Living in the Present

Tayo leaves Betonie’s with a new mindset.  He must learn to not dwell on his past memories, but to live in the current moment.  Tayo begins his new journey walking down the side of the highway with no real direction.  “He didn’t want any more rides.  He wanted to walk until he recognizes himself again”(Silko 143).  Tayo is trying to connect to his surroundings and the present; he is finding his current self and not being caught behind with his past actions.  Some old friends driving by soon interrupt Tayo from his walk: Harley and Leroy.  Tayo wants to keep walking, but he has no choice in refusing a ride from them because they would have drove alongside of him until he got in the car.  Tayo sees that they brought a woman with them named Helen Jean.  He notices that she is wearing heavy mascara, her hair is tightly curled, and she keeps applying red lipstick.  “Leroy and Harley…didn’t watch her the way Tayo did.  Her perfume was close and heavy; breathing it was like swallowing big red roses; it choked him.  He turned his face to the fresh air rushing in the window”(Silko 144).  Helen reminded Tayo of his mother, with her clothing, red lipstick, and her overall personality.  Tayo is looking for a woman he can love, not to have lust for.  He knows that only bad can come from lust and sex for money, like his mother coming home completely naked and disorientated with only a purse and red lip stick.  Tayo tries to leave Harley’s rez car (an old, junky, makeshift car that white people sell to Indians) again, but Harley grabs him by the arm.  Tayo realizes that Harley and Leroy are his only friends left, no more Josiah or Rocky.  He gets back into the car and starts drinking.  However, Tayo is not drinking to escape the past, but to feel the sensations of what’s going on around him.  “He didn’t have to remember anything, he didn’t have to feel anything but this; and he wished the truck would never stop moving, that they could ride like that forever”(Silko 147).  Tayo is beginning to live more in the present and

not in the past.

Tayo, Leroy, Harley, and Helen eventually end up sleeping at a bar off the side of the road.  Tayo wakes up to Harley and Leroy all beaten up and a white man telling him to leave.  Tayo begins to wonder how long Harley and Leroy can survive this kind of lifestyle of getting constantly drunk, passing out, and getting beaten up.  “How long before one of them got stabbed in a bar fight, not just knocked out?  How long before this old truck swerved off the road or head-on into a bus?  But it didn’t make much difference anyway”(Silko 156).  Tayo begins to realize the severity of their PTS and how the witchery has fooled them.  They represent the stereotype of the drunken Indian: sleeping wherever they passed out, rolling over women, vomiting what they had drank the night before, and not caring where or when they will die.  “The drinking and hell raising were just things they did, as he had done sitting at the ranch all afternoon, watching the yellow cat bite the air for flies; passing the time away, waiting for it to end”(Silko 156).  Tayo can now see the life of Harley and Leroy from an outer perspective and can relate it to his own life.  He finds that getting drunk constantly to pass the time does not make it easier to live life, it only makes it more painful.  Tayo sees that Harley had thrown up all over himself and one of them had pissed their pants in the car.  Tayo pulled the car over and, “pushed the door open, and something gave way in his belly.  He vomited out everything he had drunk with them, and when that was gone, he was still kneeling on the road beside the truck, holding his heavy belly, trying to vomit out everything-all the past, all his life”(Silko 156).  Tayo wants to purge out all of his life before this moment and to have a fresh start.  He does not want to live the life of Harley or Leroy anymore and realizes that, “they tried to sink the loss in booze, and silence their grief with war stories about their courage, defending the land they had already lost”(Silko 157).  Tayo knows that he must make changes to become whole again, that he must continue his journey until he finds what old Betonie told him to find: the mountain, the cattle, the woman, and the stars.