for Taze’s circle.
    “From what you-all show me on the map,” Isaac said, “That fellow Taze wants his circle to be near to where the old Indians built their mounds. We don’t know anything about them old Indians. They was all gone away before we got here. But we don’t want to bother their things. You promise me you’ll keep your people away from them mounds and I’ll talk around to the Tribal Council and I’ll try to keep them from bothering y’all.”

    Next day we drove to the Federal building in Tulsa, the state capital, to talk to the Forest Service about National Forest land where we might camp for the Circle. Then we went back to Isaac’s house.

    “Tell you what,” Isaac said. “I know a spot where the road forks to go to them old mounds – but it’s about 15 miles away from the mounds. Now that spots on Indian land, but I’ll ask the other folks that help keep up the fire at our stomp dance ground. I’ll tell ‘em y’all should stay at the fork to turn away the people that’s coming and send to that other place in the National Forest. If y’all will do that, I think we can keep the Tribal Council from meddling with y’all.”

    In the next few nights a bunch of old full-blood men wearing turbans started coming by Isaac’s place. Uncle Denny was sitting among them having the time of his life. Most of these old full-bloods couldn’t speak English. Uncle Denny would speak to them in English and Isaac would interpret.

    But sometimes Isaac would forget to interpret or Uncle Denny would forget to speak English and he’d speak in his own language. But they all understood one another anyway. So by the second weekend in June, Louie and Manny and Uncle Denny and I were camped where the road forks off towards the mounds – ready to warn everybody to turn around and ell them how to get to the place in the National Forest where we wanted to make the Circle.

    And then the very first people who showed up at our camp were Aries John and Nephi. I hadn’t seen Nephi since the Colorado Circle.

Nephi speaking

    I’ll always remember in Colorado sitting at the campfire with Brother Maceo and Rivka looking up and seeing all them people flooding down into the valley for the first Circle. Most amazing sight I ever seen.

When they got to our campfire and poured all around it, I would get dizzy from seeing that many legs walking pat me. I looked for my wife Twyla in the crowd. I thought I seen her and headed towards her – but then it wasn’t her. Then I looked around and seen somebody else I knew in the other direction. I headed towards the,, but they wasn’t there either. I was just lost. Then a big hand grabbed my upper arm and a voice said “Ha-ha!” I looked around and it was Clark.

“Come with me,” Clark says. “I want you to meet some people I know.”

He led me over to where a bunch of teenagers not much older than me had just about finished setting up a camp of shelters made from sheets and blankets and ropes and branches. In the middle of the camp was a short heavy-set guy with black curls like corkscrews sticking out of his head in every direction. He had a shaggy black beard all over the lower part of his face. I’d guess he was about 18.

At tall skinny girl about 16 with long black hair was leaning against the guy with her arm around his neck. She held out an open bottle of whiskey and she had a grin like, “Wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on?”

This couple had raggedy clothes with patches on them made of leather. The guy’s blue jeans had more leather patches to them than they did cloth. Now I have had on dirty clothes that might smell bad, but this couple – it seems like their sweat had turned to grease all over their clothes. It smelled like old meat turning sweet.

There was about ten other people in the camp. All of them dressed about the same way – and smelled about the same.

“This is Mike Palocca,” Clark said, “and Ginny and the Coyote Family.”

“The Stinky Coyote Family!” the girl named Ginny yelled and everybody laughed. Ginny handed Clark the whiskey and he sat down around their campfire with her and Mike. Clark started to drink the whiskey. “Not yet!” Mike hollered. “The first drink is for the brothers and sisters that’s passed on!”

Clark held the bottle out over the fire and poured a few drops of whiskey into it. The fire sputtered for a second. Then he took a big swallow of whiskey.

After that he handed the whiskey to Mike. Mike poured a couple of drops on the ground and tossed down a swallow bigger than Clark’s. They passed the bottle back and forth a few times. Then Mike leaned over and spit straight into Clark’s face.

So what does Clark do? He leaned over and spit right into Mike’s face. They traded spits a couple more times. Then they grabbed each other by the back of their necks and hugged.

When they let go of each other, Mike said, “Excuse me, I gotta go piss,” and he walked off into the woods.

