“There’s a lot of good cops. You just had a crush on her.”
He smiled. “Maybe I never told you this. I used to wonder about her. She was the only woman in the co-ed league who wasn’t there because of a man. I mean, she belonged in women’s fast pitch and I know they wanted her. It seemed like such a waste of talent. She obviously loved to compete. She was our school liaison officer and one day I asked her. She said that team demanded more commitment than she could give. Like what? The fast-pitch teams traveled sometimes but Amy didn’t work shifts. She just shrugged.
“I finally asked a guy on her team if he knew. You know what it was? Amy took calls from families when she was off duty. Even during games. She’d leave play to go pick up a kid who was stranded or freaking out somewhere. Talk about commitment.”
Brian was that way, too. She told him about her rescue by the young runner, how she had glimpsed something of Brian in his stride.
“That kid could be great if he wanted to be,” Brian said. “He’ll run all day but he finds the idea of training comical. In races, he’ll leave everyone behind but not by as much as he can. He doesn’t like to show people up. He could compete in Division-I but he wouldn’t like it.”
“And how do you know all this?” she asked. “Doesn’t he get to choose his own future?”
“Sure, he gets a choice, even without the running. An Indian student in the top five percent of his class earns a full ride at ASU. The Hopi value learning as a way to benefit the tribe, but they also value home. Phoenix is too big and foreign. The team isn’t your family.”
“What’s the future then—for him and for girls like Chosposi?”
He smiled at the mention of her name. “Do you know what Chosposi means? Bluebird Eyes. Her grandmother gave her that name. She’s of the Badger clan. Her Anglo name is Grace.”
“Those are pretty names,” Meg said, “one ancient and one old-fashioned.”
“Not many Britneys and Tiffanies out here. Don’t judge her by what you see at the quick stop. She lives in two worlds. Grace is more the one selling toilet paper and beef jerky, while Chosposi’s protecting the spiritual center of the earth for all humankind.”
He smashed his Coke can and methodically flattened it. “Everything out here has multiple forms. Not just what we see. For the Hopi everything that ever happened still is. Now, always—those are the choices the language gives—not was. There was a big debate among linguists over whether Hopi has a future tense. You’d think the Hopis would be more help in the matter, but I suspect for them the answer’s irrelevant—like soccer fans listening to arguments about the Packers versus the Cowboys. From what I understand, they measure their distance from events by intensity or significance, not time.”
The day she learned about Helen. The night on Cold Shivers. When Brian left. Intense. Close. Always.
“This seems a little above third-graders,” she said.
“It makes my head hurt, but it’s already embedded in them. I think all kids start out Hopi. They don’t separate the real from the pretend, the living from the dead, the essence from its many forms. They see a fluidity to dogness: a rez dog, Clifford the cartoon dog, a stuffed dog, a boy barking like a dog, a hot dog. You ruin it once a teacher says, no, that’s wrong, that’s a canine and that’s food.”
She saw what he was saying. The sunset had smeared a gold and purple glaze across the sky. A bowl and not a bowl.
“Chosposi said you spend your summer months out here,” she said. “It must feel like one long vacation.”
“I don’t usually have guests,” he said, as if there were some question. “Do you want a tour?”
The campito dated to early twentieth century but up close she could see the blue paint was fresh, the galvanized metal roof seams were fitted and sealed. Knotty cedar boards ran horizontally above painted hoops supporting the arched ceiling, creating the effect of a wood-lined culvert with an octagonal window at the end. To her right, a camp stove sat atop an old cast-iron wood stove, zinc compartments with sliding doors tucked around it. A single place setting stood upright behind a rail on a narrow shelf. A metal washbasin attached to the wall filled from a water can and drained through a rubber hose to the outside. Midway, benches faced each other. One served as his bookshelf. Brian lifted the other seat to reveal a compartment that held a butane-powered refrigerator chest. At the rear a full-sized bed filled the wagon’s width. It was raised on a stack of built-in drawers, from which a small table projected. When he pressed it, the table disappeared into a slot. Everything was battened down as if the wagon had to be ready to roll at any moment.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Crazy beautiful, like a space capsule or a submarine.”
“Except here, you can step outside and still breathe,” he said. He hopped on the bed and let his legs dangle.
Yes, she reminded herself, breathe. She took a seat on the bench. “How did you find it?”
“An elder gave me the wagon and a place to put it.”
“Quite a gift.”
“Oh, he didn’t want it. The Navajo are the sheepherders, not the Hopi. It was a semi-wreck. I think he wanted me to stay but didn’t want to ask. He figured giving me this to fix up would keep me around a while.”
“I had this picture of you as a monk. I wasn’t too far off.”
“I’m just trying to learn, to fit in with others without losing my own ways.” He clapped his hands on his thighs as a sort of declaration, the way a man plants his shovel when the hole reaches bottom. “Visitors don’t just show up here. This is a government town, there’s nothing for you to do, nowhere to stay. It’s like an electric substation, all this infrastructure just forwarding juice that’s generated somewhere else.”
“I’m sorry if I’m disturbing your peace.”
“No, it’s okay,” he said. “Just tell me why you’re here.”
