by Gwen Florio
I fed her the story about the mesa. That always gets them. Fits into the whole Indians-screwed-by-whitemen narrative. It helps that it’s true. Here’s the thing. Most people, white people and, hell, even Indians, they hear that and it’s enough. But this woman just kept those gray eyes of hers on me after I’d finished talking, not saying anything. Thinking. Turning it over in her brain, looking for the piece that didn’t fit. Like she was on to me, even if her cop husband wasn’t. Yet.
We’re going to have to decide what to do about her. About both of them.
ELEVEN
Lola had set her phone alarm for six, hoping to ease into the day alone before confronting the relentless perfection of Edgar and Naomi’s life.
Charlie, normally an early riser, lay like the dead beside her. All that driving, she thought. She lingered a moment, savoring the cool of the room. The breeze slipping through the blinds at the open window had a scrubbed, sparkling feel, the aftermath of the storm that had rumbled through at about four in the morning, lots of wind and crashing drama but, as far as Lola could tell before she’d fallen back asleep, only a brief patter of rain. Still, it was enough to release the heady scent of damp earth and aromatic sage.
A run was in order, she thought. Something to clear her head of the previous day’s bombardment of information and emotion, the way the storm had cleared the air of heat and dust. She rooted in her duffel for the caffeine-laced jellybeans that she ate before her runs—the better to avoid the pee stop mandated by carelessly calculated coffee intake—and slipped from the room, hoping to get in a few miles before the sun blasted opportunity into impossibility.
Not a chance. The aroma of fresh-ground and brewed coffee greeted her as she entered the kitchen; that, and the scent of waffles arising from an old-fashioned iron atop the stove. Bowls of sliced fruit sat around the island, next to a pair of iPads in identical leather cases. Lola wondered how Naomi and Edgar told them apart. The same pretty pitcher from the previous night now held orange juice. Wrung-out orange hulls sat in a heap on a cutting board. Lola entertained the sour suspicion that Naomi had waited to throw them away so Lola would know that, just as with the lemonade, there was nothing store-bought about her orange juice. The front door stood open, Naomi silhouetted within it, facing outward. She turned, training a brilliant smile upon Lola. It vanished fast.
“I always greet the dawn … oh dear.” She poured a hasty cup of coffee and thrust it into Lola’s hands. “You’re one of those.”
The coffee burned its way down Lola’s throat, so much better than the caffeinated candies. Something sparked in her brain, a flaring match, a flipped switch. She risked words. They came out in a croak. “One of those?”
“One of those people who isn’t really awake until after that first cup of coffee. Gar’s the same way. Charlie, too? I’m a tea person myself.” She gestured to a cup on the counter, wisps of steam curling from the pale liquid within.
Of course you are, Lola thought, thankful that the coffee had already done enough of its work that the words didn’t slip from her mouth. “You’re up early,” she said instead. Even though she knew that six wasn’t particularly early, that lots of seemingly normal people, Charlie among them despite his uncharacteristic decision to sleep in, were awake and even functioning at that hour.
“Always,” Naomi said.
You’re one of those, Lola thought, tempted to throw Naomi’s own words back at her. On a typical day, Naomi was probably in the office by seven, and filing briefs or whatever lawyers did by eight.
“Morning’s my alone-time,” Naomi offered, and Lola felt some of her prejudices melt away as their eyes met in quick understanding. “You know how it is,” she said. “Husband, kid, texts, emails. Somebody always wants something from me, all day, every day. At least that’s how it feels. Early morning is the only time I’m free of it.”
Lola raised her coffee cup. “Amen to that.”
The corner of Naomi’s mouth twitched. “Are you toasting me or do you want a refill?”
“Both.” They laughed together. Which is how Charlie and Edgar found them when they belatedly arrived on the scene. Charlie cast an envious glance at the iPads, then turned his attention to his wife and sister-in-law. “This could be trouble,” he joked to Edgar.
The smile faded from Lola’s face as she noticed Edgar’s shoulders stiffen in a sign that he agreed—and that he didn’t see it as a joking matter.