I leaned over to Clark’s ear and whispered, “Say, who are these people anyway?”
Clark whispered back to me, “They tried to stay in People’s Party Youth shelters, but they got drunk and smashed up the places so the People’s Party couldn’t let ‘em stay. Then when I was with the Nationalist Youth Corps they stayed at our headquarters and stole stuff. Our leader Jim had to tell them to leave. But I like ‘em. Mike’s just like a brother to me.”

Then Ginny called out, “Say, kid, do you want some whiskey?”

“Me?” I says.

Who do you think?” And she handed me the bottle.

“I guess I’ll try anything,” I says and spilled out a little whiskey for the spirits of the ones that was gone. Then I took a drink. It was sweet and sour and it burned. Mostly it burned.

“Aw, take a bigger drink than that!” one of the other Coyote Family girls said. So I took another and another and another. Pretty soon I was feeling sick and everybody was laughing at me.

Finally Clark stood up and said, “I’m going back to our camp to see if Bishop Louie is there. He might need me to help out in some way.”

I says, “Man, I’m feeling too bad to stand up. I just want to lay here a while.”
“OK,” Clark says, and he went off.

I felt like the ground was spinning around me. I just wanted to curl up and close my eyes. After a while I heard the voice of Ginny’s boyfriend Mike, “Here, take this, man!” And he tossed a blanket to me. The blanket was thin and the night was cold, but I was too far gone to care. I passed out.

When I woke up the next morning I was dizzy and pretty unsteady on my legs. I made it back to our camp. When I got there I seen Brother Maceo, the black man. He had just finished cooking up a small pot of vegetable soup,. And he was dishing some out to my wife Twyla!

I forgot I was dizzy and run over to Twyla as fast as I could. “Hey, Twyla!” I called out. “Clark told me you wasn’t feeling so good or you would have come up here earlier.”
“He’s right,” Twyla said in this real flat voice. “I don’t feel so good.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked her.

“I’m pregnant,” she says. “You got me pregnant in March before you left Zarahemla.”
I hung my head. I didn’t know what to say. Here I had been feeling like such a man, being married and all. And now it hit me. I wasn’t 15 yet. Twyla had just turned 16.
I sat down feeling more and more scared. Twyla just ate her soup and didn’t say nothing.

Somebody in Zarahemla had gave Twyla a little used tent, all patched up. That night we both got into it. Twyla went to sleep right away. I couldn’t sleep. I got up and left her there and went over to the Coyote Family camp. Ginny was sitting by the campfire and the others was in one of the shelters playing cards by the light of a kerosene lantern.
“What’s the matter with you?” Ginny said, looking up at me. “You didn’t drink enough whiskey to be that hung over.”

I says, “I just found out my wife is pregnant and she’s only 16.”

“Well la-de-dah!” Ginny says. “I was pregnant when I was 15. I had the little boy. He died when we was tramping across Arizona in the summer in all that heat and couldn’t hitch a ride.”

I sat down and stared at the campfire. I must have looked sad because I felt real sad.
“It’s a hard world all over,” Ginny said. “Best cure for a whiskey hangover is to drink more whiskey.”

She handed me the bottle. I poured out a little in memory of the spirits of all those who had disappeared out on the road, like Ginny’s baby. Then I poured as much of the rest into me as I could.

Chapter Twenty One

Nephi speaking

    I ain’t saying all this stuff here to be proud of it. I stayed away from Twyla’s tent and kept hanging out with the Coyote Family – the Stinky Coyote Family – the rest of the time we was in that valley in Colorado. I was scared of staying with Twyla to raise that kid – the same way my dad was scared of staying with my mom to raise me. “Besides,” I told myself, “she’ll be there at Zarahemla with Aries John’s wives and they’ll sure know how to take care of a baby. I want to see the rest of the world.”

    The Coyotes didn’t go up the mountain with the rest of the people to make the Circle on the Fourth of July. Mike just made of the people who went up. I stayed with the Coyotes and drunk whiskey and felt strange.

    People went up the mountain expecting the world to end and then they yelled and screamed when it didn’t. I seen this big crowd coming down the mountain and followed a bunch of them back to where we had camped from the beginning. Brother Maceo was there looking over a long stick he wanted to carve for a walking stick for himself. Twyla’s tent wasn’t there.

    “Where’s Twyla?” I asked.

    “Oh, she went with Clark and a bunch of others,” he says. “They went in Manny’s truck back to New Mexico.” He traced out designs with his long black fingers that he was going to cut with his knife into the soft white wood.

