Stealing Fire

by Win Blevins

  The air around the father, son, and daughter felt like an electric fence. I checked to see if Mr. Fine was carrying a firearm. Then I reminded myself that he would not do that, no way. But Jake Fine was dangerous, armed or not.

  Just then Rick Fine, aka Rick Finnerty, broke away and threw his arms around his sister.

  I put my hand on my .45.

  Iris whispered to me, “Stay out of a gangster’s family business. Shoot any of the three, and they’ll have you taken out.”

  Rick uncoiled nasty words. “You think I’m useless? Sure bet, Dad. In my duffle I have the plans for the Guggenheim—your old architect wasn’t very careful with them. Under his mattress?! I took them, you could say, right out from under him.”

  “And what am I supposed to do with those?”

  “You can sell them for a load of dough. Build the damned museum yourself.” Rick shook his fist in the air. “They’re yours!”

  Mr. Fine almost looked worried for a moment. “God, if my friends knew what you were like…” There went Mr. Fine’s moment of worry. “My son, sorry to say, you’re totally useless. You think someone can just walk up, steal a famous man’s plans, and put up a building?”

  Rick tightened his grip on Helen. “Sell them to some guy in Europe who’d buy them because they’re originals. Use your imagination.”

  Mr. Fine was quiet. I was afraid he was using his imagination.

  “See?” Fine Junior tapped the urn in Helen’s arms. “You don’t have to worry about the Payton Wood problem anymore, either. Let me just say, ‘You’re welcome.’”

  Helen was crying. Wracking sobs. And then she stopped. “Rick, you’ve turned into a horror.”

  “You went into the motel shower dirty and came out an angel?”

  She turned her head. She saw her brother. Maybe she wondered when Rick had run off the track. Maybe wondered if she’d waved a wand and fouled his soul some time along the way.

  Her eyes held Rick’s in a steady grip. “Payton and I were going to be married. You took my life.”

  “What? You want your boyfriend?” He jerked the urn away from her, opened the lid, and dumped the gray ashes all over her shoes.

  “Dad,” Rick Fine said, “I did all this for you. I want redemption for having the nerve to be born, for not pleasing you, for you finding me lacking, even repellent. I chased the Wrights from the time they got on the train to get these damned plans—they’re worth a bundle. I killed your princess’s useless boyfriend. Is that ruthless enough to be worthy of you? Dad?”

  Rick pulled Helen closer to him.

  Jake Fine was pale with helplessness.

  “The boyfriend alone should make up for a lot. I knifed him, tossed gas on him in the desert. Burned him to a crisp.” And then he started to laugh. It was the most terrifying sound imaginable.

  “Rick, you idiot.”

  “What?”

  “Shut up! I’ll call my lawyer,” Fine said. “You have just shit all over yourself. Witnesses, Rickie, you have confessed to murder in front of a herd of witnesses. We’ll have to say you’re certifiable, or there goes my business, there goes our whole family.”

  “Dad.”

  Rick pulled his .45, and with a big grin put it to Helen’s head. Then to his own head. Then back to Helen’s. A maniac.

  I put my hand on my own .45.

  “Now’s your chance, Dad,” he said. “Pick one of us.”

  “What? You’re crazy.” Fine held out empty hands. He probably wished he had a weapon.

  Back and forth, to Helen’s head, his own head.

  “Pick one of us to live, one to die, and I’ll make it happen. Only hard part will be explaining it to Mom. Although,” he said, “you’re good at pulling BS out of thin air.”

  “Listen, Rick,” Fine said in a firm tone, “don’t do this.”

  “Easy choice. Come on.”

  Jake Fine stood there, the wheels in his brain spinning. God knows what those wheels could spin out.

  Rick let go of Helen and sank to his knees, mired in his failure, his ultimate inability to satisfy his father.

  I lunged for Rick. Helen stumbled sideways, her hand over her mouth.

  He fell back but gave me a tussle, tougher than I expected. He was short but strong. Rick slammed the gun out of my hand—it skittered away through the sand.

  He raised his gun toward my throat.

