Free Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge Page A

with a tiny, fierce imprint of teeth. Vaguely he remembered hearing that Americans did this. He did not understand it; he had a feeling of messiness and disgust. He tried to move away, but she held him; he was pressed against the wall and the sheepskins. She was fastened onto him; he could feel all her body, it was entering into him. There was something uncontrolled, indecent about this. Everything became confused. A little flame ran along his veins. The world melted away from under him, his body became water floating in air, all his life was in his lips, mouth to mouth and breath against his face. He shut his eyes. His arms were around her. Now, almost unwittingly, he began to return her kisses.
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    III
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    Slim Girl was asleep. Laughing Boy was very tired, but there was no rest for him. It was black inside the house; here no night wind blew through the leaves of the hogahn wall, no stars looked down through a smoke-hole. He found his tobacco and stole outside.
    The cold night wind blew against his skin. His eyes rested among the shadowy forms of the buttes; he looked up at the thick-gathered, cool stars. It was like laying a cold knife-blade against a burnt finger. It was right that they gave women names about war; he understood that now.
    His feet took him up onto the high place above the spring, where he had slept before. There he made himself comfortable with his back against a piñón trunk, smoking. Everything was whirling within him: it was necessary to put his thoughts in order. He had never imagined it was anything like this. He had lived the intimate life of the
hogahn,
he knew the camp-fire jokes; but there was never a hint of this kind of thing. It might be just American tricks, but he thought not. No, it was she, her power. She was stronger than iron or fire. That drink was medicine, but she was not medicine; it was just she herself. That blade of grass of a girl, that little Slim Girl, she could make his belly turn over inside of him, she could make his interior dissolve. He sat wondering at her and at himself. So very uncontrolled, at moments he felt ashamed, but mostly it was wonder. That girl was like one of the Divine People. One should not forget one's self, but this was a beautiful thing.
    He had fought, and sung, and raced horses, and known the uplift of the great dances; he was old friends with hunger, cold, fatigue, and suddenly contrasted feasting and comfort; he had lived out to the tips of his fingers, but this was something that made everything else turn thin and shadowy. That was her magic, perhaps, and it was wonderful, it altered life: that she gave complete fulfilment, where everything else was partial. Her house was better than other Indians' houses, her food was richer than other Indians ate, and she fed one's spirit with a perfection that only she could give. Hunger was dead where she was. She was not like The People; life with her would have to be different, but the trail was beautiful.
    His cigarette was long dead. Boy Chasing His Arrow had moved far across the sky. Drowsiness mingled itself with his thoughts, blurring them, while the night wind blew upon him. His doubts
and wonderments faded and thickened into sleep. Sleeping, he dreamed a dream. Perhaps the sight of the ragged, wretched singer and his wife had put it into his head. It was not much of a dream, not elaborate.
    He sat by the hogahn fire, and his uncle was telling the end of the Coming Up Story. He did not really see much, but he knew it was his uncle, and he felt angry with him for what he had said about Slim Girl. He knew that the other children were there, and that the snow coming through the smoke-hole melted in the air, and fell on the fire with little hisses. It was his uncle speaking, it was Wind God speaking in his mind; they were the same. None of that was clear; only the old, familiar words came to him, very definitely, spoken with emphasis, as when one wants to impress a lesson upon children.
    'Slayer of