“I needed to talk to you and to talk I had to see you. I couldn’t just leave a message.” All true and incomplete. Why was she still tiptoeing?
The single light in the room went out. Through the window above the bed she noted the gathering darkness.
Brian said, “Ah, it’s on a timer and the motion sensor doesn’t quite reach this far in. If you want light, wave your arms. Or not.”
Everything in the wagon, it seemed, had some invisible aspect or secondary purpose. The mattress atop the cabinet, for example. An hour ago it was a divan. Did Brian’s extended hand just turn it into a bed? She settled next to him, sensing his wary expectation. They had been classmates, colleagues, lovers, husband and wife, now bonded by the experience that had split them. She did not summon the light. What she was about to tell him belonged in gloom.
She explained how the town was still obsessed with Neulan’s crimes. Its shame over allowing the killer’s escape begged for resolution. People might have recollections kindled by a glass eye found in the canyon. Imagine the renewed furor if it were Neulan’s. She wanted to know if he’d had one but didn’t dare associate herself with the question.
As he listened, his shoulders slumped. His gaze dropped to his hands. His tone went flat. “That’s all that brought you?”
Meg had thought of the eye as her problem for Brian to solve. Now she grasped her misjudgment.
He spoke in careful starts and stops, as if walking a candle down a breezy path. “I hiked in with what I could carry...shovel, a camp saw, some gasoline. The way into the canyon was rougher than I expected. I worried about locating the body in the dark but it was hard to miss. Never mind. You care about the eyes.”
Brian blew out a breath that left the conversation, went through the half-open door and found the always of their past. His fist ground into the mattress. The arm bracing him seemed to bear more than his own weight. Meg touched his shoulder and felt the muscles knotted across his back. She let her fingertips rest on his thigh, birds on a wire poised for flight.
“The sockets—there were no eyes at all. I figured it was the ravens. I’m sorry.”
<
br /> “Don’t be sorry,” she said.
“I fractured his skull!”
“You don’t know that. He was still upright and conscious.”
“He wasn’t acting right.”
“How can you tell what’s right with someone like him?”
“We have been so fucking through all this.”
“We helped rid the world of a monster. Neulan made his choice.”
“Did he? You act like you’ve forgotten.”
“Forgotten what?”
“What he said when we had him cornered at the edge.”
“He was singing,” she said.
Brian dropped to his feet. “Before he started singing. You told him we’d called the sheriff. That they were blocking the roads off the Monument. I saw him flinch. He was considering what it meant—that he wasn’t getting away. I thought, good, he isn’t going to fight us. Then you started boring into him, calling him a murderer, questioning his faith. That’s when he started singing.”
She had forgotten her lie about the sheriff’s blockade. Her overwhelming memory of the night was Neulan’s sickening certainty. Her realization that Helen was nothing to him but a sign from God that Neulan was special.
“You kept going after him. Taunting him. Saying God wouldn’t have him because there was no forgiveness for murderers. That’s when he said, Now you’re a murderer, too.”
“He didn’t!” She would remember; it was practically the confession she had come for. Brian had always thought Neulan wasn’t thinking clearly after the blow to his head. But Neulan was cold and rational to the end, taunting, enjoying her pain.
“No way. That’s just your guilt at work,” she said. “You have nothing to atone for.”
“It’s your guilt suppressing. Now this glass eye pops up and makes you all paranoid.”
Their differences exposed all over again. It was as if Neulan had sensed their vulnerability that night, found the crack between them and cleaved it into a chasm. Perhaps the great manipulator had managed a blameless distance from his victims’ fates. Perhaps he did believe his leap of faith would save him. But she was certain of his final, controlling intent. He had left them to become witnesses to his legend or suspects in his death.
“It’s not just paranoia,” she said. “There’s one more thing.” Or two. Joe Samson and Isaac. The brothers each held fragments of Meg’s secret. She explained how she had told Joe about meeting Neulan at Cold Shivers. If somehow he and Isaac connected the rim and the canyon and Meg’s passing mention...
“I get why you wallowed in your mutual connection to Kornhauer. But Jesus, you told him we were there at Cold Shivers?”
“He was sharing something very painful and private. It seemed right to reciprocate. I thought it would bring him closure, saying I was at peace with Neulan getting away. I was in the now. I didn’t think of it as an always.”
Brian’s weight shifted toward her. “Listen to me. What’s done is done. We screwed up and agreed to disagree about turning ourselves in. Nothing happened. And after all this time, the chances are even more remote—into the stratosphere. Even if Neulan did have a glass eye and Joe knows it and he remembers your conversation and he puts everything together, that doesn’t mean he’ll reveal it.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s a reporter.”
“I thought you two had a little thing.”
“A passing commiseration. We burned Neulan in effigy and watched his ashes blow down the street.”
“Well, if he’s any kind of friend, he’ll keep it to himself. What he knows isn’t the fundamental problem here. It’s that we went too far.”
“Neulan chose to go over. I don’t feel guilty.”
“Then why are you here? You don’t feel guilty but you don’t want the truth to come out. You want reassurance but you’re afraid to ask anyone who can actually tell you what you want to know. Why is that—because screwing up and hiding it doesn’t fit your image?”
