The Gulf by David Poyer Read Free Book Online Page B

circumstances had forced him to use it for the Navy enlistment. He’d used his Zuni name the first time he’d joined up, at seventeen, in the Army.
    From time to time, he wondered whether they were still looking for him.
    Bernard was twenty-two now. He’d grown up in western New Mexico, one of six whose mother had been neither pretty nor sober enough to hold a man long enough for the formalities. At four, lousy and potbellied, he’d been taken away by white women in long dresses and placed with a family in Gallup. At seven, he’d been placed with a second family; at ten, a third. These people received money for taking care of children. There weren’t enough of them and standards were low. He grew used to men’s fists and women’s tears. At thirteen, he’d gone to an aunt in Grants, then back to the pueblo with her when she’d lost her job making Indian fried bread for the tourists.
    He learned from the older boys there how to fight, steal, and use a knife. Unemployment on the reservation was eighty percent, and he saw no point in wasting time in school. At sixteen, drunk, he’d tried to enlist at Fort Wingate, but they’d turned him down. At seventeen, he’d convinced his aunt to sign the papers for an underage admission.
    For perhaps half an hour, waiting for the bus on Route 66, he’d thought his life was about to change.
    At Fort Jackson he’d taken all the Basic shit, the Sitting Bull jokes and the pugil-stick poundings. Then on his first pass, he’d met a woman from Leesville who’d never screwed an Indian. She also needed help smoking ten ounces of prime grass. After nine days with her, it was gone and he decided he didn’t feel like going to cooks’ school—let alone the stockade time the Army would want first.
    He’d hitchhiked home from South Carolina, making up a story about a medical discharge, and stayed there with his aunt and then two or three other women, Denise being the last. Till he’d carved a five-inch groove in Donicio Kawayoka’s chest.
    He couldn’t remember now whether it’d been over money, jealousy, or an envelope of speed. Late that night, however, two of the elders from the Muhewa, his mother’s clan, had come by to visit him. They’d pointed out in a friendly way that he wasn’t really one of the Corn People. He’d taken no initiation, and no sacred animal had revealed itself to him. He didn’t even speak the Shi Wi tongue. They admitted there wasn’t much future in the pueblo for a young man like him. Perhaps life would offer him more somewhere else, far away.
    Bernard took this advice seriously. The elders looked harmless and feeble, but people who ignored them tended to get run over by pickup trucks on dark nights. He’d headed for Santa Fe the next day. Far away? He decided to join the Navy.
    *   *   *
    His destination, when he found his way to it through the mazy streets, wasn’t what he’d expected. It was surrounded by alleyways so narrow the light reached no inch of them directly—the typical souk layout. The air was crowded with spices, sweat, perfumes, and wailing Arab music. The last man he asked about the “sorry market” pointed to a huge concrete-block building.
    He stood outside for a few minutes, peering in uncertainly. Was this it? The people going in and out the glass doors were all women.
    The Benadryl he’d sneaked on the ship was wearing off and he stuck his hands in his jeans to stop their shaking. This was the part of town they told you not to go into without your buddies. But he had no buddies—or none he could take with him on this piece of work.
    Twice in the half hour since he’d bought the knife, he’d thought he saw the face behind him. It was hard to tell. They all looked the same, short and dark with big mustaches. But this guy had on a pink shirt.
    Now he couldn’t decide whether to