    “Where are Bishop Louie and Manny?” I asked.

    “Louie and Manny left when all them people was still a-whoopin’,” Brother Maceo said. “They got a warrant out for their arrest and they gone.”

    “Why didn’t you leave?” I says.

    “I’m organizing a cleanup crew,” he says. “We still got people here and we can’t leave trash on the ground. When you make a mess, you gotta stay and do something about it.”
    I went back to the Coyote Family camp. I told them about Brother Maceo’s cleanup crew. Mike got everybody together and they collected all their trash in one small place where it would be easy for the cleanup crew to take it away. “Just one thing,” Mike said, “Don’t ask us to stay and be a part of no crew. My feet are here but my mind is some place else and my feet gotta be where my mind is.”

    I hiked down to the highway with the Coyote Family. We split up into pairs to hitch hike. I was with a guy named Woozy, about 17, tall and real skinny and pale, almost white with big staring green eyes. He was a nice, friendly good-hearted fellow. There wasn’t no harm in him.

    It was easy to get a ride with all the traffic leaving the Circle and pretty soon me and Woozy got to Denver and met the rest of the coyote Family at a mission. There was always kids and old winos hanging on the mission steps.

    We ate dinner at the mission and then the girls went to ask the preacher for money. If the boys went, the preacher would figure out what he wanted it for. As it was, the preacher gave the girls enough to buy a fifth of pretty cheap wine.

    That night we was sitting under a bridge drinking the wine, Mike said, “We want to initiate you into the Coyote Family.” He handed me a big Bowie Knife and said, “Cut between your right forefinger and your middle finger.”

    I barely stuck the knife point in.

    “Go on, Nephi, cut it!”

    I stuck it in a little further.

    “Deeper!”

    I stuck it in till I felt a little flash of pain. A lot of blood come out and they all laughed. They grabbed my jacket off of me and stomped it into the dirt and all the guys peed on it.

    I still have the jacket back home in Zarahemla. And I have a scar between my fingers to this day.

    We would go get day old food from dumpsters behind the grocery stores. We would go into stores and swipe stuff. But then the Coyote Family would give away most of what they had stole to folks that was even poorer than they was.

    Other times when we had all panhandled enough money to buy a few quarts of beer or a gallon of wine and we was getting loaded, some guy would come by and we wanted to help him. We’d take him under a bridge and build a fire and cook some of our food for him. But so much alcohol had built up in our system that one of us – usually Mike – would get mad him and punch him out.

    It wasn’t just the guys. Sometimes we’d be trying to help a girl out and then some of our girls would spit at her and scream “Bitch!”

    The one I was really worried about was Woozy. He’d get all weak and sick and sweaty and beg us for more beer or wine or whiskey – whatever alcohol we had. Finally one day he just fell to the sidewalk and said, “I can’t go on no more.”

    Mike put one of Woozy’s arms around his shoulder and I put the other one around mine and we took him to the hospital. The whole Coyote Family waited in the lobby to see what would happen. Finally about three in the morning a doctor come to us and said, “He’s dead.”

    A cop and a man in a suit come with some papers for us to sign. The cop said, “What’s his name?”

    “Woozy,” Mike said.

    “Well, what was his last name?” the man in the suit says.

    “I don’t know,” Mike says, “just Woozy.”

    They took him to a place where they bury poor people for free. We panhandled enough money to get a bottle of good wine and we poured it all out on Woozy’s grave.
    People I meet on the road tell me that at least once a month some of the road folks show up at the graveyard to say hello to Woozy.

    I know that now every time I open a bottle – even just Coca-Cola, I pour a little on the ground for Woozy and all the others.

    But I knew if I kept traveling with the Coyote Family, some day I’d be missing on the road for good myself. It was September and getting cool at night in Colorado and I hitched back down to Zarahemla.

    I found Twyla in front of her little tent and I couldn’t believe it, she actually looked glad to see me. I was real shy, but I finally got up enough courage to give her a little kiss.

    It was the week before October, the time the day and night are equal length when Twyla started screaming and thrashing around and moaning just at sundown.

    Cassie, one of Aries John’s wives come over and looked at her, “Twyla’s just too narrow to have a baby,” Cassie told me. “She’s gonna have a miscarriage.”

    Cassie and Aries John stayed with me and Twyla until it was over. I was clenching my fists when Twyla screamed. I was feeling pain every time she hollered.