“Watch your step,” warned their guide, looking up at her from the base of the soaring ladder that led to the cliff houses.
The site, Edgar had said over breakfast, would be a good introduction. “It’s small, not as overwhelming as places like Canyon de Chelly or Chaco Canyon, and it won’t be overrun with tourists. When I first came here, Naomi took me to all of the sites. They got mixed up in my head. I’d never seen so many cliff dwellings and kivas in my life. You know us Piikani … ” He threw a glance at Charlie, watching him catch the Blackfeet language reference to their people. “The most we ever left behind was some tepee rings.”
“And a lot of scared-ass Crow,” Charlie said, of the traditional enemies of the Blackfeet.
Lola had taken the joshing to mean that the dissonance between the brothers was starting to ease. Good, she thought. That would make for a more relaxed stay.
Naomi broke in. “With the cliff dwellings and kivas you’ll see today, the people were more like the Hopi. Even though we Diné live here now, we’re more closely related to the Piikani than the Hopi. We’re all Athabascan, the people who migrated over the land bridge from Siberia.”
She had looked at Lola as she spoke. Grateful as Lola was for the history lesson, she’d thought it also emphasized her status as a white-skinned outsider. She wondered if Naomi’s innocent-seeming lectures were a way of keeping her firmly on her own side of the fence, no matter what they had in common as stressed-out working mothers.
Now, as Lola clung to the wooden ladder halfway up a cliff, a more immediate concern asserted itself. Before they’d left the house, she’d divined that climbing would be involved. “How high?” she’d asked.
“Oh, it’s not bad,” Naomi had told her. “Unless you don’t like heights.” Luckily, Charlie hadn’t been in the room to take exception to Lola’s swift denial.
To say she didn’t like heights was an understatement. Lola thought of all the things she hated: Vacation. Wearing suits or, worse yet, dresses. Acting like a lady. But she’d have gone on vacation for a month, in a cocktail frock and pearls, trailing air-kisses in her wake, if it meant she could have avoided going more than three feet off the ground. When she’d first come to Montana, the man who’d killed Mary Alice had tried to kill her, too, by forcing her off a precipice, which hadn’t exactly helped her acrophobia. Yet now she was easily fifty feet up the side of the cliff, with fifty more to go, and aware that surviving until she reached the ledge at the top only meant that she’d face the even more agonizing trip back down.
Charlie’s booted feet receded above her. The girls had gone first, scampering like mountain goats up the ladder, their dexterity worrying even the guide. “Don’t go running around up there until I get there,” he’d called, climbing faster. “You two okay behind me?” he yelled back to Lola and Charlie. “I’ll wait for you at the top.”
Even though it was bolted to the cliff, the ladder swayed whenever Charlie took a step. Each time it moved, Lola stopped and clung white-knuckled, pressing against its rungs. Whenever Charlie stopped, she lifted a trembling leg, placed it on the next round rung, and hauled herself up, willing herself to look only at the rock wall beyond the rungs, its rough surface the color of sunset. An elegantly striped lizard with a blue-gray whiptail skittered across the rock. It stopped and turned its head toward Lola. The soft white pouch of its throat pulsed. Lola swallowed in response. Her own throat was dry. She dared not free a hand to retrieve the water bottle dangling from a carabiner hook
ed through a belt loop. She refused to look up, for fear of seeing how far she had to go. And to look down would only remind her of how very far her fall would be, the plunge that would end with her head split open like a gourd, bones shattered, her final words a whispered, “I told you this was a bad idea.”
“Mom, hurry up.” Margaret’s voice, closer than she’d thought, banged against the wall of panic that surrounded her. A strong hand clasped her wrist. “I’ve got you,” said Charlie. He pitched his voice low and reassuring. Lola loved Charlie for all sorts of reasons, but at this moment, the one that outshone all others was that he never made fun of her fears. She scrambled onto the ledge on all fours and clung to Charlie as he helped her to her feet, not releasing her grip on him until her knees stopped shaking. She took a breath and looked around. “Whoa.”
