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that
any anthropologist can do easily. Go and get drunk with local Indians in a bar.
Then arrange whatever you find out about them in terms of statistics. Turn
everything into numbers. Urban anthropology is a real field."
    There was nothing else for me to do except to take the advice of those
experienced social scientists. I decided to fly back to Los Angeles, but
another anthropologist friend of mine let me know then that
he was going to drive throughout Arizona and New Mexico, visiting all the
places where he had done work in the past, renewing in this
fashion his relationships with the people who had been
his anthropological informants.
    "You're welcome to come with me," he said. "I'm not
going to do any work. I'm just going to visit with
them, have a few drinks with them, bullshit with them. I bought gifts for
them-blankets, booze, jackets, ammunition for twenty-two-caliber
rifles. My car is loaded with goodies. I usually drive alone
whenever I go to see them, but by myself I always run the risk of falling
asleep. You could keep me company, keep me from dozing off, or drive a little
bit if I'm too drunk."
    I felt so despondent that I turned him down.
    "I'm very sorry, Bill," I said. "The trip won't do for
me, I see no point in pursuing this idea of fieldwork any
longer."
    "Don't give up without a fight," Bill said in a tone of
paternal concern. "Give all you have to the fight, and if it licks you,
then it's okay to give up, but not before. Come with me and see how you like
the Southwest."
    He put his arm around my shoulders. I couldn't help noticing how
immensely heavy his arm was. He was tall and husky, but in
recent years his body had acquired a strange rigidity. He had lost
his boyish quality. His round face was no longer filled, youthful, the way it
had been. Now it was a worried face. I believed that he worried
because he was losing his hair, but at times it seemed to me
that it was something more than that. And it wasn't that he was fatter; his
body was heavy in ways that were impossible to explain. I noticed
it in the way that he walked, and got up, and sat down. Bill seemed to me to be
fighting gravity with every fiber of his being, in everything he did.
    Disregarding my feelings of defeat, I started on a journey with him. We
visited every place in Arizona and New Mexico where there were Indians. One of the end results of this trip was that I found
out that my anthropologist friend had two definite facets to his person. He
explained to me that his opinions as a professional anthropologist
were very measured, and congruous with the anthropological thought of the day,
but that as a private person, his anthropological fieldwork had given
him a wealth of experiences that he never talked about. These experiences were
not congruous with the anthropological thought of the day
because they were events that were impossible to catalog.
    During the course of our trip, he would invariably have some drinks with
his ex-informants, and feel very relaxed afterward. I would take the
wheel then and drive as he sat in the passenger seat taking sips
from his bottle of thirty-year-old Ballantine's. It was then that Bill would
talk about his uncataloged experiences.
    "I have never believed in ghosts," he said abruptly one day.
"I never went in for apparitions and floating essences, voices in
the dark, you know. I had a very pragmatic, serious upbringing. Science
had always been my compass. But then, working in the field, all kinds of weird
crap began to filter through to me. For instance, I went with
some Indians one night on a vision quest. They were going to actually initiate
me by some painful business of piercing the muscles of my chest.
They were preparing a sweat lodge in the woods. I had resigned myself to
withstand the pain. I took a couple of drinks to give me strength. And
then the man who was going to intercede for me with the
people who actually , performed the ceremony yelled in horror and pointed at a
dark, shadowy figure