“Maybe we can work something out next growing season. I think all they’ve got is a little kitchen garden, and I don’t know how much they can put by. Maybe we can offer something there. Or, more likely, trade some work. We’d just need a few sheep to start.”
“Can’t hurt to ask,” Jack said. “I think Rupert thought he was the last man on earth before he really was, but I don’t have reason to think he’s dishonest.”
“Well, it would be nice to diversify,” Peter continued. “We rely a lot on venison, and the cattle are getting fewer. If it’s a hard winter, a lot of them won’t make it. In fact, we might want to get out and reclaim a few more of those now, too. We can take that into account when we figure out how much of the old pasture we want to repair and keep fenced.”
“I suddenly feel like there’s a lot more of this hard outside work in our future.”
“Sorry, I guess I’m getting ambitious now that you’re here.”
Jack found this gratifying. He was pulling his weight. “No, I’m all over it. I think it’s great. And rewarding, to be able to look out and see what you’ve done. To have a direct hand in what goes on the table. Very different from my former life. The most rewarding work I’ve ever done, to tell you the truth.”
“Good, because your being here gives us more options. I’m glad you’re here. Anyway,” Peter continued, “we get a bit of a break because there’s only so much we can do in the winter. Plus we need to keep up school.”
“Too bad there’s no need out there for lawyers,” Jack said. “When the Apache grumps get around to telling each other what to do, I guess there’ll be a need all over again.”
“How about the Diné?” Robin asked. “I bet they need lawyers.”
“Yeah, they sound like a lawyer’s paradise,” Jack answered.
“You can study medicine with Robin,” Peter suggested.
“You’re studying medicine, Robin?”
“Well, I’m interested. I’ve done some reading on it. But I’m just doing high school math and biology.”
“I can help with that,” Jack said. “At least until you get ahead of me, if you’re not already.”
“Looks like there may be more need for a doc than we thought,” Peter said. He was referring to the conflict between the canyon people and the neighbors all around. The world seemed a different place since the visit to Rupert’s that had started out so ominously the week before. Now they knew there was a whole society out there, and not all zombies. From what they could glean from Rupert, the Apache were highly independent and not at all eager to organize with one another. It was difficult to imagine them assembling for a council on how to deal with the Diné. The zombies were independent, too, but more than happy for an excuse to party. Peter, Robin, and Jack had withdrawn from the Willises intending to call on some of the other Apache they’d gotten information about, but it had to wait. Winter was coming on, and there was a surge of work to do before they could ease up.
“You’re welcome to take my car for your little outing tomorrow,” Jack said to Peter. “You’d just have to be careful about trees across the road. And elk. And deer. And bridges. And uneven pavement.”
“You’re scaring me with all those obstacles,” Peter replied, “and I don’t think we need it to go to the Willises. We can go a smarter way than when we were tracking them. It’s not too far by horseback.”
“We? Are you going, too, Robin?”
“Am I going, too?” she asked Peter in turn.
“I was just thinking that way from force of habit. You can go, or we can all go, or you can both stay. It’s up to you.”
“I’ll go for the ride,” Robin said. “I’ll take my books.”
“Then maybe I’ll use tomorrow to do a little scouting,” Jack said.
The next day, Jack was out early. He had learned from his maps that “the canyon” was about 200 miles away. A goodly distance for a one-day round trip, especially given the precautions that elk and neglect of the roads required, and the shorter days that winter brought. So Jack set out with plans purposely somewhat vague. He held out the possibility of going all the way to Chinle and back, but perhaps he would encounter the Diné before he got there. He was of a mind to approach such an encounter as circumspectly as he could, anyway. And if he did end up going all the way to Chinle, he would likely spend the night somewhere in the vicinity if he could. He wouldn’t be shirking his work because the next day would be Sunday. So his plans really depended on whether he scared up a contact with these mysterious Diné or not. And if he did, on how they would react.