  I dropped a shoulder onto his arm and pinned his gun to the ground.

  I heard screams. Whose screams? My own.

  I pulled away, and tried to get my knee on the forearm where he held the gun.

  He flipped me hard to the ground on my back, him on top. He brought up the gun, I whacked it down, and the trigger went off. A shattering sound of life gone broken.

  I flipped back on top. Blood ran onto the sand, mixed with the sand, and became a mosaic of oil and water, a mosaic of Rick Fine’s insides meeting the light.

  Jake Fine ran to us. He leaned over his son. For an instant, he looked like someone else. He cradled Rick’s head. “Son, son. Hang in there.”

  There was a burbling sound. I plugged the hole in Rick’s stomach with my handkerchief.

  “I saw it,” Fine said. “The gun was in his own hand.” His voice was a whisper to me, to no one, to everyone, to himself. “You’re half a second slower and the hole would be in your gut.”

  My grandfather handed me his bandanna, too. More cloth plugging the hole—it seemed like the bleeding had stopped, but no doubt about it, the wound was bad. Very bad.

  Jake Fine kissed his son’s forehead. One tear ran down his face. “Forgive me, Rickie, you don’t remember, but it wasn’t always this way.”

  Rick turned his head to his father.

  “I love you,” Jake Fine said to his son. “I just got caught up in business.” Then he wept. “I love you, Rickie.”

  Rick Fine turned his face up into his father’s. With two hands he pulled his father’s head down to his mouth. “Dad? Screw you.”

  Fifty-one

  Harry Goulding took Rick Fine to Navajo Health in Fine’s cushy car—fewer bumps. Helen rode with them. Jake stayed behind. He kept pacing, muttering, “I’m not up for this. I’m no good at this stuff. That’s why I have people.”

  Then the Feds pulled up. They were an hour later than I’d asked when I called, but I’d had no idea, exactly, what was coming down the pike. Just a rat-assed conviction that something was …

  They wore their standard-issue black suits and their J. Edgar striped ties. They got out of their car. They strutted their stuff. Wright took one look at them and said, “Do you believe it? Here they come when there are real criminals right in our midst!”

  Same two guys as on the road several days ago. When I called, they acted hot to come but didn’t say why.

  They brushed Wright away with a few hand gestures. “We’ve been asked to stay clear of you, Wright. For now.”

  “Grand.”

  They walked up to Mr. Jake Fine. “Are you Mr. Jacob Fine?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  They flipped their badges.

  “Someone get me a lawyer!” But there was no one to get him a lawyer.

  “Repeat. Are you Mr. Jacob Fine?”

  He sneered. “Obviously.”

  “You are under arrest.”

  “Under arrest? For what? I haven’t done one damned thing. It was my kid who fried that guy.”

  “You are under arrest for tax evasion.”

  “Say what?”

  “Tax evasion.”

  “I want a lawyer, and not a lame-brain like Capone had. I am getting a tax lawyer, and when I do—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” They cuffed him and stuffed him in the backseat of the car.

  And still, no one made a move to get him a lawyer.

  Wright walked over to the car and looked into it. Fine sat spread-eagled in the backseat, his head against the headrest, his shirt and hands covered with the blood of his son.

  Grandpa stood
next to Wright, put his arm around his shoulder, and eased him away. The three of us walked over to the shade of a lone piñon sitting by the face of a red-rock cliff. We sat on natural stone benches held and shaped by the earth. We watched the perfect sunset. It was perfect.

  Wright shook his head.

  “I know,” Grandpa said to him.

  “Really. I cannot believe that man almost lived in one of my houses.”

  Fifty-two

  During the night the word from Indian Health spread from cabin to cabin. They’d stopped the bleeding and sent Rick Fine in an ambulance to Flagstaff. He would make it, but he’d be missing a few feet of intestines. Apparently, there’s some to spare. An infection because of the dirty hankies we used to plug up the hole—that was a problem. He was stable, and Mrs. Fine, wherever she was, wanted him at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She was paying for a private plane, a doctor, and a nurse, to get him there.

