The Clowns of Shipolovi, and: Children of Sacaton, and: Tai Song

THE CLOWNS OF SHIPOLOVI / Greg Pape It is mid-afternoon. The dances have been going on since dawn. Women in bright shawls, women with fat brown babies in their laps, old women with white hair and pearly eyes, younger women with black hair cut and curled and permed by the hairdressers of Flagstaff and Winslow, old men with braided hair and turquoise or lavendar strips of cloth tied around their foreheads and deep creases at the corners of their eyes from a lifetime in the sun, younger men with crew cuts and large bellies, and even younger men with the long hair of their grandfathers, and children, many blackhaired children, all laughing at the clowns. The mountain spirits are in the dancers, hear it in their song like a celestial engine over the drum and tortoise shell rattles. Priests are blessing the dancers with sacred corn pollen, and the clowns are mocking the priests, scattering the pollen on the crowd in a haphazard imitation of the solemn blessing, and the crowd is laughing, the people standing or sitting on benches and folding chairs in front of the houses where they were born and all along the rooftops that surround the plaza, laughing under the song. Now the dancers file out and descend once again into the kivas, and the clowns gather in the dust with a big jug of mock spirits. They pass the jug around, guzzling and bickering and stumbling like drunkards. One lets go a huge loud belch and pats his stomach with both hands, another pukes a dark red stream, retches, wavers, and falls on his face in the muck to groans and laughter and embarrassed sighs and the fine dust comes down on those who watch the clowns, those who remember and laugh and laugh until their faces are wet and muddy. 12 · The Missouri Review CHILDREN OF SACATON / Greg Pape I came to Sacaton to teach the children metaphor—look at the clock, a moon nailed to the wall, a madman's eye. What I said was good for a laugh, a puzzled look, or a so what. I learned many ways to call the roll. I fell in love with many faces. Because I was a kind stranger they told me their secrets. Their fathers were workers, heroes, and drunkards. They were gentle, cruel, or gone. They showed me the sleeping chief in the San Tan Mountains. See it? There's his head and there's his feet. And I saw how the rocks formed his folded arms and the peak that was his nose. They explained Mul-Cha-Tha, the place of happenings. Their mothers made baskets, sang the old songs, drank beer all day, were beautiful, hit hard, or dead. They already knew metaphor. They said the wind is the long hair of the horse I ride in the mountains. They said the cactus is like people dancing. If the sun gets hungry, one of them said, you better look out. The Missouri Review · 13 TAI SONG / Greg Pape Maybe you've seen the sign on old Sepulveda, Tai Song, Cantonese Cuisine, on your way to or from the L.A. airport. Maybe you've even stopped and gone in and ordered a Mai Tai or a Stinger, then Peking duck or Sweet and Sour pork. In '61 the dark eyed brunette in a flowered kimono, the night hostess, was my mother. My father was starting a new family in some other city. So one afternoon at three when school was out I pedalled to an office in Lawndale, filled out a form and received my social security number, which has been with me, stamped in my mind, ever since. Maybe you sat in the gloom of the lounge among the plastic orchids and sipped your drink and stared at the orange light glowing within the body of a spiney puffer fish as the soft music of strings, flutes, and gongs issued from the speaker on the wall above you and you imagined yourself in some far off exotic place. On the other side of the wall nine thin men from Canton sweat and smoke and sing out to each other in...