    Two days later when Twyla was able to walk, I got a shovel from Aries John and we wrapped up our little unborn son in a pretty piece of flowered silk cloth that Aries John’s wives gave us. We walked about a mile away from where every body was camping and I dug a little hole and Twyla laid the child down in it. Then I piled some rocks over it and Twyla stuck a little bunch of purple wild flowers among the rocks.

    When we got back to the tent, Aries John was there. He handed her some money and whispered something in her ear.

    “What was that about?” I asked after he left.

    Twyla answered –“He told me to take this money and go to La Plata and get some birth control pills.”

    All that winter I tried hard to be a good husband. As skinny as I am, I was bringing in huge loads of firewood on my backpack frame for us and the other camps.

    At first I didn’t hardly think of all this business about Taze. The thing I noticed the most was that this nice young lady named Teresa moved in with Bishop Louie. Then all of a sudden, Teresa was one of Aries John’s wives. And Liz, who I hadn’t never met before was living with Bishop Louie.

    “What’s going on?” I asked Aries John.

    “It’s just something that happens,” he told me.

    In early June, Bishop Louie went off to Sequoyah with Manny and Uncle Denny and you, Buff, to handle all this trouble that Taze had caused. Louie told Aries John, “Come on with us.”

    But Aries John said, “I want to stay behind and work on my pickup. It’s a complete mess from all that traveling we done in Colorado last year.”

    One day I was walking past where Aries John was on his back under his pickup. He had been down there working on it for hours. All of a sudden he stuck his head out from under there. “Know what?” he says.

    I stopped walking and turned towards him.

    “I ain’t never gonna get this pickup ready in time to go meet Louie in Sequoyah before July Fourth,” he says. “It’s good for traveling in just around here but it’ll break down if I try to drive it that far. So you and me are gonna have to do something.”

    “What?” I says.

    “Hitch down to Deming and hop freight trains,” he says.

    He got out from under the pickup and stood up and looked at me. “I need you to come with me,” he says. “I don’t like hopping freights alone.”

    “I’ll have to go ask Twyla,” I says.

    The first thing Twyla said when I told her Aries John’s idea was, “Are you gonna be away from here for months risking your life again? Remember, you’re not even 16 yet.”
    “Twyla, listen,” I says. “It ain’t more than a few weeks. You’ll be going to Sequoyah with the other people from Zarahemla when Bishop Louie finds a place for us to make the Circle instead of Taze.”

    “Oh, all right,” she says, shaking her head. “Nephi, I swear I have to worry about you like you was a little kid.”

    So me and Aries John hitched down to Deming – not very far across the desert, but a hot journey. Then we rode freights – that’s real hot and dusty and hard to breathe. A couple of times we had other people in the freight with us. Me and Aries John tried to be friendly with them, but once Aries John stuck out his hand and they wouldn’t take it. At a time like that, you never know what they will do. I was glad I had Aries John with me. Finally we got off in Tulsa, which is the state capital of Sequoyah and I was gladdest of all to be on solid ground without all that noise and bouncing around.

    Seems like we hitched all over Sequoyah, doubling back on our trail, looking for Bishop Louie and the others. We asked everybody we met, “Have you seen any strange-looking people camped out near here?”

    And they would say, “Huh? Stranger-looking than what y’all are?”

    Finally we found Bishop Louie’s camp at a place where the road forked. And it wasn’t long after that, Taze showed up with his whole army.

Taze speaking

    Dr. Al O’Connor returned to Santa Fe and we had several very good LSD sessions with some of my leading elders from our missions around the country. We had beautiful shining spring weather for our sessions out at the ranch we were buying. Al has a wonderful understanding of how to guide LSD voyages. Most of the elders told me all kinds of personal stuff about themselves during the sessions, thanks to Al’s prompting. I understood how to keep them in line so much better.

    Al brought the woman he was living with at the time, Princess Laughing Flower – I understand her original name was Lula Mae Overton. Laughing Flower gave ancient American Indian psychic advice to some of the most prominent business people in the country. The wives of some of the board members of the Pristine Foundation wouldn’t make a step without consulting her for 150 dollars at each meeting.