The guide nodded, accepting the amazement as his due. “Worth the climb?”
“Almost.” Lola remained unwilling to grant that anything was worth that sort of torture. She stood within the welcome cool of a rock overhang that soared several stories above them, adobe houses stacked one atop the other within it. Lola reached out a still-shaking hand and touched a wall.
“Those bricks are a thousand years old,” the guide said.
She snatched her hand away.
“You won’t hurt it. But we ask that people not touch the things that are here—the pot shards, the beams, the rock art. We’re lucky, though. We’re small enough, and enough out of the way, that we don’t have the problems here that they see at Chaco Canyon.”
Lola put her face close to the brick, close enough to see the twigs and grasses that held the mud together. Heat radiated from it, bringing the scent of earth and—she had to be imagining this—thousand-year-old dung. She tilted her head back, no longer afraid to look up now that her feet were planted on rock instead of rung. The houses seemed all of a piece with the land surrounding them, the same dusty reddish color, pleasingly proportional, large homes at the base with small single-room structures perched at the top. She gazed out over the desert, far—very far—below, and tried to imagine it quilted with vegetable plots. This time of day, the people probably would have retreated to the cool of the houses, the woman chatting companionably as they ground the corn so efficiently grown across the region with so very little water. “What happens at Chaco Canyon?”
The guide’s face darkened. “New Agers kept sneaking in, holding their ceremonies—such as they were—in the large kivas,” he said of the circular underground rooms used for ceremonies. “We had to close them off to the public. Those people tried to tell us they were honoring us. But those are our sacred spaces. Imagine if Catholics decided to hold a Mass in a synagogue or mosque and told Jews or Muslims they should feel flattered.”
Lola rolled her eyes. She’d been with Charlie long enough, and had spent enough time on the reservation, to be well acquainted with the phenomenon of white people either claiming a long-ago Indian ancestor or, worse yet, proclaiming themselves “Native American” in spirit. “Try fifty—or sixty or even seventy—percent unemployment,” she always wanted to say. “Try an Indian Health Service that’s underfunded by half its budget. Try a life that’s more than cool feathers and beads.” Or, she thought, in the case of the Southwest, silver and turquoise. On their stops on the way to the reservation, she’d already seen elderly white women with squash blossom necklaces worth thousands of dollars bouncing around on their leathery, too-bare chests. Each time, she forced herself to remember that the sale of that necklace probably had supported a family for months.
“What’s that?” Lola pointed west, toward an industrial-looking tower beside an elongated heap of black rock that dwarfed the hubbub of truck traffic around it. Even from several miles away, the operation was impressively large.
“The mine.” The guide cut off the words with a finality that discouraged further questions. He spat into the dust. The damp blotch disappeared almost immediately.
Lola turned away from the modern intrusion into the ancient landscape and peered through a small square window in one of the cliff houses. The room within was cool and dim. Behind her, the guide explained that the houses’ thick-walled construction provided refuge from summer’s fierce heat. In winter, a small fire easily warmed them. “Speaking of fire,” Lola called to him, “has the charcoal survived all this time because it’s so dry?”
“What do you mean?”
Lola pointed through the window to a few sticks of charred piñon in the middle of the floor. Charlie leaned in close behind her. The guide went around through the door and stooped over the wood. He poked at it with his finger, lifted one of the sticks, and sniffed it. Charlie joined him. A long look passed between them.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Lola said. The strong silent cop thing only went so far. “It’s fresh, isn’t it?” She went around to the door and bent low to enter the room. Either the Ancestral Puebloans had been tiny or they’d bumped their heads a lot, she thought.
Charlie held up his hand. “Stay right there.” His eyes scanned the room, fastening on something in a dark corner. Wide, horizontal marks striped the dirt floor. “He swept behind him,” Charlie said. “We’re not going to find any footprints.” Having established that, he walked to the corner, Lola and the guide close behind.
Margaret’s voice floated through the window. “Mom, where are you?”
“In here, honey.”
