Kachina by Isaac Weil
A cramped adobe huddles in the desert on the bright road to flagstaff. A splintered sign on its front calls it The Native American Emporium. The two halves of its tile roof tilt against each other, sagging at the apex as if the whole building had previously swelled with a tremendous breath, but has now collapsed into a sigh, accepting the sun. Inside, the shag carpet stinks of sage. Here, Chris and his father rest from the heat of their southwestern road-trip. “Don’t touch anything,” his father says. “We can’t afford it.” Chris nods. He is too thin for his skin.
Chris hides from his father among the plywood shelves, ducking under dream catchers, bumping his head into tortoise-shell rattles. There, on a red cabinet, black, primitive and vital, a kachina doll dances in ritual stillness, still as dust. It stomps behind stone fetishes and black and white pictures of Indians in headdresses. Its knee juts, its foot dangles, and its chin bends in a dark nod, yellow mask twisted to the right. Chris gazes at its Stomp Dance, blood rushing to his fingertips. The yellow mask bites his eyes the same way the sage bites his nose, and he wants it removed, to see what is there behind it, and its black whittled teeth are not enough to discourage him. Standing on tiptoe, he steals the kachina under his shirt, then crouches in the dark crevice between the cabinet and the wall.
In the private shadow there, he turns the kachina in his hands, exploring its alien weight, its unexpected heat, holds it up, its feet to his nose, squinting under the mask trying to see, but he can make out no features of its face in the dark. So he cradles the kachina in his lap. Stretching his legs across the carpet, he runs his hand over the feathers fanning from its mask; he slides his thumbs across its eye slits, its yellow cheeks; he pauses on its chin. Trembling. He presses down hard on the edge of the mask and pops it off to the floor. Beneath, he sees nothing. Only the smooth curve of dark wood.
His father discovers him lounging against the cabinet, breathing as if exhausted, his chin jutting, head dangling, eyelids bending low over his pupils, the sunlight painting yellow on his cheeks, his fingers curling deep into the carpet, tips finding the root of the shag, and his thumb stroking the wood, empty of a face.
“Put it back quickly, before the shopkeeper sees.”
Isaac Weil is confused. He doesn’t know his place, and writes to find it. He is also a student at Fresno City College. For the last three years he attended the CSU Summer Arts Creative Writing programs, a source of infinite joy (thank you Doug and all the rest), though only for a month each year. He plays piano and plans on attending UC Berkeley in the fall of 2012.