Native Religion
From Hombre to A Few Dollars More, from Wild Wild West to Evil Roy Slade, from High Noon to Westworld, the stories appear in the event horizon of an energy field between the American psyche and the American soil
Archetypes emerge as gunfighters and morticians and gamblers and saloon girls and mountain men and renegade Indians. This is native religion, and it reaches down into deeper strata, down into the bones and the dust of pottery shards. People just showed up and took their property and their lands. This taught Bergamo a lesson about setting up a kingdom on the earth. He set his up in heaven.
Bergamo was a native, but he had only recently made a commitment to being a native. He’d operated off some vague collection of second-hand soil samples from other lands. The original cast of goths and puritans imposed over the landscape began to crack like ice and break apart. Down beneath it there was Ranchera music and the moonlight was buttery with sensuality. The train was arriving at the station.
The porters moved luggage on big-wheeled carts painted grass green, their voices were musical, like instruments being played in jazzy exchange with the excited conversations of arriving passengers and the people meeting them, and the music drifting up the street from the Mission.
“Would it be rude to ask about this equipment, sir?” the porter asked.
Bergamo looked over at the rack of gear and the keyboards. “Those are musical instruments,” Bergamo said. “Electronic instruments.” The porter nodded affirmatively, though Bergamo knew he had no programming to understand electronics. He was an actor back on earth who in Ash Fork believed he was a porter.
“So you are a musician, sir?”
“I do environmental soundscapes.”
“Like the sound of rain, or birds and bees?”
“Yes, like that.”
Bergamo was impressed with the quality of the people going into Space, even though they did not have the capacity for self-observation when outside Oz (The organic zone). They were always logical because the program behind them was logical. He wondered how much this man was being paid in Oz for the impression of his personality on the field.
The porter had stopped. They were approaching the old Mission in the center of Ash Fork. “That’s not a hotel,” the porter said.
“It’s the Mission,” Bergamo said, “and I own it.”
“You own a church?”
“Somebody always does.”
The porter reluctantly put his weight into the cart and moved it on toward the entrance to the Mission. The ranchera music had given way to a ballad. Bergamo stood in the doorway and looked at the singer. Her face was unnaturally pale in the spotlight, and she held the microphone in both hands like she was praying into it. “Lost and found, love in the underground.”
“I don’t feel like dealing with anybody tonight,” Bergamo said. “They didn’t know I was arriving, did they?”
“No, sir. I mean, they knew that it had been sold. We all knew eventually somebody would buy it. Of course, if you’re the owner, now, you can do what you want to with it.”
“Yes, quite right.”