    I understand that Princess Laughing Flower really was definitely three sixteenths Indian. The first time Al came to Santa Fe with her, she had rather reddish hair, but then she dyed it a very bark blue. She wore a spectacular feather headdress three feet high. She was a short woman, but she had to duck every time she went through one of those low doorways at our ranch house near Santa Fe.

    At that time I was wearing a pyramid on my head every day, so I can’t criticize Laughing Flower for her headdress. Still, I flinched a little when Al said, “Wouldn’t it be a great idea to make the Circle around those ancient Indian mounds? We could have Laughing Flower at the head of the procession to the mounds on July Fourth, claiming her right to visit the mounds as an American Indian!”

    “Come on now, Al!” I said, wagging my finger at him. I was trying to keep it light, but I was a little nervous at the idea. “I’ve been an anthropologist. I’ve goat a reputation for knowing what’s authentic. Now if I sponsor Laughing Flower…”

    “Who cares what’s authentic?” Al shouted in a cheerful, whiskey-filled voice.

    “What do we want,” Al said, “museum pieces? We want the Legend of the American Indian to inspire the youth of this country…” and he flung back his arms so hard that he tipped his chair backwards onto the floor with a crash. Then he picked himself up, still grinning like always.

    “Don’t you realize?” he said, propping himself against a table and laughing, “The Princess and I have done LSD sessions with Ansel Buck himself!”

    “Ansel Buck?” I said. “I don’t believe you! Ansel Buck was the publisher of Photo News, Athlete and Wealth, magazines that appeared in millions of copies.

    “But Buck has been a friend of Nixon and Billy Graham!” I said.

    “Taze, Taze!” Al laughed. “You’ve spent your life too long in universities and this Holy Roller mission. You think that all Republicans are stuffy clods. Why even Nixon – back when he was campaigning in the Republican primaries in 1956, he appeared as a guest of honor at the opening of a new casino in the Bahamas. I was one of the other invited guests, along with some other people who were also exploring the spirit with hallucinogens. Of course then, we didn’t have LSD, only mescaline. But it was these same Republicans in the Fifties who made sure we got LSD from the government labs!”

    “Well, I guess…” and I gave a little whistle.

    “Taze, just remember,” and Al’s face got serious for the first time I had seen, “If you leave the rich free to play their little profit-making games and don’t try to play neurotic left-wing games against them, they will leave us free to make a real inner revolution of the spirit – and we will have a whole new hip spiritual society before they know it!”
    “My thoughts exactly,” I mumbled.

    Then I stood up straight and set my pyramid on my head at a jaunty angle. After all, I was the True White Brother, revealed by the spirit of Maria Russell Herself. I didn’t expect Ansel Buck to cheer for me in his magazines. But I knew that if Al and Laughing Flower could guide Buck’s thoughts on LSD as well as they guided my elders, his publications wouldn’t denounce me.

    Then one day all the elders from Maria Russell Missions around the country had gathered in Santa Fe. We would have a caravan of buses for the Indian mounds in Sequoyah. I was in the bedroom, supervising some of the new disciples who were packing my clothes when the phone rang. One of the disciples handed the phone to me. It was one of the Sequoyah state officials who had been working behind the scenes to keep us from getting arrested.

    “I don’t know what this may mean to you,” he said in his nasal drawl, “but this is for your information. These other people showed up from New Mexico. They met with the Forest Service and got a place in the National Forest to have the Circle. They’ve been camped out where the road turns off to the Indian mounds, giving people directions to the place in the National Forest.”

    “Thanks,” was all I could say. Then I yelled at the disciples packing my clothes, “Work at it a little harder! We’ve got to get there earlier!”

    For a second I thought of calling the Pristine Foundation and asking them to get some of their friends in the Forest Service to quarantine the National Forest in Sequoyah for bubonic plague to keep the Circle out of there, but that would take too much time.

    The best idea would be to go to Sequoyah at once with Al and Laughing Flower and the elders, get as many of the people as we could to come over form the National Forest. Then we could have a procession to the mounds and make the Circle about a week early. I phoned Ansel Buck, the big publisher and explained that I would be in the procession with Al and Laughing Flower and there was a chance we might be arrested.

    “Sure,” Buck said, “I had to bail Al out once when he got arrested for marijuana. This isn’t as serious a charge, so I think I can get you and the others out.”

    You’d think it would be hard to get through to a multi-millionaire like Buck, but we had a number of mutual friends in the Pristine Foundation. I even felt a kind of kinship with him, now that I knew we had both taken LSD.

