She sensed rather than saw him looking at her, barely conscious as she was. She hardly knew what she had said. She only knew that she had been . . . elsewhere, and he had brought her back—with the story. But now it was finished, and she could feel herself slipping away again, slipping away into a gray country of murmurs and storms the walls of the world could not quite hold back. “Please?” she repeated. “Tell me another?”
     He spread his arms helplessly. “I didn’t bring any others,” he said. “That was the only one I had close to being right. The rest are all notes I haven’t put together, different versions I haven’t reconciled. There’s no way I can tell them in a way that would make sense.”
     Slipping away. “Please,” she pleaded. “Please . . .”
     “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
     Something else then, she thought, too weak to even get the words to her lips. The wind was rising; she was drowning in gray.
     “What?” he demanded, a mingling of fright, anger and desperation in his voice. Her head went under. She was too far gone to even wonder how he had heard her. Why couldn’t he just tell the story? About himself, if nothing else, he never talked about himself . . .
     “Only thing I can think of—is when I was lying there like that, and it was my own grandfather so worried. Funny the things that can hurt you. Wasn’t even a motorcycle with me. Just a flash of light…”

     I remember when it all seemed simple, being Indian in Las Bellotas. It was simple because I was a kid—never saw anything outside Jimmy’s Hollow, or heard anything but Grandpa’s bull about the good old days, those legends of the Bellota people and their gods that you want. Back when the world was clean and whole, before the Whites and their broken world, when you could be what you were and be proud of it—the way I was then, before I saw how I, Grandpa and our whole family and tribe were just scraping by at the margins of the White culture, trying to turn the clock back to those grand old days mostly by doing our best not to be noticed.
     Before that I was glad to learn the herb-lore and the songs, and I believed in the gods. I dreamed of nothing more than following in Grandpa’s footsteps, becoming shaman after him, just like he wanted. But he couldn’t keep the broken world out. Mom’s church was the wedge—he had to let her take me—had to let them tell me there was another god. And of course there was school, too. Poor Grandpa. You can’t find out about the larger world and stay untouched. I learned other stories—saw broader vistas and grander dreams, and once I dreamed them I had to make mine, spin dreams of my own. He never understood that. Stories to him were things that had happened, not things you could make up. He was so angry they ever let me learn to read. But Dad stood up for me—one of the few times he ever went against the old man. “Let the boy learn,” he said. “He’ll be no fit protector for the Bellotas if he doesn’t know what he’s up against.”
     “Or if he’s seduced by it,” Grandpa said, but he gave way. Grudgingly, but he did.
     I guess I was seduced by it. There was a time—a long time—when I was mostly embarrassed by my heritage. When I found out the things that were normal for Grandpa were crazy to my fiends. Oh, I still listened to him, still learned the stuff he had to teach me. Would have taken a bolder kid than I was to say no to Grandpa. But I didn’t take it seriously.
     Then the night came that forced me to—the night I had my vision, the one every true Bellota carries with him life long—used to, that is. By the time I came along that was gone with the good old days too—a hundred years gone, more or less. Missionaries put a stop to it, naturally. Except with those of us who held to the old ways and learned not to talk about ’em. Grandpa had had his, and Dad had too. But when my turn came—well, it didn’t go quite as well. No time for all the elaborate preparations, for one thing. It wasn’t supposed to come as soon as it did. Or at all, if Mom’d had her druthers. But I did carried it with me. Even now, I remember it like it just happened…

     The gray pulled slowly back as her grandfather continued speaking, and she felt peculiarly light and free. The small, dark tunnel through which she had been seeing the world since his first story had brought her back had opened up—she could see the whole room now—and the pain that had been with her in some form ever since the accident was gone. She was sitting before him, looking full up into his face as he spoke, and there was a bright, bright tinge to everything.
     She wondered, with an odd lack of concern, why she did not feel the floor beneath her. She knew it was there—she could see below, above, to either side—even behind herself, as well as before her. She wondered who it was back there in the hospital bed, with all those bandages and tubes and screens with the wavy green lines going up and down in sharp, staccato wave-forms. Some of the machines were beeping, she supposed. She could recall the beeping. But there was no sound now, none anywhere aside from the harsh, labor of someone breathing, and the words from her grandfather’s mouth. Those she heard perfectly.