The sun was still barely up when he hit Eagar. It was light enough for safe driving, but the land in many places lay in deep shadow as the road dipped and curved over the wild terrain. As he drew closer to Eagar, there were no longer big trees near the road, and he was descending quickly along mountain-hugging roads. Then he left the vertiginous landscape behind as he approached Eagar. Once into Round Valley, on the final approach to Eagar, Jack was looking at grasslands that reminded him of pictures he had seen of the South African veldt, except with more hills and vales and mountains rising up out of the plain. Jack forked toward Eagar, passing street signs for roads that barely looked like roads—Chiricahua Lane, Poverty Flat, and others. Then he passed the intersection with the town’s main street, where he’d parked on his last trip before the zombie valet had moved his car for him. He was conscious of the possibility of traffic on the roads now, something that had not seriously crossed his mind before recently. He donned his sunglasses as he eased out of Springerville, continuing north. He’d never been this far north, in this country. Jack reminded himself of the need for caution. Even though the visibility was perfect, he could be sure of his surroundings only to the next rise or the next sharp curve. His speed increased on the downhill slopes and slowed as he approached the peaks. The further north he traveled, the rockier the landscape became, and he was treated to all manner of rock striations emerging from uplifts in the plains. He saw blocky, car-sized boulders, one atop another, in swaths of colors ranging from pale ochre to purple sienna—sometimes two sets of colors in the same bluff.
There was no sign of anyone, however. Jack’s only detour before the next town was a hundred yards or so from the highway, cruising around Lyman Lake for the possibility of signs of human life. He saw none, only the lake more than a foot over its already indistinct banks, making some of the access roads dicey for washout. His next stop, therefore, was the little burg of St. Johns. It was about the size of Eagar and Springerville combined, although, Jack thought ruefully, his idea of “size” was still based on population, and given that, St. Johns was the same size as New York City now. In fact, St. Johns might be bigger if there were zombies drifting through it.
The streets of St. Johns were mostly on a grid, with a prominent municipal airport. Jack could easily cruise all the streets in the town proper without losing track of which he’d covered and which he hadn’t, except for one narrow residential street across which a large cottonwood tree had fallen, caving in the roof of the house on the other side. He paused on Commercial Street to do a thorough recycle of all of his gas containers and to relieve a local gas station of gas additives and gasoline. No sign of life, he concluded.
Jack had his windows down in town, despite the brisk temperature, just so he could be alert to noise, and sure enough, just before crossing a canal at the east end of town, Jack heard just the faintest suggestion of engine noise. He quickly pulled off the pavement onto the dirt and gravel drive of a trailer park that was hard by the canal and the bridge over it. He turned off his own engine the moment he came to a stop, willing the stirred-up dust to settle. All was still as a tomb, but only for the space of about a minute. He then heard again the sound of an engine distantly, and if he wasn’t mistaken, perhaps two. Motorcycle engines. He’d parked facing north, toward the road he’d just departed, and now he hunkered down in the seat to be less visible, trying to peer over the dashboard, and hoping his own vehicle would
look inconspicuous among the rusting and inoperable heaps in the trailer park.
Some moments went by before they came into view—long enough, Jack thought, that they might be completely unaware that he had been on the same road, going in the same direction. Jack watched as the two motorcycles cruised by, at speed, side by side. The riders wore identical brown leather bomber jackets, white silk scarves, black helmets and gloves, blue jeans with black riding chaps, and black boots. They turned their heads neither to the right nor the left as they passed Jack and sped across the concrete bridge, turning north with the wide sweep of the road until the roar of their engines could no longer be heard, and Jack was left again in silence.
Chapter 12
Jack savored the silence a few moments and then got out of his vehicle, walking up through the foxgrass of the embankment onto the roadside, looking left toward the town, and right toward the bridge. His boots against the gravel of the roadside seemed loud in the stillness. A breeze picked up. It was a contrast to the sound of the motorcycles, barely noticeable until it was picked up as a snoozy swishing by the cottonwood leaves in the trailer park. Jack walked onto the plain concrete bridge and looked down at the orange silt-laden water below. There are places in Arizona that are breathtaking in their beauty, awe-inducing in their improbable grandeur. But this wasn’t one of them.