    We set out for Sequoyah the next day, two days earlier than we had planned. We had 70 people and five buses, which came from Maria Russell Missions in the Rocky Mountain area. One of the buses was loaded up with something that we knew Louie would have only in limited supply – food.

    Once we got arrested and released, we could offer the food to those who might come for Louie’s Circle. I knew enough from taking care of poor and unemployed youth at the Maria Russell Missions to know that they would choose the Circle with the most food in it. The Message of the True White Friend would go out to the world.

Chapter Twenty Two

Rivka speaking

    Zephyr and Manny and I were sitting around Zephyr’s kitchen table the night before Manny was to take the others to Sequoyah in the cultural team truck.

    “Whew!” Manny said, drawing his hand across his brow to wipe off imaginary sweat. “At the cultural team meeting, I really was sweating. I didn’t think they would ever loan that truck to us. I thought Rose would block it completely. I had to talk and talk about how the Circle is really a movement of the working class and we can’t let Taze betray it.”
    “So Rose agreed?” I asked.

    “We negotiated a deal, “ Manny said. “We’re not lovers any more but we’re partners as advisors to the cultural team. I just better get that truck back to Rose in decent shape or she’ll hang me from the highest tree!”

    “What about supplies?” Zephyr asked.

    “Raise as much money and supplies as you can,” Manny said. “We’ll need every bit. Liz will be down here from Zarahemla to help out. Maybe you can work with her.”
    I got a lump in my throat. I was still legally married to Louie, but Liz was living with him. I had met her during clean-up after the Circle in Colorado, long before Louie met her. Liz and I had become good friends. I had gone to Albuquerque to visit her at Christmas. She was faking nursing courses in a vocational school there.

    She told me about the adventures she had once had with the Coyote Family. I thought I led a pretty wild life, but in some ways I was a prim, sheltered young lady compared to Liz. We wandered around Albuquerque and met up with two of Taze’s young people, a man and a woman, who had come down from Santa Fe to give out leaflets about Taze’s circle in Sequoyah. They had the tense, goggle-eyed quality that so many Maria Russell Mission people have. Liz took a leaflet and saw the picture of Taze in his pyramid crown surrounded by a halo of glitter.

    “Ain’t that the shits?” she said. “How could anyone call that the Circle? If I could, I’d do something about it!”

    “Well, I’m always down there in La Plata,” I said. “I’m around Manny and Zephyr and Buff and a lot of the other people who worked on the Circle in Colorado. I’ll stay in touch with you and let you know what plans we have about Sequoyah.”

    “Great!” Liz said, crumpling up Taze’s leaflet and throwing it in a trash can. “I’ll work with you on it.”

    She spoke with such depth of honest feelings – like she always does.

    After I returned to La Plata, we exchanged letters and I let her know the first tentative plans we were coming up with. Then I stopped hearing from her. In May, Manny came back from Zarahemla all amazed about the new woman Louie was with. Liz had dropped out of nursing school and moved in with Louie.

    Sure enough, when I was going around to the stores in La Plata to see if they had any extra food they might donate for our Circle in Sequoyah, I ran into Liz, who was also scouting for food supplies.

    When I walked in to talk to a store owner and saw Liz, she just stood there with no trace of nervousness. When she looked at me, her mouth was a straight line, but it was a friendly line. She was waiting for me to say something.

    “Hello,” I finally managed. “I’m here to see if they have extra food for…”

    “Yeah, me too,” Liz said.

    Just then, Ivy, my old friend from Zarahemla, showed up. Liz had come down with her in Ivy’s old black pickup, which was in petty bad shape. We fell in together and went to a lot of stores in La Plata, loading up what food they would give me. I didn’t talk with Liz about what was going on with Louie, just the necessary words for picking up the food and loading it. Liz did her share of the work rapidly and well.

    When we finished, she turned to me with a smile that made creases in her cheeks and friendly wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.

    “I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch with you sooner,” she said. “But I think you know why I didn’t. I’ll come back down tomorrow and see if we can scare up some more food from the churches and the People’s Party. The problem is how to get this food to Sequoyah. I don’t know if this truck can get there and our money is real low for gas.”

    “What about the other vehicles in Zarahemla?” I asked.

    “Oh, they’re all in terrible shape,” she said with a scornful gesture as if flinging the unsatisfactory cars and trucks over her shoulder.