Brian had nothing to risk. He didn’t appreciate what she had, the life she had built, her business, her place in the community. He was living alone in the desert, dealing with third graders from a culture that would never accept him. Feeling holy.
Brian waved his arm to turn on the light. “Sorry, that was mean. Maybe you should go to a lawyer if you want advice.”
“I did. Years ago.”
His voice registered the blow. “And what did she say?”
“He. You don’t have to be PC with me.”
“I thought it might be one of your lawyer friends.”
“They don’t do criminal law. Anyway, I didn’t want to complicate any friendships with this.”
“You’re here complicating things. What does that make me?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s different for men, with your deep and nuanced relationships. What time are your buddies coming over for the drum circle?” She was pissed and wanted him to know it. It must be nice to be so pure and laid back and above it all. “He advised me not to come forward, but if I absolutely felt I had to clear my conscience, the best course was to drop the dime on the ex, as he put it.”
“Well, it sounds like you got competent counsel,” Brian said quietly. “Look, the lawyer presented you exactly the alternatives you and I were debating at the time. You got the advice you wanted, to let it go. Follow that. I’m through thinking about what happened.” He moved closer. Another step and he would be against her knees. “We have this tiny opening between us and suddenly a torrent is trying to blast through. You, at least, could prepare for it. I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on. I was hoping you drove all this way for more than to ask about a fucking glass eye.”
He had taken the risks. He had been willing to sacrifice himself for her. What had she done for him? And what was he asking for?
“Why did you call me?” she said.
He puffed his cheeks. “Look around. I’ve been here longer than if I’d pled to manslaughter.”
“But coming here was your choice.”
“It was a consequence of our choices.”
“I didn’t choose your hang-up calls and mysterygrams.”
A weak smile. “I’ve been informed no message is a message,” he said.
“But a confusing one, Brian. Your reaching out felt like a tease. So if there was a different message, explain it to me. Keep it simple. Pretend I’m one of your third graders.”
He straightened some books slumping on their bindings and then sat on the edge of the bench, leaning forward, elbows on knees, looking at the floor.
“When I left you, I was leaving the arguments and the tension and the guilt that had ruined us. I gave up on having you—but couldn’t shake wanting you. Is that simple enough? I thought I’d forget once I was beyond range of your voice and your flesh and the sight of you walking through a room. But I couldn’t let go of the thought of you, the essence, the rightness of you. I couldn’t analyze the feeling. I wouldn’t even call it hope. It was like trying to understand why chocolate instead of vanilla. I guess I had to replenish that feeling once in a while, to reassure myself you were still real. And without laying myself out there all the way, I wanted to remain real, too. If you didn’t feel the same way, I’d never know since you couldn’t respond.”
It was so much more than she expected.
“Did you know you called the day Amy was hurt? Did I tell you where it happened? I went back to Las Colonias that night, after the scholarship event. So much was colliding. I was a mess. I would have talked to you.”
He shook his head. “I had no idea, just like when you drove up.”
“I almost turned around.”
“Yeah, I’m used to it. I guess this place can be pretty shocking. Well, I’m glad we had this little talk. So nice we could both clear everything up.” It was only two steps to the door and he took them.
The campito somehow shrank with his departure. She saw how Brian had pared everything down: a plate, a bowl and a cup; a knife, a fork and a spoo
n; one extra pair of shoes. The only sign of indulgence, his little library on the bench. Waters. Campbell. Frame. Erdrich. Maslow. Pirsig. Keenan. Cleaver. Myth, mind and captivity. And there, between The Beet Queen and Soul on Ice, a gold metal edge, a drugstore picture frame slipped sideways, a color print from the Taos trip she’d never seen. Her younger self was still anchored at the end of the bridge, but this time in closeup without her sunglasses. Her eyes shimmered and streamers of her hair blazed with backlight. His directions came back to her: Relax. Forget the wind and feel the sun...pretend you’re happy on a warm beach. And she did pretend. She had never known how beautifully.
The half-door framed him, splayed in the lawn chair outside, his hands clasped behind his head, looking up at the night sky. Of course he saw things the way he did, living where life was unchanging, where he didn’t belong, where his hard work produced so little, where the culture accepted privation and the land swallowed failure. It was sad to have arrived in a place where numbness felt like freedom. So very sad for them both.
She stepped onto the trailer hitch above him and said, “I think I should go.”
He leaned back. His upside-down face was hard to read. “Go where? The night drive is a head-on crash waiting to happen. The closest motel is forty-five miles away on the Navajo rez, and it’s tourist season. You can spend the night at my place in town if you want.”
“Or I could call and see if they have a vacancy,” she said.
“Or you could stay here—and I could go to town.”
Or.
He climbed out of the chair, waiting for an answer she wasn’t ready to give. She should at least call the motel first.
“Is it even possible to get a cell phone signal around here?” she said.
He shrugged. “I know a high point where you could probably pull a bar or two.”
“How far a drive?”
“It’s shorter to hike there.”
“It’s dark out.”
“Don’t worry. After it’s cooled off, the snakes go to bed.”
Does anybody force or trick you to do things that you do not want to do?
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