Half an inch.
“… because machines don’t die …”
Tommy could feel the faint, faint breeze stirred by the continuously moving electric blade.
“… machines are efficient and reliable. If you want to do well in the white man’s world, Little Chief, you must be like a machine.”
Runningdeer switched off the knife. He put it down.
He did not let go of Tommy.
Leaning close, he said, “If you wish to be great, if you wish to please the spirits and do what they ask of you when they send you the sign of the moonhawk, then you must be determined, relentless, cold, single-minded, uncaring of consequences, just like a machine.”
Thereafter, especially when they ate cactus candy together, they often talked of being as dedicated to a purpose and as reliable as a machine. As he approached puberty, Tommy’s dreams were less often filled with sexual references than with images of the moonhawk and with visions of people who looked normal on the outside but who were all wires and transistors and clicking metal switches on the inside.
In the summer of his twelfth year, after seven years in the Indian’s company, the boy learned what had happened to Runningdeer’s half-brothers. At least he learned some of it. He surmised the rest.
He and the Indian were sitting on the patio, having lunch and watching the rainbows that appeared and faded in the mist thrown up by the lawn sprinklers. He had asked about Runningdeer’s brothers a few times since that day at the workbench, more than a year and a half earlier, but the Indian had never answered him. This time, however, Runningdeer stared off toward the distant, hazy mountains and said, “This is a secret I tell you.”
“All right.”
“As secret as all the signs you’ve been given.”
“Sure.”
“Some white men, just college boys, got drunk and were cruising around, maybe looking for women, certainly looking for trouble. They met my brothers by accident, in a restaurant parking lot. One of my brothers was married, and his wife was with him, and the college boys started playing tease-the-Indians, but they also really liked the look of my brother’s wife. They wanted her and were drunk enough to think they could just take her. There was a fight. Five against my two brothers, they beat one to death with a tire iron. The other will never walk again. They took my brother’s wife with them, used her.”
Tommy was stunned by this revelation.
At last the boy said, ” I hate white men.”
Runningdeer laughed.
“I really do,” Tommy said. “What happened to those guys who did it? Are they in prison now?”
“No prison.” Runningdeer smiled at the boy. A fierce, humorless smile. “Their fathers were powerful men. Money. Influence. So the judge let them off for ‘insufficient evidence.'”
“My father should’ve been the judge. He wouldn’t let them off.”
“Wouldn’t he?” the Indian said.
“Never.”
“Are you so sure?”
Uneasily, Tommy said, “Well … sure I’m sure.”
The Indian was silent.
“I hate white men,” Tommy repeated, this time motivated more by a desire to curry favor with the Indian than by conviction.
Runningdeer laughed again and patted Tommy’s hand.
Near the end of that same summer, Runningdeer came to Tommy late on a blazing August day and, in a portentous and ominous voice, said, “There will be a full moon tonight, Little Chief. Go into the backyard and watch it for a while. I believe that tonight the sign will finally come, the most important sign of all.”
After moonrise, which came shortly after nightfall, Tommy went out and stood on the pool apron, where Runningdeer had shown him the self-devouring snake seven years earlier. He stared up at the lunar sphere for a long time, while an elongated reflection of it shimmered on the surface of the water in the swimming pool. It was a swollen yellow moon, still low in the sky and immense.
Soon the judge came out onto the patio, calling to him, and Tommy said, “Here.”
The judge joined him by the pool. “What’re you doing, Thomas?”
“I’m watching for …”
“For what?”
Just then Tommy saw the hawk silhouetted by the moon. For years he had been told he would see it one day, had been prepared for it and all that it would mean, and suddenly there it was, frozen for a moment in midflight against the round lunar lamp.