    “But it’ll work out,” Liz said, sticking her arm straight out and shaking my hand. Ivy hugged me and the two of them drove off in the rattling pickup.

    That night Zephyr said, “I want to give you something.” She walked over to a cupboard and reached into it and came back with her hands cupped together to the kitchen table where I was sitting.

    “I’m not going to the Circle this year,” she said. “I’m from Missouri and I came here to La Plata to escape all that summer heat and humidity – and Sequoyah’s even worse. But I want you to go. Hold out your hands.”

    I held out my hands and she dropped a wad of crumpled paper money into them. I counted out $200.

    “Weren’t you always talking about getting a used TV set?” I asked.

    “Oh, they’re just so much noise,” Zephyr said. “Besides, I’m a registered nurse. I got this money sitting up with old ladies. I can always find more old ladies to sit up with.”
    The next day, Ivy and Liz were back in La Plata getting food, looking all excited – especially Liz.

    “Six of my old buddies on the road showed up at Zarahemla,” Liz said. “Coyote Family folks! Not the same bunch of Coyotes I told you about that I used to travel around with. But there are several different Coyote clans and they’re all connected. I know two people in this crowd, Mike and Ginny. They came to Zarahemla looking for some kid I hardly know named Nephi. And guess what! They brought a flat-bed truck!”

    “Is it any good?” I asked.

    “It’s a reject,” Liz said. “Farm Boy, one of the Coyote kids, went to visit his parents at a rural co-op in eastern Colorado. The co-op was getting a new truck and this old ark was in such bad shape they said, “Take it!”

    I showed Ivy and Liz the money Zephyr had given me. “Just maybe,” Ivy said, “with this and what we can get together along the way we may get my pickup and the Coyote flat bed and Brother Maceo’s car to Sequoyah. If anybody else wants to go, maybe they can take a bus or train – or hitch.”

    I went back to Zarahemla with Ivy and Liz. I had not been in Zarahemla Valley in almost two years. When I had left, there were about 200 people, most of them camped in tents around the adobe houses where the people from Louie’s old Mormon United Order Community lived. Manny was at Zarahemla at its height, right before everybody left for Colorado in 1972. He told me that at that time there were over 300 people at Zarahemla, with people constantly coming and going. Now there were less than 100 – with still a few tents and shelters scattered around.

    “People are still coming in a lot,” Ivy said. “And they stay a few days and then leave. See over there?” Ivy pointed to the ruins of the church. I had left before the rival Mormon community burned it down. I felt a sudden blow of sadness.

    “If we could just get the people together,” Ivy said. “Even if we aren’t Mormons any more, if we could rebuild the church, it would make a good community center.”

    “Yeah,” Liz said. “I’d like to do that, but right now we have to get to Sequoyah.”
    Next to the ruins of the church was a truck nearly in as bad a ruin, like the remains of a dinosaur. Clark and Brother Maceo were working on the truck with three of the most spectacularly shabby young people I had ever seen.

    “This is Mike – and this is Ginny and this is Farm Boy,” Liz introduced me and they gave me some grimy handshakes.

    “We got three more people here with us from our Coyote Family,” Mike said. “They’re goin’ around to everybody in Zarahemla right now to see if anyone has extra parts they can give us for this truck.”

    In a little while the three Coyotes – two women and a man – came back with very little in the way of spare parts. Mike and Clark got all of them together working on the truck, barking at them like drill sergeants until brother Maceo said, “Easy! Calm down!”

    Liz and Ivy and I did whatever Mike told us to do and got black gunk all over ourselves. By the end of the day with Mike and Clark yelling and Brother Maceo trying to get them to lower their voices, the truck would drive sounding somewhat less like it was about to collapse.

    Next day we loaded the coyote Family truck with sacks of corn and beans from the Zarahemla store house.

    “We was gonna pick u Nephi and his wife Twyla if she wanted to go,” Mike said. “We wanted to take them with us to Florida. Now we think helping Louie out in Sequoyah is more important.”

    We set out, Ivy and her three kids with their pickup full of donated groceries from La Plata, the six Coyotes and their truck – three of them in back with the load of corn and beans, black Brother Maceo in his car with his white wife Brenda and Clark, Twyla, Liz and me.

    Every 20 miles it seemed one of the vehicles bro