  Jake Fine was being held, and Mrs. Fine refused to pay his bail. She told the court he was a flight risk. That’s probably not why she wanted him in jail, but she was right. He would have split. He could run his loan sharking business from anywhere. And gambling. And whatever else he had going. Fine had his fingers in many dirty pies.

  Helen was glued to the Wrights. She would be another adoptee of theirs, one more member of their extended family. She said that she’d stay with them as long as they’d have her. Which goes to show, it is never too late to make a family.

  First thing was to call Taliesin. Mrs. Wright could drive her husband as far as Flagstaff. No doubt he would hold those plans between his legs like a big you know what. A Fellow from Taliesin West could come up and drive them the rest of the way. We thought they should rest up for a day or two in Flag, but all they wanted was home. I felt the same way.

  I loaded up their yellow convertible. Fortunately, Mr. Wright didn’t have much with him, because the drafting supplies and luggage the ladies had brought pretty much filled up the trunk. Mrs. Wright was hovering around Helen, and if anyone needed mothering and love right then, it was certainly her. I felt light, time to go home, sleep in my own bed, and then I had that prickly feeling you get when someone is looking at you. I turned and saw Mr. Wright stopped in his tracks, looking at me. Just looking.

  And then it hit me. We were saying good-bye. I admired the man’s work. More than that, I admired his life. He had cut his own path, a huge one, and he had lived by his own rules. It was in that way he felt like a giant to me.

  I came closer to him.

  “Yazzie Goldman, I feel as if I have said ‘thank you’ so many times in the last week,” he said. “And still, that doesn’t begin to cover my gratitude.”

  “I can’t deny we’ve had a bumpy road, Mr. Wright, but I feel different, different in a good way, for having seen the world through your eyes.”

  “Yes, many bumps and jolts, but what a time we’ve had. Unusual for me to say to a young person, but you have an old soul,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “And I think it’s time you call me Frank.”

  He looked around, and then he leaned in to me. One tear sat in the corner of one milky blue eye. “It seems I’m not able to say good-bye to Mose. Please do me a favor. Tell your grandfather he is the only man I’ve ever met who is my match. Two big animals howling out our Coyote lives.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “I love Mose,” he said, “but you don’t have to tell him that. He may take it the wrong way.”

  We laughed, and I reached out my hand to shake his. He said, “Oh, stop that.” His hug reached me around the ribs, and even though I’m a foot taller than he is, it was he who was the guide. The genius. Yes, the Master Coyote.

  He pulled away from me. “We talked of a healing ceremony. You’ll let me know when the ceremony will take place.”

  “Of course. It’s for you.”

  “It’s for all of us.”

  Mrs. Wright turned over the engine, and Helen sat in the passenger seat. Frank climbed into the back and waved at me as they started to drive down the Gouldings’ driveway. His hat blew off, and I ran to catch it. He put his hands around his mouth and hollered. “Keep it, Yazzie. Imagine the thoughts inside it!” And then he gave me his broad wave.

  I missed him already.

  * * *

  Iris and I packed up at the Gouldings’ and waited for Grandpa. We would be relieved beyond words to get on the road. To go home. To share our happy news with our mothers, face to face, chest to chest. To sleep in our own beds. To make plans for our own lives.

  John Wayne came across from his cabin to say good-bye.

  “You got a great gal here,” he said to me. “Don’t mess it up.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “I’ll keep him on it,” Iris said.

  “It’s gonna be quiet around here without you guys. Gangsters, a murderer, a thief, a loony-tunes brother and a nice sister, a lousy father who won’t turn himself around, and one genius. Jeez, we should have put Fort Apache on hold and shot you guys. This was real theater.”

  I said, “A little too much drama for me.”

  “Way too much for me,” Iris pitched in.

  “I hear you, Yazzie. Hey, you gonna keep working for the railroad?”

  That was something I wanted to talk with Iris about, and I wanted to do it while we were relaxed and on our way home.

  “It’s a good job,” I said.

  “Yep. Lots of good jobs out there.”

  “I like freedom.”

  “Who doesn’t? Yazzie, if I’m ever in a pinch, is there any way I can get in touch with you besides calling the railroad?”