Jack returned to his vehicle, not entirely decided about what to do next, and he remained undecided as he backed into the trailer park and then nosed his vehicle up onto Commercial Street. Only then did he choose right, rather than left. Crossing the bridge, he departed St. Johns with a heightened sense of alert and a better understanding that even the smallest town in this part of the country probably had occasional visitors—and that might be more true as he headed north toward the canyon, even though the towns were, if anything, further flung from one another and the landscape wilder and more forbidding than any Jack had seen so far. The population of the world now seemed more concentrated in the formerly more remote areas.
Those motorcyclists were not zombies, surely. Other Apache, conceivably, but Jack had a sense that they were the Diné he was looking for. He briefly considered trying to overtake the motorcycles to force an interview. But that seemed foolhardy. He didn’t know what to make of these people. They might be gentle as doves, but they certainly had their neighbors spooked. Jack preferred to find out what he could about them before confronting them. But how? He finally decided to continue on this highway, taking it slow and hoping he would see the motorcyclists or other Diné before they saw him. And if it didn’t work out that way, well then he’d just get the interview sooner rather than later, for good or for ill.
The next town was fifty miles away, a trip on blacktop that would normally take forty-five minutes, if that. The sight distance was strong at almost every point, the road having many straight stretches across land that was composed first of dry desert grasses, and then painted, desert rock wasteland, and then grasslands again populated by juniper and pinion and mesquite. Jack took this trip at about half his usual speed, straining to spy out any vehicle on a turnout or ranch road or bend in the highway. His trip to Sanders would normally take forty-five minutes or less, but he took it slow, covering the ground in about twice that amount of time. He saw no sign of the two motorcycles along the way. He was concerned the entire time that he’d encounter them lying in wait for him—or worse, what he feared more, an ambush by them and a number of their friends. He alternated between this high-tension stress and kicking himself for having absorbed the Apaches’ paranoia. He’d had his share already of unfounded alarm, and just because he’d encountered other human beings. They weren’t fundamentally different than they had been previously. Probably only he was, he knew, and the long loneliness had made him so. Even his friendship with Peter and Robin had not cured him of his jumpiness.
Ahead, Jack spotted the I-40 overpass. He felt conspicuous in his big SUV. There was access to the interstate at this point, and there had been commercial development here. A couple (or more) of motorcycles could be easily hidden, one by one, in this area. They wouldn’t stand out as a gleam of chrome against the dry greens and ochres of the natural landscape. The bridge over the interstate was a natural place for someone to keep a lookout for a motorist, so Jack pulled into a commercial parking lot a few hundred yards before getting there, in front of a shabby building with a sign identifying it as a Trading Post. He turned off his vehicle in hopes that it might blend with the other half-dozen or so parked randomly within sight. He glassed his surroundings thoroughly. The interstate bridge was clear, and so were all the lots and businesses in Jack’s line of sight. He put down the binoculars and studied his maps, planning his next move.
He was at something of a crossroads. Jog west a few minutes on I-40 and then turn north on the highway to Chinle? Or go east on I-40 to about the New Mexico border and go up secondary roads to Fort Defiance and thence on what appeared to be back roads to the upper end of the canyon? Jack had been given the name Tséyi’ for the canyon, the Navajo pronunciation he’d not mastered, but his map said Canyon de Chelly, and by description it was clearly the same place. The map had a helpful footnote giving the pronunciation as “canyon de shay,” the French spelling of Chelly being given for white mispronunciation of Tséyi’. The distance from the eastern end of the canyon to Chinle was maybe thirty miles. The map showed many twists and turns, however, so the floor of the canyon and the stream inside it was no doubt twice that, at least.