Margaret and Juliana piled through the door. “Juliana showed me some rock art. Come see.” They stopped at the sight of the adults’ grim expressions.
“What’s going on?” said Juliana.
“Looks like somebody’s been using this house,” said the guide. “That’s illegal. Whoever it was made a fire. And, look over there.” He pursed his lips in the direction of the corner, where Charlie reached for a small bookbag.
“Don’t touch that!” The guide’s voice was urgent. “This is Navajo Nation land. I’ll have to call the tribal police. And the National Park police too, probably.”
“I’m a sheriff,” Charlie said.
“Not here, you’re not.”
Margaret and Juliana edged around the two men. The bookbag was a few feet beyond them, a little larger than the one Margaret carried to school but forest-green and battered, not the bright primary-color variety carried by younger kids. It lay nearly flat, collapsed upon itself. Empty, or nearly so, thought Lola. She wondered what it had held. A key chain adorned with a miniature Navajo rug dangled from one of its loops.
“No keys, dammit,” Charlie said. “That would have helped.”
“Come on.” Juliana tugged hard at his hand. “Let’s get out of here. This place scares me.”
“Wait a minute,” said Charlie. He fumbled for his cellphone. “I want to take a picture.”
“No!” said Juliana. The single word trembled. “This is a sacred place. It’s disrespectful.”
Lola could almost feel the battle within Charlie, cop versus tribal member. But not a member of this tribe. And not a cop in this state. He lowered the phone.
“Let’s go back down,” the guide said. “Do you mind? I want to let the higher-ups know about this before another group comes through.”
The only person who minded was Lola, and only because it meant she had to face the damnable ladder again, sooner than she had planned. She lagged behind as the others moved to the edge of the cliff, grateful when Juliana asked for a delay. “I have to go to the bathroom. Don’t worry, I’ll go over there.” She pointed to a nondescript space far to the end of the ledge. “You go ahead.”
Lola was pretty sure that peeing was on the list of forbidden things at the site, and said as much. “Can’t you wait until we get down?”
Juliana danced from one foot to another. “I don’t think so.”
Charlie began to shake his head. “I’ll wait for her,” Lola said. Anything that gave her another few minutes
before the climb back down. You can do this, she chanted to herself. Juliana reappeared sooner than she would have liked. “You’d better go ahead of me,” Lola said. “I’m going to take forever.”
“Okay.” Juliana brushed past her, swung herself onto the ladder, and clambered down with impressive alacrity. Lola, as promised, moved far more slowly. First, because she was at least as afraid climbing down as she’d been ascending the ladder. But also because she was trying to process the sight of the key chain’s little rug dangling from Juliana’s pocket.
TWELVE
Juliana reached the bottom of the ladder before Lola was halfway down. At least, that’s what Lola surmised by the chorus of voices floating upward, dominated by Margaret’s high-pitched “Mom, come on. Hurry.”
Hurry, she said to herself. That’s a good one. Her sweaty hands slipped on the wood. She wanted, desperately, to wipe one and then the other on her pants but dared not release her hold. The same lizard that had greeted her on the way up appeared not to have moved. It flicked its tongue at her as she leaned against the rungs and tried to steady her breathing. She blew out a long stream of air and thought that the ancient ones were almost diabolically resourceful in terms of defense. If anyone attacked, all they needed to do was raise the ladders. She’d noted with intense gratitude the heavy iron bolts that held the present-day ladder in place. Even as she’d praised it, the guide had pointed to the cliff wall. “Look there.” Her gaze traced the faintest of ledges and footholds along the side of the cliff. If enemies had been so foolish as to dare the perilous ascent, they’d have had to do so single-file, in easily picked-off fashion. And if they’d tried to lay siege, the guide told them, the pueblos would have been stocked with plentiful stores, pots the size of children filled with ground corn, even tall water jars, their bottoms indented to fit a bearer’s head. Given their imperviousness to conquest, the mystery still bedeviling historians was why their civilization had decamped from the region. Some sort of natural disaster was the prevailing opinion. Years or even decades of drought, probably. Nothing like the man-made disaster that was the mine.