  “Sure bet.” Iris tore a piece of notebook paper from the pad in her purse. I leaned over. He wrote the phone number down using my back as a desk, while she recited it for him twice.

  “Whoa,” she said, “get a load of that!”

  I stood up and got a load of that all right. John Wayne leaned forward, hands on his thighs, and let loose one of his laughs that could rip the roof right off a house.

  Soon came my grandfather and Mr. Wopsock, pulling a trailer behind his Lincoln.

  I said, “What the…?”

  “Yazzie, we made a deal,” my grandfather said.

  “Looks like Mr. Wopsock lost.”

  “Not a bet, the real kind of deal.”

  “You want to get out of the car, or you just going to yell to me through the window?”

  “I’m just going to yell.”

  I walked around to his side. He rolled his window down.

  “It’s like this. Wopsock wants the trading post. We’re probably not going to run it again. I like the idea of having Navajo and Ute art in the same place.”

  “It’s the beginning of a road between us,” said Wopsock.

  “Hózhó,” Grandfather said, nodding his head in agreement.

  “And?”

  “Here’s the deal. We can’t sell the land to Wopsock. It’s in your mom’s name—you’ve got to be on the rolls to own Navajo land.”

  “I know.”

  “I was thinking with the new baby coming, your mom will want to do the traditional thing and pass the land on to you. You are on the Navajo rolls.”

  “She’s not going to like this.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever you two have cooked up.”

  He ignored that. “Here’s what we figured. We give Mr. Wopsock a ninety-nine-year lease. The lease stays in your name.”

  “And no one needs to know those details, anyway,” Wopsock said, “at least not my people.”

  “And I get to keep my old room so I can go back whenever I want to,” my grandfather said. “One caveat to the lease: If your mom or you want to return, for any reason, Mr. Wopsock will leave. We’ll split whatever profits we’ve made, and the whole thing is off.

  “Wopsock stocks it with Ute art, and I stock it with Navajo art.”

  Oh, brother. Although, what with the lease, and being able to g
o back, I thought Mom would feel okay about the whole thing.

  “What’s the horse trailer for?” I said.

  The two men looked at each other.

  Grandfather said, “I’ll tell you, you’ll get to have a good laugh, but I am not changing my mind.”

  Iris was very excited. Nothing she loved better than an outside-the-box wacky idea. “What, what?”

  “Wopsock has plenty of Ute art. As you know, we took our better stuff to Santa Fe, and that is art I won’t part with,” he said. “The other stuff we sold, or it’s in pawn.”

  “So, you’re opening a store with mostly Ute art on the Navajo rez as a road to peace between neighbors.”

  “Don’t be a smarty pants, Yazzie. First we’re going by the shed at our place and loading the trailer up with baling twine and barbed wire. Then we’re headed down to old man Hambler’s place.”

  “I’m still lost.”

  The two men looked at each other again. My grandfather sighed. “Youngsters.”

  “We’re going to see how many items we can get without using money,” Tony Wopsock said. “We’re going to trade baling wire for goods, and see how far we get. Some places will pay us money, and that’s okay, then we buy the art. Some places, like maybe Hambler’s, might be more interested in twine and wire for fix-ups than money.”

  “We’ve got a map, and our routes are all planned out.”

  “But plans change, and that’s the adventure!”

  “Jesus, if I didn’t have a job coming up, I’d want to go along.” That was John Wayne.

  “Me, too! It’s great!” Thanks, Iris.

  “When are you telling Mom what you’re doing?”

  “Oh, I thought I’d leave that to you, Yazzie.”

  Iris had hysterics over that one.

  “Listen,” he said, “I intend to call home often. I want to know when the baby is born.”

  “You’re going to be gone that long?”

  “It could be a week, could be months. That’s part of the adventure—we’ll see how far the wire and twine take us.”

  Iris was in heaven just thinking about it. I truly was surrounded by people who’d fit right into a funny farm.

  “In the meantime, you tell Eno he can still come whenever his wife is mad at him. He does a real good job of keeping our place in shape.”