Jack had become absorbed in his maps, and he finally closed up his most detailed one showing Apache County. As he folded the map, there appeared behind it an otherworldly apparition—an oversized, smooth black head. A round ball. No, a man. A motorcycle helmet. Looking into the open passenger window. No face, just tint on the face shield. It bore in reflection Jack’s stricken, astonished face.
The man had never made a sound. Jack was too shocked to move, at first, and then just turned his head ever so slowly to his left, knowing before he saw it that there was another at his driver’s window, a short arms-length away through the open window space. Jack’s heart was pounding audibly. He thought he’d been careful, parking out in the middle of the parking lot with the windows down on a cool day so that he could hear. The surprise was so complete that Jack had no time to react with a panicked rush of activity. He just sat there, dead to rights, but quicksilver adrenaline coursed with his rapidly pumping blood.
Jack was glad for a healthy heart. He slowly opened his car door and stepped out, his left leg a sewing-machine needle against the pavement. His mind ran ahead of his body, however. By the time of this movement, he was already mentally resigned to his situation, and because there was no overt threat so far by the men, he considered that he was merely stuck with his backup option of interviewing the Diné representatives now. The abruptness of the encounter was unnerving, however, causing his limbs to shake from the unspent adrenaline.
Jack took his time collecting his thoughts, appraising his situation, and letting the panic subside, so that his voice, when he finally spoke, would not also shake. The men made no threatening movement while he paused, but the man on the passenger side walked around the front of Jack’s vehicle to join his partner. Jack could discern no one else about besides the three of them, not that he would entirely trust his senses at this point. His rapidly-developed strategy was to imagine what he appeared to be to these fellows and address them innocently, accordingly.
“You startled me,” he said in what he imagined to be a friendly way.
“Who are you?” the driver’s-side man asked. He had not removed his helmet, nor had his partner. They were identical space aliens, acting as though Jack had invaded their planet.
Jack paused a moment before answering, deciding that umbrage was the way to go here. “I’ll look you in the eye if you take off your helmets.”
The two helmets swiveled to face each other, and then turned back to Jack. A moment’s hesitation, and then the driver’s-side guy re
moved his, and the other followed. They were two ordinary-looking men. Younger than Jack. Not likely Indian, Jack noted. And not armed, he also noted. He held his right elbow in close, to press his coat closer to him, thinking to keep the .45 at his hip inconspicuous, but not wanting to look unnatural—and therefore threatening—in the process. His strategy, he struggled to remember, was to treat this as an innocent encounter. Which it was anyway, he considered, fueling his stance with a little internal indignation. The only insider knowledge he had was the stories of Diné weirdness he’d gotten from the Apache, consisting mostly of characterizations, not facts, demonizing the Other that the Diné represented to the Apache. Jack could well imagine similar slander from the Diné about the Apache. And, of course, for purposes of this exchange, Jack wouldn’t even assume they were Diné.
“Why are you guys sneaking up on me?” Jack asked with a tight smile, willing for them to see that the smile was forced.
“Well, we weren’t sneaking up, first of all,” the driver’s-side guy said.
“Then you are the quietest people on an already-quiet Earth. What’s your name?”
The driver’s-side guy, to whom this was directed, swiveled his head to look at his partner uncertainly, then apparently decided no harm could come from giving his name. “Roland.”
Jack almost remarked that this was a very un-Navajo name but remembered that he wasn’t going to let on that he assumed them to be Diné. “Pleased to meet you, Roland. Now why are you trying to scare the bejeebers out of me?” A little old-guy lingo, “bejeebers,” to throw at them. Maybe make them over-confident. Or at least let them see that Jack was confident.
“Well, who are you?” Roland asked. Not what’s your name, Jack noted.
Jack didn’t answer. “And your name?” he asked, nodding toward the passenger-side guy. The passenger-side guy duplicated Roland’s gesture upon being asked this, swiveling his head to Roland and then back to Jack. As if his name might be classified information.
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